Blue glowing penis, two sets of boobs, a gorilla fist in silhouette nuzzling between a chick’s legs, three exploding Asians and a dead dwarf being used to clog a toilet. If you can picture all of that in your mind, you have basically seen the only bits of “Watchmen” worth seeing.
The movie takes place in a fictional 1985 in which costumed superheroes are not only real, but have directly impacted the course of events in American history since the 1940’s. Nixon is serving his fifth term, David Bowie is still hot in silver latex, the USA won Vietnam and super powered vigilantes in tights have been forced to retire.
Things start with the death of The Comedian, a pseudo-masochistic, alcoholic, cigar-puffing sociopath with a penchant for superheroines, shooting pregnant women and setting fire to hippies. As awesome as that sounds, the character is little more than a paper mirror against which all but one of the movie’s protagonists look at themselves. It should be noted that each of the supposedly different voices comes to the same conclusion about The Comedian after a tortuously drawn-out and utterly failed epiphany moment.
Considering that there are, at most, half a dozen main characters in this movie with as many origin stories, the direction actually did something right in only touching on some (geeky owl-guy) and going full-out in others (blue glowing penis). Unfortunately, it really blew it by only going half-assed on the movie’s most pivotal character: the dwarf-clogging, dog-killing, bean-eating, woman-hating, liberal-bashing, bum-turned-superhero Rorschach. The movie jumps between random bits of his childhood that partially make allusions to other characters in the movie as though they are of any importance to the overall story arc, and then it hops right into his “first case.” It’s as if the intervening 12 years didn’t mean anything to his development as the most scary-good superhero I’ve ever seen work the big screen.
The rest of the movie is promises a lot, having some solidly good bits. But it ultimately drowns in its own crap of plot holes, flimsy contrivances, shock for the sake of shock, the universe’s biggest Mary Sue with the universe’s biggest set of arbitrary rules governing his god-like powers and enough blue penis to turn anyone celibate. Oh yeah, and the movie cheats by using camera angles to hide information that would keep the final revelation from you.
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