At the end of the very forgettable 1984 ski movie, Hot Dog, the
protagonists decide to settle their quarrels by competing in a “Chinese
Downhill.” In one of the movie’s few jokes, an Asian companion of the
heroes—who has heretofore not uttered a word of English—asks, “What the fuck is
a Chinese Downhill?” Allow me to answer that question. A Chinese Downhill is
any movie ending that—lacking any shred of originality, purpose, or
reason—simply devolves into a chaotic and completely stupid string of car
chases, mindless violence, death, and mayhem. This boring cliché is to be
expected of a low-rent mess of a movie like Hot Dog but some
viewers expect something a little more sophisticated in big-budget productions,
many of which make Hot
Dog look like Citizen
Kane. A paroxysm of bomb blasts and gunfire is a pretty lousy substitute
for good writing, it’s not even a substitute for really bad writing.
I have said before that if the trailer for a movie has
more than one explosion you can almost bank on the fact that the film will be a
complete piece of shit, and you can double-down on that if the actors are shown
diving away from a bomb blast going at the speed of sound as if they are
dodging a lazily tossed beach ball. If the end of the movie has a host of
explosions and people diving out of the way it means that the writers (bad
movies almost always have lots of writers) had nothing in the way of ideas on
how to bring their story to a close.
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