Star: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Around The World in 80 Days (2004) – Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan

Not just another early Jackie Chan slapstick movie! This one is genuinely well conceived — compared to the usual cheap early slapsticks at least — with real plot, good ideas and good screenplay. The usual genre, but handsomely upgraded. By 15 minutes in, it already looks like a winner, likely to score Above Average at least. The characters have real depth and backstory here — even Jackie himself. And the humour is well played too — not over done, but genuinely funny occasionally.

Cameos from Richard Branson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sammo Hung and John Cleese were a nice touch.

In the end I’m going to rate this movie Above Average for the action hero genre although if you’re looking for a silly slapstick adventure you can’t do much better!

Steve Coogan makes a good lead character, and Jackie Chan is of course a great sidekick. The lead female, a French artist played by Cécile de France was pretty good at her role too.

Batman And Robin (1997) – George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger

Batman and Robin (1997)

With constant screeching music throughout, and plot, script and action that can surely only have been made for ADHD kids, I could only bear to watch the first 15 minutes of this movie, which it quite shocking considering Batman is played by George Clooney and the main baddie, Mr Freeze, is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The producers here literally did the impossible and turned an outstanding recipe into a massive flop. It reminds me of Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002) starring Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu and Talisa Soto — another great cast, within a great genre for action hero movie fans, that somehow became a massive flop. Due to cast and genre, both movies could be passively watched if desperate bored and in some kind of zombie trance ‘feed me anything’ mode, but they’re both so bad even someone who made a website for action hero movies (myself) can’t stand to watch them if I have anything remotely worth doing instead (work, study, exercise, eating, sleeping, or another movie for example).

Just to be certain, I skipped forward and watched a few seconds every few minutes, and the screeching music literally never let up — ever — and the plot script never became interesting.

For a while it reminded me of Dolph Lundgren’s flop, Masters Of The Universe (1987), but I’m actually settling on the view that this Batman And Robin movie is so bad it makes Masters Of The Universe look good! As such, I’m going to rate it markedly Unwatchable, on a par with Clooney’s more recent massive flop, The American (2010), which had a very different kind of mood but was terribly boring nevertheless.

You might think I’m hating on Clooney or Arnie but I’m really not — they’ve both got plenty of respectable movies to their names. But Batman And Robin (1997) isn’t one of them.

Red Heat (1988) – Arnold Schwarzenegger

There are some nice aspects to the plot of this movie, but it’s generally executed in a messy way. Most of the action scenes are chaos at best, lacking composure. The terrible music qualifies as barely more than noise. Google & Wikipedia are calling this an action comedy but I struggle to find the comedy in it – it’s got a few sarcastic one liners that aren’t remotely funny. It’s watchable if you’re incredibly bored and lack something better to watch but I wouldn’t watch it again until a good decade later by which time I should have completely forgotten how bad it is. Any worse and I wouldn’t have bothered to leave a review. I almost didn’t do one, but I had to consider the other 6/10 rated movies in this list and in fairness this one is probably on a par with them.

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t terrible in his role here, and his partner policeman (played by Jim Belushi) is decent value too. We’re even graced with a supporting role by a young Laurence Fishburne, 11 years before he played Morpheus in The Matrix. Other supporting actors had quality to offer too, but it wasn’t well tapped into.

This movie is so messy and all over the place, the directors probably should have been sacked and replaced by someone who can feel the atmosphere and nurture the mood inline with what an exciting action movie should feel like. This is barely better than a microbudget B movie. Such a shame because it appeared to have all the resources required to make a really good movie – it had a $29 million budget. Arnie alone was paid an $8 million salary. The core idea of the plot isn’t a terrible one but it’s simple enough to sum up in less than 10 words and the script writer seems to have stopped there. Or maybe someone accidentally put the script through a paper shredder and then directed the movie based on what came out the other side.

I ended up fast forwarding the last 10 minutes as if I’d seen it a million times before – didn’t miss anything, and kind of knew that would be the case.

Raw Deal (1986) – Arnold Schwarzenegger

We’re treated to a decent performance by Arnold Schwarzenegger here. The movie was lacking script and characters but it had some decent attributes. It was mildly entertaining. Arnie held up the genre in style. Robert Davi (James Bond’s nemesis from Licence to Kill) did a decent job as Arnie’s frenemy in this movie.