I can’t believe Disney just let Verbinski do literally anything he wanted. A total disaster, and yet, it remains wildly entertaining compared to most Marvel and Star Wars flicks coming out these days.
Absolutely love the locker sequences, all the Jacks, the well-choreographed and beautifully shot climax, and the truly ludicrous amount of back stabbing and double crosses. It genuinely makes no sense.
It’s fascinating how good the CGI is. Very little of this looks bad. It’s aged magnificently, and looks genuinely better than today’s movies. No shaky cam to blur it, and no night time fights to hide the CGI. (In fact, the only obvious green screen takes place in the over-exposed locker — go figure.)
And Hans Zimmer’s score is excellent. You can hear him experimenting with all the ideas and motifs that led him to Inception a couple years later, and there are a few moments where I recognized motifs Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross would base their entire Hollywood careers on in The Social Network. Really polished work.
Nearly an hour long by any measure, and that’s being generous, and entirely exhausting, but also way more fun than any current franchise.