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Back Shelf Beauties
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The Cave If you are an actor, and you find out Morris Chestnut will be your co-star in a movie, you must get out of the movie by any means necessary! It's for your own good. Chestnut is like a movie plague with a horrible track record of starring in some of the worst, most absurd movies ever made, so you must run, call in sick, break your contract, join the circus, claim you have been drafted by the French Foreign Legion, start talking to yourself while in makeup so everyone thinks you are crazy and need to be fired or anything else necessary to get out of this movie and as far away from Chestnut as you can. Just one look at his filmography is all you need - Anacondas, Half Past Dead, Breakin' All The Rules and, now, The Cave. I feel sorry for him because he's not a bad actor. He just has bad luck. However, if Chestnut shows up in a Deuce Bigalow 3, I may personally fly out to Hollywood and take away his SAG card (I hope Chestnut gets the joke and has a good sense of humor, because he is a very large, muscular man). Cole Hauser stars as Jack - leader of the best diving and exploration team in the business. When an enormous, mysterious cave is discovered in a Romanian forest by Dr. Nicolai (Marcel Iures), Katherine (Lena Headley) and their scientific team, Jack and the diving squad are called in to help capture video footage of the underground caverns, map them out and see what they can find. Of course, while underground, the cave's opening collapses, forcing Jack, Tyler (Eddie Cibrian), Charlie (Piper Perabo), Buchanan (Morris "Ask For Your Refund Now" Chestnut), Dr. Nicolai, Katherine and the rest of the team (also known as the people you know are going to die) to find another way out, while also battling some sort of strange creatures they find down below. Who will live? Who will die? Will you want your money back? The Cave almost redefines bad with its non-existent dialogue, incompetent direction, C-level special effects and absurd story. It's truly a challenge to choose where I should begin. Director Bruce Hunt shouldn't be allowed to film a birthday party, let alone a major motion picture. The Cave is full of blurry, unintelligible action that is impossible to follow. Possibly, Hunt was compensating for the rubbery creatures (covered in some sort of Vaseline to make them look slimy) that are supposed to scare us while we laugh at their phoniness (I have seen muppets that scarier than these creatures), so I have to cut him some slack. However, writers Michael Steinberg and Tegan West have nowhere to hide. They complete an incompetence Bermuda Triangle that sucks all life out of this movie. The Cave has some of the worst dialogue I have ever heard. Exchanges between characters exist to barely describe the action and minor, overly simplistic and utterly ridiculous plot twists. Steinberg and West don't waste time developing characters, which is a sure sign they are just supposed to be lunch for the creatures instead of human beings we should care about. Even the audience picks up on this and starts to guffaw at each one's predictable and unoriginal demise. Even worse, the actors understand they aren't required to do much, so they start to coast. Sadly, Hauser puts in a laughable performance as Jack gets weirder and weirder as the expedition continues. He's not a bad actor, but his stiff, emotionless reading of lines only adds to the disaster. Yet, just when you think The Cave has reached new lows, Hauser gets worse and worse as the movie unspools before our eyes. I hope he ends up in a better movie next time around. The Cave is horrendous. I'm surprised no one hired Tara Reid for this one. SHE would be a scary monster. 0 Waffles (Out Of 4) Copyright 2005 - WaffleMovies.com
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