Friday, January 28, 2005

Son of the Mask

This really looks like it sucks, from what I can see in the trailers. And if the trailer looks bad, God help the picture. To tell the truth, I'm not that big a fan of the first movie, either, mainly because I was a fan of the comic upon which the movie was based. The comic had a really simple concept: a Warner Brothers-style cartoon character in the real world. So the Mask battles gangsters by producing things like anvils and ridiculous-looking machine guns out of thin air; when you shoot him, he gets holes that don't slow him down one bit, and when you drop him off a tall building, he flattens out momentarily, but then snaps back to his normal self. The goons he fights (and later, the cops he fights as well, once he becomes wanted for murder) aren't so lucky. The Mask was a bloody comic with an extraordinarily high body count, one that combined grim and silly in a really unique way. The movie, by miscasting Jim Carrey as the lead character (yes, I said miscast - I seem to be the only guy on Earth who thinks he was miscast, just as I'm the only guy I know who thinks Jack Nicholson was miscast as the Joker in Batman), threw away half of the equation. It made lots of money, but it was a pale, hollow imitation of the comic. And it looks like the sequel will play up all the aspects in which the movie departed from its source material.

Nevertheless, my daughter is anxious to see it, which means I'll probably see it at some point in the near future.

No comments: