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Sunday, August 28, 2011

My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 95 - Wing Commander (1999)


Here’s a special type of bad video game movie.  While most video game movies suck because they don’t come close to following the plot of the original material, usually because the people who worked on the source material often have very little input in the production of the film version.  However, Wing Commander doesn’t really have an excuse because it was written and directed by the creator of the game, Chris Roberts.  So why is this one so bad?  Three words: Freddie Prinze Jr.  Well, not JUST him, but still...

In the plot there’s an ongoing battle between Terra and the Kilrathi, an evil alien race.  When a device that would give the Kilrathi the power to jump to Earth and attack the Terran’s home planet is taken, the stakes are high to stop evil aliens.  Lieutenants Blair (played by Freddie Wooden-Acting himself), “Angel” Deveraux (played by Saffron Burrows) and “Maniac” Marshall (played by Matthew Lillard) are now charged with saving Earth.  But not without shouting clichéd pilot speak, bad one-liners and the typical crap like “That’s an insane plan” and “This is a suicide mission”, and then proceed to follow their captain right into said suicide mission.

The ridiculousness of these scenes is juxtaposed by the actors’ seeming disinterest in what is supposed to be going on on screen.  Now, I can relate, as the action is very boring and is almost entirely poorly shot with badly rendered CGI.  However, there is no reason for an action movie, based on a game, created by said game’s creator to be boring, and boy is this one boring, it doesn't even have the courtesy to be campy!  The screenplay is just bland, and bland is worse than bad, because sometimes bad can be funny.  This one had to be a sleep aid on paper during the readings.  
Wing Commander’s blandness is only amplified by its ugly visual style, which replicates the games in some scenes and uses some weak CGI in others.  It looks washed out and sloppy.  This on top of the overall boring acting of the cast is just too much bad to handle, and while Matthew Lillard fills his character with a certain psychotic energy (hence the name “Maniac”) Burrows and Prinze Jr. act more along the lines of “Oh… no…  They are firing their lasers at my ship… I must shoot back now…  Okay…  I am shooting back now.”  Couple that with this film’s strange tendency to have its characters announce everything they are doing, about to do, or anything that they see on screen, even after the audience has already seen it, and you have one of the dumbest movies of the 90’s.

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