The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Cole said How to Train Your Dragon was really good, and wanted to see it a second time. So we went and I saw it.

Now, Dreamworks often kind of sucks. They’re no Pixar. You can usually discount them and their animated movies as cash-ins grabbing for that “parent desperate to take their kids to something” demographic. There are some exceptions, of course. Kung Fu Panda was pretty fun. Word on the street was that How to Train Your Dragon was another such exception. They were completely right.

The plot of this movie really got to me. It’s basically a story about how father and son live in different worlds, and although both are legit in many ways, neither will listen to the other. Hiccup’s dad is the main dragon-killing Viking. He wants his son to fit in, be strong, and most importantly, be able to defend himself so he will be safe. Hiccup realizes that Dragons are intelligent and aren’t bloodthirsty killers unless provoked, and attempts to play biologist, actually learning about them, and along the way, learns they can be ridden by working with Toothless, his adorable dragon. Both want the village to live better, without fear of dragon attacks, but neither can really completely understand the other’s position.
That kind of conflict is so real, and it certainly hits on things in my own life. That’s some serious, actual characterization in there. Plus, compare this to, say, Ash from Fantastic Mr. Fox. Now, I love that movie, but Ash is “different,” but proves himself by doing things everyone else’s way. Instead of being his own unique person, his moment of proving himself comes from being an athlete, just like everyone else. By comparison, Hiccup proves himself by doing something completely different, and by solving the problem his own way. At the same time, he wouldn’t have been able to solve the problem the way he did without his Father’s strength to save Toothless. It gives credit to both sides of the argument. It’s okay to be different, but the old ways have merit. Few movies actually give credit to both. It’s either an Icarus “don’t fly so close to the sun” story, or a “man, parents have it all wrong” kind of story. How to Train Your Dragon hits an excellent middle ground. That’s just kind of awesome.

Yeah, so, How to Train Your Dragon has strong characters, and that’s really what makes it a great movie. They’re realistic, and they’re fun. On top of it all, the animation is also pretty great. Toothless is cute as hell and also completely bad-ass, and he’s animated so great that you can buy it. There’s a little bit of stylistic difference between the viking adults and the viking kids, but that would seem to be completely on purpose, to attempt to help establish that different sort of world. It does look pretty great.

Honestly, I feel like there’s a chance that this movie will be better than this year’s Pixar offering, Toy Story 3, mostly because I just feel like Pixar never wanted to make a Toy Story 3, but is doing so because of HUGE PILES OF MONEY. That worries me that it’s not nearly going to be as touching or “real” as this movie. Granted, it’ll probably still be fun, but it surprises me to say that How To Train Your Dragon has set a bar that Pixar needs to make sure to surpass. It’s a really good movie, and if you like animated stuff, you should see it.

One may have noticed that Mother’s Day was last Sunday. After we all had a nice brunch breakfast thing and the grandparents went home, we were left with a question: what should we do? I decided to step up to the plate. “Why not play that Clue game that Mom got awhile back?” A long time ago, after I had shown my Mom Scene It? and she had fun just using the DVD and answering the questions, she saw this copy of Clue the DVD Game in Goodwill or something. She thought “Hey, Scene It was fun, maybe this is fun!” Of course, it doesn’t work without the board like Scene It does, but I remembered it existed. I figured that invoking was a good move: I’m sure Mom forgot she had even got it, and that seems like a cool way to say “Hey, I remember and appreciate what you do.” Additionally, Shauna is a huge fan of Clue, so this was a new variant that she’d enjoy, maybe. So we set up the board, popped in the DVD, and played a family game of this Clue variant.

There were some good things about the game, as well as some bad things. For example, I think it was completely the right move to remove the spaces in between rooms from the board. In this game, you simply can move to any adjacent location. This makes so much more sense: the dice-rolling in original Clue just drags the game out. I also enjoyed having a fourth thing to solve, which was the time of day of the crime. You can still only invoke 3 different things when you’re making a suggestion, so it adds a bit more strategy to the game, as it becomes more complicated to figure out what you’re opponents have figured out due to the larger pool of things to think about. I also think that the DVD adds narrative to a game that could use it, at least for people playing like my mother. One of the new things you can do is “Summon the Butler” who will tell you background information about what was happening when the crime was going down. Adding the additional information through the DVD with particular scenarios does limit the number of times you can play, but also makes it feel more like a mystery, because you can figure out the answer through these other clues, not just with the cards. Finally, I really like how the game puts a clock on gameplay by causing you to have to “turn in” clues to the center of the board periodically. If you run out of clues, you lose, but by that time most of the clues are out in the open, so the game is about over anyway. This makes it superior to, say, Harry Potter Clue, which can just kill you at random for no reason, and leave you sitting there for the rest of the game.

Still, the DVD also adds plenty of annoyances. You have to make accusations on the DVD menu, which is cumbersome and annoying. In addition, messing up an accusation doesn’t end the game for you, which takes a whole lot of tension out of the game. I suppose that is more friendly, but it makes it so you’re much, much more rewarded for guessing earlier rather than later. You also have to constantly play silly minigames on the DVD and whatnot, which really just slows down the game. It doesn’t particularly add much. Special effects when going through secret passages just pointlessly screw up solid strategies of getting where you need to go to make suggestions. Slowly adding the item cards through, once again, summoning the butler is cool, but because of it, there’s little reason not to spend every turn summoning the butler until all the items are out of the Butler pile.

Final random note: the sculpts on the individual pieces are fantastic, which is kind of shocking to me. They have a lot of detail. Like DnD miniature level of detail, or more. They’re really quite impressive.

I think that, in many ways, this game is more friendly than standard Clue. Standard Clue is dated and uninteresting at this point, really. There are much better board games of that sort out there. This keeps the core of what makes the standard game interesting, streamlines in some places, and adds flash in others. That flash is often more annoying than not, but for people like my parents, that’s going to add additional investment in the game, so I think that, for a family play sort of situation, that’s a very good thing. Overall, I could actually see me playing this again with the parents, which is kind of surprising. With my friends who I can play complex board games with? No way. But this is a nice game to whip out when I need something to play with the family. It was certainly worth the, like, 3 bucks my mother paid for it.

NevznachaY, your thread title on Talking Time was literally TOO AWESOME not to steal. Sorry. Had to be done. You rock.

Anyway, I saw Iron Man 2 day one, and I was very pleased with it. It was pretty much exactly what I wanted out of a sequel to the first, and it was a lot of fun.

There are plenty of flaws to be found, though. The movie is really over-extended, with a lot of characters and stuff going on that, unless you get a primer beforehand, might not make much sense. For example, the movie never really explains much about who Black Widow is, or even calls her Black Widow. I also think a damn good argument can be made that, by making Whiplash able to so easily make his own suit, you are really sort of insulting Stark’s genius and devaluing his abilities. Apparently everything about it is supposedly so complex that most big governments can’t handle it. In the first movie, at least, The Dude was having a team of people work with Tony’s blueprints to make his suit. It made a little more sense. Whiplash, although completely badass, was working out of an old apartment building.

Still, I don’t know. I had no problem turning the parts of my brain that look for that stuff off, and just focusing the parts of my brain that enjoy seeing Robert Downey Jr. do things on a screen. He is still the PERFECT Tony Stark, and he is so much fun to watch that I honestly have a hard time caring about plot problems because he makes them all okay in my eyes. Maybe that’s silly. Maybe I should hope for more. But man, he just makes it fun.

There was also some action. Some stuff blew up, and Iron Man shot some lasers and stuff. That was pretty cool too, I suppose. The CG is solid, and there’s nothing at all wrong with it.

…the more I attempt to explain why I liked the movie, the more it’s clear that it’s purely about the actors and the acting. They were fun. They were very fun. People were talking, in said Talking Time thread, about how nice it would be to have a superhero movie that’s just character development. I think that this group could come very close to pulling that off. Still, though, they need to sell toys, and excite kids to ticket sales, so I guess it’s simply unlikely.

Still, I suppose I recommend it, because ROBERT DOWNEY JR. If you really liked the first one, I don’t think you’ll have a problem liking this one. If you didn’t see the first one, well, I think you should see that one first. It’s a little stronger, and it’ll give you a good idea on whether this sequel is worth your time. That’s about all the advice I can effectively give, apparently.

This is a review of Battlefield: The Worst Companionship.

Since I bought the PC version of 2 on a whim, I thought I would give the single player a go in the first edition before I went on. You know, for plot relevance, and so on. It arrived from Gamefly, and I played through it. Then I returned it.

First off, it’s clear that DICE needed to get some mistakes out of their system. The controls in Battlefield: Bad Company leave something to be desired. It should really be using the d-pad to select secondary weapons, but instead, it uses some weird-ass ineffective system with the bumpers. I know they fixed this in the second one, because they had it fixed in the demo, which is good. There’s no excuse for that being that way.
The campaign, too, has some missteps. First off, it gives you no achievements for playing on easy, which I hate. Secondly, the checkpoints just aren’t intelligent when you’re looking at a huge area of combat like this game does. You’ll checkpoint somewhere, drive far away, die, and then respawn at the checkpoint, where you already took the vehicle, so you have to walk all the way back to where you died, only to, perhaps, die again, and have to walk all the way back there again. Seriously, it was this sort of stuff that was the majority of the game time, and it really frustrated. They could have at least spawned a little four-wheeler or something for me when I die like that.

The one mechanic I really liked was the syringe. Most games either have health packs, or belong to the “heavy breathing” school of shooter design, where if you are out of fire long enough, you heal. Bad Company splits the difference with this magical recharging syringe. Using it heals you to full, and it recharges to use again very quickly and has no ammo. At the same time, you have to pay attention and switch to it to heal yourself, and do so in enough time for the animation to go off, if you’re in the middle of a firefight. I felt like this was a great compromise between health packs and regenning health. It’s friendly, and low stress, but you still have to think about healing and heal management. “I have time to heal now, so I could heal now, but I’m not hurt much, and if that tank hits me while I’m running across the field I’ll need to heal then, and it won’t have recharged yet. It’s one of the best parts of the game.

Additionally, I saw what the Giant Bomb guys saw in the game. The characters are excellent, and very entertaining to listen to. One wishes they would have even more banter than they do during combat, instead of keeping it mostly between fights. I mean, sure, they’re in serious combat scenarios, they don’t need to be funny then, but more excuses for them to play off each other would have been welcome. I think they nailed the tone and characterization perfectly. I heard it changed a bit in the second game, and that does worry me, but we’ll see when I get to playing the single player of that one.

The multiplayer is similar to the single player. You see where they came from, but after having played the multiplayer in the second game, it’s just ridiculous how much better that is. You have no reason to play original Bad Company multiplayer, except maybe for the achievements. I played a round just for that, and then put it down.

Still, if you’re more hardcore than me and won’t die so much, Bad Company single player is worth a play through. It’s often funny, and has some interesting combat scenarios. It’s all you can really ask for.

WarioWare D.I.Y. was a kind of random purchase. I was all sick and out of it and I just kind of randomly picked it up. However, I have been, overall, very impressed with it. It’s a game that basically requires a community around it to be interesting, and Nintendo makes that has hard as possible to do. But if you do pull it off, it’s quite a lot of fun making things and seeing what other people are up to.

Basically, the game is full of the tools you need to make your own microgames. If you’re an artist (which I am not) you can sink a lot of time into making really great looking assets for the simple, silly little games. Although the DS is not the best art platform, you still have tools basically equal to Mario Paint, with some even more robust, like actual copy and paste functionality. You can make some really cool shit. However, I feel like Nintendo wins in that WarioWare already had a very strange art aesthetic that makes it feel okay to draw shitty art. Even my horrible scribbles fit in, to an extent. I’m not hindered from creating by my artistic talent, which is wonderful.

It’s also wonderful because you can bang out a working little game in a very short amount of time. Maybe 45 minutes or so? Longer if you do a lot of art and the game is complicated. There’s nothing that feels better than having a result from hard work. Creating something feels good. Shipping a game in WarioWare D.I.Y. feels awesome. “I did this! I made this thing!” and then you can play it, mix it up with professional games, and tell yourself “fuck yeah!”

Oh, I suppose you can also create music and comics too. The music creator is, again, Mario Paint Plus, and it works really well. I just rarely want to take the time to just compose music. I’m sure many can have fun with it. The comic creator is… a real missed opportunity. Being able to draw and share these 4koma is a cool idea, but for something like this, you really need a way to export them to the net, way more than with the games or music. If there was a comic viewer where I could link my friends to uploaded comics online, I would actually try to draw more of these. Still, they are kind of fun to do.

There’s some unfortunate restrictions, of course. I mentioned the online, and that is a huge issue. You can only store 2 games, 2 songs, and 2 comics at a time in your “crate” and you have to do stupid friend code exchanges to get anyone else to see your stuff. They have a thing called the “NinSoft” store, where you can connect to the server and download games from the community and “Big Name Games,” which are microgames made by famous and semi-famous game makers. This is an awesome feature, to be sure, and keeps you in quality stuff to fiddle with, but in the end, without having access to a full community, you’re only, at best, going to pick up the game once a week to try those new uploaded games before putting it back down, instead of it being something you can go back to whenever you want and see something new.

Still, if you can actually get a bunch of friend codes exchanged, it’s great to send out a game and then have people try it. It feels awesome. And that’s why WarioWare D.I.Y. is a success. It makes you feel like a programmer without being super complicated. Anyone can do it, and it feels good to. It’s fun stuff. It’s certainly worth a shot, if you were thinking about picking it up.

Pirate Radio was such a disappointment.

There was so much potential there. You had this boat full of this amazing cast of characters doing amazing, awesome stuff. They were making history, breaking the rules, and doing all sorts of crazy things on that boat. Any number of plots could have been drawn from that. Any number of interesting events could have happened. Or, alternatively, they could have done a documentary with some re-enacted portions, and really given me information about this cool set of events in the history of the UK.

Instead, they made Pirate Radio, which was boring and stupid.

Basically, this movie was a series of completely disconnected scenes. People entered those scenes with no background or character development, simply because they were there in history, I guess. The movie made no attempt to explain who they were, or why they were there. There were so many characters, you never give a crap about any of them, because none of them are given enough time, even if you pretend this is a movie about an ensemble cast. Things happen to these characters, and you shrug, because it amounts to nothing. I guess he found his father. I guess he got the girl. You’re given no reason to care, although the movie certainly seems to expect you to.

Similarly, the movie is constantly cutting to legislators who are trying to shut down pirate radio. However, nothing in those scenes have any effect on what’s going on in the boat until the very last event. Huge portions of the movie are dedicated to showing what’s going on in the government, and none of it matters until they pass the law at the end. It’s a complete waste of time.

Other than that, you have lots and lots of screen time dedicated to showing random people listening to the radio and dancing. Sometimes they are on the toilet for no reason. This is apparently of the utmost importance, because they show this constantly, as if the viewer didn’t understand 5 minutes in that lots of people listened to this station. It’s ridiculous.

There were so many potential plot threads that, if focused on, would have meant something. But they didn’t, and the end result is the feeling that the entire film was pointless. Nothing happened. There was no plot. There was an outcome, but it seemed disconnected to 95% of the action in the film, so it didn’t actually resolve anything in a way that feels good as a viewer.

Basically, Pirate Radio is exactly how not to do a dramatic re-enactment of historical events. I really disliked it, and I bet, if you sat through it, you would too.

(And for those wondering about the title, well, that’s a quote from the funniest part of the film: the commentary we were throwing at it as we made fun of how badly put together it was.)

Remember, this is the day where I take the Spoiler Gloves off. If you care about Heavy Rain Spoilers, come back tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have some non-spoilery crap for you to read instead. If you read on, you’ve been warning.

SPOILARZ START NAO

If you don’t care about spoilers, or if you’ve played Heavy Rain, I’m just going to start by saying you should play Press X to Jason. It’s a completely awesome and accurate depiction of the start of the game. You can refresh yourself before I go on rambling!

I was not expecting Heavy Rain to be so Saw.
I mean, I guess I should have. It made sense the moment I got into the game. But Saw annoys me, and I didn’t really want to play Saw: the Game. That just didn’t seem like fun.

However, going through the trials as Ethan presented some very interesting decisions on the part of me the player. Basically, I had to decide: was I going to make these decisions as me, or as the character, and if I was going to make them as the character, who was the character?
The part that exemplified this for me, and I assume most players, was the fourth trial, where he was told he had to kill someone. As me, I don’t want to kill anyone. I’m in it to save people. Be a good guy. However, was Ethan? This was a dude who just chopped off his finger a few scenes ago, at least in my game. He barely hesitated. In fact, in the trial at the electric transformer, he briefly considered quitting, but then decided he was all in. At least in my mind. I decided that he, the character, would not hesitate to murder someone to save his son. He was to the breaking point, and he was going to do literally anything. So I shot the guy without hesitation.
If I had made different choices for him up until that point, I know I would have played it differently. I wouldn’t have had that look back, and decided I was too far down the rabbit hole to give up. THAT is where the power of a game like this lies. In changing those perceptions and having the player actual create who the character is.

Another great example: in the opening sequence, I accidentally failed to help my wife carry in the groceries, accidentally did something else before helping set the table, and then failed to kiss her when I was getting romantic. None of these were set, but they happened. Then, later, when I learned they got divorced, or were at least separated, that was some amazing foreshadowing that I did myself. “Woah,” I said, “I really set that up right. There were so many subtle clues.”
Alternatively, Scott being the Origami Killer was not set up at all. I played him as such a nice guy that I was shocked he was the bad guy. My decisions, where he helped each person he came across to the best of his ability, made the twist all the more shocking, though it made complete sense. I set up that surprise, but I could have, instead, set up the foreshadowing that he was evil, if I had played those sequences another way. Either way, I would have had a strong impact on the story, which is completely awesome.

The narrative did have its faults, though. The pacing was horrible. Very often, you jump between characters for no apparent reason. There’s little connection, until near the end, of what each character is doing in the scene before to what a new character is doing the scene after, not even thematically. This makes a really jarring, start stop feel to the narrative, and I’m sure David Cage could do better. Then again, he ended Fahrenheit with a battle against a living embodiment of the internet, so what do I know?
I also didn’t really find any of the characters particularly likable. The only character I really ended up liking was Scott. Here was this nice guy, going around helping people, fighting off dudes and putting his life on the line when he’s chubby and overweight? I thought he was awesome. Then he was the killer. Seems like maybe something should have been put in motion to make me give a shit about the other characters, since they were the real heroes. I dunno.
Finally, there was a complete misuse of fucking in the game. It was completely out of nowhere! I had a chance to choose no, I admit, but I was asked about a kiss. I feel like they would have stopped before they got to fucking, especially since it took them so damn long to get their clothes off. And then, in a game where we had seen both of them naked in the shower, they decide to put their underwear back on after they fuck to snuggle in bed? I honestly don’t buy it. Why would you push the boundaries enough to show man ass during a shower scene just for the hell of it, and then not show anything during the sex scene? It’s kind of stupid.

One Final Annoyance: The ARI glasses. Jayden has to wear a glove to manipulate it, but you see him manipulating things with his non-gloved hand all the damn time during the game. What sense does that make? Why was it so hard to follow your own set of rules? Grr.
Sorry, that really annoyed me.

Anyway, Heavy Rain is not revolutionizing anything. It was an enjoyable experience, and, despite its clunkiness and often horrible voice acting, does manage to have some truly emotional moments. I suggest everyone give it a rent as I did. Still, I doubt anyone besides Mr. Cage is going to make a game like this anytime soon. If they do, though, I hope they work some of the kinks out of the recipe.

I have played Heavy Rain. Tomorrow will be the completely and utterly spoiler-laden review, so if you care about David Cage’s latest opus and haven’t played the game yet, I’d stay away from that one. Today, I’m just going to talk about mechanics.

Specifically, Quick Time Events.

In a game that I am playing specifically for the plot, I honestly have very little problem with the quick time event, especially when implemented how Heavy Rain does it. For the most part, failing a sequence distinctly changes the action sequence and how it’s progressing. That’s awesome. Failing a button press and seeing your character fall down, or fail to block a punch, really heightens the tension. It’s way better than most QTEs in that regard. I feel like it fits the game really well. I don’t have a problem with them being there.

What I do have a problem with is their presentation.

In trying to make things look artistic and cool, David Cage has basically ruined playability. It may seem, initially, like a good idea to have the commands appear, context-sensitively, in the environment. For example, if an object to pick up is on the ground, the command to pick it up appears on the ground. Sounds good, right?
The problem comes when you mix in the dramatic camera angles if the game. If there’s an object on the ground, and I’m far away, the icon is far away too. This means I cannot read the icon to figure out what I have to do, even on my fancy new HDTV that I got to make reading such things easier. Oftentimes, to the game’s credit, it makes sense what I have to do. In the previous “pick an item off the ground” scenario, the action is always moving the stick down, as if reaching down, so if an object is on the ground, doing that will pick it up 90% of the time. Still, in heated, time-sensitive sequences, not being able to read the icons is obscenely frustrating, and causes you to make mistakes for stupid reasons.
This is only made worse by the “thought cloud” mechanic of talking. Your various conversation options spin around the character’s head. If you’re far away, you can’t read what they actually say, and often can’t make out which button does which thing. Often, options you want are behind the character or objects in the environment, making it impossible to read them all. These are some of the most time-sensitive choices in the game, and the game completely impedes you from making them. I wouldn’t mind the little touches, like the options shaking if the character is worried or rushed, if I could actually read them normally. Then it would be part of gameplay, and that’s kind of cool. Since I can’t read them normally, though, it’s all just pointless and frustrating. Ugh.

It’s sad that Heavy Rain couldn’t get it’s key mechanic completely right. It bothered me all the way through my playthrough. Still, it was quite an experience, but that’s all based on the plot, so I’ll save that for next time.

STAY TUNE!

Finally, I get to stop using my stocking mimic and use something new in the familiar department. What new would that be? Why, it’s this month’s IoTM, of course! The Baby Bugged Bugbear!

If you even look at the page, you’ll see why I quite like the Baby Bugged Bugbear. I enjoy kitchen sink familiars that do a wide variety of things and are constantly messing with combat and making things different. The Baby Bugged Bugbear fits this perfectly. It switches at random between Leprechaun, Ghuol Whelp, Fairy, and Volleyball, as well as gives you “bugged” items and sometimes fiddles with combat in weird ways. I’m especially glad it gets the Ghuol Whelp in there, as that’s an easy way to make me like something.

It’s also just really flavorful and cool. The general concept of a familiar being completely broken and constantly throwing up php errors, and that being it’s power, is just kind of completely awesome. It’s entertaining, and that is mucho important to me. That’s what I like out of stuff like this. I get IoTMs to increase my entertainment as I keep working through the game.

On top of it all, the familiar equipment lets people who care about tuning their familiars tune it to do more specific sorts of actions. You can make it act like a Fairy or Volley full time, if you’d like, although you have to zap the equipment to turn it into the full fairy version. This is cool for people who care about such things, but I don’t. I do, however, want to run for awhile in full fairy, because it has different bugged equipment drops when you have it set up that way, and I want them! I mean, there’s a container in there! That’s just neat!

Yeah, I think that the Bugged Bugbear is kind of a home run. This is pretty well exactly what I want from a familiar, and it doesn’t seem to be completely useless speed-wise, either. (By that I mean, you aren’t completely handicapping yourself by using it. I kind of doubt it’s going to end up being part of any serious speed run strategy, but eh, I know nothing of such things, so maybe I’m wrong.) I’m going to enjoy using it for this run, I think. It’s good stuff.

As normally happens, Essner pulled me out to go see a movie film, and this film was called The Losers. I really didn’t know anything about it before I saw it. I had saw some annoying pop-over ads on websites, and I vaguely knew it was based on a comic, but nothing else, really. I had little expectation.

The movie was completely fantastic.

The Losers isn’t trying to be anything more than a fun, entertaining action movie, and that’s exactly what it pulls off. There are great fights and action sequences galore, with plenty of ranged and melee combat. There’s explosions. Action stuff happens, and it is completely satisfying.

At the same time, the movie is actually pretty hilarious. It’s not that what happens is particularly funny. It’s not slapstick or anything, or completely over the top a a la Shoot ‘Em Up. It’s simply that the characters are just really witty and entertaining in their speech. Jensen, in particular, says some damn funny lines, and fulfills his role as comic relief really, really damn well. However, he’s not a “joke” character, and still manages to get up to plenty of bad-assitude. All the heroes do. It’s actually pretty spectacular that way. Everyone is a badass, everyone plays their role and shines, and everyone has some really funny lines at some point in the film.
Similarly, the villains of the piece, Max and Wade, are similarly hilarious. Wade’s over the top level of straight man routine, done in a way where you know the character is doing it just because he knows what kind of reaction he’s going to get, sets up some really damn funny moments. They have a damn good interplay, and are suitably villainous while being completely likable.

The plot is forgettable. Some bad things happened, they’re getting revenge, there’s some sort of magic science bullshit threat, etc. But it’s no worse than any other action movie you’ve seen, and by far the humor and spot-on characterization make this movie shine above other stupid action flicks I’ve seen recently. This is a movie that I’d be glad to have on my shelf someday. I was thoroughly and completely entertained the entire way through. Essner told me that, apparently, this movie is getting bad reviews. Honestly, I can’t imagine that being the result of anything but having completely off-base expectations. This is a funny action movie. It’s not trying to be art. If you want to just relax and enjoy some action and some laughs, The Losers is a damn good choice. You should see it.