This one imagines a CIA conspiracy to negate the US’s 2nd Amendment that involves kidnapping, extortion, and lots of guns, which adds stupid to the sins of boring, patriarchical, and very, very white.
Gina was flying. She always did, after sleeping with Jefferson. She told him she wanted to take advantage of it while she could, just like he spent the time after sex speedreading his textbooks one page a second. Accepting her excuse made her suspicious, but mostly relieved.
Life was peaceful up here. Floating above the city, she felt removed from everything, safe from worries about her part-time job and her full-time job, and her on-the-job training, and her hypochondriac mother, and her sister who thought she deserved a better boyfriend. Up here, none of that mattered.
It almost felt like gravity didn't exist up here, but it did. She'd learned that the first time she'd brought her camera up here. She'd drop Jefferson just as fast if sex with someone else would let her fly. Once Jefferson was through with school, speedreading wouldn't keep him with her, either. He'd move on, find new powers with a new partner. She had to enjoy the flying while it lasted.
Gina drifted downward, gravity starting to remember she existed. She flew home. Maybe she could get another rise out of Jefferson before he fell asleep. She wanted to spend more time up here.
Aggressively sexist and passively racist, Battle Drone fails in every respect except inspiring me to rewatch The Losers, the excellent 2010 alternative to the inferior The Expendables.
The fight scenes are excellent, as one should expect of a professional stunt man and martial artist directed by a former stunt man, but the script and acting and irrelevant women leave everything to be desired.
This film shamelessly stole the plot of Stallone’s 1987 Over the Top, replacing arm wrestling with giant robot boxing but keeping the unearned emotions and false tension.
The great setup—five minutes of superpower from pills mysteriously appearing on the street—is marred by nonsensical “animal genetics” explanations, and by the woman-as-objective that remains so common in stories.
Angel Has Fallen is so basic you’d think Michael Bay directed it.