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Jun. 29th, 2018 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobelOkay, I have to rant: I watched a movie on Netflix (which is a fairly common occurrence) and it is *bad*. Not the fun cheesy kind of bad, not the "so bad it's almost kind of good" bad, not even the "fascinating train wreck" kind of bad. Just ... bad. And bland. And I would rather have spent my time watching paint dry.
It's called "Brace for Impact", only that's not really the proper name, and the summary on Netflix is misleading to some extent.
So, lessee. The movie is approximately this: we meet our heroine of sorts in a support group for people afraid of flying. (This group never appears again.) Inexplicably, the protagonist works for the agency that investigates airline crashes. She's scheduled to fly somewhere with her brother, but freaks out and gets off the plane in a panic, and then a bit later finds out the plane went boom. Her meanypoopyheaded boss doesn't let her investigate the crash for silly reasons like "your brother being on this flight means you probably won't be objective", although she thinks it's more about how she turned his bedroom advances down.
Anyway, she proceeds to show how completely level-headed she can be by ... er ... staying up late obsessing over it, hacking into secured files, threatening airline workers, breaking into secured areas and also private houses, and swiping a friend's access card while he's in prayers. The friend is Inspector Muslim, and they have a colleague that she's sleeping with that honestly it took me halfway through the movie to realize those were different people, which is partly because I have mild face recognition issues but partly also because they look very very similar and also no one has a personality. Meanwhile she and her mom and her dead gay brother's gay boyfriend clean out his apartment, which is somehow about as entertaining as watching them paint the walls would have been.
She develops this crazy intricate conspiracy theory about how one of the regulars -- there were s lot of regulars who used this flight to commute to Washington DC -- was building a fire bomb to bring the plane down, only for some unknown reason the bomb went off early. This guy is a Suspicious Chemist with ties to something something militia-type something, and so clearly was smuggling stuff bit by bit to make a bomb. She visits his work, pretending she's actually authorized to investigate, and Suspicious Chemist is suspicious, according to a coworker.She tries to bring all this "rock solid" evidence to the people actually doing the investigation, but they brush her off. She says "but what if he wasn't alone and there's this whole network of terrorists" and they go "look it was probably just an accidental fire, stop obsessing over this". So Inspectoe Conspiracy Theory goes and breaks into Suspicious Chemist's house, where, in a dramatic twist that no one could have seen coming, she ...
...finds a badly concealed door in the basement leading to a Suspicious Chemist's Lair, including various chemistry doodads, maps of the Washington DC area labeled with juicy military targets, a photo of the militia group, and probably "how to smuggle a bomb onto a plane" written out in crayon or something idk. She takes pictures with her smartphone, which turns out to be a good thing because a bottle of some clear goop falls over and starts slowly trickling over to what look like battery leads or something, and instead of doing something normal like "move the leads out of the tray", she high-tails it out of there, dragging with her the police officer who was investigating the break in and should really have arrested her, so that when the CGI bomb blast goes off they are both somehow totally unhurt.
The bomb blast destroyed the house and therefore the Suspicious Lab, but apparently her photos were enough to let the fbi take down a multi-state terrorist ring that was planning dozens more plane bombings zomg. Because of course she was completely correct in all respects, despite spending most of the movie looking rather like a person channeling her grief into crazy conspiracy theories so that her brothers death would have meaning.
I wanted to punch things, and also erase the memory of this movie from my ... er, memory. Because omg where to even start.
I mean, normally there's a certain charm to "person thinks an accident is more significant, pursues investigation despite being the only one, maybe gets a few allies along the way, perseveres, and is proven justified in the end" movies. But this was just kind of a 2D cardboard version.
Did I mention she basically stalks her Muslim coworker and "friend" to ambush him multiple times at the mosque? And then demands that he prove his friendship by doing illegal shit on her behalf?
Did I mention she makes wild guesses about what's going on, calls it rock solid rather than just a theory, and ends up being right in every single detail?
Did I mention her mom doesn't like the gay boyfriend at first but that lasted five minutes and then they were bffs and bonding over photos of the brother in a swimsuit?
Did I mention that the fear of flying group never proved significant, except to extankisg that the airline safety investigator had an irrational fear of flying?
(That's where the summary is inaccurate, fwiw -- it says that the plane that went down was carrying the FOC group, which would have been more interesting)
(It would also have been mildly more interesting if she had a semi-*rational* fear of flying -- something like "I know how rare crashes really are but my job is investigating crashes and they kind of consume my life" rather than just "herp derp planes scary")
Did I mention that it's pretty boring for most of the movie, except for the last ten minutes when everything wraps up so very neatly that it couldn't have been staged better?
Anyway. Don't watch this. I don't usually bother with anti-recs, but in this case I just ... couldn't not.
It's called "Brace for Impact", only that's not really the proper name, and the summary on Netflix is misleading to some extent.
So, lessee. The movie is approximately this: we meet our heroine of sorts in a support group for people afraid of flying. (This group never appears again.) Inexplicably, the protagonist works for the agency that investigates airline crashes. She's scheduled to fly somewhere with her brother, but freaks out and gets off the plane in a panic, and then a bit later finds out the plane went boom. Her meanypoopyheaded boss doesn't let her investigate the crash for silly reasons like "your brother being on this flight means you probably won't be objective", although she thinks it's more about how she turned his bedroom advances down.
Anyway, she proceeds to show how completely level-headed she can be by ... er ... staying up late obsessing over it, hacking into secured files, threatening airline workers, breaking into secured areas and also private houses, and swiping a friend's access card while he's in prayers. The friend is Inspector Muslim, and they have a colleague that she's sleeping with that honestly it took me halfway through the movie to realize those were different people, which is partly because I have mild face recognition issues but partly also because they look very very similar and also no one has a personality. Meanwhile she and her mom and her dead gay brother's gay boyfriend clean out his apartment, which is somehow about as entertaining as watching them paint the walls would have been.
She develops this crazy intricate conspiracy theory about how one of the regulars -- there were s lot of regulars who used this flight to commute to Washington DC -- was building a fire bomb to bring the plane down, only for some unknown reason the bomb went off early. This guy is a Suspicious Chemist with ties to something something militia-type something, and so clearly was smuggling stuff bit by bit to make a bomb. She visits his work, pretending she's actually authorized to investigate, and Suspicious Chemist is suspicious, according to a coworker.She tries to bring all this "rock solid" evidence to the people actually doing the investigation, but they brush her off. She says "but what if he wasn't alone and there's this whole network of terrorists" and they go "look it was probably just an accidental fire, stop obsessing over this". So Inspectoe Conspiracy Theory goes and breaks into Suspicious Chemist's house, where, in a dramatic twist that no one could have seen coming, she ...
...finds a badly concealed door in the basement leading to a Suspicious Chemist's Lair, including various chemistry doodads, maps of the Washington DC area labeled with juicy military targets, a photo of the militia group, and probably "how to smuggle a bomb onto a plane" written out in crayon or something idk. She takes pictures with her smartphone, which turns out to be a good thing because a bottle of some clear goop falls over and starts slowly trickling over to what look like battery leads or something, and instead of doing something normal like "move the leads out of the tray", she high-tails it out of there, dragging with her the police officer who was investigating the break in and should really have arrested her, so that when the CGI bomb blast goes off they are both somehow totally unhurt.
The bomb blast destroyed the house and therefore the Suspicious Lab, but apparently her photos were enough to let the fbi take down a multi-state terrorist ring that was planning dozens more plane bombings zomg. Because of course she was completely correct in all respects, despite spending most of the movie looking rather like a person channeling her grief into crazy conspiracy theories so that her brothers death would have meaning.
I wanted to punch things, and also erase the memory of this movie from my ... er, memory. Because omg where to even start.
I mean, normally there's a certain charm to "person thinks an accident is more significant, pursues investigation despite being the only one, maybe gets a few allies along the way, perseveres, and is proven justified in the end" movies. But this was just kind of a 2D cardboard version.
Did I mention she basically stalks her Muslim coworker and "friend" to ambush him multiple times at the mosque? And then demands that he prove his friendship by doing illegal shit on her behalf?
Did I mention she makes wild guesses about what's going on, calls it rock solid rather than just a theory, and ends up being right in every single detail?
Did I mention her mom doesn't like the gay boyfriend at first but that lasted five minutes and then they were bffs and bonding over photos of the brother in a swimsuit?
Did I mention that the fear of flying group never proved significant, except to extankisg that the airline safety investigator had an irrational fear of flying?
(That's where the summary is inaccurate, fwiw -- it says that the plane that went down was carrying the FOC group, which would have been more interesting)
(It would also have been mildly more interesting if she had a semi-*rational* fear of flying -- something like "I know how rare crashes really are but my job is investigating crashes and they kind of consume my life" rather than just "herp derp planes scary")
Did I mention that it's pretty boring for most of the movie, except for the last ten minutes when everything wraps up so very neatly that it couldn't have been staged better?
Anyway. Don't watch this. I don't usually bother with anti-recs, but in this case I just ... couldn't not.