Jolt Country

Offensively stupid.

Possibly the worst movie I've ever seen.

Never again with I waste my time with anything involving M. Night ever again, who nepo babied his daughter in this. If he wrote it, no. If he directed it, no. How does he not have a single person willing to tell him how stupid almost every scene in this is?

I like Josh Harnett but he was bad in this too.

Zero stars.

Thanks for watching so we didn’t have to! The preview was ehhhh and while some of his movies are OK many are not.

Yes! Slight spoilers because I care about all of you - the trailer looked good. Ole Josh Harnett trying to escape a concert, not because of the awful music present, which would have been a fine premise, but because he's THE BUTCHER (great name, M. Night). His daughter is present, so he can't completely go crazy.

Every single beat in the film is awful and wrong. I would go into more detail but I hate it.

Just read the wiki, do they make him a protagonist?

Sort of like a Hannibal Lecter, a bad guy that's resourceful and crafty?

One thing M. Night is in love with is the comic book style "I may come back to this at any time!" escape artist Doombot shit that so many comics has. This allowed him to make that one movie where some of his other characters are all sitting in the same room, Bruce Willis from Unbreakable, that one guy that played young Professor X and so on. So I was pretty sure he wasn't going to kill "The Butcher" in this, although I will spoil his ending in a second.

Josh Harnett / The Butcher isn't really all that crafty. He's not that resourceful. He befriends a guy selling concert t-shirts ... just because. Just because the movie wants that to happen. I've bought plenty of crap from table vendors. I've befriended none of them. He later creates a distraction by having hot oil blow up in the face of some poor teenager working fries at the venue. He.... just is able to turn up the heat on the oil vat for the fries. I guess that does it. Odd that all fry stations let you set the dial to "explode." And then there is the end. I dunno if this is resourceful:

After the cops catch him, they take him to the SWAT van. His kids' bike has been turned over in the yard. The cops let him walk over to it, not shoot him, and straighten it back up, not shoot him, and then proceed to the van, not shooting him. A few moments later when we see him in the SWAT van in cuffs, he's laughing because, Vark:

The kids' bike is missing a spoke!!!!!!!!!

After the movie sits the camera on the bike wheel so we know how clever we are supposed to think the movie is, Josh uses the spoke from the tire to pick the lock, laughing like a maniac. Because what SWAT teams do is leave you alone in the truck on its way to jail, in the back. What they do is allow you to screw with things after they handcuff you. They certainly don't notice you stealing metal off a bike. They leave you alone in there, etc.

You know what would have been better, besides anything? The girl is going through security at the beginning of the movie, when they approach the venue, and hands all her metal items to the security people like the zillion hairpins girls and women have on them, and he just happens to have one at the end of the movie. That is a dumb, stock trope but a zillion times better than what M. Night put to the screen. It is important that I relate that this whole "they caught him, he does the perp walk to the bike, he screws with it, they show him in the van undoing the cuff" thing is all one scene after another. There was exactly no setup to any of this. It is the most amateur directing/writing shit imaginable.

But hey, setting something up also means that M. Night would have to have a working "PgUp" key when writing his script, to go back and add that at the beginning so it made sense, instead of the way he seems to write non-Sixth-Sense movies, which is any dumb shit he thinks of, filmed in order.

I wondered how he gets to keep making these godawful movies.

Signs (which I like) grossed $408 million from a budget of $72 million.
The Village (haven't seen it, everyone says it is terrible) grossed $257 million from a budget of $60 million.
The shine was off by Lady in the Water, only grossing $72 million worldwide from a budget of $70 million.
The Happening grossed $163 million from a budget of $48 million. There was no excuse for this, America.
I intentionally do not know what "The Last Airbender" is, it has a group of fans that won't shut up about it, it seems like twee nonsense for children. Their fans won't shut up about how much they hate this movie. It grossed $319 million from a budget of $150 million.

The Visit: never heard of it: grossed $98 million worldwide on a budget of $5 million
Split: think I saw it. Think I liked it? $279 million from a budget of $9 million.

And then "Glass" made a bunch of money as well. So there is your answer. Trap made money too. He made two movies I liked, then a string of garbage, then I liked Split and Glass and now this. He will make movies till he's 200 years old with the kind of returns he gets.

Can anyone remove a spoke from a bicycle with bare hands?

I had a hard time removing one with the proper tool for the job. I call M. Night has to pay everyone back their admission price because of that impossible James Bond shit.

Are we supposed to root for Josh or wait in suspense for the cops to jusssst miss catching him?

Re movies: Signs was the only one of these I saw. Not bad, even if you can kill aliens by throwing water on them like the Wicked Witch

I think Signs was the turning point for me (and most people). For alien intelligence to be able to travel light years across the galaxy and not recognize that they've landed on a planet which is 70% deadly to them was pretty stupid. Like, in the big scheme of things I don't think humans are all that smart and I doubt we would attempt to invade a planet that was 30% rock and 70% lava or battery acid.

The Last Airbender was the live action of the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, which they couldn't call "Avatar" because "we already got one." The Last Airbender (the cartoon) was anime-light for tweens -- we watched it with the kids when they were younger and it was okay. The movie was awful.

I never saw The Village because so many things parodied it that I felt like I had seen it.

Unbreakable trilogy, Sixth Sense . . . That's all I could stand.

I did see Sixth Sense, that was pretty much okey-dokey. Did not like the 'ha ha fooled you!' attitudes from the makers in the after-interviews.

AArdvark wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2024 2:38 pm Can anyone remove a spoke from a bicycle with bare hands?

I had a hard time removing one with the proper tool for the job. I call M. Night has to pay everyone back their admission price because of that impossible James Bond shit.

Are we supposed to root for Josh or wait in suspense for the cops to jusssst miss catching him?

The SWAT team could have been HELPING me, and I wouldn't be able to remove a spoke.

Sixth Sense is similar to Blair Witch in the sense that they were both genre-defining films that people spent decades trying to reproduce with mostly terrible results. Sixth Sense was a good film that happened to have a gut punching twist, and M. Night's takeaway was that people loved the twist and has spent the past two decades doing it over and over.