NAME : Hillary Harpo

Kicked out on the street by my transgender wife for coming home drunk and wizzing on the electric fence.

MOVIE: IRON MAN, this summer’s Marvel adaptation brought to the big screen by the barrel-scraping brains behind the ambulators Robert Downey Jr and Jon Favreau.

Let me start by theorising : if there’s anything that the world of 24 hour news channels might have taught us, it’s that apparently super-tooled asskicking highly trained armies from advanced western countries are NO MATCH for a bunch of towel-wrapped dust-covered nomads living in caves. Finish the job, people. If you can.

With this in mind, welcome to cave-riddled, dust-covered Afganistan Mister Downey Jnr/Stark, savant engineer-cum-arms dealer. Why not get down to business demonstrating your genius by blowing up a hillside? Good work. Try not to get captured by Afgan rebels while out chumming it up with your soldier friends “Deadmeat”, “Bullseye” and “Flange”. Oh, hang on…

In its simplest form the resulting movie is a very basic comedy/revenge story (if such a thing exists), with Downey iterating a few designs of mechanised fighting suits and using them to simultaneously KICK COPIOUS ASS and PROVE WHAT A HUMANITARIAN HE IS across the globe. We also see Geoff Bridges as the ultimate bad guy, telegraphed for any non-comic fans (like me) from the offset of the movie by a bad-guy-hair and beard.

End result: Geoff (better to call these people by their actual names, as the characters generally have such insipid nothingy forgetable monikers as to render the whole process of naming them useless), mad on POWER and possessed of a kind of RIGHTEOUS ATTITUDE, constructs a bigger better weapon to defeat the Downey in a fight worthy of a hundred saturday morning Action Man playtimes undertaken by 8 year olds. But, remember the lesson? Geoff may be big and strong, but he’s oh so dumb and Downey wins. There. The end. Take that Capitalism!

IT’S EITHER WATCH THIS OR GET TRICKED INTO PLAYING DRESS-UP WITH AN ALBANIAN PORNOGRAPHER ON THE PROMISE OF A 5-NOTE TO BUY SHOES WITH FROM OXFAM : The movie. It’s simple. Downey jnr is ALWAYS value for money, and it keeps my lousey mug off the internet for another day.

NAME : Carlos Rodriguez

Communist witchhunts in 1950s Los Angeles forced me to abandon my lucrative beachfront propery business and take to the rails.

MOVIE: DOOMSDAY, a turgid reflection on modern movie making, organised (I fall way short of using the word “directed”) by homage-driven baldy Neil Marshall.

This movie … nay, this entire director’s output can be blamed on John Carptenter and George Miller. In fact, if I was John Carpenter right now I’d be calling my lawyers and seeking some kind of executive producer credit. DOOMSDAY is a British Action Movie, which already sets the scene for a true festival of pain. Naturally, Marshall has limited budget to play with and yet this movie falls way short of its dollar-to-fun ratio. In reviewing this tripe it’s helpful to break it down into chunks and detail each movie reference as we find it. So …

First ten minutes. The setup from 28 Days Later except the words are changed, mixed with some 24-esque gun play and a bathtub shotgun moment straight out of Leon.

11 minutes and we’re into Carpenter land and the first signs of the wholesale ripping off of Escape From New York even down to the graphical stylings on the map we see showing the trajectory of the containment wall  stretching across the border of Scottishland and England.

Next : we meet the “team” – a rag tag group of rough diamond army entertainers equipped with … wait for it … APCs and who mutter things like “check your corners”. We’re trying for Aliens.

After that, it gets silly. Cannibal gangs like the Crazies from the Broadway sequence in “Escape…”; Scottish mentals in Braveheart makeup; chicks fighting with plastic swords, a FUCKING STEAM TRAIN, an entire fuedal society holed up in a castle on a loch (“I think I preferred this in Reign of Fire,” I recall thinking), a yammering pit fight looking like a horrid fast-cut poor-man’s Gladiator, and a final chase scene lifted right out of Miller’s Big Book Of Driving Spikey Cars Into People Who Scream And Bleed and Puree (only with a Bentley instead of Max’s Interceptor)

And as if the references weren’t overdone enough, all fight scenes are from Xena warrior princess.

Oh, and Sean Pertwee dies … AGAIN.

All in all, I am lobbying the Hague to designate this movie a war crime.

IT’S EITHER WATCH THIS OR SPEND ANOTHER NIGHT ON THE STREETS DODGING BOTTLES AND PISS FROM DRUNKEN REVELERS : Show me to my cardboard box please, Grayson. I sleep with my mouth open.