Gary amuses and delights you this week, with his review of the most boring extreme sports movie we've ever seen.

— Marcus

Hello American movie fans! I'm here to ask you all something really important, and it goes like this: "Fans!? What's wrong with all of you?"

American movies these days suck. In fact, so bad are they, their stench travels clear around the world, dissipating as it blows over the vast expanses of ocean encircling each continent. It's so bad that if you want to make a pretty good movie, you gotta get at *least* as far away as London (Thanks, Harry!).

If you wanna make the coolest movie in the world, ever, you better dang well get yourself as far from America as is humanly possible: New Zealand. Awe man, I read some stuff about The Two Towers and it sounds so cool! I mean, I heard there was this one part where Legolas is all...

I'm sorry. I almost forgot. OTHER movie reviewers get to see Lord of the Rings early and then write reviews about its splendor while crying tears of pure joy, frequently changing their underwear after remembering particularly divine moments. Well THOSE movie reviewers are a bunch of spoon-fed pansies. Anybody can woo you with an impassioned story about their very first kiss, or the very third time they didn't die on an airplane.

But if you want to know what living really is, you've gotta go somewhere else. You've gotta walk the dark corridors of existence. You've gotta get your feet stuck good and tight to the floors of the cheap theater in ways powerful enough to remind one of those dreams where your feet get all stuck to some floor or something, or your teeth fall out, or like that one where I was in grade school and one of the hallways became a giant throat, and then swallowed me and my classmates. I'm talking about going where no hope is left, and it's not nearly as far away as you might think. Why, you needn't travel to my elementary school at all!

Get yourself to the cheap theater and see what I will now attempt to portray as the most X-TREME!!! movie I've ever seen in my life. I speak of course of an extremely irritating little polyp that just came out called Extreme Ops. Or maybe it was like X-TREAM AHPS! Yeah, that seems trendy. It seems like the kind of movie that would be extreme enough to screw up the title in a trendy way like that. At any rate, I'll never know, because I'm certainly not going to look it up, or down, or at anything involving this crapsicle again. I put in my time, for you, so you don't have to.

And now, because three or four of you are still here reading this (according to online statistics regarding people who keep reading crappy movie reviews after they've been given a full two paragraphs to bail out), I shall attempt to take the road less taken. I am going to defend the grace and beauty of this true masterpiece of a movie with everything I've got. I warn you, it's going to take every last ounce of this two-liter Mountain Dew, and I may occasionally mumble or go silent as I slip in and out of the Sartrian void I've been in since seeing X-chreem Oops, but...

Oh for the love of... three paragraphs... you still haven't taken the opportunity? Well, I guess not all of us are blessed with a basic 'flight response,' so... here goes. Movie review. You had your chance. Buckle up - this is going to be "><-treme."

First, in its defense, I have to give it some props. The movie actually starts out pretty cool, with a preview of Star Trek: Nemesis. It's not until after we see the Enterprise explode, taking much of my heart with it, that Extreme Ops goes rapidly and EXTREMELY! downhill, rail-sliding occasionally along the way. Where do I even begin to begin?

Seriously folks, this is the only movie I've ever seen or reviewed where I don't have to worry about spoiling anything for you. This has all been done for me in post. Well, all right, there is one worse movie: Jet Li's Black Mask, but I've since removed that one from the "movie" category and placed it into the more appropriate "natural disasters and plagues" dustbin.

So, what happens? Let's see... First we got some trendy, very young, happenin' kids, all between the ages of 28 and 43, and they're being crazy. Oh man, the craziness! I guess it's not really that crazy though, 'cause actually the opener stuff is kinda sissy in nature, and plus they're all doing it for an advertiser to sell their product, so they're all getting paid.

I don't know. I spent a lot of that first scene wondering quietly to myself if my laces were long enough to touch what was easily the filthiest most x-tremely adhesive movie floor I'd ever been on. I vowed right then and there that if any of the laces made contact with the floor, and provided I could once again free them from its clutches, I was just going to throw the shoes out and get some new ones the next day. There was one extreme moment, though, where some guy was all "NO! Don't get out of the KAYAK!" and I was like "I CAAAN'T! My FEET are STUCK! HEEELP!!!"

Oh man, I was so embarrassed—everyone in the theater was looking at me. I apologized to both of them, though, and they were cool. I guess I just got caught up in the dislodging process, plus I'm kind of afraid of being restricted in any way. It's like a claustrophobic response, or maybe germophobia. I admit a small part of me was wondering if maybe the floor of the theater had it's own sentient capabilities, 'cause it really seemed like it was trying to keep my there. It may have just been temporary paralysis brought on by the movie's bewitching badness.

"What ELSE happens?" you ask? Well of course you don't, but I'll tell ya, just in case you didn't see the trailer. Shit happens. I was warned. They warned me, growing up. They said it's going to happen, but I didn't listen. And I certainly didn't expect it to happen to me, while my feet were stuck to the floor in a dirty theater. I guess I'd expect it more if it was a porn theater or something, but I didn't think Hollywood was going to poop in my face AGAIN. Surely not again, after taking a bunch of my money. I mean, they all warned me, but I just walked right into the theater all excited. And then... poo. Let's get out of this paragraph!

Okay, these kids, they're like normal kids who are middle-aged, and all they want to do is break all the laws of physics and never get hurt by machine guns at close range, or even fall down when they're kicking 80 degree inclines to the side like unwelcome reconstituted onions on the burgers of pure extremity.

Well, all of them except the blonde girl. Oh man, that skinny blonde girl. I don't think I liked her very much, 'cause she was the only one with skis or any kind of inner monologue, and the rest of the shallow-minded snowboarder-lugging cast members made it quite clear that I shouldn't be too into that junk. But she was in a lot of the movie except for the ending, and I really developed a relationship with her, not unlike those relationships you see on daytime talk shows where chair-throwing and face-biting are the order of the day.

Now that I think about it, NONE of the cast was in the ending of the movie. I think. Did I fall asleep? Maybe... did I die temporarily? I mean, I watched a group of skiing enthusiasts somehow get in a fight with a military helicopter, and I remember they won hands down using only a length of rope, snow boards, and the desire to cut away from the action when it just got too implausible.

I saw one kid get shot in the stomach, but since he usually did stuff like snowboard off four-story buildings into broken glass or something, he wasn't much affected by it. I even saw a boy who was afraid of heights/flying sacrifice himself off a cliff face for the good of the team. Psyche! He had a parachute! Yeah, that's right, only the people I wanted to live died. They made the snowboarding kids impervious to danger. That had the effect of making me really wish they'd die sooner, by my hand. Say, remember Aliens? You know why that was awesome? 'Cause they beat up and killed all the annoying people. This movie lets them all live! What a ripoff! I left angry and tense.

You know what? Skip the rest of it. I remember now why I didn't see the end. Stupid me. I dropped a quarter on the floor. I had been poking myself in the eye with it 'cause it felt really good in comparison to the movie, and then I totally forgot about the floor, and I reached for it. As I'm sure you've already guessed, my hand got stuck in the goop, and then it just got worse. I was like "Oh, I'll free my hand using this other hand." Of course, that got stuck, too. Then I was all "Crap, I guess I have to use my teeth or gnaw my hands off now and junk," and then my hair got stuck in it. Then somehow my butt knocked my soda out of the cupholder and it poured down my back and around my head. By the time they loosened me up and freed me with the aid of a giant tub of popcorn butter, I had worked myself into the shape of a fly playing twister on fly paper.

So that was pretty crazy. I don't know why I forgot about it 'til now. I mean, I made so much noise that those two people left the theater a full hour before it all happened, leaving their shoes behind to fossilize.

Anyway, look. This movie was crap, I can't defend it. There's no way. I think you can see that I've been avoiding actually reviewing it as much as possible. Thanks to this movie, the next Lord of the Rings is going to have to finish up on the moon or something, just to get even further away from America and its suckiness cloud.

If you want to see some real extreme action, do yourself a huge favor and go beat up these young middle-aged actors before they regroup and make an XX-treme Ops (note the two X's, indicating your worst nightmare in the form of a sequel). After that, see/rent xXx. No, I don't mean DVDs from the "over 18" room. I mean "Triple X" starring heartthrob Vin Diesel in the title role. Now that's some ramp-jumping, rocket-launching, trash-talking extreme action if there ever was any.

If that's not enough, and the hell it isn't, there's plenty more grade-A movies like it, including Soldier, starring Hollywood heartthrob Kurt Russel as, get this, a soldier! and all eighty-seven Dolph Lundgren movies starring international heartthrob Jean-Claude Van Damme, sometimes.

Finally, cross your fingers that The Core gets released as soon as possible, 'cause a movie where the military's newest device accidentally stops the core of the Earth and creates electromagnetic lightning storms that can only be corrected with a four-billion dollar machine built by Delroy Lindo can't POSSIBLY be bad. It's just not possible, and I'm covering my ears and singing right now, so don't even try it.

Anyway... I'm done, so, get out of my face!
(I said that to be x-treme - no offense, okay?)

— Gary



Congratulations! You really are extreme. You read the whole review! You've earned the right to glue your feet to your driveway and poke yourself in the eyes with quarters!