Down 'n Dirty (2001)

Renegade cop, everybody's-in-on-it, blah blah blah. But have I made it clear that I love Fred Williamson? He is amazing. Fred Williamson plays Fred Williamson in a movie about Fred Williamson directed by Fred Williamson. And look at that quality cover art. Quality!

SHOULD I WATCH IT?
Cop movies are a whole thing. It's nice to know the tropes and then groan your way through them. Most cop movies are absurdly alike and there's something comforting about that. Nice, predictable, classic. To me, anyway.

I will also go into detail now about Fred Williamson, because I am beginning to watch any of his films that I can get my hands on. He's one of those fellows who did the football-to-film transition (like Woody Strode, only with a kickin' moustache) and then transitioned from blaxploitation star to his own production company, Po' Boy Productions. He's a charismatic brother who, according to legend, was not picky about taking on a movie role so long as he punched people and got the girl in the end. He's always got a cigar in his mouth and makes his fingers into little kung-fu tiger claws when he fights. I love him to pieces. He's a dude who knows what he wants and makes it happen. How can you not applaud a career like that?

PARTICIPATION

1. Make a list of every cop movie trope you can think of. Call them out during the film.
2. Take a drink every time Fred grumbles "Yeah. Right."
3. Take a drink when Fred drops something.
4. Yell "safety's off!" when a cop violates a basic tenet of gun safety.
5. Do your favorite Kill Bill bit when David Carradine pops up.

THE SUMMARY
Our hero's name is Dakota Smith. I've started turning on the subtitles for almost every film I watch, but in this one I forgot to do so until about 10 minutes in, so I thought his name was Jack. No, it's Dak. Short for Dakota. Cop movie trope the first: badass, all-American name.

...what are you doing in my post, Joe Don Baker?
I mean, Thomas Jefferson Geronimo III.

It's the standard betrayal, cover-up, dirty politicians, whatever story that you really don't care to follow the details of because you are never really clear on who is who anyway. Dakota's partner is killed in a raid and, for whatever reason, the other cops on the scene try to immediately pin it on him? Like it's a set-up? But there's really no consequences. So Dakota runs around trying to uncover the scandal by strong-arming and threatening people while doing no other actual detective work, although I guess he's getting paid for something. Along the way he meets a sassy young photographer who helps him. But mostly Dakota Smith is grumpy old bastard who is clearly only a "detective" because of a terrible, stonewalling union, and people just sort of let him do whatever he wants. We hear names of bad cops, a DA, and some mobster and they're really kinda interchangeable because you don't see most of them until the last 30 minutes of the movie (because Gary Busey and David Carradine don't come cheap).

One of my favorite things about Dakota Smith is that he is clumsy. It's probably not intentional on the part of the filmmakers, but an integral component to his character - and his survival - is that he has butterfingers. First, in what appears to be a bad take, he's leaving a convenience store with a teetering heap of snacks for him and his teenage son. He drops a corn dog on the asphalt, awkwardly picks it up, and then continues to the car to give it to his son. This is the introduction to our scene establishing that he's a good dad. Sometimes it's really worth it to get that second take.

Just pick out the cigarette butts, it's good for you!

Later, he drops his cigar, which saves him from an assassin's bullet. He literally trips on a tripwire, the fall of which causes the wall-mounted gun to miss. Finally, he drops his keys. It's only because he bends down to pick them up that he sees a huge red wire of a freaking bomb sticking out of his car door.

So what we have here is a hero who does not have detective skills, and isn't the guy on the force with the crack shot... rather, he is incredibly clumsy and lucky. It's never a good thing when your hero's arc is propelled by blind luck. Maybe it's a self-aware joke on the part of Fred Williamson and his aging film crew: how they're turning into old men and doing old man things like forgetting to pick up their wife's prescription and calling their kids to help them turn on the WebTV because it "started acting funny". I really would have liked a scene, then, wherein Dakota Smith busts out a pair of reading glasses.

But this isn't the case, because the film takes great care to establish that our 63 year-old star is lusted after by all the ladies.

All.

The.

Ladies.

Even the widow of his partner!

(Wait, Fred was 63 when he made this? Damn, lookin' good. I mean. What?)

It's kind of refreshing when the process behind a film is clearly a bunch of dudes having a good time and living out their pussy-chasing vigilante dreams. They don't take themselves too seriously and they're not ashamed of what they're putting out into the world. However cheesy a film is, you gotta give them respect for that. Maybe somebody collects their cat's vomit and shapes it into stegosauruses to put in small dioramas scattered throughout their mother's basement. By God, shake their hand and say "good for you!".

The only thing cop-movie-making dudes fantasize about more than getting tail is fun-lovin' hazing, like firing off a couple rounds at the gun range... aimed at each other.

I want to say this is terrible and grossly insulting to police officers, but given the headlines these days, I start to think maybe the writer did some hard research into gun policy here.

I do, however, love the (sadly lacking number of) scenes featuring this teddy bear cop. He was a little excited to perfect his 'do halfway through filming, and took the coif in for a Franciscan monk kind of look.

I just wanna snuggle him!

...and then tell him there's no shame in going bald, but there is shame in a high-sheen combover that is capable of alerting aircraft to your position... oh. I suppose this is Bubba Smith, yet another football player-turned-actor, who died in 2011. Too soon? I'll snuggle him in the afterlife. (In the meantime, Fred, call me.)

There's also a really awkward scene involving a female traffic cop. She's writing our detective a ticket and then he, like, tries to get out of it? I think? The scene goes on for way too long and has no point. This wincing actress also looks really uncomfortable. Maybe she was an actual traffic cop and as the production van was getting an actual ticket, Fred was like "hey, I'll put you in our movie if you don't give us the ticket", proving that art does imitate life and life imitates art. After all, if you can't afford a second corn dog and you can't afford Bubba Smith (seriously, is it too soon?), you probably can't afford a parking ticket, either.

As a special treat, I will end this post with some fresh rhymes from the title song.

Do you really wanna call Dakota?

Everybody out here is dependin' on him

Do you really wanna call Dakota?

Everybody wanna know what Dakota gonna do

Do you really wanna call Dakota?

Everybody is out there watching him

Do you really wanna call?

Do you really wanna call?

Do you?

Absolute Zero (2006)

With a catchphrase that will make you want to physically accost the screenwriter, this made-for-TV disaster flick revolves around the premise that the magnetic field of the earth can flip on a dime and that's what makes things cold. Prepare to roll your eyes directly out of your skull.

SHOULD I WATCH IT?
Yes. These 2000s disaster movies have a special place in my heart (and in hell). If you advanced beyond the 5th grade, such films cause you to suspect that you should be having cocktails with Stephen Hawking. You also start to feel not so bad about the times you've found yourself hating humanity. This can be a reassuring exercise. Normally I label myself a humanist, and spend a lot of time personally working to practice non-judgment... but once in a while it's nice to bathe in smug superiority. Disaster movies are the death-by-chocolate of mental desserts.

Another great one is the Asylum's 2012: Ice Age, which is actually the film I wanted to watch, but it was no longer available on Netflix. I'm trying to start the tradition of watching a bad snowstorm-themed movie when the first snow falls. It's a good excuse to snuggle up with cocoa, popcorn, and a tall boy of Milwaukee's Best from the convenience store. A true celebration of all things terrible.


PARTICIPATION

1. Take a drink every time someone says "science is never wrong".
2. Take a drink every time someone makes a global warming joke.
3. Brainstorm the implied layout of the Antarctica research base. Include the location of the Office Depot.
4. Post-film discussion. Who is more annoying: the computer genius character in Absolute Zero or the computer genius character in Jurassic Park? Explain.

THE SUMMARY
Jeff Fahey is a "scientist" who does research on magnetism and its effects on Making Stuff, Like, Really Cold. He has a big lab where he somehow brings it down to absolute zero in a controlled environment. Now, I don't know much about the details of temperatures that halt all molecular motion, but in the first five minutes, I had a feeling that maybe this wasn't going to be the most accurate depiction of science in a film ever. We're then aptly introduced to the... ugh... catchphrase:

Someone call Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is a Level 5 fallacy emergency.

See, science is wrong all the time. I don't mean from a creationist standpoint. I mean that the idea of science is to form ideas based on current evidence, then test that evidence with experimentation. Being wrong is part of science at its most fundamental level. If you're doing science right, you're open to the possibility that you made an error and need to re-form your hypothesis and test again to come closer to truth. And every time technology or statistics advance, we find new evidence that previously-held concepts might need further investigation and testing. SCIENCE IS WRONG ALL THE TIME. Lawnmower Man is talking about pseudoscience, which is never wrong in the case of delusional narcissists who hand-pick data to justify the values they know are wrong but are too scared to consciously challenge, because doing so would shake the foundations of their small and bitterly disappointing human existence, Dad.

...I mean... Jeff Fahey.

So, back to our main character. It's the classic trope of the guy who sees everything coming, and tries to warn people, and nobody listens. He's sent off to Antarctica as a distraction to investigate some general weirdness that's happening. There's a cute little rover with the words "ROVER" emblazoned upon it (note: it's a rover) that finds human remains in a cave. Upon one glimpse of the grainy footage, the scientists determine the frozen body is 10,000 years old. People in this movie are really good at pinpointing, to the day, things that happened tens of thousands of years ago. The end of the world can also be predicted (and is constantly shown to the audience) in the format of a countdown timer, to the second.

My favorite part about Antarctica is that the production crew was too cheap to grab more than the one valu-pak of soap flakes, so the "snow" is clearly a carpet with a thin dusting of stuff on top. You can constantly see the carpet bunching up under actors as they walk around.

It's like you're THERE, you guys.

All right, so after literally everyone else is killed in a freak storm, Jeff Fahey returns to Miami in the next scene. Don't ask questions. It just happened. We're also introduced to one of his colleagues and his wife (previously our hero's girlfriend), their daughter, and two college students who are trapped in the friendzone.

I will give credit where credit is due. Taylor Swift and Seth Rogen are not as irritating as they could have been here.

The rest of the film is, of course, everything getting really cold and our cast struggling to get to the lab where they will inexplicably be safe. We watch mom leave her 9 year-old daughter in a corridor, to face the end of the world alone, while she tries to rescue Corporate Asshole Guy in an elevator, despite the fact that he's totally trying to kill her. Parenting! Simultaneously we have to, of course, do some computer hacking to restore the power. There's also some absolute-zero-proof environmental suits that are in the building somehow. Obviously, you have to go outside for the big climax.

Did I mention that this is all because the magnetic field of the earth randomly flip-flopped?

Oh my God, Lawnmover Man has other people saying it now, too.

My frontal lobe is missing.

This has backfired. I was feeling so smart. Now I can't feel anything.

NO. IT'S NOT TRUE.