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Shelf Beauties |
Turistas If I learned one thing while
watching Turistas, it is that I will never travel outside of the United
States
EVER (not even Canada!).
Alex (Josh Duhamel), Pru
(Melissa George), Bea (Olivia Wilde), Finn (Desmond Askew), Amy (Beau
Garrett)
and Liam (Max Brown) are six tourists traveling by bus through the
Brazilian
jungle, in an area where the locals are upset with all of the outsiders
taking
advantage of them, when the bus crashes in a horrible accident. They all survive, but it
will be at least 10
hours before another bus comes to pick them up and take them to their
final
destination. While
waiting, they
discover a tropical paradise just down the road with a beautiful beach,
awesome
ocean water and a bar (it wouldn’t be a hedonistic paradise
without some
liquor). Turistas delivers all of the
prerequisite booty shaking, tiny bikinis, male six pack abs and bloody gore
promised in the commercials, but never rises very far above all that. Writer Michael Ross and director John
Stockwell set up an interesting, if familiar, situation that is fraught with
danger for our victims, but take too long to get to the heart of the danger. Our six turistas seem to be wandering around
aimlessly for most of the movie (while wearing tiny bikinis), and continue to
do so long after we have figured out they are doomed, and who is going to do
the dooming. Then, after briefly
delivering a shocking and scary fate for the turistas, Stockwell takes us
through one of the worst climactic chase scenes in the history of movies. You better hope the movie theater where you
see it has put a new lamp in the projector (the AMC Georgetown in DC probably
didn’t), because it all takes place in murky and dark conditions that are hard
to follow under the best of conditions. It
becomes impossible to tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and
the action slows down to a snail’s pace because of the place where the fight
happens. Going from the most intense
part of the movie to this kills any momentum Stockwell was able to gain for Turistas. Turistas has enough scary
stuff to make you feel like you weren’t completely cheated out of your ticket
money. We HAVE seen worse this year (Deck The Halls, A Good Year, The Wicker Man and The Omen all come to mind). Turistas is rated R for strong graphic violence and disturbing content, sexuality, nudity, drug use and language.
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