TITLE: Dishonored
PLATFORM: 360, PS3, PC
DEVELOPER: Arkane Studios
PUBLISHER: Bethesda Softworks
ESRB: M
RELESASED: October 9, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

It’s always nice to see a new title release — that isn’t a sequel or a reboot of some sort — that manages to take things that we’re all familiar with and shake them up in a way that still makes it well worth playing. The only other game that I’ve had the pleasure of playing this year that did that was United Front’s Sleeping Dogs, but technically that game was originally an unfinished sequel in the True Crime series, so that leaves Arkane Studio’s first person stealth title Dishonored one of its kind 2012, for me at least.

There’s a lot of games that make claims to stealth being a huge drive to the gameplay, but few of them actually live up to the premise. Just look what happened to the Splinter Cell series. The last one basically might as well been called Michael Ironside Crushes Skulls Interrogates Bad Guys: The Game, with how far removed it had become from the stealth genre. Fortunately, Dishonored gives players a wonderful amount of breathing room as far as how stealthy they truly want to play the game. Not once in the game does it feel like it’s all or nothing; it’s quite the opposite, really.

The game takes place in the fictional, quasi-steampunk/clockwork city of Dunwall, which kind of looks a bit like 19th century London, during the ravaging epidemic of a rat plague. Corvo Attano, the bodyguard of Dunwall’s Empress, is returning from a trip overseas to request help of the neighboring cities against the outbreak. Upon his return he is framed for her murder by assassins, as well as the kidnapping of her daughter Emily. Months later, he is broken out of prison by an underground group of rebels still loyal to the late Empress and set on his way to work up the food chain to find the missing princess, right the wrongs and the consequences that followed, and most importantly — get revenge on those that framed him.

In the city of Dunwall, the player finds that there’s a certain air of class warfare going on, with the rat plague hitting the worst in the poorer, slummy areas of the city, while the upper class still enjoys a bit of protection from the disease, going so far as to hold swanky masquerade parties and all of the other things that such a society would hold comfort to. However, even they aren’t immune to the disease, something that becomes quite evident with everyone’s reliance on elixers and remedies — health and mana potions to the player, but important rat plague medicine to everyone else in the game’s world.

Through his alliance with the loyalists, Corvo is given a number of weapons, from the requisite pistol, crossbow and sword, to the slightly more sneaky, such as mines that shoot out metal shards when set off and tools that can be used to rewire enemy security systems to work against them rather than the player. The loyalist’s in-house scientist, Piero, is available to sell the player any needed ammo and tools, as well as upgrades to both weaponry and personal equipment. With the amount of loot that is strewn throughout the game’s expansive levels, as well as on pretty much everone that walks around in the game, there’s no excuse to not take advantage of the many upgrades available.

Early in the game, the player receives a visit from a mystical being known only as The Outsider, who grants Corvo with magical powers, the first one being the ability to teleport across short distances. He also gives Corvo a human heart imbued with both mechanical and magical properties which allows him to find runes and bone charms hidden throughout the game’s levels. The runes serve as in-game currency to buy magical powers for Corvo to use, such as the ability possess other living creatures for short periods of time, to see through walls, or to even stop time itself, among other things. This all comes at the cost of mana, and all of the powers are limited in how long they can be used for, making everything have a cost and requiring them to be used strategically in the levels. Bone charms, on the other hand, offer small perks to the player, and can help with everything from health regeneration to the amount of loot or ammo the player will find from time to time. The player is only allowed to equip a limited number of them at the same time, so once again strategic planning is the name of the game.

It’s not hard to notice aesthetic and certain gameplay similarities to Bioshock; the visual style itself — between both the characters and levels themselves — has the same colorful, imaginative appeal of that game. Dishonored also has that same weird affinity for having levels full of strange foods hidden everywhere in the game. However, much like Bioshock, it’s little things like that that give the game’s world — as fictional as it may be — a very realized and fleshed out feel to it. The game has its own very palpable culture, something that can be taken in to a greater extent by seeking out and reading all of the books lying around the game. There’s everything from history volumes to science tomes, diaries, even books with nursery rhymes and plays in them. Why? Why not? It’s just one of those things that’s there if you want to check it out, and if not — fine, don’t. But in many respects it only helps to enrich this fictional place and makes it seem all the more real to those that have the pleasure of exploring it.

The game itself is always dependent on giving the players the ability to choose their plan of attack every step of the way. There’s always the typical straightforward path to get from point A to point B, but what’s the fun in that when you can climb rooftop to rooftop to get there, or — even more ridiculously — possess a rat and sneak around dilapidated alleyways and the sort of holes that only a rat would be able to sneak through? Even more importantly though, not once is the player ever required to kill anyone. Granted, a completely pacifist run through Dishonored is both a test of skill and patience, but even when the loyalists give Corvo his next assassination target, there’s always a less violent way to neutralize the target, as the game calls it. It might not always be evident or obvious from a passing glance, but it’s always there. That alone gives motivation to players to explore a little and dig into the world that Arkane created.

For players not determined enough to attempt a completely non-lethal runthrough, it’d be recommended to find a happy medium between stealth and combat, as going out guns blazing has its drawbacks as well. Given the time period, Corvo’s gun and crossbow manually reload, so initially players will have to make each shot count. There’s always the alternative of using melee combat, but guards are more than skilled swordsmen, requiring proper use of blocking and counterattacks. Of course, with enough weapon upgrades, the player can eventually get a bit of an upper hand, but it’s still not going to count for much in later levels, which find more guards, as well as the powerful Tallboys, watchmen that tower above everyone else on mechanical stilts, with bows and explosive arrows in their possession. It’s possible to survive just about any encounter, but it’s not nearly as fun as picking off enemies one by one and only getting aggressive when truly necessary.

If it sounds like I’m gushing a bit, it’s because I am. I haven’t been this excited to replay a game immediately upon beating in quite some time. Dishonored is beautifully realized from a visual and conceptual standpoint, and despite many of the areas being quite desolate in their nature, it’s all explained quite purposely, given the plague and the number of people that died and/or escaped the troubled city. For the most part, the controls suit the game quite well, with only a hiccup here and there. For me, the only time I felt that the controls were a bit clunky was when traversing the levels in a near-parkour manner, and it felt to me that it was more of a matter of them not being tight enough for that type of movement, but otherwise they seemed to work well. On a side note, it must also be mentioned that this is probably the first Bethesda published game I’ve played that hasn’t been hampered with tons of bugs and ticks. Granted, there’s still some framerate issues from time to time (I played the 360 version, so results may vary), and every once in awhile the game’s autosave would cause the action to pause, but nothing of the gamebreaking variety that I’ve come to expect from the publisher.

As much as I loved Dishonored, there are a couple of minute things that I’d hold against it. First and foremost, for a game that promotes player choice like this, it really does kind of spell some things out a little too much at times. I assume that a lot of that is because there are so many variables in how one can solve some of the game’s problems that the developers wanted the player to know just how many options were on the table, so to speak, but that really takes away a bit of the discovery that could have been possible otherwise. Of course, I did end up becoming surprised myself in more than a couple of situations due to happy accidents, but I still felt like some of the initial in-game tutorial messages that popped up might have been better as an option that players could toggle on or off should they choose. The only other issue I had was that while the game does wrap up in a tidy fashion, via cutscene, it kind of just ends, leaving me wanting more, but that’s not exactly a problem when you really come down to it.

With a sharp, fully-realized environment and play style, Dishonored took many things that we’ve all seen in games before — political conspiracy theories in a dystopian society, a heavy emphasis on player choice, stealth elements, actions with consequences — and tied them all together in a very original, very engaging title. It’s also rare for a single player title to be unhampered by the stereotypically requisite multiplayer modes hogging up precious development time, but I think that Dishonored was better for it. As I said before, it isn’t perfect, but with a game this addictive, this compulsive and engaging, it hits all the marks as perfectly as possible.

RATING: 9.5/10

Front page image and screenshots photo from dishonored.com.
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ARTIST: Parkway Drive
ALBUM TITLE: Atlas
RECORD LABEL: Epitaph Records
RELEASED: October 30, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

There’s a saying, about how if you’re going to steal to make sure that you steal from the best, and I’ve felt for a long time that it applies to Parkway Drive very, very well. It’s not that they’re a bad band, and I don’t find them to be entirely derivative, but I’ve never really felt that their sound was entirely original either. But the Australian band is really good at what they do, which is write slightly above average modern metalcore songs. In other terms, songs with lots of Swedish death metal leads, breakdowns, spoken word bits between growled/shouted vocals, and squealies (aka pinch harmonics).

Each of their first three albums have found the band improving their songwriting and playing ever so slightly, and Atlas continues the trend, except they’ve incorporated some new tricks into their arsenal. There’s some emphasis on atmosphere through synths — and in a couple of instances, female backing vocals — on a number of songs that gives those numbers a much more mature air than the surrounding tracks. Songs like “The River,” “Sleight of Hand,” and the title song are where everything jells in a way that none of their past songs ever did. There’s so much focus on making the keyboards sound natural within the band’s sound that I really wish that they would have experimented more with that, because they are the most promising songs of the bunch. Compared to the rest of the album, it’s these three songs, and perhaps a couple others to a lesser extent, that show Parkway Drive really coming into their own, rather than just playing by the rules already set forth and perfected by countless others.

Interestingly enough, it’s the times that the band doesn’t play to genre stereotypes that jar the flow of the album the most. There are points during Atlas where you would think they’d be heading left, figuratively speaking, but they end up making a hard right. A perfect example of this is the broken flow between intro track “Sparks” and first true song “Old Ghosts/New Regrets.” The way the album opens with “Sparks” is completely squandered, as it almost sounds as though it is leading into a bigger, more explosive payoff, but there isn’t. It’s just all this buildup and then an awkward cut, and then the next song starts. The way the album flows gives it a somewhat incomplete feel, as though some of their better ideas only were fleshed out on a sparse few songs rather than the full album. Another oddity occurs in “The Slow Surrender,” where vocalist Winston McCall’s raspy vocals are sampled and scratched, the way a DJ would scratch on a turntable. It’s off-putting and just doesn’t fit into an otherwise excellent song.

Other songs just sound like more modern takes on what they’ve already pretty much mastered. “Dream Run” and “Swing” sound like the lovechild of As I Lay Dying and Killswitch Engage. While not bad songs in their own right, they don’t really do much to show the band’s growth. On the upside, I do appreciate PWD’s dedication to their sound. It isn’t a big deal in the bigger picture, but I love the fact that they don’t once give in to the overbearing need to fill every song with a catchy, cleanly sung melodic chorus, so it’s evident that they’re paying attention to what they don’t need to do in their songs to keep things interesting. Also, Winston McCall is probably one of the best vocalists in this style of music that I’ve heard in quite some time, and his delivery on Atlas is varied, energetic and full of heart, to say the least.

Parkway Drive isn’t a bad band, and Atlas isn’t a bad record, but they don’t really do anything to advance the metalcore genre in any way whatsoever, but that’s okay. It seems like the past couple years have seen a steady drop in bands attempting this style, which is probably a good thing, as thinning the herd will definitely promote some bands to rise to the top, and hopefully that means that some fresh ideas will come that way as well.

RATING: 6.5/10

Front page image/interior photo from substreammusicpress.com, interior photo from theaureview.com.

TITLE: Medal of Honor: Warfighter
PLATFORM: PS3, 360, PC
DEVELOPER: Danger Close
PUBLISHER: Electronic Arts
ESRB: M
RELESASED: October 23, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

Fall has come to mean military shooter season for most gamers, due to the annual release of whatever new Call of Duty game is coming out. As it is, a small part of me actually slightly looks forward to each of these titles. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not one of those gamers that spends night after night plodding away on the infamous shooter’s multiplayer matches. I just like to kill a few nights going through the series’ usually entertaining single player campaigns. I liken the series to gaming’s version of junk food, and once I’m through with it, the binge is over and that’s that.

However, for publishers, the Call of Duty series is that behemoth that every other shooter tries to one up, year after year, and typically gets shot down. The franchise to get the closest was EA’s Battlefield series, with Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 both showing a multiplayer offering that was more than competitive with the popular series. While I haven’t personally played Battlefield 3, I have played BC2 and loved the single player, and thought that its multiplayer was well-crafted but the maps were a little too big for what it had to offer players.

The thing with the BF entries is that they’re only released every other year, which meant that EA clearly needed another blockbuster title to pick up the slack while EA DICE works their magic on those games. Enter 2010′s Medal of Honor reboot. Much like Modern Warfare did for the CoD series, the shooter took the franchise into current times, but where MW was able to reinvent the series in an over the top, action movie sense, MoH 2010 was ultra-serious and hamfisted, and its core gameplay components were a little too much like all the other shooters out there for its own good.

It just felt like the game did just enough to be like all the other military shooters out there, but nothing more. And by having EA DICE develop the multiplayer for that title, there was a total disconnect between the single player and the multiplayer components. But alas, the game made enough money to warrant it becoming franchise-worthy once again. With EA desperately needing something to compete with CoD during Battlefield’s off season, there was definitely some pressure riding on this series taking off. Something tells me that the awkwardly titled Medal of Honor: Warfighter isn’t exactly how EA wanted it to turn out though.

Going into this game, I noticed a few odd things about its release, aside from the tons of money that was being thrown at it in the marketing department, the odd cross-marketing between the game and weapons manufacturers, and the ill-fitting Linkin Park endorsement that was going on. For starters, not one publication had a review up of the game until release day, which happens from time to time, but it’s unusual. Some of the bigger game sites didn’t even get their reviews out until a few days after release, which makes it look like the game was purposefully being held off from critics until the last minute, so that a good number of folks wouldn’t be swayed by negative press early on if there wasn’t any press to be had. It happens all the time when stinky movies hit theaters, and Warfighter is no different.

The second thing was the 208mb day one patch that released for the title. I understand that plenty of games go gold and whatnot, only for developers to find last minute bugs and things that they want to polish up, but a patch of that size is a little more substantial, and raises a pretty big red flag to gamers that actually pay attention to that sort of thing. It’s not the biggest or worst day one patch, but it’s still something that would make one think that there’s more than just the typical quick fix here and there going on. Mind you, these were just a couple of innocent observations that I had made going into my initial play session with the game, but you know what they say about first impressions…

So going into the game, I was saddened to find that it’s by all accounts worse than its mediocre predecessor, and only succeeds in how average the whole affair is. Not one single thing about the game is terrible by any means, but nothing was done to make me feel like this title is anything more than just another modern military shooter. The single player campaign follows a pair of soldiers, known as Preacher and Stump, as they’re alternatively trying to gather intel on a terrorist unit with plans to blow stuff up. From what I could gather, that’s about how deep it got, as the story was very convoluted and didn’t flow too well.

Actually, I just lied, the storyline has a whole subplot about Preacher’s home life coming to a bitter end. His wife wants him out, but his dedication to the military keeps him coming back. If it sounds corny, it’s even worse experienced, due to the dialogue in these cutscenes and just how uncanny valley his wife and daughter look at times during these segments. I understand that emotional attachments help to get players invested into the characters that they’re playing, but when you’re basically one of two cardboard cutouts that goes around shooting up various “terrorist” stereotypes, it’s kind of hard to really take that any further.

And this would all be forgivable, but the game — even after said patch — was just buggy and kind of a mess. In my opinion, one of the worst part of the Call of Duty titles is its insistence that the player has to follow someone else around the entire time, to trigger enemy spawns or so that the path or doorway will open up for you to continue down the games’ linear paths. Warfighter has these too, but unlike CoD , sometimes the scripted events just won’t trigger, and the only solution to that is by reloading. Also, with such a heavy reliance on scripting, sometimes the NPCs will push you out of a vantage point because you happen to be where they’re supposed to be standing. In a game that is full of firefights that requires the player to wisely use the cover provided by the level design, that sometimes doesn’t end so well.

On top of that, some of the missions in the game don’t even really tie into the story in any way whatsoever. Without giving away any spoilers, a couple of times, missions took place that never really are touched on again, ever. One of these particular missions could have actually fleshed the game out and given a totally different dynamic to the campaign, but nope! When the game is chugging away properly, your friendlies aren’t pushing you into into enemy fire, needless dramatic cutscenes aren’t playing and you aren’t being lead along by the nose, the game does an average job of being an average shooter. Sometimes the firefights take a considerable bit longer than they could, which only adds to the malaise of the oversaturation of this game genre, but they work as well as they’re supposed to.

And sometimes, they let you drive cars! As odd as it is to have emotionally stirring dramatic scenes between the gunplay, it’s even stranger to drive around non-military cars in the game. Danger Close brought in some of the devs from the Need for Speed titles to help conceive these missions. And you know what? These two missions are actually fun, different, and exciting! Perhaps it’s partly the shock of how much they shake up the general monotony of the combat missions in the game, but they were well-crafted, and truly brought something different to the title. The worst part about the driving missions is the fact that after they’re over it’s back to the firefight.

As far as multiplayer goes, it was evident with my time playing that the developers put a little more time and effort into that, but it’s not really enough. Ironically enough, I felt that the multiplayer maps in 2010’s reboot were more fun and engaging, and had more of a sense of character than these did, but that’s just personal preference. Part of my bias against it might be because of the bad taste that the single player campaign left in my mouth, but I didn’t really feel that it was good enough. It’s certainly not enough of a complete package to warrant purchasing the game at full retail price for what it has to offer.

As said, I’ve played much worse first person shooters — military or otherwise — than Medal of Honor: Warfighter, but this game really doesn’t do anything whatsoever to excite me. Graphically, it holds up to the higher standards of EA’s other military shooters, but everything else only really excels in how mediocre and disaffecting it is. On a personal note, I’ll take a small budgeted, quirky first person shooter any day over this, because at least those games have some sort of angle or gimmick to make them stand out from the pack, unlike this one, which comes off as the premiere example of a ‘me too’ shooter merely going through the motions. When the most exciting aspect of your game is the driving segments — and your game is a first person shooter — you know something went awry in the development, or that the title was simply rushed out to beat the competition. Either way, it’s a good way to lose your audience.

RATING: 4.5/10

Front page image and all screenshots except driving image courtesy of EA. Driving image from polygon.com.

TITLE: The Expendables 2
STARRING: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Liam Hemsworth, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger
DIRECTOR: Simon West
STUDIO: Nu Image, Millennium Films, Lionsgate
RATED: R
RUN TIME: 103 min
RELEASED: August 17, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

What could I possibly say about a movie like The Expendables 2 that most people haven’t figured out already? To put it lightly, reviewing a film like this is more of a formality than most, because the readers out there that want to see it (as well as those who don’t) already know the answer to that question.

Seriously, it’s one of those films that should be a fairly easy decision as to whether you should see it or not. Did you grow up loving the Stallone and Schwarzenegger films (and all the ones just like it starring lesser known macho men) of the ‘80s? Do you like action movies where the bad guys get shot up in a gloriously gratuitous fashion, typically involving muscles, guns, and explosions, or a combination of the three? Did you like the first movie? If the answer to any (or all) of those questions was yes, then you should have a pretty good chance of liking this movie.

Taking place sometime after the events of the first film, Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) enlists Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and his group of merry men for another job, this time in Albania, that only a group like The Expendables could handle. As is usually the case in a film like this, things go wrong, at the hands of the villainous mercenary Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme). Yes, the villain is named Vilain. And he’s villainous. Seeking revenge, Barney and company hunt him down, uncovering Vilain’s plot to unearth five tons of plutonium in order to sell them on the black market. From there, I think it’s pretty obvious how a film like this pans out.

Fortunately, a movie like The Expendables 2 relies just as much on how they get there as they do the climactic showdown between the two opposing forces. I wouldn’t want it any other way, really. With the amount of star power running through this film at even higher levels than it was last time around, once the setup is in place pretty much the entire film is one big orgy of guns, explosions and people dying.

For the most part, it appeared as though a lot of what didn’t work was dropped from the first film. Sure, there was a bit of downtime here and there to give some of the characters a little more depth, but it was handled in a way that didn’t come across as hamfisted this time. However, in a film like this, a little cheese is good, and the stars never forget that. The overly serious tone was scaled back in favor of allowing the actors to jokingly quip about everything from their age to subtly making fun of each others’ more infamous movie roles. Hell, even Chuck Norris, who has a couple of short but sweet scenes in the film, manages to make a joke about himself that should sound all too familiar to anyone who knows a few of his internet meme jokes that used to spread like wildfire a few years back.

While it isn’t as vulgar, and the action is much less soaked in the annoying CGI blood that permeated throughout the first film, I think that it was a better film for it. There’s a much greater emphasis on practical effects and corny one liner humor that makes it feel more like the good old days of these actors, and you could tell that they were having fun. Rather than a bunch of action heroes from yesterday trying to make a modern explode-a-thon, they did what they did best. Plus, to see Schwarzenegger back in action was awesome, even if he’s starting to get up there in years.

After thinking it all through, I think I liked Expendables 2 more than the first one, even if only just a little. I like the more humor-infused approach than the first one, whose occasional humor was more of the “bros one-upping each other” variety, and I think that Jean-Claude Van Damme was a much stronger bad guy than Eric Roberts’ rogue CIA operative was in the first film. The sequel might have lacked a couple of the badass moments that the first one had, but it made up for it with a better story, more badasses, and an even better fight at the end.

RATING: 7/10

Front page image and interior stills courtesy of Lionsgate.

TITLE: Total Recall
STARRING: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, John Cho, Bill Nighy
DIRECTOR: Len Wiseman
STUDIO: Original Film, Columbia Pictures
RATED: PG-13
RUN TIME: 121 min
RELEASED: August 3, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

With the summer blockbuster season winding down for the most part (not counting the next entry in the Bourne series or The Expendables 2), we’re left with the scraps. At the top of that pile is the unnecessary remake of Total Recall, starring Colin Farrell.

Farrell plays a man named Douglas Quaid, a factory worker in a world ravaged by World War III. Due to toxicity levels overrunning the atmosphere, the only habitable places left on the planet are the United Federation of Britain and The Colony, which is what’s left of Australia. Quaid keeps having nightmares that seem too real to just be figments of his imagination, and it’s been causing him to become increasingly more unsatisfied with his life.

Finally in an act of desperation, he decides to visit Rekall, a company that advertises that they can implant memories into one’s for recreational purposes. Of course, he uses his dreams of being some sort of secret agent as the basis for his “trip” from Rekall, and things pretty much go sideways from there on. He’s caught in the middle of a class warfare battle between UFB Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston) and the Resistance, a group of rebels from The Colony fighting for equality. Cranston and his army of Clone Trooper-inspired robot soldiers are playing it off like the Resistance are the bad guys, and vice versa, all while Quaid is trying to figure out what’s real and what’s Rekall, or recall, or something like that.

The effects are decent enough when they’re not looking like they were ripped straight out of one of the many post-apocalyptic and/or futuristic video games out there, and Farrell brings a lot of depth to his conflicted, confused character, but there really isn’t a whole lot else that couldn’t have been swapped out for other actors and actresses. Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel have always played their roles steely and cool, and that’s pretty much all you can expect here, making them more or less appear as plot constructs for the film, and Cranston plays a decent enough villain, but his mannerisms remind me a little too much of his Walter White character on Breaking Bad.

The setup and midsection of the film are in my opinion are much better than the stereotypical finale; once you learn all the secrets and what’s really going on, the movie kind of wanders off into typical action trope territory. It’s not a particularly bad film, but it’s not really the type of movie that gets you sitting on the edge of your seat, either. Part of the reason for that is because the original is much more memorable than this, and because much of the science fiction ends up becoming eschewed in favor of running and gunning action sequences towards the tail end of the film.

Although it’s been a number of years since I’ve seen the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, it had a number of scenes that have been seared into my memories for life. The “two weeks lady” disguise, the three breasted prostitute, peoples’ eyes bugging out on the surface of Mars; the original Total Recall might have not been the greatest film, but it made up for it with unforgettable scenes and director Paul Verhoeven’s twisted and darkly comical commentary on commercialism and propaganda.

The remake tries to do its own thing, but ultimately stumbles by reminding viewers of the original whenever it needs a shot of adrenaline to get us interested again, which is something that should never happen if you expect your remake to be taken as its own piece of work. The best way to go into Total Recall is expecting nothing more than a summer popcorn flick. Expecting more than that would require a memory wipe, possibly wholesale.

RATING: 6.5/10

Front page image and interior stills from rottentomatoes.com.

ARTIST: Hellyeah
ALBUM TITLE: Band of Brothers
RECORD LABEL: Eleven Seven Music
RELEASED: July 17, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

While Hellyeah is still not quite there yet, this is much closer to what I’ve been envisioning for the band for years now. Two years ago, Hellyeah’s sophomore release, Stampede, hit my ears and left me feeling cold. Considering the band’s pedigree, including members of Pantera, Mudvayne, Nothingface — three bands that comprised a great chunk of my daily listening during my teenage years — not to mention Damageplan, it felt like the band was yet to really hit its stride. And I feel like Band of Brothers is finally showing the band starting to figure out what works and what doesn’t from a songwriting standpoint. It took two albums for them to do that, but who’s really keeping score here?

My biggest problem with Hellyeah’s last two albums was that they seemed like they were trying too hard to live up to the band’s name, which brings a much more southern vibe to mind than that of a hard-hitting supergroup formed from members of metal bands that were at their biggest at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps it’s my own selfishness, but when I first heard that former Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul was teaming up with half of Mudvayne, all I wanted to hear was songs that sounded like Pantera with Mudvayne’s Chad Gray going apeshit all over it, and after patiently waiting nearly half a decade, they’ve finally done it — to a point.

Maybe the band leaving the safety net of a major label has a little bit to do with them being more willing to let loose this time around, because even songs like “Drink, Drank, Drunk” sound more like anthems to start a riot in the pit rather than the weaksauce outlaw odes that the last two albums offered up, and they had a lot of them.

It’s funny, because before actually hearing this album, I had all but written the group off as another “shoulda, woulda, coulda” supergroup that failed to live up to the expectations; a band that didn’t equal the sum of its parts. But Band of Brothers finds Hellyeah focusing on the many different influences that the individual members have brought to the project for the best. From the more chaotic Mudvayne touches of “Bigger God” to the more pensive, almost balladic flourishes that Nothingface’s later albums had found in the mellower “Between You and Nowhere,” the music actually feels like the sum of its parts. Combine that with a production style that really brings to mind Pantera’s style (a crisp, clear sound comes from Vinnie’s drumkit throughout, plenty of fadeouts at the end of songs — a Pantera staple), and you’ve got a rather solid album from start to finish.

I don’t know if my lacking expectations have slightly tainted my opinion of Band of Brothers for the best or not. The band is still sorely lacking in the lyrics department, and their whole general image — the band name, the cowboy hats, and the machismo — is still kind of off-putting. But I’m really liking the musical direction that the band have taken this time around. I always felt like they were playing it too safe with their last two albums, trying to hard to cater to an approach that made sense given their name but didn’t really add up given the creative output that each of the members have been responsible over the years. The whole outlaw sound only works to a certain extent, and if the band doesn’t really sound convincing as outlaws, especially when their own respective bands played it much looser and more dangerously, then what’s the point?

Ultimately, it’s unlikely that Hellyeah’s music will ever outshine anything that Pantera laid to tape, but this is the closest that we’ll ever get to the level of ferocity and intensity that the Texans had achieved back in their heyday, and that’s something that drummer Vinnie Paul can be proud of, I’m sure. Unless, of course, the band miraculously puts their past behind them and finds a suitable guitarist to fill the bigger than Texas shoes that late Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrel left behind. But, with Band of Brothers I get the impression that Hellyeah is consciously trying to remind listeners us why they’re even here in the first place, and you’ve got to give credit where it’s due.

RATING: 7.5/10

Front page image/interior photo from facebook.com/hellyeahband.

TITLE: The Dark Knight Rises
STARRING: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Morgan Freeman
DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan
STUDIO: Legendary Pictures, Syncopy Films, DC Comics, Warner Bros. Pictures
RATED: PG-13
RUN TIME: 165 min
RELEASED: July 20, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

We all knew that The Dark Knight was going to be pretty hard for director Christopher Nolan to top when the third and final of his Batman films finally came around, but after being spoiled to two quite excellent Batman films this generation, was he going to strike out like many superhero franchises tend to at their third go-round? Recent events surrounding the release of the film aside — after all, this is a movie review, not commentary on the acts of someone who clearly had some personal demons of their own — The Dark Knight Rises was every bit the finale that I was hoping for.

Taking place eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, Gotham City is a safer city than it ever was before, and Batman hasn’t been seen since the death of Harvey Dent, whose death he assumed the blame for. But with the city a safer place, Gotham didn’t really have a need for Batman, causing Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) to become a bit of a recluse and a shadow of his former self. That’s until Bane (Tom Hardy), a cold and calculating terrorist with brains and brawn, shows up in Gotham with plans to raze the city to the ground in an attempt to let the people retake a city built on corruption and crime. Wayne realizes that he has to put on the cape and cowl once again, but at what cost? With all of his loved ones gone except his trusty butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), does he have anything left to lose?

The thing I always loved about Nolan’s Batman trilogy was the humanity behind the spectacle. It wasn’t just about the gadgets, the costumes and the flashy villains. In a sense, his films boldly brought the moody, dramatic overtones that the more modern comics have always touched on that the other films barely even scraped at. We got hints of Bruce Wayne’s psyche in Tim Burton’s first film, but it wasn’t enough to outshine Jack Nicholson’s Joker, let alone Prince’s Technicolor soundtrack. Nolan’s films — for better or worse — spend a lot more time focusing on Bruce Wayne and his struggles to find a place in a world that he feels tragically detached from, and it’s the drama that makes his struggle so compelling. The events of The Dark Knight Rises almost makes the whole thing seem like a final gamble on Bruce Wayne’s part that gives viewers the sense that he doesn’t even want to get out of this alive. He just wants to get out.

With the bulky mask not only rendering most of Tom Hardy’s facial expressions invisible, his voice was augmented through his breathing apparatus as well, giving him a very detached, almost inhuman feel throughout the film. This only helps give him even more of a presence though, because it’s the terrifying lack of emotion in his actions that really carries over through the screen. Even combined with the odd cadence and random inflections in his voice, he completely embodies terror and uses that as his strongest asset. Combined with his brute strength, Bane might not be the way comic fans remember him from the books, but he every bit as menacing, posing an even greater threat to the Dark Knight than the Joker ever did.

With great supporting roles from Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake, an idealist cop who still has faith in the Batman, and Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate, an investor and member of the Wayne Enterprises executive board who seems more than willing to help the company get back on its feet (not to mention the always great performances by Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman), The Dark Knight Rises hits all the right notes, and knows when to pull its punches accordingly. Additional props must be given to Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, who took a role that usually ends up becoming oversexed and too campy, and making it completely plausible in this particular Batman’s universe. And Michael Caine was absolutely astounding in his portrayal of the worn-down butler. Never before did I think that an actor in a comic book movie would be able to nearly move me to tears, but his heartbreaking performance hits like a ten ton hammer.

Equal parts comic book movie, drama, and action caper, its story builds up to a fantastic finale that manages to make the trilogy come full circle without feeling contrived or forced. Is it a little long? Well, yeah; a movie that’s close to three hours long is a bit of a stretch by any means, but to me it felt well balanced and didn’t really feel like a chore to watch. Is it as good as The Dark Knight? Well, not exactly. With the performance that Heath Ledger left us with as the Joker, I don’t think Rises ever could have topped it. But it’s a worthy sequel with its own identity and its own wealth of memorable scenes and subtle bits of fan service, and it never gets lost in the shadow of its predecessors, proving that not all third movies end up being terrible and unnecessary.

RATING: 9/10

Front page image and interior stills from thedarkknightrises.com.

TITLE: Battleship
STARRING: Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker
DIRECTOR: Peter Berg
STUDIO: Bluegrass Films, Film 44, Hasbro Studios,Universal Pictures
RATED: PG-13
RUN TIME: 131 min
RELEASED: May 18, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

With a few scant weeks before the real sci-fi/alien movie Prometheus sets fire to all the competition, we’re left with few options in terms of what to watch to bide the time. I mean, who hasn’t already seen The Avengers, right? So, unfortunately, that leaves us with Battleship.

While not quite as much of a train wreck as I was expecting, it wasn’t all that great either. Then again, when your expectations are barely scraping the bottom of the b-movie barrel, anything could pass for decent. Considering that I’m the type of guy that can find enjoyment out of even the trashiest schlock (Machete or Ghost Rider 2, anyone?), that’s really saying something.

But no, my friends, Battleship is not in that self-aware, “so bad it’s good” category. It’s just sitting squarely in that uncomfortable limbo where movies go that just don’t do enough to make you care either way. Sure, there’s some great special effects moments, the requisite comic relief here and there, mainly in the form of the Jeff Goldblum-esque Cal Zapata (Hamish Linklater), and a slightly thought out setup to how one makes a movie such as this. There’s even the obligatory side story about would-be hero Alex (Taylor Kitsch) and his girlfriend (Brooklyn Decker) on opposite sides of the battle. It’s just that all of this really doesn’t add much to the vanilla-grade blockbuster bullshit that’s going on elsewhere.

Long story short, Alex Hopper is one of those classic cinematic fuckups; he’s the bad boy with a heart of gold and tons of potential who just can’t seem to get his shit together. A naval officer at the RIMPAC naval exercises, it’s his lack of judgment and decision making skills that nearly gets him kicked out of the Navy. However, just in the nick of time, five alien ships come barreling out of the sky, four of which land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in relatively close proximity to the ships out at sea for the event. With the world’s fate lying in the balance, it’s up to Alex to step up and become a true hero, or something like that. If this all sounds very clichéd, don’t worry; it is. And then some.

That’s about all the film really offers us; there’s no real explanation for the extraterrestrials’ presence besides the opening, which explains how NASA scientists beamed a communication signal to a planet in another galaxy thought to be of the same inhabitable qualities as earth. They did this to see if there’s any intelligent life out there, and the result was the aliens coming to visit. Other than that, there’s nothing really explaining the aliens’ actions, which are questionable at best. This is all before we even get into the fact that the film is so loosely tethered to its board game “inspiration” that it might as well not have even been called Battleship. I mean, sure, the aliens’ ordnance look pretty much exactly like the pegs in the game, and part of the Navy’s endgame centers around tactics pulled straight from the gameplay, but it’s akin to making a movie about checkers that amounts to a warrior that kills everyone up the ladder only to reach the top and take over as ruler.

The ties to a game such as this are so tenuous at best that there’s no point. But I get it. With the Transformers franchise taking a bit of a break while things are reworked for the next Michael Bay grand opus, Hasbro Studios needs something to get those asses in the theater seats. And if you’re going into it just to turn your brain off and see shit blow up, or if you’re the type that gets a bit of a thrill out of seeing Americans kick some alien ass, à la Independence Day, there’s enough of that in this to make the trip worthwhile, in a lowest common denominator kind of way. But for those of us who crave either A) an alien/sci-fi movie that has a gripping story and great characters to go along with the effects or B) something undeniably tacky but loose enough to have fun with it, well this ain’t it. Battleship has all the ingredients of something that could be much more, but the way its all packaged and delivered onscreen doesn’t do nearly enough to elevate it above mediocre.

RATING: 4.5/10

Front page image and interior stills from.

TITLE: Justice League: Doom
STARRING: Kevin Conroy, Tim Daly, Susan Eisenberg, Nathan Fillion, Carl Lumbly, Michael Rosenbaum, Bumper Robinson
DIRECTOR: Lauren Montgomery
STUDIO: Warner Bros. Animation, Warner Premiere, DC Entertainment, Warner Home Video
RATED: PG-13
RUN TIME: 77 min
RELEASE DATE: February 28, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

I’m just going to go out and say that I’ve always been kind of iffy when it comes to the Justice League, and after watching this film, I’m pretty sure that that was the final nail in the coffin for me. It’s not that the film is inherently bad, but just the whole idea of the Justice League kind of always has nagged at me a bit, and that was partly due to the fact that they just don’t work on a practical level for me.

I know, I know. I’m getting off to a bad start by bringing up the realistic applications of a squad of superheroes that exists solely to protect the world from danger, but hear me out. For me, I’ve been able to accept most of the DC heroes on their own, even the most ridiculous of them. And I don’t mind the ridiculousness of it all, I really don’t. But for whatever reason, once you put them all in the same sandbox together, it becomes painfully clear which ones will be pulling the most weight, due to them having to work together in a sense. That being said, if everyone’s living in a world with a Superman, well what’s the point of even trying?

There really isn’t one. That leaves comic book authors with the unenviable task of trying to come up with creative ways to disarm the most powerful man in the universe, or at the very least, ways of dividing and conquering the opposition. Because, let’s face it: if you’re living in Superman’s world — theoretically speaking — the only way that you could attempt to get the upper hand on him is to have multiple scenarios distracting him, as he can’t be in two places at once, as well as a good, strong amount of kryptonite. Both things are exactly part of the plans entailed in Justice League: Doom.

Based on Mark Waid’s excellent “Tower of Babel” story arc from the JLA comic a little over a decade ago, Doom is the story of how a Vandal Savage-led Legion of Doom gets the upper hand on the Justice League, and forever changes the relationships between its members. One of my biggest issues with the film, however, was not the fact that it was a story dealing with the Justice League. It was that the story itself was changed to the point that its original premise is still intact, but the rest of specifics were changed. Some were done so for the best, but many were left looking worse.

See, “Tower of Babel” functioned more or less as a Batman story that happened to feature the Justice League as supporting members. While they weren’t really the main focus of the story, their presence held just as much weight as if they were, but it was the way that they were balanced that made it such a page turner back in 2000 when the story was originally published. Long story short, the story detailed how Ra’s al Ghul was able to infiltrate Batman’s base of operations and steal files that Batman had on each and every member of the Justice League. In these files were contingency plans that Batman had compiled, should the moment ever arise that he would need to incapacitate one (or all) of them. Considering that he is the only member of the Justice League without superpowers, this is a logical — albeit slightly cold — way of thinking, but it’s something that makes sense for the man who has a plan for everything to take into consideration.

With these files, Ra’s was able to plan a series of attacks to take out all of the Justice League members, so that he could enact one of his typical ‘destroy most of the population for the sake of the planet’ plans. Obviously, everything eventually gets resolved, and Batman and company put a stop to Ra’s al Ghul once again, but it brought about a turning point for the league. After that, it found the members untrusting of Batman, and many of them felt betrayed, a sentiment that still lingered in more recent comics. While it wasn’t without its fair share of faults and plot holes, it told a great story and the impact of its events informed the respective characters’ feelings towards the Dark Knight for years to come.

In the late Dwayne McDuffie’s revision of the story, “Tower of Babel” gets a bit of a makeover, which works about half of the time. The immortal Vandal Savage puts together a team of enemies that each have a reason to want to put a stop to one of the members of the JL, and under his direction, they use Batman’s files against them. This, of course, is a distraction to allow Savage to attempt to complete his greater goal, which is to destroy most of the world’s population for the sake of the planet.

While it’s commendable that McDuffie thought that it would make for better storytelling to provide the League with a singular enemy, giving them a more unified reason to stop Vandal Savage, it took much of the wind out of the sails of the original story. Much of Batman’s back story deals very much with personal baggage, and what better way to tell a larger scale story than to use that idea to the max? Because of Batman’s baggage — this time his ties to Ra’s al Ghul — the league as a whole has big problems to deal with. “Tower of Babel” was always a Batman story set under the JLA backdrop, and by taking out that dichotomy, you lose much of the impact that the story has. Plus, it helped to establish Batman as even more of a wild card that should always be feared just a little bit, because he truly always does have a contingency plan. “Babel” only made that point even more crystal clear.

In many ways, I felt that Doom really missed out on some great opportunities to justify Batman’s involvement in the Justice League, and it softened the serious tone of the story by adding some quick-fix elements to it that ultimately feel like more of an afterthought than a thoughtful recreation of a story that really didn’t need fixing in the first place. I’m aware of the fact that some of the heroes were swapped out in order to represent the more current iteration of the Justice League, but it didn’t need to be done so in a manner that flooded an already packed story full of characters that don’t really matter too much in the whole scheme of things (Royal Flush Gang, I’m looking at you…).

From a production standpoint, I thought that the animation style fit the story, but only because much of its content ended up feeling like a stretched out version of one of DC’s many animated half hour series. In that, it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. It got the job done, but wasn’t as stylish as I thought that it could have been, especially if the story was considered important enough to warrant release on DC’s Animated Original Movies line. However, if I felt that the story was better portrayed, it wouldn’t have mattered.

This is all a bit of a shame, because while McDuffie’s writing lacked a bit in the general ideas department, the interactions and mannerisms between the characters was wonderfully executed, by both the dialogue and the voice acting. This is likely due to the fact that many of the voice actors from the Justice League TV show returned to do the characters for this film. It was especially a great pleasure to hear Kevin Conroy’s voice once again, after having been absent in the Batman: Year One film.

However, despite the film kind of missing its marks in some areas, the Blu-ray release of the film sort of makes up for it, with a couple of exclusive featurettes. “Guarding the Balance: Batman and the JLA” takes a look at the real-life inspirations for “Tower of Babel” and Doom‘s story, and and “Their Time Has Come: Cyborg and the DC Universe’s New Diversity,” which dives into a number of DC’s more prominent figures explaining why a character like Cyborg deserves to be in the Justice League now more than ever.  “A League of One: The Dwayne McDuffie Story,” a feature that is found on all versions of the release, is an interesting look at the life of Dwayne McDuffie, as well as a profile of his legacy to both comics as well as his impact on media in general. The two Blu-ray exclusives aren’t must-watch material, but it’s hard not to get wrapped up in McDuffie’s story, the one special feature that nearly justifies the release’s purchase.

At the end of the day, Justice League: Doom will probably be remembered by most as a bittersweet final project from McDuffie. It’s a hard thing to attempt to recreate a major story arc like that without leaving fans feeling like something was lost, but sometimes it’s best to just leave well enough alone. Knowing when to do which is the hardest part.

RATING: 6.5/10

Front page image from collider.com, interior stills from toonzone.net.

TITLE: Casa de mi Padre
STARRING: Will Ferrell, Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Génesis Rodríguez, Pedro, Armendáriz, Jr., Nick Offerman, Efren Ramirez, Adrian Martinez
DIRECTOR: Matt Piedmont
STUDIO: Gary Sanchez Productions, NALA Films, Pantelion Films
RATED: R
RUN TIME: 84  min
RELEASED: March 16, 2012

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

The first time I saw the trailer for Casa de mi Padre, was before seeing Contraband, and I was immediately intrigued. Will Ferrell in a Spanish language film spoofing telenovelas and spaghetti westerns? What exactly was this? A fake trailer for a film that doesn’t really exist? A straight-faced comedy? Or is it just another Will Ferrell vehicle spoofing an as-yet untapped genre?

As it turned out, Casa did for the telenovela style of Spanish language TV what Black Dynamite did for blaxploitation, albeit Ferrell and company did it a little better. The film employs some of the same low production tricks as Robert Rodriguez’s Machete — the opening credit sequence owes so much to that film that I’m surprised that Rodriguez himself wasn’t given a guest director credit — along with many of the other tropes, such as pseudo-grainy film presentation, little or no special effects, and missing film reels.

And then you have the one big gag in the film, and that comes in the whole absurdity that is Will Ferrell playing it straight as the Mexican born and raised rancher Armando Alvarez. Truth be told, as the film opens, it seems like Ferrell is trying a bit too hard to keep a straight face with his portrayal and delivering his lines properly, at least as properly as a man can that literally learned the language just before production started. That being said, he’s not going to wow anyone that can fluently speak Spanish, but at the very least, he’s convincing in his delivery and that lends credence to his character. Plus, his slower speaking is referenced in the very way his character is written, the black sheep of a family, whose own life is overshadowed by his uber-successful brother Raul (Diego Luna).

In a nutshell, Armando is a simple man who has nothing but love for his father’s ranch and the land surrounding it, to the point that he’d rather be one with the cattle than stop to see the world passing him by. When Raul comes home with a beautiful fiancé (Genesis Rodriguez) on his arm, his father is quick to embrace his return, going so far as to declare him as the only son that really mattered to him. What their father doesn’t realize is how Raul came to his successes, through drug trafficking, and they’ve followed him home. With Raul’s troubles bringing a violent drug lord, The Onza (Gael García Bernal), hot on his tail, Armando must choose whether to remain a coward, or stand up for his father’s land and their honor and save the girl.

Casa de mi Padre works best when it sticks to the style of filmmaking that it’s lampooning, and for the most part it works quite well. The least interesting parts of the film were those that tried to incorporate Will Ferrell’s more stereotypical shtick into the film. Perhaps that’s mainly because that’s what we’re used to seeing from the actor, but I personally like him playing a little more out of his comfort zone. Much like how he was the (somewhat) straight actor to Mark Wahlberg’s machismo-overdriven cop in The Other Guys, he’s a fantastic actor who’s at his most hilarious when you know he’s not trying to be funny, even moreso because of how well he commits himself to whatever role he’s playing.

While there’s a few gags that run on a little too long here and there, Casa de mi Padre feels like a very competent tribute to the films and television programs that it’s gleefully poking fun at, and at a sparse 84 minutes, does well enough to not overstay its welcome. Personally, I’m a big fan of parodies and genre satires, especially those of the Grindhouse variety or at least inspired by it, so that’s definitely something to consider when debating whether or not this is the type of film for you. It’s most certainly not another stereotypical Will Ferrell movie, and that’s it’s greatest asset.

RATING: 7.5/10

Front page image from allmoviephoto.com, interior stills from collider.com.