Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Assassins

Assassins (1995)

Runtime: 132 minutes

Directed by: Richard Donner (RIP)

Starring: Sly Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Julianne Moore, and various random people

From: Warner Bros.

RIP Richard Donner

I realize how daffy it will sound for me to watch a mediocre movie for the first time last night as a tribute to anyone, but... I've talked about plenty of his work before yet don't want to review it again, it was part of my physical media collection-a Blu disc that was one of a few in a Sly set-and I could use this to discuss how I've seen Donner's movies since I was a little kid. Starting off was the first two Superman films (hey, he did the majority of II) then came The Goonies, which was a childhood favorite-and still something which is looked at fondly by myself-as a young teen was the Lethal Weapon pictures and as an adult was The Omen. All are worth seeing more than this, that's for sure... yet it was not horrible (The Expendables 3 was notably worse) and it is disappointing to hear he passed away even if he was 91 years old.

Stallone plays “the best assassin”, someone who is looking to retire as he has started to become too old for this s***. Antonio Banderas is a cocky upstart-and was the highlight of this picture with his OOT acting-who feuds with him; Julianne Moore plays a computer hacker named Electra (hey, why are you laughing?) who gets involved because she has a true MacGuffin in that it is info not specifically revealed to the audience and instead the potential damage of this information (in this case, data on a floppy disc... more on that at the end) is vaguely discussed.

I'd rip on the people now known as the Sisters Wachowski for how stupid this movie is and all the illogical moments, but apparently much of the story was rewritten by others and they weren't happy with the end product. While I haven't loved the majority of their movies (at least the ones I've seen) their scripts were never quite like this so I should have suspected... it's not a movie I hate but it's still disappointing as with the talent involved and the general idea Assassins might've been at least good. At least it was a motion picture I was able to laugh AT and some of the action was fine.

The biggest laugh came when Electra was transferring over the MacGuffin data; it was on her sweet 90's Mac Powerbook and via a graphic we know it was a few hundred megabytes in size. She was transferring it over to... a 3 ½ inch floppy disc. For those of a young age, those only held between 1 and 2 megabytes of data! Talk about insulting my intelligence.

 

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