NO BAD DAYS (2008) ** Ok, look, I know this isn't a very good movie, by any of the millions of particular standards. The Blair Witch Project style action filming doesn't work for the most part--although a couple of the pseudo psychedelic underwater cave shots are incredible-the plot is a half-page outline of every other action movie ever made, and the acting is generally terrible. But the Yucatan is a cool place to film-imagine how great it would have looked in focus, like the calmer barrio shots. Michael Madsen is really good, not perfect but good enough that he's fun and mean and it's really good that he isn't in more than ten minutes of it, because it's clear that he's in a different league than the other actors. Protasio looks tough enough to believe it, and he seems kind and gentle enough to be interesting and contradictory if not for the fact that he's not able to bring any depth to a character who was written in 1-D. None of it quite adds up, for a guy who never fails to have a drink in his hand he seems entirely immune to either the short or long-term effects of alcohol, it's as if the bartender must have really been serving him alcopops all these years or something. Heather Storm is substantially worse: the first inclination is to wonder why they didn't at least send her to acting school, then it dawns on you that she's just too fresh from it, and probably got pulled halfway through the semester: in every scene you can see her pondering, as hard as she can, just what great energy she's supposed to emit all over the place now. For all that it keeps moving along, and they kind of deserve each other, and you laugh involuntarily on occasion, and the music's locale authentic. But it's the kind of film where they deal with the Mayan calendar just enough to wonder what the hell they're talking about if you don't already know; and they consume hallucinogens (peyote is fairly mild compared to some of the other stuff on the Yucatan as I understand it; I had a friend who did graduate work on the multitudinous psychotropic mushrooms of the region) without your really being sure whether they did or not. Light, poorly done, relatively spirited and entertaining enough.
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