The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. Take today's installment, The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior. One glance at the cover art tells you that something is wrong:
ALL-NEW, I TELLS YA
Yeah, it's an "ALL-NEW MOVIE". You can tell, because that's what it says in all caps on the poster. I don't know about you, but I find this disturbing. I mean, why did they find it necessary to add that? "NOT JUST A BUNCH OF OUT-TAKES AND B-UNIT FOOTAGE FROM THE FIRST MOVIE" didn't have enough zing? That's the best they could come up with? Not "ACTION-PACKED" or "A REAL THRILL RIDE" or any of the other standard canards liberally tossed onto movie posters these days? It's such an obvious, and obviously unnecessary, thing to say that it's practically an admission on behalf of the filmmakers that the movie is just not up to par. It's like getting a hamburger with the phrase "THIS IS FOOD" written on the wrapper. It's an odd—but as it turns out, oddly accurate—harbinger of what the film contains.
Because yes, technically, it's a "new" movie, but there's nothing about it that's original. And before we go any further, let me remind you I watch bad movies for fun. I'm not the most discriminating audience, that is, so I'm hardly a stickler for originality. In fact, I understand perfectly well that throughout human history we've been telling ourselves the same twenty or so stories over and over, and that's totally okay. All that aside though, there is a difference between retelling a classic tale and simply aping the superficial forms of other, recent films. Thus, the paradox of today's subject. This movie is so unrelentingly derivative, so remorselessly me-too, that it actually breaks new ground. It has elevated the art of the knockoff into brave new territory.
Everything about this movie emanates "knockoff". While it's easy to call professional MMA-fighter Randy Couture a knockoff of The Rock, it's also true. But while The Rock (amazingly) actually has a knack for comic timing and the ability to deliver a line in a mailbag, Mr. Couture does not. That's not to say he's a bad actor, it's to say he's no actor at all. He could do very well in a film, really, provided he were playing a cop or a drill sergeant. No, for real. Every word, every syllable he utters has that clipped, martial 'huah' to it. As a villain/sorcerer... eh...
Michael Copon, as the hero, just looks like a young Lou Diamond Phillips so much that I couldn't stop thinking about the resemblance. It's just there, in your face the whole time and it never lets up. Not that it matters much, for his character is so one-dimensional that he might as well be reading from the phone book the whole time. Come to that, it might have been better if he had, for that would have spared us the awful dialogue he's given here with requisite hot chick Karen Shenaz David. Their scenes are littered with cutsie-poo eye-rolling and cringe-inducing anachronisms ("not my cup of tea", "you just go on ahead acting like a big jerk") engineered to endear the characters to 21st-century illiterates. (I think it was also supposed to create sexual tension, but since none resulted, I'm not 100% on that.) As it is, though, David's heroine is the overwhelming anachronism here, with a huge "I'm as good as any man" chip on her shoulder and enough sass-and-baditude to embarrass a sitcom writer. She's just totally out of place, and it's painful to watch.
Then there's the character Aristophanes ("call me Ari"), and he's a gem. He's a mash-up of sidekick tropes—a full serving of tweedy, arrogant academic, a dash of mincing faggot, a spoonful or two of comic buffoon—stewed together and topped with an incongruous British accent. He's all over the place, and he's the narrator too. Oh, right, the movie has a narrator. Forgot to mention that earlier.
There's also "Fong", a goofy, gibbering Asian who (spoiler alert!) turns out to be a martial-arts badass and a troupe of mercenaries so expendable they might as well be wearing red Star Trek jerseys (one of whom looks like a poor man's Gary Oldman). Actually, these guys are even more expendable than that: at some point several of them just disappear, with no explanation whatsoever. It is possible that their exits are in some deleted scene somewhere, but that presupposes that the director deleted scenes, and I consider that highly unlikely.
This film runs roughly 1:45, but it feels so, so much longer. Shit happens that nobody seems to care about, and then it happens some more, and so on. But even when you've accepted that you're in for a tedious slog, the hero's party finds their way to "The Underworld" and the film, inconceivably, grinds to a halt. Long, talky "confrontations" betwixt hero and some evil goddess ensue, and again, nobody gives a shit. David's sassmouth gets her into a chickfight with the evil goddess, while Copon stands around looking smug, and Fong and Ari perform some hijinks. Wash, rinse, repeat for a while, then it's back to the goddamned talking. I swear, this goes on forever.
Ah, but all that's a breeze compared to Copon's showdown with Couture. I was thinking, as Couture in real life is a very frightening man with a very real ability to fight, that we'd at least be treated to some decent cinematic fisticuffs for a showdown. But no. It starts off talky and stays that way for a surprisingly long time. An all-too-brief punchy period follows, but then, it gets plain silly. After badmouthing our hero and besmirching his manhood, Couture suddenly has to play the heh-heh-now-let's-all-calm-down-didn't-mean-it card when Copon has him at magic swordpoint. Well, at least until Couture can recite some spell (sounding like a cop reading a statement in court) and turn into a very poorly animated giant scorpion. Then follows at least six hours of Copon hiding behind pillars while the scorpion batters the room, very much like the cave troll going after Frodo, only it sucks. And it keeps going.
This is interspersed with Fong and the hot chick desperately trying to foil some ludicrously complicated scheme to set an entire amphitheater on fire. I'd describe it, but it's really lame, so fuck it. Long (and I do mean long) story short, the people are saved, Couture gets his, and the rightful king is restored to the throne.
Oh yeah, the rightful king. No one had mentioned the guy at all through the whole film, but at the end, there he is, smiling and waving and giving a suspiciously Barack Obama-esque speech about how it's all going to be about the people from now on etc. etc. In like 2500 B.C. or whatever. 'Cos, ya know, fuck it.