Reviews

The title was pointless, having no bearing on the plot.

The plot - uncovering a conspiracy to murder a politician - was pointless, having been done many, many times before and invariably much better (In the Line of Fire, Parallax View, The Manchurian Candidate {either one}, Vantage Point, etc).

Plus, the plot has more holes in it than a pound of swiss cheese. Why is this secret service agent allowed to just go home and told to sleep it off, the day his charge - the friggin' PRESIDENT - was killed? Why aren't there swarms of secret service agents trying to figure out what happened? Why are there NO other reporters looking into it except Harmon's character? How do the Bad Guys manage to run people down and spray bullets all over downtown Washington DC and there is ONE cop, who stops Gooding's character because a teenage girl called 911 when she saw a black guy running down the street with a gun? Where is all the DC traffic???

The actors - lots of well-known names (Gooding, Anne Archer, James Woods, Burt Reynolds(!), and others) were pointless because the writing was so terrible it kinda didn't matter how much star power you had reading the lines.

The makeup and lighting look cheap and unprofessional. The dialogue is hackneyed and cliche. The dramatic scenes are too ham-fisted to be dramatic, as they try to make lighting and cliches stand-in for drama.

The action scenes are laughable. Like, literally hilarious. Gooding and Harmon dive in the water at the last second as his boat explodes, evade two guys shooting at them in the water by using a scuba tank - which somehow survived the explosion - to breathe, and then Gooding is able to jump out of the water (without having seen where the Bad Guys even are!) and pick each of them off before they can shoot him. Sure, ok.

And the "twist"? A jealous First Lady apparently orchestrated the whole thing as revenge for his affair! Where did she get the money to pay for it? How did she even know about all these mercenaries? Why not just divorce the SOB? The boss at the Secret Service is also involved, but we're never told how or why.

The one good thing is the scene with Anne Archer, showing off her art, which of course is the key to the whole movie: "You're too close," she says,"...you can't see the big picture." And the fact that she gets away with it, although not how they handle the epilogue, where it becomes a point of amusing banter between the Secret Service agent and the investigative reporter - now on a date she says isn't a date - whereas in reality his conscience should not allow him to sleep at night knowing what he does, and her journalistic work ethic should not allow her to let it lie.

I got to watch it for free on Prime, and I still feel like I got ripped off. What a waste of an hour and a half.

I've heard Frank Caliendo's impressions on ESPN radio and the man is very funny. Not a big MADtv fan, but I can imagine that he was a riot there too. But Frank TV? It isn't working there. I saw the first episode last night, and I'll be very surprised to see them air a 2nd. His impersonation skills and humor work well when playing off another character or two, or in a stand-up show, when playing off an audience's background knowledge of the characters he does makes it funny, but when playing off himself playing multiple roles, it's just not that funny. Some of the ideas are amusing, but the sketches either don't work or they drag on too long.

Case in point: Dick Cheney stepping in to give the "father/daughter talk" to Jenna Bush on her wedding night. The idea is moderately amusing, but a good impression of Cheney isn't particularly funny, and the skit just took too long.

Maybe the writers have something else up their sleeves for next week, but if not, I don't see how they can make it work. A funny and/or attractive co-host, instead of some dead fish from the audience, might help, too but more of what we saw in the premiere episode will not cut it. The show will be canceled before we see 5 episodes.

Dreadful. That is the best word I can use to describe this film. It starts out slow...and then tapers off. This subject had all the makings of a great story: flight from European oppression, venturing into the Unknown, internal conflicts, struggle for survival, battles with the indigenous peoples, romance. All of these things should lend themselves to an interesting and engaging movie. Instead, we get over two hours of a beautifully filmed, but self-indulgent, preachy, meandering, and ultimately boring work. There is little dialogue, with most of the characters preferring to monologue (almost inaudibly) and/or pray as they wander through the forest. There is even less action, with the few battle scenes and occasional power struggles (between John Smith and those who would usurp his command) having little buildup and being over quickly, which is about the only thing in this tedious movie that does happen quickly. You would expect that a film about the men who first tried to colonize Virginia to be exciting or at the very least interesting, but it's a 135-minute marathon to see whether you can stay awake and resist the urge to fast-forward through the obviously overdone and drawn out scenery shots. Also, you'll spend a lot of time turning up the volume to hear the self-important and pretentious voice-overs, of which there are many.

There are two, and only two, good things about this movie. The first is Q'Orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahontas. She's beautiful, and seems a very promising young actress, even if Malick did have her wandering around and mumbling for most of the movie. The other is the filming, which is very picturesque and authentic. (I visited the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, and the film, shot in natural light on a nearby river in Virginia, looks identical.) But even at that, we are forced to sit through shots and sequences that easily take 3-4 times as long as is necessary to get the point across. For some reason, 45 seconds or more after it is blindingly apparent that Pocahantas is "whimsical" or that Smith is "sad", we're still watching her skipping through the forest or him standing alone in a field (and mumbling his monologue, of course).

Each of the elements that should make this an excellent film is somehow wasted. The struggle for survival, with men in the fort boiling their own belts to eat the leather, becomes laughable when the Powhatans bring deer and other game to help the colony. Why didn't they just go out and hunt for themselves? For a colony struggling to survive, whose crops are failing, without enough food, at war with the Natives in a strange land, with shaky leadership and little support from England...the characters in this movie spend an awful lot of time just walking, at an excruciatingly slow pace, around the compound and talking to each other (or, more frequently, to themselves). Shouldn't they be working at something? Shouldn't someone in this film be in some kind of hurry? And as for romance, how could any woman feel romantic toward Farrell's character, who never looks anything but forlorn throughout the entire movie? How could any man identify with him or want him to succeed in leading these people, when he seems so dispassionate and distracted for so much of the film? This movie could have been to the Jamestown settlement what Dances With Wolves was to the Old West. That movie was also beautifully filmed, and didn't over-simplify the roles of heroes and villains, but kept the story moving. Even with a plodding actor like Costner, numerous voice-overs and three hours or more to watch, you stayed glued to your seat. The only thing keeping you in your seat through The New World is gravity, and that becomes less compelling as this dud of a film drags on and on and on...

I tell you, if the "new world" was really as boring as The New World, it's amazing anyone else ever came across The Pond.