FilmDistrict, Contrafilm, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM),
Chris Hemsworth, Josh Peck, Adrianne Palicki, Josh Hutcherson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Isabel Lucas, Connor Cruise, Kenneth Choi, Alyssa Diaz
This ill advised remake of 1984’s film of the same name has been updated to have the attacking army be from North Korea. A group of young people wake one day to find the armies of North Korea have taken over their city. They decide to fight, and take off, hiding in the woods taking every opportunity possible for fight for truth, justice, and the American way. One of the friends, Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth) is a Marine, and helps train his friends to hideout and go underground. They call themselves Wolverines, and eventually join up with the armed forces to fight the enemy.
This film was ready for release in 2010, but MGM ran into financial problems and it was shelved. Perhaps it should have been one of those films that gets lost in the vault and found hundreds of years later when we’re all dead and gone and don’t have to watch it. This was a horrible film. There was no personality at all in the bunch of freedom fighting kids that gave you anything to interest you, and it was unimportant if they win or lose. There are lots of complaints about the film being unrealistic. Well, lots of movies are unrealistic fantasy and such, but this attempts to be a real war story that makes you feel like it ought to be an authentic war story, not a fantasy/adventure, but that isn’t my biggest beef with this film. The acting was just so bad, and the script doesn’t have anything for the people unlucky enough to be cast in this movie to work with. The whole thing is just rather silly. The original 1984 film had the Soviet Union as the attackers. That had to go, of course, since they don’t exist anymore. So the film was filmed with China being the bad guys, but in the 2 years it sat on the shelf, someone realized that if this film was released internationally, that China would naturally ban it, so they cast the villains as the North Koreans. I don’t suppose there is much of a box office in North Korea anyway, so go ahead and make them upset. But I really wonder if it ever was released in China, and if so, what the actual box office was. I haven’t been able to find that out, but I would expect it to be dismal. We can’t all like everything, and in my opinion this was a waste of my time. I really did not enjoy this at all.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
