Bombshell is one of those crappy sci-fi flicks that is set in the weirdly distorted near future. The year is 2011 and the future is BRIGHT (literally everything is some hue of neon), cars drive around with barcoded license plates, use credit cards for keys, they have GPS navigation & video phones and e-mail, but the TVs are still shitty.
The “Wake Up, Time to Die” dude from Blade Runner gives us the rundown on Nano-Engines, little robots that are designed to destroy and replace cancer cells. Instead, they give cats seizures and kill them. Frank Whaley and the long-haired main character guy (We’ll call him Dude) argue over the ethics of exploiting the flawed experiment to make cash.
So then Dude is driving home one night and his crappy GPS leads him to a Dead End, where he gets maced into unconsciousness. When he wakes up, his kidney is gone (he’s not in a bathtub of ice, so he should be screwed right?)
We come to find out that they replaced his vital organ with a bomb that is being constructed with nano-engines. A masked dude has him run a bunch of meaningless errands, threatening him with something more painful than having a bomb in place of a kidney (still don’t know what that could possibly be).
None of this movie made any sense, so I guess there’s no harm in pointing out some bizarre things that randomly happen out of context:
There’s an interview between Frank Whaley and a glittery reporter lady, in which there are lots of repetitive shots. It’s very repetitive. Shots repeat themselves quite often. Over and over again. It’s a bit repetitive.
After a video call to the police, a message from a female cop appears stating – “Don’t buy alcohol, don’t buy guns, don’t do drugs, racism is a felony.” Guess I can’t argue with all of that…
At one point Dude’s girlfriend is being kidnapped and gets thrown through a car window, setting off the most irritating car alarm that states “Call 911!” over and over and over.
At this point I abandoned the movie to watch Parks and Recreation, because Louis CK was on.
(It was awesome.)
I felt guilty about ditching the flick so I came back to finish it. UGH, it was more stupid than I remembered.
It turns out that Frank Whaley was the masked kidney thief (spoiler spoiler, this movie didn’t have the budget to pay more actors) and he goes all postal because he doesn’t want the shitty nano-technology to kill people.
(Officer Mom and the Soccer Practice Squadron)
So, after a wild car chase with minivan cops with giant LAPD letters on the side that plow through giant mirrors, Frank busts into the lab with hostages and threatens to blow it all up and kill everyone. A gung-ho cop pops him and – as he’s falling to his death – he manages to fire wildly into the air, killing the cop that killed him and a reporter lurking in the background.
The Dude’s nurse/girlfriend performs emergency surgery to remove the bomb and they escape as the bomb explodes behind a reporter, whose keen observational skills beckon her to remark “THAT WAS AN EXPLOSION!” The movie then rewinds and plays back the explosion again, because it was just that damn exciting.
Bombshell is a terrible joke played both on the audience and anyone unlucky enough to come across it. There are some grievous technical blunders that persist throughout the film; boom mics bobbing from the top of the screen, many of the shots were out of focus, random freeze-frames and extreme zoom-ins are scattered throughout and the editing is generally atrocious.
But when you have material like this, what’s the point in editing at all?
Awful, Awful, Awful. 3 out of 3 Cinnamon Bears.
Awfully Bad Movie Club 