REVIEW: On Good Bad Movies and Bigass Lizards (5/28/98)
You want to know what the real problem with Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich is? I'll tell you. They don't realize they suck.If they got on the boat with the rest of America and realized they weren't very good writers or directors, they could settle down, plan things out, and make themselves one humdinger of a good bad movie. But no. They think they know what they're doing. Hence "Godzilla".
How else do you explain a two hour and twenty minute running time with maybe 45 minutes of Godzilla action, tops? How else to explain the entire Baby Godzilla sequence, which did zip, zero, nada for the film? How else to explain them actually trying to explain the science behind their flick, in grand Brannon Braga-esque strokes?
I'm no Godzilla purist. Change the design if you want (although why you'd give a fearsome monster a Jay Leno chin and Jesse Helms wattle is beyond me). Change his origin until the cows come home. Have secondary characters be eaten instantly while main characters are sniffed for 20 minutes. Have the Indestructible Taxi of Doom drive out of Godzilla's mouth to safety on a collapsing bridge.
I'm fine with all that. And all these scenes, and more, would have worked in a different movie. A movie that actually acknowledged that it was crap. A little self-awareness goes a long way, guys. But no. Instead we get the interminable running joke of Siskel and Ebert as the New York mayor and his aide, reverse respectively. Instead we get to watch Maria Pitillo in a performance so bad it makes Alicia Silverstone in "Batman and Robin" look... well, not as bad as all that, but still pretty bad. Instead, we get huge chunks of Godzilla-less movie explained away by Godzilla "hiding in a building", or "nesting underground".
This said, Godzilla wasn't nearly as bad as the Troika of Terror from last year (B&R, Event Horizon, Starship Troopers). Many of the individual set pieces were OK, there were some good things happening, a couple of good lines of dialogue, and it's nice to see Our Hero as a geek for a change. Oh, and Jean Reno did the best he could with the whole hideous French Foreign Legion subplot.
Overall? Turd on ice. I give it no stars, on a scale of no stars to no stars.
