The Watchmen

09. March, 2009 | by John Moroney

Occasionally I like to see big budget Hollywood movies where lots of things blow up. My wife suggested The Watchmen, yet another CGI-filled kung fu movie based on a comic book that, for some unfathomable reason, runs two hours and forty-five minutes. Oh, excuse me; “graphic novel.”

Two hours and forty-five minutes of completely unnecessary plot development. C’mon—it’s based on a comic book! What fourteen year-old moviegoer is going to sit still that long? I have no idea what studio exec let this turkey out of the coop in its present form, but that exec might want to look for a new job soon. I don’t recall ever seeing a film where so many people walked out. The only thing that kept me in my seat was respect for my date. I wanted to leave at about the one hour mark. I never experienced a single moment of suspension of disbelief.

The Watchmen was filled with unnecessary violence, unnecessary blood and guts, and even an unnecessary sex scene. It was gory and graphic for the sake of being gory and graphic, and the action sequences were the same old martial arts, super slomo that we’ve been seeing since The Matrix. For the love of Pete, enough already!

I would like to point out that I love movies filled with blood, guts, sex, and violence. However, that has to be a point to it. This entire movie was pointless. The sound was overproduced to the point of being distracting (has anyone in Hollywood ever actually heard a handgun being fired?), the CGI, while very beautiful in spots, was mostly just recycled from every other CGI movie ever produced.

The Watchmen was pointless. The endless, mind-numbing back story didn’t make any sense! Why have it in there?

Hollywood, just blow things up, already! All you do well these days is blow things up and show boobs (Every Hollywood DVD release seems to have an “unrated version.” Translation: three minutes of gratuitous toplessness). Oh, and Hollywood spends money well, too—this piece of garbage cost $130,000,000.

Why doesn’t Hollywood spend that kind of money making a 2D animation of an actual comic book? The characters, because they’re cartoon comic book characters, could believably act like cartoon comic book characters. Imagine how beautiful it would look, if done well, or even with the slightest bit of imagination.

Huh. Looks like I finally have a Hollywood pitch.

The Watchmen was painful to sit through, and I highly recommend you never, ever see it. It’s terrible. Awful. Horrid. Pointless. Bad. Just atrocious.