Crapshoot 2016: To the Extreme

The line between stupid and fun has never stretched so thin.

Modern takes on properties such as Alvin and the Chipmunks hold a special place of contempt in my heart as a source of lazy, low brow, easy cash that that's pragmatic to exploit for income from the masses.

Then there's Point Break, a film that lands below even that honor based on the logical query of "who revered Point Break enough to warrant a profitable big budget remake?"

The tale of athelete turned FBI agent Johnny Utah may be a fairly fondly remembered one but to say that nobody was clamoring for a Point Break remake

This may very well be the point in which Hollywood reboots begin to make their downward spiral in terms of popularity. For all the years of talk audiences have done of being sick of seeing the same thing being remade over and over again, never have the suppliers let it come to this point; a remake of an original film property that in absolutely no way benefits from modern filmmaking whatsoever.

Regardless of the demand level for ill conceived reboots such as “The Amazing Spider-Man,” “Robocop,” “Ghostbusters,” or any other big budget production surrounding a preexisting IP, at least those have a core concept that lend themselves well to extra money and technological advancement.

“Point Break” is a hodgepodge of mildly impressive stunts that are less impressive than Youtube stunt reels involving GoPros. The stunt work isn’t bad but compared to something like “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” which came out just a few months earlier, nothing is particularly worthy of high praise.

And that’s just the technical side of things. Any effort made to explain this waste of existence’s attempt at a story will only succeed in making the explaining party look stupid. Where the Kathryn Bigelow’s original film carries the veneer of an intelligent young stoner destined to grow out of his self indulgence to become more productive, this film walks and talks like that douche bag you met at an impressionable point in your life that thinks he can make himself sound smart by treating the rest of the world as stupid.

Waffling between laughably ludicrous in its efforts to make a Mountain Dew fueled culture of extreme sports athletes into a postmodern philosophy and being downright boring in how much of a straight unfaltering face it keeps in presenting arguments, concepts, and moral justifications that are less complex than marijuana conversations, the film’s only genuine saving grace comes from Delroy Lindo, an FBI supervisor whose constant expressions of frustration and confusion, coupled with an outright demand to know what the hell any of this garbage even means lends itself wonderfully to a more ironic enjoyment of the movie.

He doesn’t look confused as to why he took the check for this flick, so much as he does baffled as to why it even exists. He was the only character with which I found genuine empathy.

Dear Vin Diesel,

Box office numbers and critical lambasting would implore you, in a logical world, to relent in your efforts to create cinematic popcorn fantasy. Riddick has had a hit or miss history with audiences and “The Last Witch Hunter” has unfortunately faired far less favorably.

I would like to take this moment to plead with you to continue. If I were guaranteed to come across something as glorious as “The Last Witch Hunter” every year, I would look forward to marathoning the year’s cinematic worst far more.

Your story about a cursed immortal Hellboy-esque witch hunter maintaining the balance between the magical community and human society is cheesy, stupid, cliché, and fairly predictable in all of the right ways.

The fun world building, combination of special effects, strong performances and generally brisk pacing across a tight hour and a half or so length, almost elevate this movie beyond the schlocky premise and barebones story that unabashedly own up to the corny but fun B-flick that this ultimately is.

“The Last Witch Hunter” is silly, cartoonish, and dumb and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s a fun geeky love letter to modern urban fantasy made for the fans of the genre.

The only problem with it is that you have asked the public to go out to the theater to experience a glorified Friday night couch feature.

Whatever that budget was spent on wasn’t worth a theatrical release. A neat scaled back direct to video/VOD release could have marketed this film directly to its audience and slowly built up a cult hit. What we’re unfortunately left with however is a B-movie with a narrow audience that was unfortunately pushed out as a film of higher quality to a worldwide audience with little interest in what it entails as a property.

I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who would be willing to watch the exploits of your characters play out in serialized adventures like modern pulp fantasy action heroes. Sadly, there are only so many folks that actually do, so how’s about scaling things down to a format that we can all more easily support?