Movie Reviews: BloodRayne

Imagine this: I watched an Uwe Boll movie and it wasn't a total disaster (!) Well, actually, I think Uwe Boll is unjustly demonized as THE worst filmmaker ever. It seems all of his movies are placed on the IMDb bottom 100 list and people are considering his movies crap almost by default. True, one certainly can't call Alone in the Dark a good film (or even watchable). But, Boll's films often have that weird amateurish charm, you know, like when you're watching something and it's so unbelieveably bad that you just can't take your eyes off it. House of the Dead was like that. Sanctimony too. On the other hand, had someone more "famous" made Sanctimony, they'd probably call it a masterpiece.
Anyway, I'm getting carried away. The point of this post is BloodRayne, which I have just seen. It's certainly the best of Boll's films I've seen so far. I don't know how the heck did he manage to convince all those people to appear in the movie (with his reputation and all that stuff), but what we have here is almost an all-star cast: Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley, Billy Zane, Meat Loaf, etc. None of these people is Robert de Niro, but for an Uwe Boll film this sure is an achievement. So, the acting is vastly improved. Usually, every time when it comes to talking in an UB film, you want to bang your head on the wall. Here, it's different. Somehow those (rare) scenes suffer only from terrible writing, rather than from BOTH terrible writing and terrible acting. Fortunately, the filmmakers wisely realized that a film based on adventures of a dhamphire (half human, half vampire) wanting to kill her own father wouldn't make a good drama, so they turned it into an action movie. Luckily, action in Uwe Boll's movies usually passes smoothly. It's nothing spectacular, but it's not unwatchable, either. Here we have LOTS of action, and lots and lots and lots of blood. So, when you have a large fight scene, with, say, fifty actors, and everyone's cutting everyone everywhere, and every cut causes a fountain of blood to flow, you can't help but feel at least a bit satisfied. And Uwe even manages to surprise us with some very nice-looking outside scenes, you know, sunsets, mountains, forests, pretty pretty, it looked as if he used some scenes that Peter Jackson threw out of his Lord of the Rings trilogy (which is a good thing).
Naturally, the writing is terrible. The source material (an action game from PlayStation) is nothing spectacular, of course, but the writer tried to further destroy things with absolutely crappy dialogue and some extremely pathetic and lame scenes. Surprisingly, the worst moment of the movie is the sex scene (?) which was completely unnecessary and terribly directed. Actually, it looked and sounded like someone was raping someone with a wooden stick. Sure, Kristanna Loken shows her baloons in clear light, but even with that great advantage that scene was so painfully terrible that it was painful. It seems that Uwe Boll can't direct sex scenes. He has finally learned to make talking scenes, now he will probably have to spend three or four movies to make a decent sex scene.
I will shut up now. The point is - although this movie is far from good, it is definitely not what you'd call crap (like Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, or Charlie's Angels). So, I recommend seeing it. Of course, if you're not a rabid Uwe Boll hater who has given up on him long time ago just because he directed like fifty terrible movies.
By the way, it seems that Boll's next project is an adaptation of the already legendary FPS game FarCry. Let's hope he does better than with Alone in the Dark, which was probably the worst film adaptation of any work from any medium ever.