I'll tell you why so serious

As Good As It Gets

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I remember watching this on VHS with a friend who was obsessed with Christopher Lambert and thinking it was quite interesting and I would like to see it again. And walking through a Collector's shop there it was, the dumb title grinning at you on a now oversized looking VHS cover. I made the purchase. Let's whack it in the player and see if this was actually worth the $3 Australian I paid for it.So we start with Ice T (he's in this) a major player in a crime syndicate who's invited 100 hardened criminals (and one seemingly innocent girl), who have all wronged his syndicate, to fight to the death inside a prison facility that is to be opened the following day. Only the last three (at least they resisted the temptation to say "There can be only one") will walk away with $10 million. "What if we don't want to play?" one of the criminals asks. "THEN DON'T." Ice T answers shooting him in the chest.This is a pretty intelligent film given the subject matter. There are a lot of alliances made and the fighting, while artsy, does try to trend towards realism. Though there are a few scenes where director Albert Pyun (B-movie go to guy) can't help himself. The ending is surprisingly well thought out and satisfying. The main issue here is the lighting, it's usually far too bright and the walls are all white and grey. Darkness would have worked better. It would be interesting to see what David Fincher or Quentin Tarantino (for very different reasons) would have done with this.This is a good little movie. Decent story and passable performances. Smarter than I thought it would be. Hard to get hold of, but worth a watch.

One hundred hit men are locked in a prison with a thousand guns and the last three left alive gets ten million dollars. Sounds a bit to me like a recipe for disaster. Sounds also like a pathetic excuse for some pointless violence. The violence on one hand may seem pointless, but I feel that there is a lot more to this movie than simple pointless movie, and those who simply argue about the shamelessness of the violence in this movie will have missed the point.My friend compared it to the Italian movies where in the end everybody is dead. We must remember that everybody (except for two people) who are in this prison are all there for one reason, and that is because they upset the syndicate. Instead of just killing them, they told them that they must earn their freedom, but none can. Even Moon (Ice T), the syndicate boss who organised this little event, does not escape. The only people who escape are a little girl and an accountant that was dragged in there because she took too many photos.My friends commented that the dialogue in this movie was quite bad, but I feel that some of the dialogue extracts the theme to the movie. At the beginning, some of the hit men are sitting in a Cadalac and are swearing, and another does not appreciate this. The comment that comes out is the more that something is said, the less meaning that it has. This is the theme of the movie: the more you do something the less meaning that this deed has. These people are all killers, and as they have killed so much, the act of killing has simply lost all meaning. Moon says that the money is there because there is nothing else to entice them to do anything, but the mere existence of the money is not going to stop them from killing each other, it just encourages it. The whole idea of only having three people left is also very interesting, as it comes out as to who these three people are and they consider whether those that they are associating with are the three, or if Moon must be one of the three as well.The violence in this movie is not explicit, rather there is simply a lot of killing, and this emphasises the attitudes of these characters: they will kill another human without another thought. As such, none of them can be redeemable. It is interesting to notice that the accountant is the only one to survive (excluding the little girl who spent most of the movie in the car) and she was the only one who was not a killer, nor did she have any connection with the syndicate. The only reason that she was here was because she had evidence to convict the syndicate of many crimes, yet she escaped. Evil is so ingrained in society, that a few pictures could simply tear it apart. This prison, the symbol of justice in society, was built and is controlled by the syndicate, the symbol of crime in society. This paradox is the paradox of society - is there such as thing as an incorruptible judge? This movie is not a movie about pointless violence, but rather about the darkness of the human soul, corruption in society and they way that we become desensitised to the wrongs that we do. It is actually quite a good movie, and Moon is the type of character that Ice-T plays very well.

A gem amongst B-movies of its age - specifically, the ambiguous 90s age, when you weren't exactly sure if something was B or A variety just by looking.The premise itself is ingeniously simple - upturn a couple of IKEA plastic boxes full of guns, assorted ammo and baseball bats on top of a crowd of small-time hustlers, big-time killers and middlemen entrepreneurs, with a deadline and a 10 mil prize ahead of them. Hilarity will not hesitate for a moment to ensue.The movie demonstrates a surprisingly sure and purposeful grip of its unsophisticated material. The writing is full of self-indulging one-liners and disconnected shock scenes, but manages to remain concise and dry overall. The directing is full of action movie clichés (though less so if you consider that it was done before The Matrix or Bad Boys or Shoot 'Em Up), but retains a certain stylish fleur of mamba shindig where only the cool ones are invited.The acting is accomplished entirely by the way of good casting (suitably so for cutout characters that this movie so nicely puts to use) - Lambert as an unstable Leon-type children-loving killer with a weight on his conscience, Halsey as an implacable killer with a heart, a worn-out accountant-journalist with a dirty conscience, a cool blonde killer girl with a chrome-plated Desert Eagle and so on.Every cliché that this movie invokes it surprisingly fresh - no less because these clichés managed to become clichés without a worthy, contemporary manifestation in the actual films worth watching. Maybe these are common in literature or cheap TV, but in cinema, they lurk modestly in the background.Here, they are in the spotlight. And they create drama - maybe not a tearjerker, but epic enough to be respected and not laughed at benignly.All of the violent scenes are rendered with an aesthetic detachment, and at the same time, with geeky admiration for the heroes' undeniable coolness. This combination makes Mean Guns a singular experience - you're cheering for typical B-movie shootouts, but at the same time admire the stop-motion hallucinatory flashback-murder scenes; you're laughing at simple street-wise humour that Ice-T impeccably projects (from his personal experience, no doubt) - but you stop and wonder at the surreal scene where a roomful of crooks tries to shoot each other with empty guns in time lapse.After all, the location alone makes this movie unique - an ultra-clean, high-tech, dystopian prison, smack in the middle of a large city, littered with cold bodies and warm cartridge cases (or vice versa). Prize is in the middle of the labyrinth, and a cynical, steel-toothed demiurge is at the top of it; he seeks death but scoffs at weak attempts to deliver it.All in all, this movie in my eyes puts to life a chaotic reality of William Gibson's Sprawl (from his Neuromancer cyberpunk trilogy0. An assortment of selfish crooks, sophisticated in their choice of gadgets and styles, each one with a dark secret in their closet; somewhat flat personas, trigger-happy but cautious, in the middle of the lawless but tech-ridden world; this is Mean Guns all right.

Mean Guns is hilarious. It's a cleverly filmed shoot-em-up with a thin, but unexpectedly interesting plot, some talented actors hamming it up with reckless abandon (Lambert, Halsey, Ice-T, Van Valkenburgh and Cote) and a great sense of humor.The premise seems simple enough. A politically connected crime syndicate, with the cryptic name "The Syndicate" has just built a brand new high-security prison and they are staging a grand-opening with their most cold-blooded killers all in attendance. But in reality, all of the invitees have in some way betrayed the syndicate and they are being locked in with snipers on the roof for a shoot-out. The three who survive can walk away with ten million dollars.In one way or another, each of the assassins participating in this deadly game is psychotic, but Michael Halsey and Chris Lambert really take their roles for a ride. Lambert is perfectly cast as the only voluntary participant, and Halsey does a nice job as a cool, rational killer with a troubled conscience.Some of the acting is, to be sure, pretty atrocious (Kimberly Warren is terribly miscast, but nevertheless amusing), but the directing (by the unfairly derided Albert Pyun) is truly great. Mean Guns parodies Pulp Fiction, itself, and even its entire genre constantly - from one ridiculous scene of near-slapstick violence to another.The cinematography is perfect for the genre, and the incongruously happy mambo soundtrack constantly reinforces the film's comedic aspects.Highly recommended for fans of "guy flicks"