Welcome to Renegade Rant, my name is Shawn S. Lealos and you have entered my world. I want to talk about bad movies.

Before I get started, I want to talk about movies that seem to get low critical scores because they are fun movies. I’m talking about movies like G.I. Joe: Retaliation, where some critics feel the need to count off on them because they aren’t the new P.T. Anderson film. A movie can be a lot of fun, such as The Avengers, and those movies deserve to be treated with the same praise as a movie like Lincoln. Sure, it isn’t “high art” but movies are movies, some are serious and some are fun, and they all deserve to be treated equally as forms of entertainment.

With that said, there are some bad movies that some people defend that boggles my mind. This Renegade Rant will include major spoilers for both 2012 and Olympus Has Fallen, two horrible movies that have far too many defenders.

Now, I understand a lot of people hate these bad movies as much as me, but when I reviewed 2012 I received over 100 comments below the review defending the movie and calling me an idiot for hating it. They claimed that I was bashing the movie because it wasn’t a “high art” movie. As I mentioned at the start of this column, I don’t review movies in that manner. But there were people who wanted to attack me because of my hatred for that Roland Emmerich abortion.

Here is why I hate bad movies like 2012 and Olympus Has Fallen. The scripts exist only to create a spectacle and the story points are meaningless and – in the case of both of these movies – stupid.

I’ll start with 2012.

When I reviewed this bad movie, I called it the most nihilistic piece of trash I had seen in a long time. The only thing that Emmerich wanted to do with this movie was to destroy the entire earth. At least with movies like Independence Day, there were heroes and that movie was a hero’s tale. There were no heroes in 2012. The movie only existed to destroy the earth and kill as many people as possible. A movie without a good hero is not a good story – period.

John Cusack was not a good hero. His goal was to save his estranged family. That family had a new stepfather and he and Cusack never got along. Finally, there was a nice moment where Cusack and the new stepdad finally bonded. Cusack realized he was being a dick all along, and they apologized and Cusack promised to do better in the future. 30 seconds later the stepdad died. Cusack got out alive, went to be with his ex-wife and kids, and they made it look like they would rebuild their family. No one seemed to care that the stepdad was dead. I don’t even think they mentioned him again. He was just a loose plot point, eliminated and forgotten.

That is the kind of shit in this bad movie that pissed me off.

There was a scene where the President of the United States found a little girl wandering around the White House looking for her mother. He told her to sit on a chair and he would go and find her mom to reunite them. It was great, the President looking out for his people. He then went outside and realized that a giant wave was heading towards the White House. Bravely, he stood his ground and watched the wave crush him and destroy the White House, killing everyone there – INCLUDING THE LITTLE GIRL WE JUST SAW! Why was the scene with the little girl there? It was just there so Emmerich could gleefully kill her for our pleasure.

God, I hate this movie.

Don’t get me started on the people in Rome praying for God to help them, all dying while praying for help. It is a mean, cruel movie that only exists to show death and destruction, and the people who lived on the arcs mean jack shit in the grand scheme of things.

I don’t hate Olympus Has Fallen as much as 2012, but the decent reviews I have seen boggle my mind. This movie was not meant to show a nihilistic look at hatred like 2012. The movie exists to show a man heroically saving the President of the United States from terrorists. My problem is the script was written by a writer with the mentality of an eight-year-old. It was color by numbers in the simplest manner.

The President’s wife dies at the start of Olympus Has Fallen so Gerard Butler’s secret service agent can lose his job and end up on the outside in order to allow him to sneak back in to save the President. Then the movie gets underway with the bad guys killing about a thousand people in the streets of Washington D.C. to cause a distraction to allow them to get in. They all had photos of the President’s son because they needed him to force the President to reveal a code they needed. Then Gerard Butler saves the President’s son halfway through the movie, killing a lot of the tension.

Then they end up with the President’s code anyway, making the entire subplot of getting his son meaningless to the story, except to give Gerard Butler something to do for the first half of the movie. Then the main terrorist beats the shit out of Melissa Leo because a guy punching and slapping around a woman is something we want to see. Then the former secret service agent who helped the bad guys makes snide comments to the President and tries to kill Gerard Butler. When he loses and is dying, he admits he only betrayed the United States because “he lost his way.”

Give me a break.

This is a bad movie whose screenwriters hate you, and yet the IMDb users give it a 7.2 rating with over 9,000 votes and its Rotten Tomatoes score is even higher than G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Look, this is why Hollywood treats you like an idiot. If you support movies that are this dumb and then defend them to people who point out why they are bad, you deserve to see bad movies. Yes, the explosions and CGI is pretty, but don’t you want more from a movie? Shouldn’t even popcorn action films have a good story?

Stop supporting shitty bad movies and you might actually get something good.

This was Renegade Rant, and that is just the way it is.