Mutant Chronicles

Mutant Chronicles has a serious consistency problem. I was going to make a hilarious joke about the consistency of crap, but you know we wouldn’t stoop so low on this site. Needless to say, Mutant Chronicles is a big old turd. With maybe a few granules of awesome thrown in. This granulation is a problem. I get crappy action movies, I don’t just get them, I love them, I actively seek them out and number them among my most favored of films. This has all the ingredients, a pretty good cast, a collection of one liners that almost outdoes some of the Stallone classics (almost) and a plot which is so ridiculously thin it can be summed up in one line: incongruously multi-cultural (with ridiculous accents) group journeys to mutant factory to destroy it. Even half of that sentence was taken up explaining that the group is incongruously multi-cultural, thats how much I had to pad out the plot to get a worthwhile sentence out of it. The problem though is that it never quite embraces this crappiness, it wants to be Blade Runner awesome when it should be trying to be Bucky O’Hare awesome. It is best summed up by the films use of blue-screen CGI for basically, as far as I can tell, absolutely everything. I think even some of the money they paid John Malkovich to be in the movie must have been computer generated, because I cannot for the life of me work out how they convinced him to be in it. Anyway, some scenes look absolutely amazing, really beautifully rendered fantasy worlds, some scenes they clearly ran out of money, or will power, and filled them with so much cgi smoke/dust/light accents/gas that you can barely see what is going on. For some reason they have even done this in scenes set in such mundane places as a front room, presumably to give some sense of continuity visually, but making the whole thing make very little sense. Had this been a zero budget (this is not me saying it is a big budget movie by the way, they just spent all the cash on Malkovich) fun action romp (romp is a word reserved for such descriptions, and Sun newspaper headlines) they would have done away with all the pretty stuff, thrown in some more gore and one liners and everyone would have been happy. If they had a little more cash they might have been able to build a couple of sets. I think this might have made the film makers invest in them a little more. There are some amazing settings that are there just because the characters happen to wander through them. If they had spent a little time and effort making them they might have been tempted to have the cast do something or another in them just so we can linger over them a little longer. As it is all the meaningful dialogue takes place in normal rooms, lift shafts and caves. Its a tiny bit like playing tekken on the ps1, everything going on behind the characters looks amazing, but you know you can’t go an interact with it. Oh by the way, the black guy dies first, oh then the other black guy… then an Asian dude…then a German, then an Asian woman, then a white chick, then the white dude manages to…oh you know the rest?