Christopher Walken’s evolution into a parody of Christopher Walken makes this a little hard to take seriously. In the end, it’s a very well crafted thriller despite the goofy premise and completely unhinged depiction of a corrupt politician.
After watching, my wife was asking about the actress who plays the female lead (Brooke Adams). I said that I think she’s the lady from Invasion of the Body Snatchers who vibrates her eyes and that’s about all I know. She then looked her up and asked, “Hey, do you know who she’s married to?” I guessed what I thought was the most random actor I could think of, Tony Shalhoub. Turns out I totally dead zone’d the correct answer. I swear I had no idea. I even went back to see if any of the suggested films on the streaming service were Monk or Wings or whatever. Nothing. This proves it. I’m psychic.
Baby Boomers love this movie and you’ll often seen it ranked as one of the best comedies of all time. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t hold up. I swear the first twenty minutes of the film are completely joke-free. Belushi is billed as the star but his part boils down to being a pervy Buster Keaton and occasionally mugging his puppy dog eyes at the camera. I found it hard to sympathize with the Deltas who were, in reality, a bunch of stupid drunks. The movie’s idea of a joke is to yell, “Food fight!” then have people throw food. Hilarious. I guess the general form here is gross-out comedy, but so many films did it better later on. Even Revenge of the Nerds, which basically steals every plot beat here, had more likable characters and bigger laughs. The last 15 minutes of mayhem is the only time when I felt the movie come to life.
Unbreakable was great. Split was pretty good too. Glass, however, is a piece of unmitigated garbage. The premise is goofy and there is way too much self-aware dialogue about superheroes and comic books. It ends with what is supposed to be this epic comic book battle, and it just looks dumb and home made. Sarah Paulson teetering-on-crying delivery is so annoying and bad. The grown-up child actor playing Willis son, M. Night’s cameo, nothing here works. A cringe inducing failure.
I just finished watching the pretty good T.V. adaptation of the game and was inspired to start up a new game of the original. Fallout was the first thing I ever bought on eBay back in ’98. The box smelled like cigar smoke, but the game didn’t stink at all.
In retrospect, it’s not quite as good as I remembered. There are just a few to many fiddly “puzzles” where you are supposed to try using random objects on the environment to get past obstacles. There are no clues. You just have to know to “use radio on computer” or whatever.
I found the water chip. Yippie!
Otherwise, everything else is great. I love the turn-based combat, the skills, and character interactions. The game is relatively short, especially when compared with the 3-D open-world sequels. We need more digestible length games these days.
I played a modded version of the game using a patch called Fallout Fixt. Most of the enhancements were not noticeable to me, but there were a couple things that I later realized weren’t in the original game. Most importantly you can tell your followers to move out of the way if they are blocking a doorway. This doesn’t work on recruited help from the Brotherhood and can end up making the game unwinnable. This is because the mod allows the Brotherhood knights to join you inside the mutant military base, which wasn’t designed for companions to fit alongside you.
I ended up playing all the way through the game and got all the good endings except for killing the Khans off. I’m tempted to fire up Fallout 2 now, but I should probably hold off. Skald comes out in a month.
