Okay, now there’s a boat chase. A stuntman water-skis in his dress shoes while holding on to a chain attached to a speedboat. The boat crashes into the dock, and Archer and Troy both fly through the air and land on their feet on the shore. But it’s still not over! More punching! Sean spear-guns Castor in the leg. But he can’t spear-gun him to death because he still needs to take his FACE/OFF!
Just to be a dick, Castor starts fucking up Sean’s face with a piece of glass so that he can’t have it back, so then Sean just kills him with the spear gun anyway. Hopefully, the FBI can decapitate him and get his severed head in a fridge, ASAP! The only doctor who knew how to do the face/off surgery is dead and all the equipment blew up, but I’m sure it’ll be fine!
Sean takes his wedding ring back from Castor’s dead finger and goes home with his wife and daughter. Later that day, ding-dong! Who’s that? Oh, it’s just ADAM, THE ORPHANED SON OF THE TERRORIST I KILLED WITH A SPEAR GUN AT WORK THE OTHER DAY. “He needs a place to live.”
The most unrealistic part of this whole movie is that Sean’s wife does not beat him to death.
Face/Off is just Big Boy Freaky Friday.
RATING: 6/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 You lived alone in a castle with your sister for like ten years and you never talked to her????
2 Okay, he is sometimes in a good mood, I guess, but if a person ever said “elementary” to me, I would stab them.
Time Travel Doesn’t Make Sense and I Think We Should Make It Illegal
Here we sit, grizzled and pandemic-worn, already five years beyond 2015—the dazzling, neon-lit vision that Doc Brown and Marty McFly drive to in Back to the Future Part II in search of [question mark?????]. With the gift of hindsight, this crossroads in real and cinematic time generates much hilarity, as it means that in 1989 (the year the film was made), Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg were pretty sure that just twenty-five years in the future we’d have flying cars and bionic high-tops and robot Michael Jacksons would bring us all of our nanomilkshakes. What a coupla bozos! The coolest pieces of technology I have in 2020 are a windshield scraper with a mitten attached and a $400 flashlight that I’m told some people use as a “phone.”
But let us examine.
We open in a garage. It is 1985. Marty McFly, having just returned from going back to the future once, is caressing his Jeep in an unpleasantly erotic way when Elizabeth Shue shows up. Sensing Marty is in the mood, she’s all, “Shue-d we intercourse?” and he’s like, “Well, I kind of had a side thing going here with my Jeep, but I GUESS.” (Hey, quick aside: Maybe if Elizabeth Shue is in your movie, don’t name her character “Jennifer”? I already think that eleven out of ten blondes from the ’80s are Jennifer Jason Leigh, and this is not helping. I don’t come down to where you work and name David Niven’s character “White Flavor Flav”—GOOGLE DAVID NIVEN AND TELL ME I’M WRONG.)
Marty’s acting a little weird, so Jennifer’s like, “Is everything all right?” Marty glances around furtively, catching a glimpse of the shadow-shrouded, reanimated corpse of Crispin Glover watching him from behind a screen door, as if to say, “I am in your house and I have your mom.” “Yeah, I’m great!” Marty lies.
They’re just about to tongue face when VROOOOOOOM, out of nowhere, HERE COMES DOC BROWN WEARING PHYLLIS NEFLER’S FOURTH-BEST SILKEN BED CLOAK.
“BLRRBLRRBRRBRRRRRBRBBBBBBRRR!” Doc explains, “MARTY! YOU GOTTA COME BACK WITH ME!”
“Where?”
“Back…to the FUTUBLLRRRRBRBRBRBRBRRRR!!”
When Marty expresses concern at not having been able to tongue Jennifer, like, at all, Doc Brown says, fine, they can take her to the future too. Marty and Jennifer, you see, have to drive to the year 2015 to stop their horrible toilet children from going to prison and ruining everything. (Yo, just a thought, but I kind of feel like it might be time to let this genetic line peter out? Marty’s really the only borderline competent one out of three generations. Pick your battles.)
When they get to 2015, Jennifer is like, “Why am I in this flying garbage car?” and Marty goes, “Uhhh, Jennifer, ummm, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re in a time machine.” So then, of course (WOMAN) literally the only thing Jennifer can think of to do when confronted with the fucking miracle of time travel is to babble incessantly about her wedding. Doc Brown is like, “WHO IS THIS TERRIBLE PERFUMED YAPPER I THOUGHT THIS WAS A BOY MOVIE,” and immediately blasts her in the face with a shut-up ray. “She was asking too many questions,” he tells Marty. “No one should know too much about their future.” Also, I thought dragging a lifeless corpse around would really speed up our important mission.
Not to worry, though, because then Doc and Marty literally throw Jennifer in the garbage.
It’s raining outside, and Marty is like, “Ew,” but then Doc is like, “Hold up—just wait five seconds and it’ll change, because I have the rain memorized in the future for reasons unexplained.” Doc gives Marty some electric shoes and this terrible future-jacket, and tells him to go to a nearby diner and pretend to be his own son and then a man named Griff will come in and ask him a question. “Say no, NO MATTER WHAT.” If Marty fails to say no, no matter what, “this one event starts a chain reaction that completely destroys your entire family.” Yo, is this really a situation that justifies the use of a technology as fraught and
