Action Hero MoviesThe first half hour consists of a mix of boring but pretentious drama, and mildly entertaining action.
Dwayne Johnson obviously lifts the value tremendously, while most of the supporting cast are terrible.
Cinematography and stunts have a high budget feel.
It’s still too early to really predict the rating since the core plot is still yet to unravel, but if forced to, I’d say the first half hour is Below Average in itself but strongly indicates that things are about to get better soon.
Before 45 minutes in, it’s all a bit of a mess as buildings come tumbling down and people get caught inside, many dead and many maimed. While this is only fiction, it’s clearly an outlet used to express the fantasies of the sick people in Hollywood, since it’s basically pre-playing a massively toned down version of what they did in Gaza, like some kind of sick ritual, and it’s not even meant to be horror genre here. Not to mention 2001.
By an hour in, the action has indeed picked up, but it’s still interwoven with boring drama, and it remains a very simplistic a plot. As such, the very early wild guess of a Below Average rating is looking about right, with increasing confidence.
In the last hour, and increasingly towards the end, unpleasantry was the overwhelming factor, so the rating dropped a couple notches from what it initially looked set for. In the end, I rate it So-So. That’s a few levels below average. Some of it was strong, but there were many unpleasant patches and many boring patches, well worth fast forwarding, especially if you’ve seen this movie before, so I think a final rating of So-So is fair. If they stripped out most of the unpleasantry and focused on the good action it could have been well above average, but they didn’t, and it wasn’t. This movie is really a mashup of genres — it’s a mix-up between a good dose of cool fast action, and a lot of borderline suspense horror.