Equilibrium

Okay, the boss has been getting on my ass about pumping out some of these drunk reviews. For my first, I chose the Christian Bale masterpiece Equilibrium. It came out in 2002, directed by Kurt Wimmer, whose other credits include...well, who cares?

Netflix: Yup
Viewer: Dipstick

Let's see...the premise is not very original. In a dystopian future, after WWIII, emotions are outlawed and punishable by death. Culture and innovation and life are all a hindrance to productivity and efficiency. It is pretty much the setting of Brave New World or 1984 (that's right, I read, too). Christian Bale is a samurai cop of sorts -- called a Cleric -- and he is in charge of finding members of the 'resistance', people who live outside the main city and fight to overthrow the Fascist regime. He is an expert in the martial art Gun Kata, which involves clearing entire rooms of bad guys with absurd gun swinging, ala Wanted. After he finds out that his partner, played by Sean Bean, has become one of the resistance, Bale, too, stops taking his emotion-suppressant medication and begins to feel. Yada yada yada, he becomes a member of the resistance and kills all the bad guys.

This is a mindless action movie with a tiny bit of imagination. It tries to be smart and poignant, but doesn't seem to realize how unoriginal it is.

The main thing I didn't like about it, is that despite being a mindless action movie, it doesn't have a whole lot of mindless action. So much of the movie is devoted to Bale's nonsensically profound awakening as he discovers emotions for the first time. Rather than see him laugh or smile -- which I perceive would be the most fascinating and awkward instinctive gesture to have for the first time in your entire life -- we interpret Bale's new sensations by watching him listen to Beethoven, look at a snow globe, rearrange stuff on his desk, and hold a puppy, all with an emotionless face. I guess we're supposed to be shocked at how inhuman the world has become, while relating to the protagonist's revelation. But the movie is too black and white (literally, Bale wears all black and when he becomes the hero, he wears all white) to really care. On that same token, his adversaries/former colleagues are cartoonishly villainous; they find the Mona Lisa and set it on fire, they kill all of the aforementioned puppy's friends, and they incinerate Bale's wife for 'sense offense'. They're basically mindless drones, so we really don't care when they all die.

My only other complaint is how wasted the made-up Gun Kata is. If you want a better explanation of it, Cracked.com does a pretty good job. The idea is, a single guy in the center of a room is a more effective assassin, taking a power stance and whipping pistols over his shoulders and around his back, then, say, the twenty guys aiming at him with assault rifles. It's pretty nonsensical, and gets even more ridiculous when they try to explain it. Every time we see Bale use this technique, he gratuitously shoots or pistol whips a handful of bad guys way more times than necessary and with way too much spinning. The final shootout is relatively brief and boring, and is not as dramatic as the filmmakers want it to be. Bale is captured, his weapons taken away, and he is seated in a room, surrounded by bad guys. Yet, despite knowing he is a Cleric, and a master Gun Kata, no one realizes that he has two more guns, literally up his sleeves, with which he executes every single bad guy without breaking a sweat. And when he fights the main villain, we are treated to three full minutes of them swatting each other's arms out of their faces until one of them gets shot.

In the end, Bale is a pretty shitty hero. He let's his wife be executed. He tries to same a few members of the resistance, but then turns his back on them. He watches all the dogs get slaughtered, saves one, and then we don't see the dog again for the rest of the movie, so I can only assume it's dead. He falls for Sean Bean's girlfriend, goes to save her, and then let's her die too. He doesn't really save anyone, actually.

All that being said, there are much worse movies out there than this one. I guess if you and your friends want a movie that's easy to follow to drink to, this is a good choice. Just don't get your hopes too high.

Beer Scale: 2/10

(Now if I'm understanding the rules correctly, the lower a movie is on the Beer Scale, the better it is. It means I only required a couple of beers in order to get through this movie. So all in all, I'm saying it wasn't that bad.)