Travis wrote:Supposedly in the first draft, one of the new recruits came out as gay in the movie.
That was in an early draft of the first movie. The character, Richard, was a youngster (Sly had already met with Kellan Lutz and Liam Hemsworth before he scrapped the role) who came in to replace Gunnar in the team.
First shows in Paris (yesterday at before 2PM) took more than
30% less than EX2 (which had the higher score in France) with 1403 admissions (2105 for EX2). It's still the higher score of the new releases but we'll see if it can get the first spot of the week all releases included (with LUCY and GARDIANS OF THE GALAXY still taking names) which less likely...
So, past my boredom and disappointment of the first viewing (and knowing what you're in for), the second time gets much much better and it feels less like a movie in "fast forward". But it still does everything wrong (especially after the first two action sequences). I can take it for what it is but even as such, I find the last battle to be tasteless and edited horribly. The problem is they try so hard making it "fast paced and furious" that there is no dramatization or storytelling of the action (which any good action film will have) and the fights so it's a mishmash of random stuff all over the place so it doesn't matter (even more when you see the anti-"payoff" of the end).
Another big flaw is to have pasted Brian Tyler's music of the previous movies instead of having new cues (or at least re-orchestrated) composed over each bit of action (that is not gonna fit as well if you just lift a cue that was made for another movie). The worst is that Patrick Hugues had a new theme composed by Tyler when they were still filming it, and he was playing it over playback to get an idea of how it edit together (and I quite liked it). So I assume much more new music was composed, yet apart from a few cues (notably for Banderas scenes and the museum takeover) most of the new material was trashed (as were a lot of the stars big moments) during post-production and most of the remaining score was lifted from the previous movies (which feels old and lessens the impact of the action scenes)...