What not to Watch – Puncture Wounds and other rants

Sports actors. Two of the worst words to be put together that come to mind. Many sports stars have tried to become actors and very few of them succeed. For every Kareem Abdul-Jabbar there are at least 3 Shaquille O’Neals. I am not counting people primarily known for acting that happened to be professional athletes beforehand like Jason Lee and Carl Weathers nor do I count pro-wrestlers, it’s not a sport. Pro-wrestling involves athletics and what not, but it’s not a sport due to a lack of competition. Sports actors like: Dennis Rodman, Dan Marino, Michael Jordan, Chris Bosh and Howie Long have pretty much shut the door on the possibility of professional athletes turned actors being any good in my book. I would like to give you my warning on the movie Puncture Wounds starring kick-boxing vet and UFC alum Cung Le.

Le has some potential for being a good action star. He’s got the moves. The main issue he is running into right now is that he has the personality of drywall. He should just stick to knocking people out, he’s great at that. If he insists on acting, he needs to learn to emote better than a Gothic teenage on stolen Ambien. I love Dolph Lundgren, but he’s Lundgren. I love Lundgren the same way I love watching Maury Povich, I know it’s terrible but sometimes I want terrible.

Basically, Le is a vet with PTSD and saves a hooker from some Aryans. Then, exactly what you expect happens, they kill his family, he kills them, and he gets away with the girl. I think someone was watching First Blood and thought, what if he ran into a prostitute and not that cop in the beginning? This story is lame and seems to be written by a monkey with a hatchet covered in ink. Every time the monkey spazzes out, the ink gets all over the papers and actors have to read and act out what the monkey was doing. I was hoping this may have been a diamond in the rough due to Le’s legit martial arts skills but the camera work was working against his skill. They were using shaky cam while he was doing the moves. Apparently they didn’t get the memo that shaky cam is only used when the choreography sucks.

I am sick of shaky cam as a thing in all action movies now. Some do it perfectly, Evil Dead and Saving Private Ryan are great examples of the proper use of shaky cam. The problem is that a lot of action movies are using shaky as an excuse to have terrible cinematography. The second two Bourne movies are great examples of terrible shaky cam. They used it enough to the point of being referred to as queasicam. I implore all potential action movie directors, please stop using shaky cam. It’s annoying and you are bugging the movie going world.

While I’m at it, stop with all the random slow motion parts while you are at it. I’m looking at you Zack Snyder and all you Snyder wannabes. It’s getting to the point where they slow down the most random part of the action for no particular reason. Hercules and The Matrix movies are great examples. Some of the slow motion stuff is cool but it gets to the point of being excessive. I don’t need to see some jerk off eating a BLT or buying colace in slow motion. It is just plain unnecessary.

Anyway, I digress. You should avoid Puncture Wounds unless you like bad movies like I do. I’m going to warn you, even if you like crappy movies, you are going to have a difficult time sitting through this schlock. As always I am Tim McDonald, your movie watching stunt double. Hit me up on Twitter or Facebook to make suggestions or comments. I want to thank my all of my Facebook friends for their entries for the picture caption Facebook thread. Kurt Hoffman and Rob Cmor won for their comments this week.