Returner
After the
abolishment of prohibition, the mob turns to dealing in child organs and
spaceships. I always knew the mob had
people high up in law enforcement agencies, but never thought they would even
have people in Area 51 who could smuggle an impounded spaceship out the
backdoor. The only man standing in their
way is Neo J. Batman. Neo shows up and
fucks up all their mobster meetings. He
is an outlaw vigilante whose weapons and intel
are provided by an old lady who is an arms dealer, information trafficker, and
I think she cuts keys and sells lottery tickets as well. Neo is an excellent shootist
and pose-striker. He shoots guys until
they outnumber and surround him, then he strikes a pose that causes them to
resist just shooting him at which point he pulls a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and makes a telephone call for help
to his friend, who is a bomb. He does
this a couple times throughout the movie.
Neo is close to
killing his nemesis who is some sort of Castor Troy type individual, but Castor
also can strike poses that counter-pose Neo and stop him from shooting Castor
despite several opportunities. But on
one big vigilante raid things are complicated when a girl named Milly from the future shows up and interrupts. Even though Milly timejumps to exactly where Neo is and he being the first
person she meets upon emerging from the timewarp,
this doesn’t seem to be planned. It is
just a coincidence that the first person she meets is a superhero whose nemesis
is also the man responsible for the alien war that she has been sent back to
prevent.
The two run
around investigating alien shit and bonding.
I really laughed at a part where they go to an alien crash site in the
forest because Neo is still wearing his The
Matrix clothes but he looks really funny hiking through the woods and
panting and sweating in a long black leather jacket and funky sunglasses. I think you can really only pull off The Matrix outfits when you are in a
big city in a night club being the awesomest
motherfucker around. When it’s time to
change car tires or clean your hamster’s cage or pull leaves out of your
eavesdrop you should probably switch to paintclothes. On the flip side, I would like to see a
bullet-time kung-fu movie with a hero who wears a camping vest and a John Deer
hat the whole movie.
Like a lot of
these movies, there seems to be a lot of moments when the characters are taking
a few too many naps and personal moments when The End of The World is
barrelling down on them and they are the only ones who can stop it. There’s one part where they oversleep and Milly bitches at Neo about getting a late start on the day
and he basically waves his hands at her and says “Quit yer bellyaching, woman, it’s Sunday. If
it’s good enough for The Lord to rest, it’s good enough for me.” I’m just saying, if
it were me, I’d probably drive a little faster and sleep a little less than
these two. But everybody defines
‘urgency’ different.
There’s lots of silly
scenes that are all pretty enjoyable and the whole thing builds up to a
showdown on an oil derrick. I think the
bad guy chooses to do his business on an oil derrick because he models himself
after Castor Troy and there was awesome part on an oil derrick in Face/Off. I can’t think of any other reason. The derrick doesn’t appear to be operation
and Castor Troy guy and his henchmen don’t seem to know their way around their
own derrick very well, so maybe it’s somewhere he doesn’t go very often, maybe
it’s his cottage or something. Anyway,
this portion of the movie drags out a little long. It’s sort of like the hero will strut into a
room full of bad guys and beat them up, then the guys will get the drop on the
hero, and then he’ll use his bullet time device to escape and then they repeat
this sequence several more times. But I
did like all the shots of Milly running around with
the alien in swaddling clothes like it was baby Jesus or something.
Then it goes
into multiple ending mode. At first I was a little pissed and thought it
was one of those movies like The Last Samurai
where they just don’t know where to end it and keep tacking on epilogues, but
then the endings kept coming to such a ridiculous overload of conclusions and
post-conclusion that I realized the joke was on me and I had to laugh. You’ve got the first ending where they return
baby alien Jesus to the aliens and the clouds all part and the aliens leave and
Neo and Milly just stand there with these looks of
awe on their faces as the spaceship flies away to inspirational overwrought
music and it seems like the end. Then
they exchange some unnecessary but cute dialogue about having a meal together
and that seemed like they were ending on the note of their platonic friendship
being the one thing they got out of this whole silly ordeal (other than world
not being destroyed by aliens and revenge against Castor Troy). But then Milly
starts to fade into nothingness, Neo swats his hand through her like a ghost
and she ultimately disappears and Neo looks at the sunset and it seems this
going end on the note that he is once again alone to fight the forces of
evil. But then it keeps going with him
returning to the old lady and saying he’s quitting the vigilante business and
starting a new life of peace (but still dressing like a Matrix guy) and he puts down his gun and walks out the front door
and we think it’s going to end on the note of learning to be peaceful or
something. But then it goes Layer Cake and some insignificant shit who Neo wounded earlier comes back and shoots Neo and he is
dead, and the camera slowly pans up with a shot of him dead on the ground in the
rain and I figured okay, he’s dead, Milly’s gone,
it’s over. But then he’s not dead and it
turns out Milly installed a bullet resistant plate in
his Neo coat that he never felt and now he’s got a new lease on life and it
really is the end this time.
To call this
movie derivative would be a waste of one’s breath. When you notice they’re stealing shit from Trancers that’s like saying “Hey, they stole that song from Kill Bill!” When it comes to movies this transparently
cut-and-pasted from a collection of movies that are already closely associated
all I ask is that it be well-executed and that the actors not wink too much at
me. And so on that standard, I would say
this film is a success. It’s pretty entertaining
and the actors all take this stuff pretty seriously and it’s got lots of funny
ultraviolent slapstick moments to keep me amused. If they make a sequel I really hope they call
it Returner Returns and then
complete the trilogy with Avatar: Returner Returns Again.
If you liked this, how about returning in
time to these other past writings:
Everything that has a beginning, has no spoon.
James Cameron’s sci-fi
classic gets re-Indomagined!
They made her to fuck up
the past.
Now she’s going to fuck up
their future.