IN DEFENSE OF UWE BOLL

NOTE: Fair’s fair, I reposted an entry I made here on my other blog, now I’m returning the favor, if you want to call it that.

There’s a link to an article about director Uwe Boll on the Film Threat message boards that I really can’t bring myself to read. No offense to Terminal_NY, but bagging on Herr Doktor is getting tedious to me, frankly. Granted, the guy has yet to make a decent movie (having seen BloodRayne last night, I can confirm this), and there’s nothing out there to indicate this will change in the near or distant future. And this is someone with six freaking movies in production.

Boll has no ear for dialogue, no knack for shooting action scenes, and no sense of plot that doesn’t come from Screenwriting 101 or some other movie (the final scene in BloodRayne might as well have been directed by John Milius, seeing as how perfectly it apes the end of Conan the Barbarian). He brings out the worst in his actors, even allegedly good ones like Ben Kingsley and Michelle Rodriguez, who all seem to mill around aimlessly while waiting for the check to clear. What we end up with are alleged horror films that are funnier than most Hollywood comedies. These are the facts, and they are indisputable, as Kevin Bacon might say.

But why isn’t our intelligence more insulted by the likes of Michael Bay and Brett Ratner, two guys (names chosen at random, insert your own choices as you see fit) who benefit from monster budgets and A-list talent, and yet still manage to make unwatchable pieces of s**t? If I was Boll, and I saw the man who subjected an unsuspecting world to Pearl Harbor getting $122 million to make The Island, I’d be pissed off as well.

Which is worse, from a creative standpoint: another video game adaptaion (albeit of a video game we haven’t seen adapted before), or another sequel/remake like Charlie’s Angels 2 or The Pink Panther? Who deserves more censure, the director like Boll who – by all accounts – honestly believes he’s making the best films he can make, or directors like Ratner and Bay who know they’re churning out brain-dead garbage, and simply don’t care as long as they’re up to their eyeballs in cocaine and Laotian boy w****s?

Exaggeration aside, I think you see my point. All of Boll’s major American releases (House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne) are currently residing in the IMDb’s Bottom 100. And yet, Pearl Harbor, Rush Hour 2, and Rent (or Bicentennial Man, all Chris Columbus movies are interchangeable for purposes of this exercise*) aren’t. Boll’s movies suck, no doubt about it, but he’s definitely not alone in that regard.

* Except Adventures in Babysitting