My Masochistic Evening
This is not going to be a posting about music. Still, I couldn’t resist writing about my recent experience. Because it was strange and, frankly, hard to understand — if I don’t want to try to look at it through a political prism. Which I don’t. So, here it goes.
After a long time there was an evening, when I could comfortably sit in front of a television set and watch a whole movie. So I started to flip over Netflix in an effort to find something worth watching. And the algorithm kept offering me this one year old US movie Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, with actors, I would think, were ‘the top class’. It is a sequel to the 2017 film The Hitman’s Bodyguard. Although I am not a big fan of this type of action movies full of guns and blood, when I saw names like Ryan Reynolds, Salma Hayek, Samuel L. Jackson, Morgan Freeman, and Antonio Banderas, I decided to give it a try. My thinking was like — even if it wouldn’t be the cinematic gem, all these guys together couldn’t produce anything really bad…
Oh boy, how off had I been!!
My wife, whom I invited to watch with me with a hope to enjoy the evening together, and who has very good sensors to discover potential fraud, gave up after about 6 minutes. Right after the first splash of a fake blood got spilled and the first few of endless blasts of “F” bombs landed. She urged me to do the same and couldn’t understand my determination to continue watching. Not sure why, but she called it ‘masochistic’!
When searching internet for a proper explanation of the word ‘masochistic,’ one possible meaning comes for a general use as — enjoying an activity that appears to be painful or tedious. Bang on!!
Although the truth is, I had not been enjoying watching this movie. It was really painful AND tedious.
So why had I decided to go all the way through?
Because after a while I simply became more and more curious, how much worse it could get and how much deeper the creators would go to lower even the lowest expectation of “quality”. And in that regard, I must say, that they really didn’t disappoint.
This cartoonishly simplified idiotic ‘action comedy’ drags on for the whole of one hundred minutes. It’s producers wasted $70 million! Filming took place in mostly cheaper locations like Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and also Italy and the UK. Although we can be sure, that beside an endless series of detonations and gallons of fake blood, a substantial part of expenses went for paying these A-listers actors.
So what does a viewer get from these superstars?
There is a lot of absolutely non-sensical ‘action,’ but very little comedy — if at all. You could go a scene by scene and identify where have you seen it before. It is like everything has been just recycled, reused, or copied from similar movies produced in the last 50-60 years.
I am not going to criticize creators of this trash more. They got a lot of bad press already. There is just one thing I am trying to figure out, and it is — ‘Why?’ Why would anyone spend their time, effort and money to produce something like this?
Sure, they got paid. So was it for the money? Is that it?
I am afraid there may be something more nefarious. Not sure how to qualify it, but the closest would be that I feel like this movie to be some kind of a bizarre revenge on the public. Or a punishment of the audience despised by creators? Is it the result of two years of COVID? Lockdowns?
The scariest thing is, that based on the information from the web, they are already working on the third instalment of this movie, with possibility of even more! Really?
If this is the direction where Hollywood is heading — and sinking, I have only one hope. My hope is that it will not take too long and will not cause irreparable damage, until the Virtual Reality and the Artificial Intelligence takes over the visual entertainment.
Let’s hope!
