Skyfire (2019) We've still got 9 months to go in 2022, but as of right now, here's the dumbest, craziest and most cheeseball entertaining guilty pleasure of the year.......
Don't mind telling you, we laughed our ass off all the way through it......and couldn't have enjoyed it more.
Now that we think about it (not that we did any real thinking while watching it), "Skyfire" was inevitable.
Hollywood studios scooped out big box office bucks by pumping out an endless stream of big budget, junky action-disaster movies. Even to the point where they'd still make them even if a competing studio was making more or less the same damn movie.....
So we all thrilled to the spectacles of twin 'meteor headed for earth' movies ("Deep Impact" and "Armageddon", and twin volcano movies, "Dante's Peak" and "Volcano". The tireless junk movie shlockmeister Roland Emmerich became an "end of days" factory with "The Day After Tomorrow", "Independence Day" and its sequel, "2012", "Moonfall" and other apocalyptic fantasies.
Vast boodles of those box office bucks, came from audiences in China, who couldn't get enough of these bloated CGI-fueled three ring circuses.
Which brings us to the inevitable "Skyfire", in which China itself produced it very own homegrown version of the All American Hollywood Disaster-Action-Apocalypse movie. And just like knockoffs of designer clothes, you can hardly tell it apart from the real thing.
It's one of China's most authentic carbon copies of Hollywood product,...... as gloriously idiotic, eye-popping and action-packed as the most brain-dead, overproduced Jerry Bruckheimer epic.
And the producers took no chances here, hiring as its director Simon West, the seasoned workhorse who brought us "Con Air" , "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and "Expendables 2"
Everything's in place here for the kind of movie that requires a tub 'o buttered popcorn and a lobotomy. What's not to love?
A lunatic premise - a multimillion dollar theme-park-hotel resort built around a volcano, complete with monorail rides to the peak and a huge observation bubble elevator that drops the tourists straight down for an up-close-and-personal look at the lava.....
Anybody wondering yet is this sounds like a bad idea? You bet Jurassic.......
Geologists have assured the self-important Australian tycoon (Jason Issacs) who built the place that ole Smoky Top won't blow for 150 years.......
But you and I and anyone else whoever sat through a movie like this know the lava will soon start flowing like rivers of overcooked oatmeal......and we'll thrill to sight of half the cast obliterated either by fiery debris or from taking forced swan dives off the monorails.and other high places.
Yahoooooooooooo! Let the red hot carnage commence!
We especially appreciated that "Skyfire" presents a fast 'n furious 97 minute stripped down version of a Hollyuwood disaster-rama, wasting no time at all with any comic relief or excessive exposition.
We want the wham-bams right away and this movie delivers....... with real showstoppers like hapless tourists trying to leap from one monorail to another and the surviving actors dangling from a jeep while suspended over the boiling magma.
Naturally the lush orchestral score swells with anthem-like gravitas as we watch some folks survive and others meeting fates that guarantee they won't be around if there's ever a "Skyfire 2"
Stupid to the max? Sure. Populated with a badly dubbed Chinese cast? Well...yeah, but they're all not bad and take a whole lotta wear and tear. A generic imitation to the extreme? Uh....okay, but we knew that going in.......and the unintentionally funny moments here came at us non stop. Who know, we might've gone through two popcorn tubs......
You can call us as misguided and nutty as "Skyfire" is as a movie, but we're still going to erupt out 3 stars (***). And we don't care. We had a good time.......and in this day and age, that's not bad thing to experience.......
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