Offcuts: Due Date

25 Jan

Behold, the worst injustice in filmic history since that actor you like wasn’t nominated for that award you thought he should win: Due Date’s Metascore is twenty-two points lower than that of The Hangover. I. Know.

Zach Galifiankis plays pretty much the same oblivious, thumb-handed idiot in both films, but partnering him up with a quietly seething Robert Downey Jr. yields far funnier results than having him flanked by two equally stupid (but considerably more prone to hysterical screeching) manchildren. RDJ’s expecting father -a high-strung but straight-faced architect forced to roadtrip across the US with the bearded cretin that got him kicked off his plane – focuses his rage with laser precision. It’s genuinely funny when he punches a kid in the stomach, almost entirely because of the swiftness and efficiency of the blow – in an instant, the outburst has passed without so much of a changing facial expression. These kinds of moments are, simply put, far more entertaining and far less tiring than the prolonged screaming meltdowns that so often punctuate male-led comedies.

The story is predictable, the situations contrived, but Due Date boasts  some great staccato-ish gag delivery, gorgeous scenery and an enormously underrated double act (even though Galifiankis can’t match his co-star’s comedy chops, he’s likeable enough and absolutely sells the more dramatic bits) that probably won’t reform ever again. LoveFilm it, at the very least.

Offcuts: Fixing Modern Warfare 3

19 Jan

The sequel!

1) Make Akimbo Go To It’s Room And Think About What It’s Done

Most games of multiplayer MW3 are blisteringly fast. The excitement therefore comes in the fraction of a second it takes for you to meet an enemy, level your gun before they do, and be the first make an accurate hit. It’s an almost inconceivably brief period of interaction, but there are so many instances of this during one game that it isn’t really a problem.

All akimbo loadouts successfully remove this. Instead, their user simply strolls around, looking in the vague direction of any foe and liquefying them with a wall of hipfire spray before they can even bring up their sights. This isn’t tense, fair or fun for the victim, and – having tried this tactic myself in a couple of games – doesn’t provide any real satisfaction for the culprit.

It seems to me like, just maybe, secondary weapons should be used as secondary weapons? Making akimbo guns far less accurate than their two-handed default equivalent – even with Steady Aim – would encourage slower but more rewarding playstyles, without sacrificing their role as close-range backup for snipers.

2) Seriously, Why Are Flares Still Automatic?

The general de-emphasis of offensive killstreaks in favour of team-friendly Support pointstreaks is a huge leap in the right direction, but mighty Osprey choppers and AC-130 gunships still act undeservedly unassailable. When the best players are given even more opportunities to remotely blow up the losing team, is it really so much to ask to have them take their finger off the trigger for one second to deploy their defensive flares manually?

3) Even The Odds: Give Out Free Unlocks

One of the reasons I abandoned Battlefield 3 was that I was sick of getting killed by people with objectively superior weapon attachments to what I’d unlocked so far. Thanks to smaller maps, higher damage and lower recoil, this isn’t so much of an issue in MW3 – someone with an ACOG scope doesn’t necessarily have an absolute advantage over iron sights peasants (as in BF3). Still, the new Proficiencies (perks for weapons rather than people – lower recoil, better bullet penetration etc.) don’t start unlocking until several levels in, and new ones appear only infrequently after that.

It would be great if freshly-unlocked weapons came with all the Proficiency options included. There are still incentives to level up in attachments and camos, but newer players start out on a slightly more level playing field – and are free to experiment with different setups before they settle into a complete loadout.

 

Offcuts: Chuck, Season 5

19 Jan

It kind of feels like, somewhere along the line, spy fiction forgot how to be fun. Arse-joke comedies where the main character happened to wear a tux, sure, but films and TV that weren’t parodying a genre that doesn’t exist anymore resorted to either immense grumpiness or impenetrable technowank. Chuck, for all its California glossiness, was pretty much unique: a competant spy-fi action series, with a sharp sense of humour and brilliantly understated pop culture geekiness. Then they went and cancelled it.

Season 5, which only has a couple of episodes left to air, has been crafted in the oddly beneficial knowledge that this is truly, properly, for realsies the end this time. That means no more infuriating cliffhangers, no more tiptoeing around character development or playing coy with backstory. The end is nigh, but for once in US TV, they saw it coming. This doesn’t mean, however, the ostensible plan to tie four season’s worth of only unconncected stories into a final mega-conspiracy hasn’t been a total bust – after setting that up in the season 4 finale, it seems like the writers didn’t actually know how to pull it off, so substituted it for a smaller plot masterminded by someone who wasn’t even a villain until halfway through season 3.

That said, Shaw is an awesome villain – genuinely threatening but frequently funny (“If you were, you would have brought a coat. Silly.”). It’s hard to think of Brandon Routh as anyone other than the hilarious psychic vegan bassist from Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Word, but his character here – a symptom of a not-seen-enough side to Chuck, one which doesn’t pull punches and isn’t afraid to put bullets in the main cast – makes me sad that we’ve seen the last of him.

Otherwise, S5 has been mostly great. Action sequences are more ambitious and better-choreographed than ever, the references remain pleasingly modern, and the subversion of the Intersect from magic cure-all to a brain-melting scourge is the perfect way to put a lid on the whole thing. It’s a bit weird seeing Chuck himself being a decent fighter, hacker, shooter etc. without it – the initial appeal was, of course, seeing a complete dork fumble his way through international incidents – but hey, they’ve all got to grow up some time.

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