Jim McGraff - Episode 1

To tell you the truth, I have become increasingly irritated by PAMs over the years. For every good one, there would be atleast ten uninspired and boring ones, lacking in both style and inventiveness. Obviously this is not the case anymore, as we hardly have more than ten releases per year these days anyway, but you get my point. Luckily Jim McGraff belongs to the former category of PAMs, much thanks to the craziness of Dan Martin.

Jim McGraff was, if I have understood correctly, originally a character created by James Quicksell in an unfinished movie of his released in 2006. Dan apparently liked the character so much that he has made sure to include him in his movies ever since (or so I have been told, anyway), and now Jim has finally gotten a movie of his own. The premise, to the extent that there is one, is simple: Jim McGraff is on the run from the police for all the countless crimes he has committed. And that is basically all you need to know.

You see, McGraff truly is a PAM in every sense of the conception, giving us little to no explanation of who McGraff really is and what he is really up to. Instead we are in for a 15-minute ride of absolute craziness, with McGraff kicking his way in and out of seemingly impossible situations. Dan has, as others have pointed out before me, a great knack of knowing just when to hold back, and when not to. His timing of action and silly gags is nothing short of great, and has improved a lot since the days of JDR Revolutions and JDR Revival (which, I must admit, I was never a particularly huge fan of). One of the latter scenes including a female and McGraff hard at work does break up the action a little though.

McGraff has several moments worth mentioning, with the Billy Prison shrine and the “Whoah!! Yeah!!” bit of the final car chase being some of my favorites. The ridiculousness of Augustin the police officer and the references to Moderately Confused were also great. Others have critized the movie for having too many injokes, but I did not really see this as a huge problem. Granted, they did sometimes make me go “what was that all about?”, but they did not really subtract much from the overall experience. And if you got them, well, good for you. The Q&A bonus movie is a great addition to the release, sometimes explaining (but mostly making fun of) the illogical bits of of the film.

As we have come to expect from Dan Martin, the visuals look great without ever being overly complex. The exaggerated facial expressions work well with the overall silliness of the film, and some of the scenes are incredibly well constructed (again, the Billy Prison shrine being one of my favorites). It is, however, apparent that Dan has been lying on the lazy side when putting together some of the first scenes, which are not as goodlooking as the others.

Jim McGraff might not be a revelation in terms of 3DMM movies, or PAMs for that matter, but what Dan Martin does, he does better than most others who have been attempting on a PAM for the past three years. Jim McGraff has style, it has personality and last, but not least: it is entertaining. Despite its faults, that is all a decent PAM really needs.

8/10

Originally posted on www.3dmmspotlight.tk

[Dominator Dan]

Hahaha thanks a lot man! I understand about JDR, i watched Revival earlier actually, and oh god it was shite. Andres' review makes a ton of sense now, well.. it did back in 2004 but now I AGREE, haha yeah.

BUT YES, thanks for the review much appreciated

[Aaron Haynes]

I watched it (Revival) again a few weeks ago, and found the first half worse and the second half better than I remembered. Dan obviously wasn't sure what his movie was about until 10-15 minutes in. As a result, there's a long, uncomfortable period where the movie is grasping at any kind of reason to continue.

The second half gets all meta and doubles back in an attempt to correct all that and give it context, which is neat, but I can see how it didn't appeal to a fair amount of people.