Well, well, well....today I did the two for one special. I paid the discount matinee price of $4.50 to see
High Crimes and then walked across the hall to watch
Clockstoppers. Lots of free time? Yeah, but it was also hot today and my air conditioner wasn't working.
High Crimes This movie just sucked! It is a lame rehash of
Double Jeopardy and all the other sucky movies Ashley Judd has been making lately. She plays a powerful lawyer on the verge of becoming a partner in her distinguished law firm. She and her perfect husband are trying to get pregnant. Gee, their life seems so nifty....except the plot is so thin that they don't have any friends and the husband doesn't seem to have a profession. Well, no matter....it turns out he is wanted for nine counts of murder by a military court. It seems he led a double life....and during a mission in El Salvador (or somewhere) he went nutso and machine gunned down some villagers. Ashley, totally shocked by this double life, decides to resign from her law firm and defend her husband. She eventually realizes she needs some help...so she rounds up a recovering drunk played by Morgan Freeman because he used to be "the best." In his last five movies, Freeman has played the same archetypal role over and over again....luckily I kind of like that character, otherwise this movie would score even lower. There are some downright stupid plot twists, made all the sillier by Ashley Judd's inability to carry off her leading role. I am not some misogynist just waiting for her to get naked, but I don't think she plays the "logical strong-willed but double-crossed woman" very well. And it is not for lack of practice. I think she can play a crazy or whimsical character pretty darn well, if it matters. Anyway, enough babbling....this movie gets a score of
3/10. Without Morgan Freeman, we might be talking 1-1.5 territory. Avoid, avoid, avoid!
Let's shift gears....
Clockstoppers I went into this movie with zero expectations. The plot revolves around a teenage boy who cleverly sells stuff on Ebay so he can get enough money to buy a car. His father, a famous professor, wants him to be less whimsical and more analytical. The kid wants to spend his time riding his bicycle (LOL), trying to hit on the South American exchange student and hanging out with his friend the DJ who works at the paintball store. LMAO! Things get funky when one of the father's former students asks for help with a project. It is a watch which sends you into hypertime! The person wearing the watch can move around while everyone and everything else freezes. I know, some corny shit. The kid finds the watch and is preparing to sell it on Ebay when he discovers the time manipulation powers. He and the Venezuelan hottie go out for a night on the town to play with the contraption. They stop by a club where his friend is competing in a DJ contest called PLUR.
Damn, the friend is a horrible DJ so the boy and the girl go into hypertime and help him throw down a blistering set. All is fun and games until the evil corporation that was funding the project shows up to get their watch back. There is assorted shenanigans, the father is taken captive and eventually the two kids team up with the former student to pull off a rescue. This movie can be considered by a couple different standards. If you are comparing it to the
Orange Country genre, I'd say
Clockstoppers gets a
5/10. On the other hand, while I am really too damn old to like this sort of a silly movie, since I really enjoyed stuff like Matthew Broderick's
War Games or John Lithgow's
The Manhattan Project, I will score it a
8.5/10. Bottom line: Don't trust my rating of 8.5 unless you liked the two movies I specifically mentioned. Otherwise, go with the 5/10 and maybe give it a look once it comes out of video.
The irony of it all? I liked the randomly selected movie (
Clockwatchers) better than the one I specifically went to see (
High Crimes). Just goes to show....
[ 08 April 2002: Message edited by: Catch-22 ]