what may or may not be hard reality

Cold Vengeance: and believe me, it *pains* me to say this, because Christina is in it (top-billing and all), but I'm sorry, Christina, I really totally didn't like this at all...

Now, there are about half a dozen people on IMDb who claimed to like this movie. Which has to mean that they are insane, because no-one could possibly like this crap! Right? Right!

I so try to not be the judgmental type; people can like whatever they want, and I realize that one person might think someone is a good actor, while someone else finds the same actor stilted and off - as evidenced by any movie/TV discussion forum ever. I happen to love crappy B-movies. I'll stand by that. This is not a crappy B-movie. This sucks. (If you believe you have reason to believe otherwise, please, tell me why.)

Let me tell you the ways in which it sucks. Over-all, the explosions are nice, but script, dialogue, acting, plot, characters, pacing, etc., all suck.

Now, I know Christina can act. I've seen her do it. Hell, she's made me cry more than my last 5 obsessions together. I have obsessions because they're hot and often kick-ass. If I want actual emotion out of a film, I'll watch something with Jodie Foster or Meryl Streep. Those two can make me cry. And Christina can make me cry. Hence; proof of her acting abilities. However, in this film, taking into account that her lines are generally stupid, it still doesn't excuse her stilted lines, and strange whimpering sounds. Can I blame the director for this, maybe??

Because it's not like anyone else acts either. The hero is your typical Herc-face with 2 of Nathan Fillion's 3 faces of acting; 'Did I leave the stove on?', and 'OMG I left the stove on!' (the movie never got to the 'Thank god, I turned the stove off!'). The bad guys strut around for no particular reason and glower un-intimidatingly. The moms are relegated to smiling indulgently from rocking chairs, or possibly looking worried/annoyed. (Checking up on the actors, most of them haven't exactly done a whole lot of movies... but the ice skater (props to her for being an actual, really good, ice skater!) and the kick boxer who haven't done *any* other movies weren't at all any worse than anyone else.)

Back to Christina for a moment, and maybe it's partly my fault, but I just don't believe it when she claims to be a damsel in distress. She's gonna cower and whimper because some little chick with a bad attitude is pushing her around? I don't think so. Maybe it's just because I watch her whenever she's on screen, but I'd like to think she has a certain presence about her when she's in frame, and acting abilities disregarded, she just can't seem to downplay that enough that I'll believe her when she's trying to appear frightened of someone she should be wiping the floor with. Because she doesn't play the character broken otherwise, regardless of her home life. And she could probably play broken, but come to think of it, I don't know that I've ever seen her play broken. Flawed, absolutely, and pushed too far, and on the verge of breaking, and she's done them all amazingly, but never broken. Hmm. And they're trying to play Cassandra cowed. Which isn't really working for me.

Anyway, she did get to kick some ass at the end. At least. Finally those 'self-defense' lessons she'd been taking came in handy. Maybe that where she learned to shoot a gun, too... I liked that she killed her abusive step-father when he tried to kill her boyfriend. Go Cassie!

Anyway, let's get on to the scenes/plot lines/characterizations/interactions. There are so many things wrong with it, and I guess it's both manuscript and direction is behind it.

Now I read up on the actors, and most of them are un-famous enough that they don't have birth-years listed on IMDb, but Christina was 32 when this movie came out, and she doesn't in any way look significantly older than anyone else, so I'm guessing most of them are 30-35, with a few upwards 40. However, everyone acts as if they're about 13, or so.

For one, everyone still lives with their parents. Now, I know *I*'m a pathetic loser still living with my parents, but I don't see no-body makin' no movies about my life, and that there's a difference. And maybe I was brainwashed as a child, but I don't particularly want to live anywhere else. It's a nice house, and internet and rent is free, and my daddy just bought a new 40-inch HDTV, so... lazy would be me. And these particular parents spend a fair amount of time ordering the main characters around, and giving them LOTS of reasons to move out. One is an abusive step-father dude with brilliant lines like 'well, I guess you're both pretty enough to do porn', and he slaps them around. The other is a caring mother who makes the connection between her son's envelope full of money, and the explosion that killed 6 gang-members two nights before, and 'you get rid of that immediately, I will not have it in my house!'. However; dude, you've gotta be at least 35, how about you move out? I don't have much conflict with my parents, I live in the house, they live in the house, and then we go on with our merry separate lives.

For second, the main romance feels like it's written with 13-year-old actors in mind. The first time the hero and the heroine (dude and Christina) meet, she asks him an innocuous question, 'were you gonna order something?' (because he's taking up line-space, but not really doing anything), he turns to answer, and gets completely tongue-tied when he lays eyes on her. Now, that's pretty much how *I* would react if I met Christina (you know how the 13-year-old boy looks when the school's hottest 16-year-old cheer leader says hello to him in the hallway?), but I'm not supposed to be a cool action-hero. So he gapes at her for a minute, doing a great gold-fish impression, before getting out a 'maybe'. Disturbingly, instead of rolling her eyes and going on her merry way, she proceeds to find this charming, and *giggles* at him (you know the 13-year-old girl who was just smiled at by the 16-year-old school hunk?). It's pretty dumb. A *little* more suave, please? This is not a dorky comedy, you're both supposed to be cool action heroes! (Well, at least the dude, Christina doesn't get to kick ass until right at the end.)

Other kick-ass moments include:

- Cassie (I spontaneously want to refer to her as Christina, but the character is actually named Cassandra) leaving her phone number on the hero's windshield written with lipstick and signed with a heart.

- The hero getting up on a stage in a biker bar and announcing his intentions to sing a self-penned song for his lady love, leading aforementioned bikers to mock him relentlessly, leading to bar-fight and no singing.

- And (we truly didn't think this was for real, we were like, dude, he must have written like a safe-number where they can go to escape their abusive home life, or a master plan, or something, but no) the hero giving her a poem and her rushing home to show it to her mother and her sister. Come on! Do grown-up women really want that? They always do in fic, but I assumed it was because the fic was written by 12-year-olds...

And the dialogue is corny enough to match above actions. It's like they wrote a movie about middle school bullying, decided last-minute to make it about 35-year-olds and changed the school yard to rival gangs blowing up gas stations and having shoot-outs in warehouses, only they forgot to change anything in the other storylines.

However, there's also the interesting fact that despite this movie having been made in 2003 there were (as far as I remember) no computers or cell phones. People must have had regular phones (what with Cassie leaving her phone number and all), but I don't recall seeing them. Now, I've only spent 4 days in Canada, but I'm pretty sure it was as technologically advanced as the US, and they've had cell phones on TV since the early 90s. Also, everyone always met in person to discuss things.

Speaking of Canada, just where is it supposed to be set, anyway? IMDb says it was filmed in Langford, suburb of Victoria, B.C., which would be Canada. And considering they're using view shots I'm assuming it more or less set where it's shot. Which doesn't explain that everyone keeps getting paid in American money. (Also, I must have totally seen this place across the water when I visited the San Juan islands a few years ago! Way cool!)

I have the perfect solution for all of the above annoyances, though. Obviously they wrote and cast this movie in the mid-80s as a middle school adventure piece. Then they forgot to actually film it, suddenly realizing 20 years later that they had all these actors and this script, belatedly realizing that having 35-year-old actors fighting over school yard dominance would look weird, and so they changed it to warehouses, but didn't actually change anything else to compensate for the fact that the actors were now 35 years old, and technology had advanced significantly from '83 to '03.

Anyway. Christina was pretty. Not that I'll diminish a woman to her looks, not at all. Ahm. But she was kick-ass, too. When she finally got over her damsel-in-distress routine and started fighting back, that was cool. She does have some really nice kicks (who choreographed that fightscene? She kicks the girl in the face 7 times from different angles...). I'm gonna cleanse my brain with Better than Chocolate now.