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JulyDiaz

Episode 82 — Double Team

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Kind of shocked this was barely addressed, but did Rodman stash Van Damme's kid in a storm drain? Because it really looked like the base of a storm drain. Also he did this while a man-eating tiger was roaming those same hallways.

 

Also, I loved the opening sequence where it cuts to the CIA office, some guy yells "OUTTA THE WAY" then pushes some dude he could have easily sidestepped into a desk.

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Fuck! I'm never going to done watching this movie because I keep stopping to laugh at just the first 4 minutes!

 

 

The satellite uplink hack just to start a truck.

 

Needlessly pushing the CIA office worker out of the way.

 

The super awkward cut to the hangar door before the truck bursts out. Not only is the dorky cheerful guy's voice from the previous scene still going, but you have that cheesy and pointless transition of blowing out the shot from a black screen. It would have been so much more effective to just show the hangar door in silence for a couple seconds before the truck burst through out of nowhere. That blow out thing was like someone fooling around with transition effects for the first time in windows movie maker. Which brings us to...

 

...the title crawl! Seriously that looks like the title sequence to a public access show.

 

Setting up the blockade to stop JCVD's truck: an armored vehicle, humvees, and...two dinky European police cars? Two dinky European police cards that skid to a stop in front of the armored vehicle like they should be the first barrier to stop a 20 ton truck.

 

The armored vehicle's cannon firing and somehow magically hitting just the trailer hitch all the way in the back of the truck???

 

The tiny pile of gravel he drives over, which is enough to launch the 20 ton truck over the train cars.

 

 

I need to catch my breath.

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I've seen quite a few Van Damme movie (stopped counting, probably over 20) and the movie studios always dealt with his accent in one of the three following ways:

 

1- He's not American (in which case, every other country is a good answer, it doesn't matter whether or not the accent match the country). He played Belgian, French, Russian, Hong Konger and French-Canadian characters (Louis Burke in Death Warrant is from Quebec)

 

2- He's an American, we gave him an American name, and no one in the movie will even question why he has this accent.

 

3- He's a cajun from Louisiana. Luc Devereaux and Chance Boudreaux are cajun characters, which is the middle ground studios used to jsutify the French accent while still having an American as the hero.

 

I think 3 is the best option all around when trying to make him American otherwise keep him a foreigner like in Lionheart. This is a good way to handle the accent. Or simply a back story of him being the son of immigrants who spoke little English and so the accent developed from that.

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Double Team is a defense term in basketball, and the slogan is They don't play by the rules, like it's a game

really like this post, thanks

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Being a kid in the '90s, I ought to remember the games but don't.

 

As for the hair though, I'm pretty sure that I still have one of the color changing cups from McDonald's somewhere....

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You guys rocked my 2nd opinion theme again this week and to my knowledge I've never once been credited the 4 or 5 times you played it. Am I complaining? yes, in a way, but I come bearing another theme...

 

https://soundcloud.com/mikey-knives/dan-harmon-i-know-the-theme-to

 

Well I've posted it on the boards before but I forgot to make it downloadable... Or rather I forgot that soundcloud sets it to non-downloadable by default. But there it is.

 

Another fantastic show this week. Keep up the good work.

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Start the drinking game rules!

 

- Every time you see a tiger (opening logo counts)

 

- Every basketball pun

 

- Every allusion or euphemism for anal sex (I counted 3 "back door" hints in the first 10 minutes)

 

- Every jarring amateur editing effect that looks like it came from Windows Movie Maker or Video Toaster

 

- Coke product placement

 

- Every time Rodman's hair color changes.

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That reminds me, did Rodman ever rebound from this project? He seemed pointless in the movie.

Incredibly, Rodman went on to be the star of 1999's Simon Sez, as a "hip interpol agent." Even more next-level bonkers, this movie also has cyber monks. I'm dead serious. And John Pinette is one of the cyber monks. And Dane Cook is Rodman's sidekick. WHAT IS HAPPENING?

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Finally finished. They probably covered all this in the episode, but....

 

The grenades in this movie are all tactical nukes! The 2nd biggest laugh of the movie was the grenade in the swimming pool not just creating a huge water spout, but a nuclear napalm fireball that took out the whole house!

 

Biggest laugh? The very end. One landmine takes out the entire Roman Colosseum! I was already howling with laughter when that happened, but then they started running away from the fireball knocking down an entire domino row of Coke machines.

 

It took me a good 5 minutes to start breathing again.

 

 

P.S. What the heck was with the very end? The colony boss demands a lock of JCVD's hair and his shirt, so Rodman tosses a golden coin smoke bomb so JCVD can drive away without cutting his hair and giving away a tattered bloody shirt? Then the boss jokes around with Rodman? What?

 

P.P.S. The pointless "foot knife" fight was a blatant ripoff of the rooftop fight scene from Jackie Chan's Who Am I?

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NOTE: Paul mentioned James Bond fighting a foot knife wielding woman. That was Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love. That knife was poison tipped so it killed quickly.

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They had to kill time (since the main plot was only about 50 minutes of the whole movie), so they crammed in a bunch of other movies that didn't fit. The entire first hour seemed like they saw No Escape (released just 3 years before) and figured use it to kill time.

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Okay, ridiculous shit checklist:

 

- The cold opening has been discussed. My favorites was the tank somehow hitting the rear tow hitch and the tiny gravel pile launching the 20 ton truck airborne. Also loved how the CIA guy reading off the line about "if he drives another 15 minutes he'll be able to retire!" like it was a game show.

 

- If JCVD was part of an official CIA task force, why did he have to go to some crazy arms dealer set up in a BDSM rave club to get guns?

 

- Why did Stavros bother with the body double at the fair if he was just going to stand out in the open nearby?

 

- Was that some abandoned hospital maturnity ward where they just left all the babies?

 

- What the heck was "the colony"? If it was the CIA, why did they throw spies in a ridiculous prison and force them to watch news footage under threat of nerve gas instead of just putting them back in the field? If it was a private company, do they just follow secret spy missions around on the off chance they can kidnap wounded agents?

 

- Why did JVCD have to construct the same primative workout equipment from Bloodsport? The fancy prison with underwater lasers and nerve gas thumbscanners couldn't spring for a gym?

 

- When planning an escape, it's probably best not to practically write out the day it's happening on the calendar in your cell.

 

- How did JCVD's rival "warden" inmate know that JCVD was going for the raft and the exact day? Even if he knew, how was he already there in a scuba suit when the lasers were only turned off the instant before JCVD hit the water?

 

- Aside from the basketball parachute, Rodman's role as a Q type gadget maker never comes into play during the movie!

 

- Who were all the people at his house and at the Rome wedding? The CIA? The Colony? Stavros' men? So confusing!

 

- Back to the house, they couldn't just booby trap the place or have the assassins shoot JCVD if he showed up, they had to have a woman walking around in front of the windows 24/7 pretending to be his wife holding a bomb baby, going so far as to put the bomb baby into the crib for regularly scheduled naps?

 

- They show a team (CIA? The Colony? Stavros' Men?) searching for the hacker monk base, then never come back to them.

 

- Okay, walk me through Stavros' plan at the end. He has no idea that JCVD knows where he is, unless he planned for him to tail his sniper, survive the sniper and foot knife guy trying to kill him, notice a prescription for his wife, and stumble across a sect of hacker monks who could trace the prescription. He orders the wife shot so he wasn't going to do it in front of JCVD, but he decides to bury a bunch of mines with a standby tiger in the colleseum to take the baby to so he can kill it in front of JCVD just in case he happens to show up that night. Then he marks all the mines with crosses and tells JCVD about them, rendering the mines pointless. After they leave, Rodman decides to remove a bunch of crosses on the chance that they'll come back and doesn't tell JCVD, which means all he did was make the odds 50/50 that Stavros or JCVD would step on one. Keep in mind even that is pointless because apparently each mine has the power of a tactical nuke and will kill everyone in the building, which begs the question why Stavros, who planted the 20 megaton atomic mines, sat down nearby to watch the tiger fight.

 

- Did they offer product placement to the highest bidder during post? That must be why they CGI'd in the hundreds of coke machines lined up like dominos that the colleseum obviously has.

 

- The colony boss wants JCVD's hair and jacket because.....? Rodman distracts him with a smoke bomb because...? The boss is all happy and jokey that JCVD got away because....?

 

- Fuck this movie

 

 

edit: well shoot, just listened to the episode and they already covered most of these. Darn those guys for being so efficient. One note: I totally thought the scuba guy was the guy who hated him on the colony and his "guardian".

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NOTE: Paul mentioned James Bond fighting a foot knife wielding woman. That was Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love. That knife was poison tipped so it killed quickly.

Speaking of shoe knives, how has the show not covered the ridiculousness that is the Angelina Jolie spy movie Salt?

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I thought it was strange that with all the Coke-a-cola product placeement, nobody in the movie is ever drinking a Coke. I would think that as an advertiser I would want JCVD or Rodman to be enjoying a Coke or in some way releating Coke to the viewer. Instead they showcase Coke products in absurd scenes where the product placement just looks so forced.

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What I liked about this episode was the team going back to their old format where they cover the movie in chronological order, giving a setup to each scene as they go along. Hardly any skipping around at all. It really helps follow the show, especially when they cover movies so bad that there's no way I'm going to suffer watching it.

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NOTE: Paul mentioned James Bond fighting a foot knife wielding woman. That was Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love. That knife was poison tipped so it killed quickly.

 

Good note in case anyone is considering how long it might take to die if they play Houdini in a Poison Tipped Foot Knife Battle.

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As a physics teacher, the non-bouncing basketball non-parachute invention really bothered me.

All of the other physics portrayed were SPOT ON.

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Speaking of shoe knives, how has the show not covered the ridiculousness that is the Angelina Jolie spy movie Salt?

Or the 1989 Dolph Lundgren "Punisher" film! COME ON! I know the adopted white mute ninja daughter of Lady Tanaka has some pretty sweet boot knives that she tries to stick Dolph with as he picks her up off the ground and totally ragdolls her.

punisher2.jpg

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As a physics teacher, the non-bouncing basketball non-parachute invention really bothered me.

All of the other physics portrayed were SPOT ON.

What I wondered is why not just use a parachute? I don't understand the need to put the basketball shaped magical balloon in the movie. Was the payoff worth it? They just show it rolling on the ground and we are supposed to believe that it just worked?

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What I wondered is why not just use a parachute? I don't understand the need to put the basketball shaped magical balloon in the movie. Was the payoff worth it? They just show it rolling on the ground and we are supposed to believe that it just worked?

 

In a movie that was 90 minutes of complete nonsense, this took the prize. I almost shut the movie off when it happened, because it was just such a ham-handed way to get a basketball reference in there. It really bothered me.

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Or the 1989 Dolph Lundgren "Punisher" film! COME ON! I know the adopted white mute ninja daughter of Lady Tanaka has some pretty sweet boot knives that she tries to stick Dolph with as he picks her up off the ground and totally ragdolls her.

punisher2.jpg

Also if the cops in that movie were looking for the Punisher why not look for the retailer of all those skull knives that he used to kill almost EVERY person.

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Also if the cops in that movie were looking for the Punisher why not look for the retailer of all those skull knives that he used to kill almost EVERY person.

They must be the same cops from "2 Fast 2 Furious" that immediately forget to ever look for this group of people in very distinct vehicles ever again. Seriously, they spend the whole movie hanging out together, and one of the cars is bright pink and has a huge dragon on it or something.

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Or the 1989 Dolph Lundgren "Punisher" film! COME ON! I know the adopted white mute ninja daughter of Lady Tanaka has some pretty sweet boot knives that she tries to stick Dolph with as he picks her up off the ground and totally ragdolls her.

 

 

Oh man, 14 year old me LOVED that Punisher movie.

I'm afraid to watch it now, though!!!

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