TheRPGSite

So I had some time this weekend, mostly because I didn't do a fucking thing, so I watched Mutant Chronicles, and here is the verdict:

The movie begins with the Fallout Narration, explaining why a bunch of really old dudes in crusader gear are 'at the end of the last Ice age' moping around in some mud and fog against a black backdrop.  

Seriously, there is no depth of field anywhere in this movie, all sets are about a dozen feet deep, and they hide this with a lot of darkness and fog. Get used to it.

So right away we know this isn't Mutant Chronicles, the Game, because there, the FIVE (not four) corporations are all over Space, the 'Mutants' come from an unholy artifact found on Pluto, not by grubby old men with crusader swords during the last Ice age, the artifact is a 2001 style monolith that summons extra-dimensional evil god beings, not a UFO that blindly turns men into mutants so they can go out and... get more men to transform... but I get ahead of myself.   Pretty much the only thing that is kept from the MC game are the Corporations, and thats pretty tenuous.  

Right after the Fallout Narration ends, we are directed to some trench warfare between England and Prussia... I mean Imperial and Bauhaus.  Some british That Guy walks around a trench looking at the apparent horrors of war for a while, not even wincing when some private gets shelled to oblivion about ten feet from him, right after he talked to the guy. Poor extra had already delivered his lines, so it was time to demonstrate that this shit was serious, yo!

Anyway, he eventually gets to where the Punisher is building a ring of dog-tags of his fallen comrades.  They exchange some dialog that establishes that they are buddies with a history... then we cut to where the Bauhaus guys, lined up next to truly massive artillery and with equally massive coal fired tank/troop transports begin their assault.

So the Imperial guys, including the Punisher and That Guy line up on the walls of their trench... and I get the first look at the MC guns. Big, yes, but its rather hard to connect them to the distinctive (and LARGE... seriously, the standard caliber for a Mutant Chronicles Gun was like, .75...) guns from the game... someone put some effort in, I can tell from the Bauhaus Guys SMG (critically angled clip, check!...) but from the cinematagraphy you'd never tell.  

Now this trench assault happens in slow motion. Not the filming, but the actual guys moving around. The tank things stop the first time the Imperial artillery blows one up about a hundred meters from the lines, the guys sort of mill towards the trenches, there is a lot of shooting and random CGI blood, stylistically bright against the muted palette of the film.

Apparently the artillery shell from the Imperials uncovers and breaks this massive stone seal that, slowly, crumbles to reveal a giant hole... during this incredibly long intro scene!  At last! Shit will happen, right?

Er... eventually.

So, despite a powerful advantage of trench cover vs open ground, no surprise, no real artillery support, the Bauhaus guys start to win, so That Guy run around, loses his gun, and we get an amusing round of Surprise! Headshot! that puts him back with the Punisher... just as Ninjas start killing guys with Whooshes!

Wait, those aren't NINJAE, they be MUTANTS!!!  

Seriously, the Mutants are... odd.  Essentially you take a Zombie from 28 days later, give him Ninja Whoosh powers, some industrial staples and a big fucking hook hand (every one of them has the same hook hand)... and... that's it.  Also, they apparently are wearing uniforms from... someone. Its hard to tell, and the initial wave may be wearing mostly Bauhaus... but WHY?! The hole literally JUST OPENED!

Now, the mutants apparently can take gunfire pretty good, and there is a meet cute where the Punisher and the so-far nameless Bauhaus officer (last seen on top of a tank) have a knife duel in the no man's land as they run from Ninjae!Mutants... until the rest of the surviving Imperials show up and surround him... only to be picked off my Ninjae!mutants.  There are lots of scenes of Big Fucken Hook To Face, the slaughter reduced to montage, and we are left with That Guy, Nameless Bauhaus, Punisher and some dude named Jesus (he's a mexican Imperial, apparently. Also, he has this really awesome double barreled gun with a sword strapped to the barrels. Not usable in any way, but it looks cool. Also, he never uses the sword on his gun. Amazingly, said sword looks JUST LIKE the crusader swords from the opening narration! Bear with me...)

So That Guy grabs a big honking turret cannon thing that is just Out There, in No Man's Land and starts fucking up Mutants while the Punisher gets Jesus out of there (Jesus is down! Flag on the play!) as the steam powered flying thing shows up to rescue the viewers from this incredibly LONG setup scene!

No word what happens to Nameless Bauhaus Guy, also known as NBG.

Now some old guy on a mountaintop with a fucked up radio tower (seriously, the top third of it is bent over for some reason) hands a telegraph to a little boy, who almost falls of a mountain to take it to a monastery, where he interrupts Hellboy giving a sermon. Hellboy walks into a room with a bunch of Crusader Swords covered in cobwebs in a nice stand past my new favorite actress, Anna Walton (who says nothing and follows him around without a word of explanation for the entire film... just saying)

You know, it just occurred to me that The Punisher is Capitol in the film, which is just never explained in the opening scene why he is there with the equally Capitol Jesus, with an Imperial (That Guy) commander/Top Kick (First Sergeant, at least in real life...). Ah.. movies.

Anyway: Hellboy's next scene is in this tower with Cyrus the Virus, who has acquired a gnarly facial scar and a nasty wheeze.  It is NOT AT ALL obvious in this scene that the other people in the room are ambassadors from the various Corporations (I figured it out from the 'Bauhaus Ambassador' entries in the fucking credits!).  Hellboy says he needs twenty men and a ship to save the world, and CtV says; Hell naw, its easier to evacuate people to space and leave millions to die.

Cut to a woman running through the city with a little boy, clutching evacuation tickets (You can tell, cause they say it right on the ticket), narrowly avoiding slaughtered by mutants who are fighting soldiers (this time without Whoosh powers, never to return. All the Ninjae!Mutants were obviously killed in the first scene...), and eventually heading up some stairs, where the kid drops his ticket! Mom puts him on the ship with much silent screaming... then the evacuation ship is crashed by another ship and dies in fire for NO REASON!

OMG! Humanity is DOOMED!

Hellboy is talking to CtV in the triangle table room from the last scene as they watch the crash. CtV gives Hellboy some evac tickets to bribe soldiers with, and his own personal transport, which has just arrived to evac him. He says "Fuck naw, I'm motherfucking Cyrus the Virus, and...' Or, rather he says he's too old for this shit. Hellboy leaves, and Cyrus gets an awesome pre-death line as all the mutants crowd the room behind him. "Do you even have a name."

Trust me, it works.  I'll spoil it for you, its the coolest death in the film with maybe one exception I won't spoil yet.

So, the Punisher is getting drunk in a bar when Hellboy offers him some tickets, cut away when he gives them to That Guy's wife and daughter, who are fuckign SMILING. He joins 'The Team'.

The Team includes Jesus and NBG, who is given teh name Stiener (and is thus now Named Bauhaus Guy... or NBG).   Also on the team is a black guy (the token Imperial), who refused to take Evac tickets because he is that honest or something, an asian dude named Jubal, the french DEBS, who is pretty white/asian for this and Hellboy and Ms. Walton.  

 Some old monk in glasses explains that they have an alien explosive device taken from the machine by the original old dudes back in the day. Its in two parts and the third part, the key, they don't have. How they know it is an explosive? Um... well.. they are putting it on faith. The key? They think its in the machine somewhere.  And, apparently, Hellboy plans to detonate teh bomb inside the machine himself, because he's awesome.  

No, they don't have a backup plan.

NBG has a surprise for everyone when he shows them a captured Mutant, that apparently was pinned under a tank because they are so awesome a threat.  They explain that the mutants feel no pain, don't die to single bullet shots but explosives, fire and machine guns are all cool. the Mutant then breaks its chains (a recurring problem here... apparently MC chains are fragile things) and the lovely Ms. Walton cuts it apart with swords, because those work too.

So Hellboy gives everyone (except Ms Walton, who has cooler swords anyways) one of the cobwebby crusader swords in an early morning ceremony (we know because Jesus is asleep on his feet). Of course, he's already got one strapped to his gun, so whatever! Also: NBG, learning that Jesus uses White Phosphorus rounds in his double gun/sword explains that Jesus will die when his gun explodes so please do that 'over there'. Hint hint.

Oh, and apparently they went to the monastery in the mountains at some point, because they totally leave from there in an awesome but rather silly locomotive flying machine with a coal fired plant inside (complete with dudes with shovels... who, apparently, have never heard of turbulance, because they don't close the hatches when they take their smoke break.  The dirty half dozen exchange brief life stories, and the Captain of their 'Ship' is awesome.

Also, they are flying through ships evacuating, obviously going the 'wrong way'... a nice touch.  Then there is an oncoming 'civilian craft' that is acting funny... way too long a sloppy 'we don't want to shoot it but I think we should shot it' while they are shooting at it, then discover that yes, it is piloted by a mutant! where did it go? Crash! (remember the coal plants? Burning coal everywhere, funny!!!!)

So the dirty half dozen pile into an escape pod. But its jammed! But the Captain, burned up by coal and crashing mutants pulls the external lever! But the Chute is, apparently, designed by morons because it is too weak to stop their free fall! But they have another chute! But if they use IT it will fail too, so they have to wait! But BUILDING!!!  Oh NOES! The 'too good to be used for a suicide mission guy gets metal through the leg! But Second Chute!

Whew!

So they crash four leagues from the temple (in a Bauhaus city) they are headed too, so they'll have to go on foot.  Oh, but the black guy can't make it, the metal is through the artery, may I have a grenade?

Oh, not to draw fire and maybe kill some mutants in a noble death trap, but so he can die the moment the Punisher lights up a cigarette outside the crashed pod.  Seriously?

So. They walk through the mutant infested city, see some refugees, don't see a mutant watching them... kill some corrupt flyboys selling evac tickets on their ship, worry about ambushes and make it to the temple without further incident. Seriously. Hell, they might as well have skipped the whole crashing thing...

Inside the half buried temple (mudslide? Pompeii? Why is this  thing buried up to the dome in an otherwise occupied city?), they see statues of robed...mutants. No explanation. They walk over bones in the catacombs to reach teh 'lost city'...complete with skyscrapers (they actually call them that), and have to repel down an elevator shaft.  Hellboy keeps consulting his book, and translates some grafitti as 'abandon all hope....motherfuckers' for Jesus, but lets be honest, the book is fucking silly. I can't call it useless, because apparently its got an awesome, if hard to read, map of the lost city or something.

We get further proof of Ms Walton's awesome when she catches a grenade to save people during some shenanigans in the elevator shaft that are too crazy/silly to describe in a reasonable time frame...

Jubal is left topside... supposedly to keep mutants from following them, I guess. Normally you'd do something like that to secure an escape route, but everyone knows its a suicide mission, so why are they bothering? He takes twenty minutes to asseble his gun.. okay, five? three montage scenes?

Whatever: Our heroes are trapped in a room off the elevator shaft by lots of mutants.. like six or so... while Jubal has to fight off dozens topside while in the rusted hulk of the elevator car... and one in the car with him that he kills three times as the car is in freefall down the shaft.  Seriously, I think Jubal (who, yes, dies here) kills more mutants in this scene than anyone in the entire movie!  I mean, he's DEAD, in the elevator that just crashed, when the mutants under him get back up to kill the exhausted surviving heroes, when he drops a grenade and finished them off post mortem!  See, Imperial token dude! That's how you use a grenade when you are 'dying'!  Duh!

There is some fake drama as they think they are trapped in this room that was totally their goal in the elevator shaft until they find the tunnel out. They get up by some sewers where they can see mutants dragging not-quite-dead bodies to 'The Machine'. Punisher recognizes That Guy and after NBG threatens to shoot him, goes down to rescue his friend while everyone else continues the mission.

Rescuing That Guy is stupidly easy. Apparently he's the last body being drug to the machine, the mutants with bodies to drag are both somewhat oblivious and easier to kill (Boom! Headshot!).

Of course, that guy is in BAD shape. He's happy to hear his 'Girls' are safely on their way to mars, but he has to order the punisher to continue his 'save the world mission'. Of course, he won't quite die on his own... he does a headfake, starts up a new line  of 'fuck, I'm dying this sucks' and Boom! HEADSHOT! from the Punisher in THE death of the film!   I mean: You see it coming, but you don't expect it to go down the way it does.

Now the punisher is somehow lost. Like... he can't follow the wide ass tunnel the mutants are using to drag bodies to the Machine to find... the Machine.

Luckily, while he's doing that, NBG falls of this stupid ledge into a mass of mutants. He gets up, whips out his sword and starts to go to town.  Insufficent extras makes it look like he is seriously winning, but everyone decides to jump down to fight alongside him. Hellboy and Ms Walton fight as a tandem Duo that is pretty sweet, French Deb, of course, is a Ninja (without Woosh! Powers, sadly), and Jesus is a maniac in full on Panic/Slaughter mode.

Guess what happens?

If you guess that Hellboy dies, using the book futilely as a sheild, French DEBS goes down with a hook in the shoulder and Jesus's gun blows the fuck up, burning NBG to death? You'd be right.  Ms Walton, proving her awesome, pulls a Ninja exit until the Punisher, following a sign from God (after a brief prayer) Hears Jesus go Boom and shows up to an empty room.  Ms Walton finally speaks, revealing that she can't read what's left of the book because...she can't read (and an awesome mini-dialog on teh nature of faith, btw).

Wait! French DEBS and NBG aren't dead yet! So, quick rescue time!  Still no sign of the machine, but they are literally dropping bodies into a hole (that leads to a surprisingly well like conveyer belt of DOOM!... er Mutination!).

So Punisher and NBG, who looks a bit like two face, lower the girls on a rope (from?) into the hole.  But Mutants are Coming! Oh Noes! So NBG lets go of teh rope and wanders over to stare them down, salute his mortal enemy, The Punisher, and blows himself up! Ok, that death was pretty cool, actually...

Of course, the moment the Punisher sees that NBG has wandered off to die nobly, he can't hold the lightweight girls at all, and he drops them onto a spar or something before falling onto the Conveyer of Mutination!  Apparently oblivious to his plight, the girls run to The Machine, crossing needless deathtrapped Ledges (Seriously, the last six feet before the center platform turns 180 degrees AND spits fire at random... there appears to be no other way to the center platform and no connection to IT from the Conveyer. Also, the 'key shape' in the book is identical to the big spinning fan thing underneath, which will later be revealed to be razor sharp... not that the shape apprently means anything...)

Meanwhile, the Punisher gets cut by the spike thing, strapped to the belt, stapled by a robotic arm, then fights (yes, while strapped to a spiked death trap conveyor belt) the mutintation injection robot (with a laser pointer for its injector doodad).  He gets jabbed once in the soon to be spiked arm, then uses the face injection process to free a hand! He grabs his gun, he shoots the robot, he shoots his straps! HE's FREE! Score one for the Punisher!) I forgot the laser dipliliation that shaves only half his head!  Oh, details, details.

So, as the girls arrive at the center platform, a half mutant Punisher shows up, there is a 'good guy showdown', even after he speaks and (at last!) sucks some black venom from his arm.  

So, despite there being for ledges to the platform the girls guard two on opposite sides while the Punisher puts the bomb pieces into place. Of course, he's got no KEY to the fucking thing, so hey!

Round one, French DEB loses her sword, so Punisher gives her his combat knife.  Never mind that Ms. Walton has TWO swords... she needs them both.

Round Two French DEB kills her last mutant, getting stabbed and falling to be cut in half by the giant slow fan of doom. Meanwhile, Ms Walton runs into Mutant Hellboy, tries to sweet talk him into being a good guy and is stabbed in the gut, dropping one of her swords on the useless scraps of the book!

Mutant Punisher vs. Mutant Hellboy: FIGHT!

Oh, look, the tip of Ms Walton's sword looks just like the drawing of the key they are looking for, and landed PERFECTLY on said drawing of key! What do you know? THe Brotherhood HAD THE FUCKING KEY ALL ALONG!!!!

Mutant Hellboy is stabbed by the key (which fits perfectly) the 'detonator' is turned and Mutant Punisher, far from being blown up, jumps down through the Slowly Spinning Razor Fan into the nice clean water underneath! Alas, poor French DEBS, if only you'd been more flirty you might have survived your fall!

Oh look! It wasn't a bomb after all, but the entire machine is apparently some sort of alien space ship! It flies off, as the Fallout closing narration furthers the theme of faith by calling Mutant Punisher an Apostate who succeeded where the man of faith failed.  Mutant Punisher lights a cigarette that has seen much better days (seriously, he just pulled himself out of the water!), then tosses it for no reason.

End of film.





Seriously, its like a brainstorming session where they kept a bunch of movie cliches without seriously trying to work out how they fit into the movie.  Setting it on Earth makes some sense, until they send everyone into space.  

But the Mutants fail as earth destroying bad guys.  Given that they wanted to dwell on Faith and Hope and all that Jazz, changing the mutants from unholy necro-mutants (some are undead, some are just mutated) with a vaguely contra-biblical theme (plague mutants, death mutants (undead rising as you kill people) with leaders and armies and fuckign Necro-tech that should scare the pants off you... you get one flavor of no too scary mutants, utterly without organization and showing up now and again, at random, to slaughter.

One of the more horrific elements of Mutant Chronicles, the game (which, lets be honest, isn't exactly top notch horror material...its too tongue in cheek) is that there is no real way to win. Sure, you can beat off mutant armies until the sun burns out, but what are you going to do about the god-like masters of the four mutant armies? They may not even exist in this plane of reality.

Here, its just a device. One that could, theoretically, be broken if you actually, you know, tried.  The Mutants aren't organized, they are just slaughter machines, and the horror of them (that they are living people turned into these killing machines against their will) isn't really dwelt on aside from, like, two seconds of film.  Given that the Machine is, apprently, exactly under the giant fucking hole in the ground, one wonders why someone doesn't just drop big fucking bombs down that hole until it STOPS MAKING MORE MUTANTS!  Seriously: If crusaders (at the end of the last Ice Age!) could beat this thing into submission and bury it miles underground, you'd think a highly industrialized, war based society could manage to do a bit better with high yield explosives... or, given the size of their guns, even LOW yield explosives...

Tension does not exist in this film in any way. Even the rope they rappel down is pretty slack.

Lastly, lets talk about time.  The time for That Guy to be dragged into the hole in the ground (literally a hundred meters from where he fell) is about six weeks. The time for Hellboy to be turned into a Mutant? About six minutes.

Now, I can GUESS from clues in the movie that the flashback Crusaders (at the end of the last Ice Age), based on the Lost City and references to Ages, are actually a near future us, and that all our history was lost, along, apparently, with our mostly superior technology, and that the world we are seeing was built on the ashes of this apocalyptic arrival of this fucking UFO... which, honestly, isn't any more stupid/unstupid than the canon timeline, with its fuedal corporations arising naturally as we start to explore our solar system and terraform worlds (Mars, Venus and the Moon are all habitable in Mutant Chronicles. I don't recall what happened to earth, but I vaguely recall that on one talks about events ON EARTH in either edition of the game I have.), because, you know: Exploration means societies grow more rigid, not less...

Now, Ron Perlman is awesome in everything, even when he isn't.  His 'Brother Sebastian' (I think...) is stoic, faithful and... well.. Ron Fucking Perlman. Of course, he isn't given a hell of a lot to do, and poor direction/editing kinda makes an early outburst sound... forced (when the Corporations refuse his mission to save the world in favor of evacuation...)

Devon Aoki, on the other hand... pretty girl, but hardly earth shattering, and she doesn't sell action as much as she wants too.  Its like she actually sucks the good out of movies, which is a shame.  I mean.. DEBS was fun, and really she deserved to be the breakout star from it (which, so far as I know, she was...), but after that? Everything I've seen her in she's made worse.  This, ironically, was her least worse thing.

Now, I'm increasingly bored with the 'And then there was One' survival plots. Its cliched and obvious, and the 'fun' of spotting the survivor seriously goes out the window in most cases.  Poorly done, like this, when guys are picked off just to pick them off (the token black guy in the pod? Really? Jubal in the elevator, alone, for no good reason? Really?) is just obnoxious.  

Now, a movie like the Thirteenth Warrior pulls it off well. First, not everyone dies in the end, just most of them. Second, while some deaths are rather anonymous (because, you know, 13 motherfucking people!), we feel their impacts because the characters care (the dude who's head is ripped off gets more flavor from people's reactions to his death than the travel montage that gets them there), or they die DOING STUFF that actually impacts the scenes they are in (dude on the rooftop trying to get the fire arrows).

Here its just like "oops, running out of time, gotta get rid of... hmm... you". Like, Steiner, who is admittedly walking hamburger, doesn't try to stall for time against the oncoming mutants (picking their way through rocks, mind you), he just blows himself up... because, well... survival horror, right?  


Now: Some poor bastard worked really hard to capture the feel of the Mutant Chronicles universe...  All the guns are distinctive and oversized, each faction has its uniform... sort of. Mishima guys are apparently more guerilla fighters than uniformed soldiers if Jubal and French DEBS are any indicator (but she does apparently wear a sort of kimono-style top in a few shots), but the lighting is so murky and indistinct that you just can't care!  

So, the final project is somewhat disjointed. Its almost as if there were two groups of people working on it, one group were die hard Mutant Chronicles fans who wanted to really bring the details to life in a movie, the others were the back benchers from Casshern who really wanted to make a stylized movie without any attention to the basics of plot or cohesion, but still failed miserably to live up to that standard.

Still: Ron Fucking Perlman. And Anna Walton, despite her few lines still manages to impress.  Of course, Ron is getting old, man, and he hardly convinces as well as he used to in the lumbering fights. Stick to movies where they give you guns, man... you stop being credible as a melee fighter when you move like you're wearing a full body cast... just sayin'.

I can't really recommend Mutant Chronicles, even for fans of the original game... if only because the nice details are utterly lost in the shitty filming.   This film suffers the WORST case of "Stuff Happens" of almost any film I've ever seen.  Mutants wander in and out of Scenes based entirely on the whims of the director, without much for rhyme or reason. Mutants have Ninjae Whoosh! Powers then they don't. They are mostly bulletproof, but the Punisher regularly kills them with Boom! HEADSHOT!  That Guy takes six fucking weeks to die?! Anti-armor turrets are there, enemy fliers disappear after being shot at to ambush the ship to drop it just because...

Stuff. Fucking. Happens.  I've watched porn that flowed better.

Damn, man. What a staggering amount of observation on Mutant Chronicles.

I thought the movie was oddly claustrophobic because of the crazy blue-screen antics. Even the outdoor stuff seemed really cramped and weird.

I quit watching not long after the trench scene. The special effects were awful.

Having pulled out my Mutant Chronicles book I have to retract the speculation about the guns. The big ass assault rifle looking things do NOT look anything like MC guns. I THINK the Punisher is using a Piranha pistol (which totally does not make sense, its an oversized, underpowered civilian flash gitz gun...), and Yeah, Steiner's SMGs do have the angled magazines, but that is IT for gear fidelity from what I can tell...

... but of course, it so god damned murky I still can't authoritatively say one way or the other!

Just posting to say I am slightly in awe of your review. I was vaguely aware of the setting when I picked up the DVD and I like Sean Pertwee but fucking hell that is a bad film. Cheers for your efforts.

Yeah, I've got a vague sort of formula I've been trying to hone with reviews like this... cute names, oddball asides and so on.  The length comes from just, you know, going over the almost real time scene transitions to capture the stupid as much as possible.  Snark works better with actual details, etc.

What people don't realize is that I work entirely from memory.... hell, sometimes I don't even watch the actual film, I just stick the case to my forehead and do an full Karnak the Magnificent!

Ok.. maybe I don't actually do that...