“You shouldn’t think of her as a woman. That would be a mistake.”
Criticize director Steven Soderbergh all you want for casting someone who isn’t an actual actor to lead a star rich action film, but director Steven Soderbergh accomplishes something studios are often too narrow minded to try. He casts a woman who is brawn, beauty, and brains all in one. While Hollywood and directors have a fetish for casting wafer thin women who look as if they can barely hold a pencil let alone a machine gun (I’m looking at you Milla Jovovich), star Gina Carano is a woman who is built like a fighter in every sense of the word and approaches every single brilliantly staged fight scene with competence and believability, because there’s no doubting a woman of her presence can handle a man two times her size.
Director Joseph Kahn basically creates the “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” of slasher movies, a movie so meta and so self-aware that a subset of audience members may be convinced this movie is actually an affirmation of the fads this movie tackles. I imagine some folks will smile thinking “He really gets us” while Kahn is pointing and laughing at them in the background. Kahn seems to have little respect or regard for people in to fads and spends most of the movie skewering just about everyone in this odd vacuum of cyclical nostalgia and retro crap with a modern age lacking an actual identity of its own. “Detention” is a film that many movie fans will either love or hate. I often fell in to the category of despising it but also kept dabbling in the area of admiration for being so unpredictable and original.
For a purported comic genius his knuckle dragging fans claim he is, Seth McFarlane really does lob something of a soft ball in his cinematic debut. I can just imagine Seth one day playing with a teddy bear and giving it foul language in his Peter Griffin voice while laughing hysterically and snorting another line off his Asian hooker’s backside, thus leading to writing the script for “Ted.” McFarlane’s cinematic debut is nothing short of abysmal and infantile with the basis of the film centered on a talking live teddy bear with a foul mouth and serious sex addiction. His owner and friend is a man child whose own immaturity borders on mental retardation at times. But hey, “Family Guy” fans might just find this to be genius. Because talking inanimate objects is comedy gold apparently.