a review of 孤岛惊魂

A cheesy '80s B-movie that arrived about 20 years too late and is missing a big up-and-coming action star to act as a vehicle for. Had this of come out back then Til Schweiger might have been the next Jean-Claude Van Damme or something. He's certainly a charismatic enough lead here that one could see him potentially headlining a higher caliber action film than this. Not that Far Cry is really all that bad. For a Uwe Boll flick it's downright impressive. Maybe even good. It's as close as the director ever got to successfully replicating the blockbuster formula. The setpieces are entertaining, there's a decent sense of humor, and the whole thing is, dare I say it, fun! Even the most unnecessary comic relief sidekick since Rob Schneider in Judge Dredd ends up being kind of endearing. There are still plenty of moments where you'll notice an incredibly obvious flaw and wonder whether Boll was just too lazy or incompetent to fix it, and the whole thing is rather cheap looking despite having a $30 million budget. Where did that money go? Certainly not the setting. I've never played the game it's based on, but I'm pretty sure the island was supposed to be tropical. Seems like all the research script writers Scheerer and Roesch did going into this was reading the back of the case at their local GameStop. They also failed to realize that having a scientist sedate a bulletproof mutant via needle injection makes no sense due to the whole impenetrable skin thing. As flawed as Far Cry is though, it still works as a schlocky throwback to the shoot 'em up classics of the Schwarzenegger/Stallone era. It's also probably the most competent piece of cinema out there that has Boll's name attached to it. For the first time ever I can enjoy one of his movies as something more than a guilty pleasure. Well, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but I do like it.