Action

I like summer action movies as much as the next guy, but a certain fatigue is starting to set in. "Iron Man" is an excellent movie and deserves to be one of the biggest moneymakers of the year. While many found "The Incredible Hulk" to be solid (pun intended), I was underwhelmed by its climax. Jeffrey Wells over at HollywoodElsewhere expresses quite succinctly what I'm feeling:

"The problem is this: I'm sick to death of watching stuff getting wrecked and smashed and shattered and blown into a million pieces.

I hate the rigid big-studio FX formula that insists upon confrontation and chaos and ruination happening ever 20 or 30 minutes, like some stupid whammy chart. Windows exploded, buildings decimated, cars doing aerial triple-flips, fire hydrants spewing tons of city water, industrial clutter everywhere....what the fuck is this? It's the same shit in every movie, and it vacuums your soul.

What kind of cretin do you have to be to find this stuff interesting after it's been repeated 25 or 30 times? How many times can the dumbest moviegoer out there go "whoa!" after seeing a super-hero wallop a slime-covered monster and send it flying several hundred yards into a building or a wall of glass or a concrete bunker, or vice versa? How many times can the hero take a severe beating to the extent that it looks like he's finished? How many times can a slithering disgusting alien creature try to eat or invade or flatten the heroes? How many times can a moron with a extra-large tub of popcorn in his lap be impressed with loud aural thumpings on the soundtrack?

Guillermo does everything he can to add feeling and humor and humanity to Hellboy II, and he succeeds nicely from time to time, but he's working within a genre that insists upon showing the same shit over and over, no matter what and no end in sight. I really can't stand watching shit being blown up any more. How can people can sit through the same demolition derby in film after film, over and over, year after year? It's insane."