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balajiramanathan
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Infinity Pool (2023)
There is Eurotrash and then there is Infinity Pool
Complete, utter garbage of a movie. As the headline says, this is much worse than the normal trash that European producers regularly churn out and call "art". I knew it was going to be bad as soon as I saw the 360-degree photography in the opening shot. And it went downhill, and very far and fast, from there.
I don't normally write reviews on IMDB, but I felt it was my solemn duty to warn others about this movie before they waste 2 hours of their life watching it by mistake.
If you are into extremely thin or non-existent plot, completely unrelatable and stupid characters, and copious amounts of gratuitous bloodletting with a few sex scenes thrown in, this movie is for you. Otherwise you are better off spending two hours poking your eyes with needles and then pouring brine and lemon juice over them.
Home Invasion (2016)
Asinine plot with stupid characters
I am going to keep this quite short: avoid this movie if you can. There is no character development of any sort. The characters are stupid. For example, they apparently don't know that a car can drive through a closed garage door. Also, if you threaten someone loudly enough, they may figure out how to open a safe they don't know the combination to. You get the general idea, I am sure. And the action is even more stupid. Everybody seems to be walking around at random, seemingly explicitly to avoid running into each other. What a waste of one and a half hours. And at the end, we still don't know several things. What is the relationship between the home's owner and the home invaders? What was inside the safe that lead to this whole stupid movie?
Olympus Has Fallen (2013)
Entertaining, but totally unrealistic and contrived
The movie is entertaining. I will grant it that much. It is fast-paced and fun. But you have to suspend disbelief to an enormous extent to enjoy the movie. I am not going to list all of the places where this falls apart. But basically, the movie is completely predicated on the fact that the terrorists gain access to the safe room in the white house because the POTUS overrides standard protocol so that he can take his visiting dignitary (and that dignitary's entire security team) with him to the safe room. Now, how did the terrorists decide that was going to happen and plan around it? And don't even get me started on the portrayal of Cerberus as a completely hare-brained idea that would destroy the US if it was ever used (as portrayed in this movie, if there is an accidental launch of an ICBM, the US would be better off letting it get to its target because if they try to destroy it using Cerberus, every other American ICBM automatically gets armed and detonates in its silo, thus destroying the US several times over). It is like Independence Day, but with fewer special effects and more martial arts.
Blindness (2008)
Absurd and stupid movie
If you want to see a good movie about how humans become animals when society breaks down, go see Lord of the Flies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057261/). This movie is a protracted, boring and stupid rehash of the same idea with no originality, no redeeming values, nothing. And I don't know about the screenwriter, but if you suddenly find yourself blind, would you just declare to people that "I am blind" as if it had been the case forever? Or would you tell people that you had become blind or that you could suddenly not see anything? Implausible storyline, bad screen writing, incomprehensible ending... I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Avoid the movie if you can.
Rendition (2007)
Unsatisfying plot, lots of loose ends
The movie is powerful as a political statement about extraordinary rendition, torture and the politics of the war on terror. Others have already commented on these and other aspects of the movie. My review may contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie, you may not want to read beyond this point.
Several questions are raised by this movie. First of all, was the protagonist guilty or not? There is no satisfying explanation for why the NSA decided to have him picked up and rendered in the first place. Is there an innocent explanation for why he got phone calls from what the NSA thinks is a terrorist? If there is, the movie does not seem to give one and that made the whole movie quite unsatisfying to me. It is all well and good to make statements about whether torture is right or wrong, but first prove to me that they tortured the wrong person, then we will take it to the next step.
If the protagonist was guilty, then what was achieved by releasing him? Perhaps, we was well-trained to resist up to a certain point and then pretend to break down and give answers that can be proved wrong with a little research, thus tending to lead the torturers to believe that they had tortured an innocent man into confessing without actually being guilty. However, there is nothing in the movie that proves he is guilty either.
The various other loose ends out there are: 1. So, a rogue CIA agent has him released and flown back home. What prevents the NSA from picking him up again? A little publicity in the Washington Post? Please give me a break here... If a senator is not willing to put his neck on the line to intervene on his behalf, what does Corinne Whitman have to fear? 2. If the NSA has been tracking what phone numbers are being called by whom, why couldn't they listen in on some of the calls to figure out whether anything underhanded is being discussed? 3. The plot is even more stupid anyways. Any criminal with more than a dozen brain cells would transact his criminal business on an anonymous prepaid cell phone line, not on one that can be traced back to him and his house.
The whole movie revolves around tugging at the viewers' heart strings by showing graphic and gratuitous scenes of torture. But when you think about it with any more depth, there is nothing of substance in this movie, only plenty of unanswered questions and the feeling of "what, that is it?!!!" at the end of the movie.