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Stars Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, and Monica Bellucci, are all obviously slumming in what I can only call action porn. It’s like The Matrix without the philosophy or plot. It’s Die Hard without the compelling characters and interesting caper. But mostly it’s Sin City without the vision, style, or noir-ish brilliance. The dialog is bad. The one-liners are more obvious than bad pop song lyrics. The plot is bad. Events are strung together with the barest of reason. The acting is bad. Clive Owen had a nearly identical part in Sin City while Giamatti is trying to channel Jack Nicholson without as much success as one might expect.

But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

All the bad parts are so completely irrelevant to this festival of improbabilities, impossibilities and insanities. It’s all about one action sequence after another. It’s absurd and delightful in it’s disregard of anything nearing seriousness. It’s not just action porn, it’s comedic action porn. It takes action so far over the top it comes back around to the bottom then over again. The only movie I’ve laughed more at this year was Knocked Up. (Yes, I realize how often I mention this movie, but I really loved it that much.) This being said, it’s not for everyone. There’s lots of possibly inappropriate child endangerment, tons of blood and a bit of sex. Monica Bellucci is most of the sex. This is a good thing. She does one of the better hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold’s in recent memory. Owen isn’t doing anything new here, but he’s not doing anything out of place either. Surprisingly, Paul Giamatti was not as great I’d expected, though he does a decent enough job being creepy and menacing. Just don’t expect anything but goofy fun, a guitar heavy soundtrack and lots of violence. You’ll have a great time.

And the movie is a PR coup for carrots.

Last week I saw the Kevin Bacon revenge pic, Death Sentence. There’s something kinda weird about this movie’s provenance. It’s based VERY loosely on the book by Brian Garfield of the same name. It was written as a sequel to another Garfield book that was made into a movie, the Charles Bronson vehicle Death Wish. The series of sequels ignored Garfield’s books. So does Death Sentence. Directed by James Wan ( Saw) and filmed mostly in Columbia, the movie starts off well enough with Kevin Bacon’s perfect life and family being shattered by a terrible tragedy. It was a little distracting seeing bits of Columbia being used as locations, but I did my best to just note the recognized places in my head and keep in the world of the movie. If only that world had stayed consistent and sane. The movie goes all over the place in tone. One minute it’s a family drama, the next a revenge flick, then a horror movie, then a comedy, then a morality play, then a Swedish dwarf foot fetish film with Badgers.

Well, maybe not the Badger bit. That’d be at least something new. Or at least one would hope so.

One bright spot is John Goodman’s performance. He chews up the scenery and manages to be both menacing and funny at the same time. I think that might be what the film itself was supposed to be but it failed miserably. The last half of the movie just got to be so weird and disjointed that the audience I saw it with seemed to give up on taking the thing seriously.

On a side note, I sat through the credits to see what kind of kudos and shout-outs my hometown got. A “filmed in” under some sort of film incentive act. Whoop-tee-do. A thank-you to 5-Points? Nope. Group? Nope. All the folks put out by the weeks long blockage of part of much-used Kilbourne St.? Nope. Classy filmmakers? Nope.

I suggest waiting for DVD and playing drinking games based on Columbia landmarks. Oh, and I think the movie poster is pretty snazzy.