Reviews by Loyal-T

Calling something the “worst” isn’t often taken lightly. If it’s the worst video game ever made, for example, such claims causes sales to plummet and promise the title in question a future reduced to ironic Let’s Plays with daring YouTube personalities ripping it to pieces and cracking wise as they consume its every awful second. How about the worst movie ever made? Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, according to review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, is easily the worst film in existence. It currently holds a 0% Fresh rating, that score based on a total of 116 reviews. What’s interesting about Ballistic’s shocking score is that it hasn’t led to more widespread attention. Movies like The Room and Manos: The Hands of Fate are considered bad movie gold and have gained huge followings over the years. You likely know someone who at the very least knows about these movies, perhaps even has seen them or, gulp, owns copies of them. Ballistic, however, is relatively obscure.

Thai filmmaker Wych Kaosayananda, or simply Kaos as he is credited here, makes his English language debut with Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever. I remember seeing the trailer for this when I was but a wee lad of 14 years.  I remember its opening weekend, and I remember wanting to see it its opening weekend. I also remember finding a secondhand copy at a local Hollywood Video just a few months later, buying it, and then watching it. I remember very little about this viewing. I don’t, however, remember thinking that it was particularly awful. It was… fine. It was OK. It was about what you’d expect from a $70 million ($95 million when adjusting for inflation) action movie following the immense success of The Matrix; techno soundtrack, cool stunts, slow-mo galore, and lots of slicked back hair and long, flowing coats.

I came across a cheap-as-dirt DVD on Amazon recently and thought, what the heck, let’s give it another shot. A rewatch 15 years later and my feelings are much the same. After seeing some truly heinous films over that 15-year span, I find myself more dumbfounded than ever at the claims that Ballistic was a cancerous wretch unleashed upon the filmgoing masses. If nothing else, Ballistic’s biggest flaws are that it’s staggeringly bland and its story is poorly written & told. Writer Alan McElroy (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, 1997’s Spawn adaptation, and a spate of Wrong Turn sequels) has penned an inconsequential, utterly pointless script. I can’t imagine McElroy's treatment being more than a couple pages long. It wants to be a twisty turny spy thriller, but it hasn’t the faintest idea what its plot actually is or how to tell its incoherent story in any discernible fashion.

The back of the box says that Ballistic is about two rival spies working against each other until they realize they need to be working with each other to stop a common enemy. That’s only partially true. Agent Jeremiah Ecks (a scruffy and downtrodden Antonio Banderas) and Sever (Lucy Liu, clearly phoning it in) aren’t rivals. They aren’t even familiar with each other until about the middle of the movie. Ecks and Sever are only enemies because Sever fires a few shots Ecks’s way during an investigation and he proceeds to chase her down. Their real enemy is a man named Robert Gant (Gregg Henry, giving a far better performance than this movie deserved) who, as the movie progresses, the audience and our two protagonists realize is a very bad man who has used his own young son, Michael, to smuggle something back into the States undetected. Gant knows something about Ecks’s wife, Vinn (Talisa Soto), presumed dead years ago, and Sever is his only lead on Gant.

Believe me, that plot’s harder to describe than you can imagine provided how slapdash it’s presented. Much of it doesn’t make any sense, and it starts to become so contrived and so convoluted by the third act that I simply can’t imagine someone sitting at a desk and writing it and thinking they’ve got something worthy of a major studio’s backing. There were so many times during the movie that I felt like Kaos and the actors were making it up as they went along, trying their best to fill in the gaps that McElroy's flimsy script left out. It feels really unrehearsed and unrefined, like a first draft script that went straight into shooting.

It’s an action movie, I hear you say, and the story isn’t all that important. Usually, yes, I would agree with that. But with Ecks vs Sever, it spends a lot of time with the characters, giving them opportunity to explain their pasts, their motivations, and really wants you to care about them. According to Kaos, the plot IS important. It’s just so ineffectual and so rote and cliché. Thankfully, though, Kaos does live up to his name and delivers a whole lot of that: chaos. This is a movie released in 2002, and I was expecting it to look seriously dated by today’s standards. It doesn’t. Most of the action here is downright impressive, offering the same kind of over-the-top bombast we see so much of today.

One thing I was really surprised by was the lack of onscreen bloodshed in what the back of the box states is an action movie rated R for strong violence. Even by 2002 standards Ballistic is quite tame. The bullet impacts are all just off-screen or dust hits, necks are broken off-screen, and the one gratutious headshot in the film is a quick shot of a bloodless bullet hole in someone’s head. There’s no nudity either, and the profanity consists of only mild obscenities (not a single F bomb). In fact, I can’t imagine how this ever got an R rating. Warner Bros. must have submitted this on an off day for the MPAA because this is an easy PG-13. Even more so today.

 If you need one reason to see this movie and can live with a teeth-gnashingly silly plot, the action is all the excuse you need. The DVD sounds amazing, especially considering its age, and Kaos films a good bulk of the big action moments using stunt doubles, real cars, real fire, and the actors do seem to be performing a lot of their own stunts. The fight scenes also have a gritty realism to them, looking less like choreographed stuntmen and women fighting and more like two trained agents engaging in an actual hand-to-hand fight. As opposed to lots of blocked and countered punches and kicks, you end up with more grappling and struggling - more akin to how a real-life tete-a-tete takes place. There were many times that Banderas would pull off a huge jump or land a hard fall and he would lie on the ground writhing in pain. That's not something you'd expect to see in a flick like this. He felt like a real person who was in way over his head. He looked tired and beat up, and I bought it.

Kaos loves explosions. I mean, he absolutely loves them. Everything blows up. Cars crash into other cars and explode on impact. Sever shoots a prison bus with a grenade launcher and the prison bus splits open and goes careening down the street into oncoming traffic with Ecks laying on top of it, firing a shotgun at Sever as it destroys everything in its path. The entire third act of the film consists mostly of Ecks and Sever blowing up freight cars and shipping containers with rockets and C4. And all of the explosions are filmed in slo-mo and shot with multiple angles for maximum effect. Kaos’s action sequences are very John Woo-esque in that they feel laboriously detail-oriented, almost balletic, and everything happens with such exquisite timing. His action beats lack the finesse and grace of a John Woo shootout, but there’s certainly potential.

However, everything else is generally lackluster. The acting is painful save for Gregg Henry and Antonio Banderas. Both breathe some much needed life into the picture. Henry chews the scenery and Banderas lends to Ecks a real human credibility. Lucy Liu as Sever, though, is just flat. I’ve heard that she received very little direction and pretty much said her lines as written and stood on her cue. It looks like it. She’s stone faced 90% of the movie and has zero personality. She does look convincing firing weapons, though. We do learn more about her as the movie goes along, including her and Gant's past and why she's on this crusade to stop him, but it doesn’t change anything. I get the feeling Kaos wanted Sever to look unconflicted and emotionless. Instead, Liu comes off as bored. The material isn’t giving her much to work with either, but direction can go a long way.

Ray Park (best known for playing Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace) plays AJ Ross, head of Gant’s cleanup crew. Park gets an impressive showing at the end where he’s allowed to flex his extensive martial arts knowledge in a fight against Liu, but when he’s actually required to act, look out. The man couldn’t act his way out of a middle school play. Then again, Talisa Soto’s hammy, melodramatic showing isn’t exactly giving him a run for his money. I’m supposed to care that Vinn and Ecks think they’ve lost each other. I’m supposed to want to see them reunite, but the piss-poor script and shallow performances don’t allow me to get there.

Still, Ballistic isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. The action sequences are handled well and Kaos gives the movie a really cool, appealing visual style. Again, if you’re OK with a movie that doesn’t mind not having a coherent narrative or much in the way of performances from its stars and you just want a decent 91-minute time killer with no reason to care after it’s over, Ballistic is your movie. Worst movie ever? Absolutely not. Painfully generic sans a few action sequences that are seriously impressive even today (all about that prison bus chase)? You bet. There was a seriously good action movie in here that could've been brought to life with a more experienced director at the helm and a richer, more polished script for that director to work from. Worst movie ever? Again, no way. Just exceedingly mediocre.

“I never feared death or dying. I only fear never trying.”

The above quote is from the song Wiz Khalifa and 2 Chainz recorded for Fast & Furious 6, We Own It. It comes off a bit haunting now what with the death of star Paul Walker on that fateful November day in 2013. The song was recorded long before his death, but the subtext, unintentional as it is, exists nonetheless.

The success of the Fast and Furious franchise is the stuff of legend. It had a rough go of it some 16 years ago when the original film, directed by Rob Cohen (xXx,The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor), debuted to immediate interest from the youth market and general disdain from movie critics. Being released in 2001, this was a time when high school kids were chatting it with each other about spoilers, NOS tanks, tricked out exhaust, and suicide doors. The LA car culture phenomenon had grown from a local one to a national one, and The Fast and the Furious capitalized on it, weaving images of flashy cars, flashier girls, and white-knuckle racing sequences into what was essentially a low-rent Point Break rip-off. It was by no means a critical darling, but it made heaps of cash. And sequels there were.

2006’s Tokyo Drift was both Vin Diesel-less and Paul Walker-less, having nothing to do with the previous two films other than racing fast cars in exotic locales. It performed reasonably well at the box office, but the franchise was running on empty by this time. Cue the fourth film in the franchise, Fast & Furious, which reunited Walker and Diesel. Then, magic happened. Fast Five was a runaway success from the word go. Gone was the racing. Gone was the glitz. Fast Five ditched the cars for a heist, substituted street races for shootouts, and took a slew of past cast members and slapped them all together in one movie to form a “family,” a concept that would be revisited in every film after. Fast Five brought about the rebirth of the franchise. It was a big action epic, the most expensive of the films at the time, and successfully transitioned the series into a completely new genre. Fans loved it, critics loved it, and it too made oodles of cash. More sequels ensued.

Unfortunately, Paul Walker’s passing cast a huge cloud over the production of Furious 7. His death was and will always be the elephant in the room when discussions about this particular entry arises. So much of the script purportedly had to be torn out and rewritten to accommodate the horrible circumstances, cutting down on screen time for Walker’s character, Brian O’Connor, and trying to find a way to write him out of any future installments respectfully and in a way that the fans would accept. It might not have been so bad if there wasn’t still a good amount of filming left before Walker’s scenes were completed. You’ve heard the story by now: Paul's real-life brothers Cody and Caleb stepped in to assist with filming while CGI was utilized to superimpose Walker’s face onto their bodies.

Furious 7 suffered another loss, this one before shooting had even begun. Longtime series director Justin Lin decided to pursue other interests when it came time to sign new contracts, and in to replace him was James Wan. What an interesting choice. James Wan isn’t a name you’re probably very familiar with. His biggest claim to fame is as the director of the 2004 smash-hit horror film Saw, about as far away from a $200 million action blockbuster as you can get. God knows what Universal saw in him, but he’s the guy the studio ultimately went with to direct the movie, logic be damned. Replacing the guy who more or less patched up the sinking ship that was Fast & Furious was bound to cause a stir. Fitting yourself in with a group of people that have worked together for two movies now, in the process of a third, and having one of your key cast members die with only 30% or so of his scenes filmed isn’t a job I envy. Wan had to deal with directing his first big budget movie while dealing with an obviously grieving Vin Diesel. Troubled productions have a storied history of turning out lackluster results.

James Wan’s directing style is visually different from Lin’s in a number of vital areas. Wan’s horror roots aren’t as apparent as you’d think, but they are noticeable. The lens filters are a bit dirtier this time out. The blues are darker, the greens are harsher. His camerawork also suffers a bit. Lin actually had a pretty steady hand for a contemporary action filmmaker whereas Wan is shakier, favoring quick cuts over steady shots. Lin’s action was never hard to follow. It felt very old-school in that sense, like something out of the ‘80s or ‘90s where you always had a good grasp on what was happening on-screen and where characters were in conjunction with one another.  That flashy rapid edit style from the Saw movies is here in much smaller doses. Barring some harder to follow editing, some of Wan’s shots, however, are really inventive. During a fistfight at the very start of the film between Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and villain Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), there’s a bit in which Statham kicks Johnson over a sofa and the camera follows him from a side angle down to the floor, turning with his tumbling body.

Wan favors a lot of these unconventional shots and utilizes them to good effect throughout. They’re remarkably different than Lin’s, but they do fit this one’s tone.Furious 7 is, at its core, a revenge picture. The plot in a nutshell is that Diesel is after Shaw for killing one of his crew (no spoilers here). This sets up a series of events where Diesel’s character, Dominic Toretto, needs to find Shaw before he finds him. Cue Kurt Russell’s Mr. Nobody, a shadowy government agent who sees Dom’s team as an asset to his cause. If Toretto and company can get him something called God’s Eye - a device that would allow the government who owns it to find anyone at any time in any part of the world in mere seconds - he’ll give Toretto full access to it to track down Shaw. Shakespeare this isn’t, but it serves the purpose of giving Toretto and his guys another reason to pull themselves out of retirement and wreak the kind of havoc that only they can.

The plot of Furious 7 is ridiculous. It’s preposterous in every way. The other movies were beyond ridiculous, but taking a group of career criminals/street racers and turning them into government assets is ludicrous. This is the point in which I can’t take any of this seriously anymore. Furious 7 wants to tug at the heart strings by having those expected Fast & Furious moments where the characters engage in solemn conversation with each other about the value of family. These are human beings that we’re supposed to care about, and then two scenes later we’re asked to believe that they are capable of pulling off superhuman feats of strength and resiliency. This franchise jumped the shark in the sixth installment by having Toretto literally fly across a freeway to catch Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) in midair after she’d been tossed off a tank. Yeah, that happened. To its detriment and also its advantage, Furious 7 is a whole movie chockfull of this.

No one’s going to argue that Furious 7 is anything but pure absurdist antics. Everything it throws at you requires so much suspension of disbelief that you might as well pretend you’re taking in the latest Marvel vehicle. What makes this sort of thing work for Furious 7, though, is that it’s having fun with it. It smiles and winks at the audience, never taking itself too seriously. If nothing else can be said for James Wan’s involvement, his kinetic visual style pushes the action sequences into the next stratosphere. He understands how stupid this all is and he’s having a great time with it. You’ve got cars being dropped out of planes, cars being driven between buildings, cars evading attack drones in the middle of LA, cars being thrown down cliff sides, cars leaping each other, dodging each other, being tossed through the air, crushed, mangled, and exploded. If fiery automobile explosions were gore, this thing would be a bloodfest.

One of the film’s biggest action beats comes in the form of a mountainside chase that sees Dom and his crew attempting a high-speed rescue of a computer hacker named Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) who knows the location of the God’s Eye. They’re attacking a convoy of terrorists headed up by Jakande (Djimon Honsou), and in their possession is Ramsey. Do you get where this is going? Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) comes up with a plan to drop their cars out of the back of a plane as he reasons it’s the last thing they would expect. What follows is one of the most bonkers car chases I’ve ever seen in a movie. The stunts are masterful and Wan films it exquisitely. The use of room-rattling LFE punctuates every boom, bang, and crash. My 12" Klipsch subwoofer got its clock cleaned. The cherry on top of this petrol-filled sundae is O'Connor running along the top of a bus as it slides down the side of a mountain.

Unfortunately, Walker’s death affects the story greatly. I couldn’t tell you what the initial script did or didn’t contain, but it’s obvious that writer Chris Morgan struggled to find a logical reason to write the O’Connor character out of the film. What we end up getting is implemented as organically as possible. If you haven’t seen the film and don’t want it spoiled, I can tell you that I’d guess this is how Walker’s character would’ve been written out of the movies eventually anyway. It feels like the last two movies were leading up to this. And it’s all done so tastefully to boot. Although Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6 had really big action set pieces, those movies never felt like they were wall-to-wall nonstop action. There were good amounts of downtime in between the set pieces where you spent some time with the characters. Because of the rewriting of the script, Furious 7 feels like the inverse of that. There’s more action here than anything else.

The action is jaw-dropping, at least, but the story suffers. At a moment’s notice we’re whisked away to the Caucasus Mountains, Abu Dhabi, and Los Angeles with phoned-in explanations as to why Dom and his team need to do so. A Saudi prince has a car with a chip they need, blah blah blah. It doesn’t really matter. Don’t give it too much thought and you’ll have a blast. Give the film more than two seconds to rattle around in your head and marinate and you’re going to end up at the same conclusion I did: none of this makes any sense. Walker definitely wasn’t the backbone of this franchise, but his death weighed heavily on the production. The biggest area it affected was the story. And because they had to strip away so much, you’re left with action scene after action scene with nary a second to breathe.

Securing Statham was also a really big deal and I was hoping he’d finally give this series the villain it’s so desperately needed. I’m a huge fan of him and his commanding screen presence is a huge asset, but Wan doesn’t do a lot with him. He feels like a video game boss, showing up at random intervals to attack the player until the end of the game where you get to finally defeat him. The team are going about their usual lunacy and Shaw will show up in an opposing vehicle or magically appearing in an elevator just to throw a wrench into their plan and disappear until he’s needed again. Hounsou’s Jakande gets more screen time than Statham does, sorry to say. Diesel and Statham do get a really bad-ass fistfight at the end of the film, though. Chemistry between characters is still as strong as ever with Ludacris and Tyrese’s banter respectively being a highlight. Wan continues with Lin’s tradition of letting the actors play to their individual strengths and partnering up key cast members with one another and just letting them take the helm.

Furious 7 has all the makings of a disaster. One of the principal cast members dies in the middle of production, the set is a crappy place to be with a very moody Vin Diesel skulking around, CGI has to be used to film unfilmed sequences, and an untested horror director is at the helm of a massive tent pole picture, working with a $200 million budget. It sounds like a nightmare scenario, something that could spell the death of a franchise. Amazingly, Furious 7 isn’t a disaster. It’s obvious when watching it that it was a troubled shoot and concessions had to be made to finish it provided all of the things that went wrong. It’s a gigantically entertaining film with the action being the biggest it’s ever going to be, and it’s a fitting tribute to star Paul Walker. It sends him off into the night admirably, and of the scenes of his that were able to be completed, it’s obvious that he was going to be much more front and center than he was in the previous film. Furious 7 is all so wonderfully absurd that you’re either going to love it or hate it. If you need any semblance of realism in your movies, skip this. Nothing about it makes any sense or should be anywhere near as enjoyable as it is, but the cast and crew have been beating the odds for three movies now.

There’s always a sacrifice. Gaming journalism, or perhaps just journalism in general, is a strange beast. When titles are awarded unanimously high scores from just about every publication under the sun, you’re going to see the inevitable backlash where fans and non-fans alike all band together to decry the scores, citing payoffs and brand loyalty as the reason said title was given its glowing scores. What’s so interesting about this is, when a game isn't showered with gold and trinkets, but instead banished to the darkest corner of a room, those same people don’t all pipe up and defend it. Oh no; they’re going to jump in with both feet and join in the shit-slinging.

It’s one of life’s many enigmas. When something fails, we’re right there to jeer its existence and take a stab or two with pitchforks of our own.  If something succeeds, we think that there has to be something wrong, that somehow it’s rigged. You know what I’ve concluded? You’ve got to have your sacrifices. Deep Silver’s Homefront: The Revolution looks to be 2016’s sacrifice. It’s a sequel to the Kaos Studios-developed Homefront, a 2011 Call of Duty wannabe that attempted to differentiate itself from its competitors by pitting gamers against North Korean forces who had attacked and then occupied a vulnerable United States. It wanted to be a contemporary military shooter with shades of Red Dawn and America's everlasting fear of communist takeover as its two base inspirations. It wanted desperately to be the game that usurped Call of Duty's throne, but its generic campaign, mediocre graphics, shoddy voice acting, and utterly wasted concept meant it lost the race before it even got out of the gate. It had a strong multi-player component, but its hyped single-player campaign fell well short of what was promised.

THQ, the owners of the Homefront IP, went bankrupt not long after its release. Crytek bought the property, began work on it, and they too folded after their Xbox One launch title Ryse: Son of Rome didn’t produce the sales figures Microsoft were hoping for. Now solely developing free-to-play titles, Crytek sold the rights to Deep Silver who then formed Dambuster Studios, made up of mostly ex-Crytek employees, who resumed work on the title. Development schedules like that can cast a looming shadow over a project. I don’t think anyone was really clamoring for a sequel to Homefront, least of all me, but Dambuster certainly seemed to be taking it in the right direction.

The first thing to go was the heavily scripted linear campaign of the original. The Revolution goes the route of the recent Far Cry titles by opening the environments up to the player, giving them numerous tactical opportunities and ways in which to accomplish their objectives, strongholds to conquer, and equipment to purchase. Really, the best way I can describe The Revolution in a nutshell is that it's a combination of Far Cry’s open-endedness and Crysis' customization. One of the best things about The Revolution is the way in which you don't switch weapons in the traditional sense, but instead bring up a radial menu for each weapon class that allows you to swap out various parts of a gun to turn it into a grenade launcher, a heavy machine gun, a high-powered rifle, a combat rifle, etc... It's a great feature that further emphasizes Dambuster's aim to make The Revolution, in a sense, more tactically sound than its predecessor.

Next in line to go was the Unreal Engine 3. Being that the game was initially in development at Crytek, it utilizes the latest iteration of their lauded CryEngine technology. And damn is it pretty. Dambuster also ridding itself of the linearity of the first game proves to be a winning gamble for Homefront. It's got the same premise of the first but feels completely disconnected from it in every other way. The layouts of each of the individual areas are distinct enough to feel different, though just small enough that they aren’t overwhelming. The digitally recreated, post-invasion ruins of Philadelphia take the place of the first game’s Colorado-based setting, and it’s completely unsurprising that it feels like such a natural fit. Since the game is driving home that you’re a resistance fighter, not a soldier, the bombed out buildings, apartment complexes, and multi-story houses give way to a myriad of hit-and-run tactics the game encourages you to use. Your crafted pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and wide assortment of machine guns, shotguns, rifles, and rocket launchers feel sufficiently impactful. Going up to the third floor of a house, tossing a Molotov down onto a group of approaching KPA soldiers, and then blasting their armored escort with an RPG round and escaping via the rooftops nails the guerrilla warfare tactics that the first game's linear set pieces couldn't.

The first title was a bog standard run and gun shooter, so naturally I jumped into this one expecting much of the same. I died very quickly. Dambuster opts to give The Revolution a much more realistic sheen. Close quarters fighting is to be avoided as much as possible. Weapons aren’t terribly accurate and a few well-placed bullets will get you a dirt nap real fast. Your best bet is to use the environment to your advantage. Dambuster have incorporated something of a parkour mechanic into the game, although not as refined or as deep as, say, something like Dying Light. There’s a good amount of verticality on offer. Environments allow players to mantle over most waist-level structures and climb up a bulk of its structures. You’ve also got access to dirt bikes that’ll let you get from point A to point B quicker without taking nearly as much enemy fire as you would going by foot.

A lot of The Revolution’s core gameplay consists of liberating strongholds, outposts, and furthering the resistance’s influence in the game’s six districts. There are both yellow zones and red zones; yellow zones put you in the middle of populated areas where you have to complete objectives while maintaining your cover, and red zones are highly restricted areas where you'll be fire upon immediately if spotted by a KPA soldier. There are a handful of objectives to complete in each area – such as taking out a set number of snipers, tuning radios to the resistance’s frequency, and destroying enemy convoys – that will eventually lead to an uprising. Taking over enemy bases is done in much the same manner as games like the aforementioned Far Cry series. You can use stealth, such as close-range takedowns, silenced weapons like pistols and a crossbow, or you can just outright blast your way in. Quiet or loud, it’s your choice. There’s also a really cool mechanic where you can recruit up to four other resistance members to join you at any point in the game. Just approach one, hit the E key by default, and you’ve got yourself a hunting party. Their presence is invaluable. They do an admirable job of taking out enemy soldiers, distracting them as you make your way in and claim their base as your own.

There is a story here, albeit not a particularly strong one. The game’s narrative is more of an excuse to set the player up with an assortment of exciting, overall well-designed missions that see you doing all the revolution-y things you’d expect: sabotaging, sneaking, and destroying. The characters you encounter aren’t all that interesting, although the voice acting is definitely a notch above the original. The game’s story isn’t going for poignant or touching. It’s there as an overarching narrative to provide some level of context for what you’re doing, not just blowing shit up for the sake of blowing shit up (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The original game went for something a lot more emotional and relatable. The Revolution is first and foremost a sandbox game. Presenting players with a vast open world and a myriad of things to in it is its primary point of sale.

From the purely technical side of things, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with The Revolution. Sound design is excellent, the music is superb, and the graphics are gorgeous. The CryEngine-powered visuals left me gobsmacked. The most impressive thing about the CryEngine has always been its lighting capabilities, and The Revolution makes great use of them throughout. Most of the game looks positively beautiful with even the most minute of details being painstakingly rendered. The texture work isn’t always up to snuff with some jarringly low-res textures here and there, but I would imagine that has more to do with the give and take of game development. CryEngine is a powerful engine, one that has always required considerably high-end equipment in order to achieve playable frame rates at its highest settings, and the comparatively low-res textures are more than likely a sacrifice to keep the game’s visuals from requiring absolutely beastly specs to get it up and running.

Generally speaking, I think the The Revolution is a criminally underrated experience. It didn’t really stand a chance coming out a week after the excellent Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and the balls-out Doom, but the damning reviews really don’t give it credit for what it does. If nothing else, it’s a huge step over the original. The bulk of the negativity has been aimed at, you guessed it, the crazy amount of bugs and glitches this thing has. I understand that games today are more complex than they’ve ever been and that glitches are just part and parcel of most open-world games. That doesn't, however, make it any more acceptable. Graphics are approaching true photo-realism, the worlds these games take place in are so intricately detailed, and the amount of people It takes to produce even a mid-level title, let alone a AAA title, is astounding. Patching used to be a PC thing, but now that consoles have that capability it means that games are released before they’re totally ready to come out of the oven. They are eventually patched, but not before critics drag them through the mud. It hurts sales immensely.

As it stands, The Revolution is far from unplayable, but it isn’t all that playable, either. I’m rocking a pretty high-end PC here – an overclocked i7 4930k, 32 gigs of RAM, and a Titan X - and there are frame rate drops all over the place. I quickly gave up on even hoping to achieve a solid 60 frames per second and decided to lock my frame rate to 30 frames per second instead. There are still areas where the game will drop to the low 20s with absolutely nothing happening on-screen to warrant those drops. You’re also going to be dealing with frame rate hitching, micro stutters, some wonky, if not amusing, AI, and even sound and movement glitches. One particularly nasty bug I encountered involves taking over a stronghold. The problem? I can’t! The object I need to complete the mission simply refuses to spawn.

 If I’m having this sort of experience on what many would consider to be a pretty top tier PC, I truly pity the folks who have lesser hardware. I can’t imagine what they’re having to do to play it or if they’re even able to play it at all. Sadly, most of the game’s bad reviews are because of these bugs, not in lieu of them. The gameplay is there. It truly is. The Revolution is a lot more fun than I expected it to be. The tactical nature of its gameplay is refreshing, its concept feels a lot more fleshed out than it did in the last game, and the action overall feels nice and satisfying. It’s a single-player-focused experience, and I love that about it. There’s no multi-player here outside of a pretty decent co-op mode. The main attraction is its campaign, and it’s full of content that earn it its $60 price tag.

Like I said at the start: sacrifice. Publications handed out their high scores earlier this month to Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and Doom. The Revolution was never going to stand up to those two. I’m still scratching my head as to why Deep Silver decided to stack this up against two of this year’s most anticipated titles. It seems to me that a two-month delay could’ve been mutually beneficial to the game and the audience it’s being pitched to. Give some time for the dust to settle, fix the bugs before release, and put it on shelves during the notoriously dry summer months. What else would gamers have to play? Maybe they would’ve been kinder to it if the competition hadn’t been so stiff.

Homefront: The Revolution was exactly what I wanted it to be. I got what was promised to me: an open-world first-person shooter that lets me enact guerrilla warfare-style revenge on an invading enemy force like a boss. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of the first game. It’s everything the 2011 game should’ve been. It’s got the graphics, it’s got the fun factor, it’s got the gameplay, and it’s got a much better, far more satisfying use of the first’s promising setup. I see lots of potential for a future franchise if Dambuster just fleshes out the characters a bit more and gets themselves a more focused storyline. I don’t see any reason why gamers itching for more Far Cry-esque action after this year’s disappointing Far Cry: Primal took the guns out of the equation wouldn’t have a bunch of fun with this one. It’s a shame those poor scores will sway a bunch of people from giving this the unbiased look it deserves.

Specs played on:

Intel i7 4930k

32 GBs of RAM

GTX GeForce Titan X

Unfortunately, the movie's brief 101-minute runtime doesn't allow for much time to explore their relationship, although the extended cut adds in some much needed character beats and the film is better for it. The popular opinion seems to be that Courtney and Willis shared very little on-screen chemistry. I'm in the minority here, but I thought the two worked remarkably well together. Courtney did a fine job as McClane's son, pulling off the tough guy routine admirably, ably expressing emotion through body language and facial expressions, and even giving the elder McClane a run for his money in the banter department. The movie wanted me to believe that they were family and I honestly had no trouble buying into it.