Lazer Team

Let me start off by stating I am a long time fan of the entire Rooster Teeth brand. I will try and stay as unbiased as possible while I write this.

Considering this was RT's first attempt at a movie, they did a great job. Some of the special effects were visible placeholders and could have been improved with the added budget. And while we love the guest castings from the RT employees, most of their acting is terrible and wanting to have such a large say in the movie questionably dragged it down. (I'm looking at you, Burnie.) There's a lot of gripes that can be made, but considering how low their budget was and that the entire movie was funded directly by the fans it can be excused.

One thing to note though is that the entire movie is designed to be a love letter to the fans. Many of the exchanges between characters were filled with quotes and references to other products in the brand and were sprinkled with their trademark jokes. It has all the makings of a cult classic, full of Easter eggs directly aimed at the fans that a lot of people that the casual watcher wouldn't catch.

Overall, great first outing for the team. As long as you go into watching the movie without high standards and enjoy it as the campfest it was designed to be, you'll love it.

'LAZER TEAM': Three Stars (Out of Five)

A sci-fi action-comedy flick; directed, co-written and co-produced by Matt Hullum. Burnie Burns also co-wrote, co-produced and stars in the movie; which also costars Gavin Free, Michael Jones, Colton Dunn, Alexandria DeBerry and Alan Ritchson. It's the first feature film from Rooster Teeth Productions (which specializes in machinima); and they raised most of the budget for the movie, from a successful Indiegogo campaign. The story revolves around four incompetent losers, who are trained to save the world; when they accidentally stumble across a special alien power armor suit. I liked the special effects, and some of the humor, but ultimately I found it disappointing.

We learn, as the film opens, that Earth received a message, from peaceful aliens, decades earlier. After decoding it, we learned that we are going to be attacked, by evil aliens, and need to train someone to fight them. So a man, named Adam (Ritchson), is raised since birth, to be the 'Champion of Earth'. He will be sent a special 'power armor suit', by the peaceful aliens, to wear in battle. The ship containing the suit, is accidentally shot down, by four losers though. They then each become genetically attached, to different parts of the armor. So Earth's new plan, becomes to train these losers, to be 'Earth's champions'.

The movie kind of reminds me of the cult classic comedy flick 'SUPER TROOPERS'; except more geared towards kids. The film especially seems aimed at 'video game loving teenagers'. For that reason, I think a lot of the jokes are too silly, and somewhat forced. A lot of the performances are pretty weak as well (with a few exceptions). There is some witty commentary, about social media obsession though; and how it effects everyone's lives. The film also has some pretty cool looking special effects (as I said before), especially for such a low budget movie. It's not a complete waste of time, but it's nothing special either.

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Lazer Team (2016) is nothing more than mindless entertainment. While I can't call myself a current fan of Rooster Teeth, I did quite enjoy them when I was younger. I'm sure people who are actively following them and have grown to appreciate their sense of humor will find this film enjoyable. Still, the major problems lay within the script. Everything is played out and predictable, the attempts at one-liners are flat, and the story isn't even compelling. The special-effects are shoddy, some are fine while some are horrendous. This is a low-budget sci-fi flick, so that's to be expected, but the film relies on those effects too heavily. The acting is fine and everybody at least seems to be making an effort. The action is also pretty solid, but it suffers from being too foreseeable. Clichés are also something to be found throughout to point to where it just blatantly copies from other source materials. 'Lazer Team' is kinda fun but is also kinda annoyingly unoriginal.

When I first saw the poster and the IMDb rating of 7 - I was impressed and couldn't wait to watch the movie. However, I'm really disappointed that the hype couldn't deliver.

Some people argue that the story of "lazer team" could have been written by a child. But this doesn't have to be a bad thing. I found the plot to be interesting. Only the execution was poorly done. Why?

First of all - the characters are boring and annoying. I understand that comedies kind of live from stereotypical over exaggerated persona. But this was too much.

Do you knows this feeling when you're watching a bad horror movie and you think to yourself:"No, don't go there. You'll be killed. No, dude - don't go there.Oh, he's dead..."

"Lazer Team" is similar to that. Very predictable, flat jokes, boring character development. If this were made by a Youtube channel and only aired on Youtube - I wouldn't complain. But as a real movie - "Lazer Team" is just not good enough.

I had high hopes for this film. Rooster Teeth is one of the best online content producers hands down. Lazer Team was not up to the storytelling brilliance RT (Rooster Teeth) is known for.

The story falls very flat on its face. It was trying to be cleaver but came off as so generic, it was impossible to care about what happened next. The main characters (Lazer Team) are very forgettable. At no point in the film did I care about what would happen to them.

The acting in the film is hit and miss. The Lazer Team characters are surprisingly well acted, besides a few scenes with Bernie's character. The side characters were pretty bad. With the exception of Alan Richson's character, all the acting felt like it was from an Asylum Syfy flick.

The special and visual effects went from bad to mediocre. The alien designs were pretty ugly and uncreative. There were also several points during the film were I noticed obvious green screen shots as well as chroma key errors.

There are a few positives I have with the movie. The jokes are hysterical. Rooster Teeth excels at making clever jokes that hit their mark. I do want to note that I did have an issue with "crotch shot" jokes that happened over and over and over again. The first 3 or 4 were funny, but when it got to 7 or 8 "crotch shot" jokes, I stopped finding them funny. One other positive I had with the film was the picture quality. For a film not being shot with Hollywood cameras, the Red 4K cameras look beautiful.

Overall, I went into Lazer Team to see a great film and laugh throughout the movie. I unfortunately didn't like the film and don't even think that as a movie it is that great. However, I did laugh at most of the joke and I did love the references to many of the Rooster Teeth characters.