I CAME FOR SALMA HAYEK,
BUT STAYED FOR AMPUTATION

I get invited to a lot of advance movie screenings, and as the law of Hollywood averages would suggest, many of the films suck, and you know they're gonna suck from the moment you get the invitation. Sure, sometimes you get to see obvious train wrecks like The Day After Tomorrow, that give a critic that rare opportunity to rant about a wonderful piece of shit, but more often than not, a boring sucky movie is just a boring sucky movie, and seeing a preview screening so you can write a review of this boring sucky movie is just an exercise in torture.

It was pretty clear that After The Sunset was going to be one of these movies. The director brought you such fantastic hits as Rush Hour, the first time screenwriter's previous work was appropriately writing jokes for "The Weakest Link" TV series, and the tired recycled plot that features an aging European actor with a hot girlfriend half his age that steal things has been done to death. What could possibly be redeeming about this film? Aside from seeing Salma Hayek in a bikini, I could think of nothing else.

So I dragged myself to the Natomas Regal Marketplace in Sacramento last night to watch this. From the moment the movie begins, it's a piece of shit. Pierce and Salma somehow manage to steal a giant diamond by having her dress up as a windshield cleaning hobo, using her super hi-tech squeegee to read the Vehicle Identification Number on the dashboard of the car transporting the jewel, and transmitting it to Pierce, who puts it in some magic remote control that can take command of the car and drive it away, despite Woody Harrelson's (horribly miscast as a serious FBI agent) efforts to drive it.

The movie went downhill from there. You have to suffer through a scene of Pierce making out with Salma while she's wearing her hobo beard and fake teeth (even though that's a fetish for many), and the ultimate product placement of the Atlantis Resort in The Bahamas. For the first 10 minutes of the next act, it's just like a giant commercial for the vacation spot.

Pierce is just walking through his lines, waiting for the paycheck, and Salma just looks beautiful with tons of gratuitous eye candy shots like leaning over the hood of a car with her tits hanging out, or walking on the beach with pants that crawl up her ass while she says dumb lines like, "The tennis instructor said I had a great backside", to which Pierce replies, "that's backSWING!" HAW HAW HAW!

It's as if God had pity on me and decided to give me a reason to leave because the sound on the film started fucking up really bad, as if it were being processed through some sort of robot voice akin to Evil Otto in the old Berzerk arcade game. The audience started heckling it, and they eventually turned the movie off to see what was going on. After about 10 minutes of no movie, I decided to cut my losses and scram. If the movie was rated R, I'd have at least stayed for some more Salma, but watching her make out with Pierce was beginning to make my stomach churn.

So as I left the theater I saw that SAW was playing in another room, and I had only missed the first 5 minutes. I loved the film's premise, and though the acting was pretty damn sucky, the Tales From The Crypt on steroids atmosphere more than made up for it. The gore was brilliant and the whole movie had a great freaky tone to it.

During a scene were a woman is looking for a key within some guy's bloody entrails, I heard a little kid whimper in the row behind me. I turned around and saw a boy that couldn't have been more than 4 years old watching the film while his 25 year old white guy with a FUBU shirt dad was yukking it up. This blew my mind. Now instead of enjoying each intense scene, I was just getting angrier and angrier that someone would bring a little tot to get tortured through this horrifying movie.

I couldn't stand it anymore, so I turned around, facing the parents, and angrily asked, "Why are you letting your kid watch this movie?" To this, the Vanilla Ice wanabee replied, "If he learns that it's fake now, he won't be scared when he's older." What the fuck does that mean? That's like letting your kids kill the neighborhood pets, so he'll be able to strangle drifters with less remorse at a later age. I replied, "That's pretty fucking twisted for you to make him watch this!" And at this point, I realized I was probably traumatizing the kid more by yelling at his dad than the movie was, so I just shut up and watched the rest of the movie.

When I left, I asked the manager (who looked all of 20 years old) why they would let little kids like that in to see these movies, and he just said, "It's illegal to keep anyone from seeing a movie with their parents." I told them they have the right to refuse service to anyone and that they have an obligation to discourage that, to which he just laughed and walked away.

Fuck you, lazy parents! I'm sure the kid was too little to put much of the film in the proper context, but that's one fucked up movie to make a little boy who should still be watching Barney to endure.

So basically, if After the Sunset had Salma Hayek and Pierce Brosnan chained up in a dingy bathroom and one of them had to cut off their foot so they could grab a gun from a dead guy in the middle of the room and shoot the other so they could save their family, it may have been a much better movie.  But only if they put some Power Rangers dancing around in it to keep the 4 year olds that got dragged in to see it happy.