Out in Theaters: THE LAZARUS EFFECT

February 26, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Danny Glover, David Gelb, Evan Peters, Jeremy Slater, Luke Dawson, Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sarah Bolger, The Lazarus Effect 2 Comments

There are some movies that are actively bad and others that are actively nothing. The Lazarus Effect falls in the later category. The tripping-over-its-own-feet script from Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater is a hodgepodge of horror movie tropes that fails to deviate from the path most traveled. In following that oh-so-familiar road to nothingness, they prove they came prepared without anything new to say, much less add to the genre.

The characters within Lazarus are fine, more too-well-defined horror cliches, and are notably bolstered by a quartet of compelling actors including Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Evan Peters and Danny Glover all giving the DOA material a faint jolt of life. As the bands research into coma patients and DMT begin to prove viable to reanimate animals from beyond the grave, the lazarus serum is born and a series of one-location events are set in motion.

Before long, the ragtag team of scientists – followed on camera by student documentarian Eva (Sarah Bolger) – are able to bring a pooch that had been put down back to life through the Frankensteinian power of electricity and potassium. Yay bananas. As its heart starts beating again, the dog’s aggression levels spike as does its ability to pull a Lucy and control 100% of its brain – whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Psychic shit happens.

As you’ve probably gathered, the experiment goes even further awry and Olivia Wilde’s Zoe is killed by a surge of electricity because she (awwww) forgot to take off her engagement ring. Unable to resuscitate her, hubbie-to-be Frank (Duplass) slaps her on his science slab and demands the group assist in injecting her with their very much still-in-development serum. As one would anticipate from a mile away, his shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to science has some nasty, horror-moviesque implications when Zoe wakes up and doesn’t quite feel like herself.

Up to this point, The Lazarus Effect has only committed the horror cardinal sin of, well, not being very scary. It has a few thing-appears-out-of-nowhere moments to surprise the crowd into a yelp or two but absolutely nothing actually scary or even worthy of note. But as the movie continues, it’s as if it actively tries to disarm its own internal sense of spookiness. Themes of science and the divine are explored in the context of hell but that plot-thread is all but abandoned before anything of worth comes from it. As for the inevitable kills, there is nothing imaginative or memorable in the slightest of ways, just a series of underwhelming, ashen disposals seemingly at the hands of a real pacifist .

The PG-13 horror movie hasn’t had a hit in a long while and with the MPAA stamping The Conjuring with a R-rating simply because it was deemed “too scary”, these all audience entries into the horror genre such as The Lazarus Effect and last year’s much worse Ouija make me question whether it’s even truly possible to have an effective PG-13 horror flick. Because if the bloodless, scareless nature of The Lazarus Effect serves as any indication, it surely doesn’t seem like it.

In the annals of horror past, the greats stand out in large part because of their inventive spirit. Something that Lazarus has almost none of. It’s Hollow Man (Hollow Woman) means Reanimator (ReanimateHer) and if the film didn’t have the good fortune of Duplass, Wilde and co. working for it, it would be even more dismissible and dopey. David Gelb was able to do something truly special within the documentary world with Jiro Dreams of Sushi making it just that much more of a shame to see him fail so acutely with his dull attempt.

Exiting the theater, one man turned to another and said, “It was alright but I can’t imagine paying $10 to see it” and that pretty much hits the nail on the head. At only 83 minutes, The Lazarus Effect is filmic premature ejaculation embodied, suffering from creative ED and hardly able to justify even half of its theatre asking price. For the real h-buffs, there’s nothing here worth seeing on the big screen so if you’re inevitably going to gobble it up, make sure you do so at home.

D+

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Out in Theaters: FOCUS

February 25, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Focus, Glenn Ficarra, John Requa, Margot Robbie, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Will Smith

Focus lacks almost entirely in its namesake, flopping from one light-fingered narrative point to another, despondently coasting off the star power of its two sugary leads until its thinly veiled, ill-constructed story finally peters to an unsatisfying halt. As a discernible comeback vehicle for Will Smith‘s equally stalled career, Warner Bro’s one hundred million dollar gamble is just that; a hundred million dollar gamble. The blue chips come piled high on Smith’s stock but all the flash and pizzaz in the world can’t distract us from the real pressing questions at hand: where did all that money go?

A motif of Focus is to keep your eyes on the prize but the sheer impenetrable nature of Hollywood budgets is more than sufficient to keep us from ever being able to answer that posed question with any degree of clarity. As Focus attempts to pull off a magic trick on screen, the only slight of hand I see is transforming a hundred million dollars into this utterly disposable lark. Though undeniably stylish and as easily digestible as baby food, Focus ultimately lets down the intoxicating and downright sexy promise of Will Smith and Margot Robbie with blasé character arcs and vapid twists that come nowhere close to conjuring the imaginative, cunning power they ought.

As with any film predicated on gambits, a ruse can only be as astonishing as it is purchasable. The prestige only works if we sign off on the pledge. You can’t properly make the turn when the road is this straight and narrow. Focus gambles on its intelligence, assuming it’s slick enough and smart enough to shake off our suspicions. But upon entering, we taste the rank stench of bankrupt storytelling on our tongues the air is so thick with it. For all ye who enter, surprised ye shall not be.

Trying to pull the wool over our eyes is Smith’s tactfully reckless Nicky Spurgeon. Operating solely on a vast ocean of charisma, Nicky is a notoriously cold-blooded machine running on pilfered Rolexes and swiped wallets. Maintaining a mild empire of looters and cheats, Nicky’s illegal enterprise runs as smoothly as a Mercedes-Benz assembly line, flipping nabbed billfolds and eBaying stolen iPads to the syncopated beat of a factory whistle. The arrival of amateur con-artist Jess (Robbie) threatens to overturn Nicky’s emotionless ways as he takes her under his wing to teach her the tricks of the trade and ends up with more than he bargained for.

The official synopsis of Focus describes Nicky’s latest scheme interrupted by a femme fatale from his past. What it fails to mention is that the history between Nicky and Jess is established in the first 60 minutes of the film and the whole “latest scheme” thing is a rushed hustle that gets less than half of the film’s run time. Thusly, the meat of the picture is contained in Focus‘ final 44-minute helping, a frustratingly humdrum afterthought of a narrative appendage that is tasked with the impossible function of making up the second and third act. By the time the laughably lengthy introduction flips its “Three Years Later” card, it feels like the movie has already ended. And our patience is more than well worn.

Tit for tat, Focus isn’t all bad though. For every misstep writer/director team John Requa and Glenn Ficarra take, Smith and Robbie amp up their alluring sorcery to compensate, selling their product as a genuine Fudgsicle when we can tell it’s really a dressed-up poopsicle. Smith’s cocky charm is a suit that fits him nicely and it’s nothing short of a relief to see him back on the big screen trying it on again while Margot Robbie continues to shape herself into a coveted Hollywood figurine. Powered by so much more than just her angelic looks, she oozes chemistry like a broken DIY science kit.

With enough charm in the tanks to partially power a date night, Focus intermittently manages to overcome a narrative buckling under its lack of realism and forethought but only in periodic fits and starts. Will it be enough to jump start Smith’s downward-trending career? Probably not. Though he hardly comes out of the wholly lackluster picture blemished.

C-

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Out in Theaters: HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2

February 19, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Adam Scott, Chevy Chase, Clark Duke, Craig Robinson, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Josh Heald, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rob Corddry

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 doesn’t quite make you wish you could go back in time and stop yourself from attending…and then its characters rape each other. Yes, I mean that literally. Puerile, potty-mouthed and purposeless, this five-years-later sequel has the audacity to jettison the whole “likable losers” appeal of the original in favor of three wash-outs crashing parties in the future, solving a hackneyed murder mystery. When John Cusack can’t be bothered to join the reunion party (last year, he had four films score 10% or lower on Rotten Tomatoes), you can assume the settings are off but little can prepare you for how uninspired and piecemeal this never-should-have-happened follow-up is. Set phasers to shun.

In the aftermath of Hot Tub Time Machine, our characters have settled in nicely using their knowledge of future events to make themselves rich and famous. Lou (Rob Corddry) ripped off some Motley Crew songs (renamed *sigh* Motley Lou) before inventing Lougle (yes *sigh* that’s a rip-off of Google) to the tune of someodd billion dollars. Craig Robinson‘s (at least marginally affable) Nick has gone on to rip off countless artists from The Black Eyed Peas to Nirvana and for it is a celebrated artist struggling with identity issues. Well no shit you thieving hack. Cusack, as mentioned, is nowhere to be seen – there’s a brief mention that he penned a popular sci-fi book about Time Lords or whatnot – and we’re lead to believe that Clark Duke‘s baby-faced Jacob just vegged out on the couch and didn’t pursue fame and fortune like his other time traveling cohorts.

Corddry’s Lou is an absolute dick of a human being and a test to withstand. He’s reprehensible in a most off-putting way, so much so that I couldn’t remember if he was this much of a churlish asshole in the original or if his obnoxious, off-putting nature had been ratcheted up to fit the sequel quota of “bigger is better”. Nevertheless, his dickishness leads to his near immediate demise (in a lights-flickering thunderstorm no less) and the trio is forced to travel back in time (more on this soon) to solve his murder before it ever happens.

It stands to reason that a movie with “hot tub time machine” in the title doesn’t make any sense but the time travel aspects of this film are even more misshapen and whacked out than they once were and our “heroes” wind up in the future – but a future that is still their past. Or something like that. They need to get blackout drunk in order to operate their sudsy time machine, unless screenwriter Josh Heald deems that there’s not enough time to get into another pill-popping, cocaine-eating montage and then it just works with the press of a button. And did I mention that the characters at one point are forced to rape each other? And I don’t mean implied rape, I mean bent-over, screaming-at-the-top-of-your-lungs rape. I just don’t know what to say…

Perhaps the most distracting element of the film is the one that sums it up best: the arrival of the etherial repairman. In the role, Chevy Chase throws down one of the worst cameo appearances of all time, reprising his shtick as a “grandfather time” figure in what might just be the least enthusiastic onscreen appearance of the last decade. You couldn’t have paid him money to make him look less happy to be there. But that pretty much sums up the film in its entirety though: a bunch of people wondering what they’re doing in the midst of a completely defunct comedy. It’s not really a shock that director Steve Pick (Hot Tub Time Machine, About Last Night) falls so hard on his face but it’s nonetheless embarrassing to watch.

Robinson, newcomer Adam Scott and even Corddry give it their all – and do manage to cull some immature laughs with their frequent, obviously improvised riffing – but it’s just far too little in a film that’s far too creatively barren. The actors hack at each other as best they can but their comedy is crude, mean-spirited, cheap and often just sad. In summation: the characters are forced to rape each other.

D+

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Out in Theaters: MCFARLAND USA

February 19, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Carlos Pratts, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, McFarland USA, Morgan Saylor, Out in Theaters, Reviews

Apparently there’s a place in America called McFarland. Home of the “pickers”, flatlands of the Meheecans, McFarland is California-as-fly-over-state and the perfect staging grounds for an inspirational underdog story. Almost Steinbeckian in its desperate position of agricultural purgatory, McFarland is a training grounds for drop-outs and inmates, the kind of small town that plants their state pen adjacent to their high school with traffic between the two state institutions resembling the systematic marching of ants. But the days of crop picking woes are thrown out the window when a white man sport (cross country running) rears its dignified head and the white man (Kevin Costner) saves the day.

Hollywood has a long history of the flipping the noble savage equation on its head, planting a savior of a white dude in a pit of assorted-colored serpents and seeing what happens when you mix things up. Cool Runnings did it with Jamaicans and bobsleds, James Cameron did it with CGI and the Na’vi, Stand and Deliver did it with James Olmos and Math. In McFarland USA, Disney does it with distance-running Mexicans. It’s the seventh son of a scheming formula that’s as crowd-pleasing as it is emotionally manipulative. And if anyone does emotionally-manipulative right, it’s Disney. Sometimes.

Costner is Jim White, a high-school football coach who gets the proverbial boot when he hucks a cleat at a sassy quarterback and ends up knicking his country club face. It’s one of those classic coaching accident. No pain, no gain right? Unfortunately Coach Taylor’s “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” doesn’t really apply when you rough up the ol’ student athlete population. Fired and marked with the scarlet letter of “abuser of children”, White has few options on his once silver platter and is forced to uproot his family of four. Arriving in the dusty nowhere of McFarland, the Whites – if this weren’t based on a true story, the choice of last name would earn far more commentary – are faced with the harsh reality that their the only white face in a hundred mile stretch and the only chow joints in town are taquerias. And they don’t even serve burgers.

The White family fits into the town like pepperoni pizza into a tamale. Realizing they’re in hostile territory when a bunch of low-riders cruise by bumping the bass (a terrifying prospect), White vows to wife Maria Bello that he’ll get his family out of his Mexican-inhabited lion’s den with two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Playing the oh-so-intriguing role of “supportive wife”, she backs Jim out of his fight-or-flight instinct with the calm rationale that he’s about as desirable a teacher as Mama June is a bikini model. She might have suited up just fine back in her heyday but nowadays the prospects of such a fit aren’t so hot.

As is expected with these kinds of films, Costner’s White becomes an integral part of the community in less time than it takes a Kenyan to clock in a mile, recruiting himself for a position as a cross country coach (met with your standard issue ignorancia response of “cross country what?”) and assembling a sextet of hardworking, fast-running Mexican students because “Damn, look at that boy run!” When he locks down casual sprinter/day-laborer-in-the-making Thomas (Carlos Pratts) – who also serves as a low-broiling love interest for White daughter Julie (Morgan Saylor; 21 playing 15) – the prospects of a McFarland cross country team begins to bloom. The dustbowl of a town sees its first true spark of promise rising like the harsh sun above their endless fields of cabbage.

The ups and downs of McFarland USA are as calculatedly high and low as the mounds of discarded almond shells that the runner boys practice on. Dramatic tension is invented for no reason beyond an assumed need for dramatic tension – the Quinceañera parade scene being an aggressive offender of bait-and-swing melodramatic hogwash AND a complete editing miff – while various character arcs are forecast from the moment they arrive on set. A roguish hero with a troubled past overcomes the odds to become a champion, you say? How novel.

That isn’t to say that it doesn’t actually work though. In fact, McFarland USA can be downright rousing, with Antônio Pinto‘s soaring eagle score (complimented by Terry Stacey‘s flag-brandishing cinematography) borderline forcing you at sonic gunpoint to tearfully cheer on its underdogs, even through hard-trained knowledge that McFarland‘s outcome will be as predictably cheerful as a Quinceañera in Beverly Hills. It’s the kind of heart-warming Disney sports movie that serves up its schmaltz in thick, gooey gobs, the brand of pick-me-upper to bring your little league team to but never bother to dig into the meaning behind it. Because beyond the surface layer of faux inspiring hooey balooey, there really isn’t much else there. After all, McFarland USA, or How Kevin Costner Saved the Mexicans From Picking More Crops, doesn’t actually concern itself with going beneath the skin. Even if it did, there really isn’t much else there that needs to be said. Or seen.

C

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Out in Theaters: WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

February 18, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Jonathan Brugh, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rhys Darby, Taika Waititi, What We Do in the Shadows 1 Comment

From 1984 to 2006, Christopher Guest lampooned perplexing cultural phenomenons from dog shows to community theater. Guest was quick to caricature and mock but never did so in lieu of creating earnest characters. Rather, his work paired the easy-to-poke-fun-at ludicrousness of small town obsessions with the genuine earnestness of their salt-of-the-earth makeup. For every Meg and Hamilton Swan and their posh Weimaraner, there was a Harlan Pepper and his basset hound. Were Guest still making movies today, one might expect his signature mockumentary stylings to take on child beauty pageants or vocal protest groups. Or vampire flatmates. Read More

Out in Theaters: FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Dakota Johnson, E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Dornan, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sam Taylor-Johnson

When I’m in the mood to do the pant’s dance, you won’t find me reaching for airport smut the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey. Rather, I prefer my sex with a little, uh, sex. I have been told the crop of humans that find this lewd drivel titillating are mostly repressed housewives and jittery virgins. Even then I find it hard to believe that the virginal palette is whetted by domestic abuse dressed up as BDSM and that housewives crave the kind of punishment on display in Fifty Shades of Grey. I imagine the more apt female fantasy involves turning the table and gaining the whip rather than submitting to an older, powerful, pain-obsessed billionaire. I’m willing to admit that maybe I just don’t get it but I have an inclination that I’m standing on the right side with this one.

Fifty Shades of Grey is fifty shades of shady. It’s porn for people who don’t watch porn – filled with nudity (you even snag a glimpse of shaft-top), playroom tools (Mr. Grey keeps his own personal, in-house red light district stocked to the brim but never gets around to using any of his actual instruments. When he does finally turn to his tool box of BDSM trinkets, he uses an ordinary belt? Really? But you have a wall STOCKED with sick canes?!), and waiting – but the film is improbably light on actual sex. And, more importantly, sex appeal. For a movie that’s two hours of contrived tension and nothing in the way of plot, the payoffs suffer creative erectile dysfunction en masse and fail to tick the arousal dial even slightly clockwise.

It’s no surprise to learn that the concept from Fifty Shades was explicitly born from “Twilight” fan fiction. Doing my best to know as little as possible about these kinds of things, I had no idea this was the case when I turned to my girlfriend during the screening and said, “This is just Twilight without the vampires”. After over two hours of Fifty Shades though, I was begging for Twilight. That should give you a sense of just how putrid a product Sam Taylor-Johnson‘s adaptation of E.L. James‘ bestselling romance novel truly is. At least Twilight had a story.

Starring two nobodies that no-one cares about – Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan – Fifty Shades of Grey purports the telling of a peculiar love story but to call what unfolds a story is unfittingly generous. A story involves characters being forced to make choices and subsequently developing because of those choices, their relationships thickening as various circumstances swirl around them, pushing them hither and thither. Fifty Shades revolves around one choice – whether Ana will submit to the dominant Mr. Grey – and only by curtain time has our character made her choice. It’s 125-minutes of will-they-or-won’t-they BDSM-lite cinematic garbage and to spent any more time discussing the “plot” is a waste of resources, yours and mine both.

Perhaps what is most off-putting about the whole affair is (my admittedly personal) perception that the sexual acts that take place are in no way, shape or form sexy. Their bumping uglies is either as awkward as losing your V-card or as painful to watch as sitting through Blue is the Warmest Color with your parents, and Taylor-Johnson has little to offer in terms of variety to spice things up. Surely she was handed a pile of narrative yuck so it’s hard to put the blame on her for trying to dress that yuck up as pretty as she could. In the midst of the second act, the movie appears as if it might switch gears and turn its engines to full steam ahead but just piddles out shortly thereafter and gets back to the will-they-won’t-they grind.

Not having read the source material, I genuinely wonder if this kind of novella smut could have ever made a good movie. The plain truth of the matter is Fifty Shades of Grey just isn’t a story. There’s no three act structure. There’s hardly characters so much as denuded cardboard cut-outs sticking themselves into each other, brewing with overt undertones of sexual violence.

Damian Grey’s misunderstanding of consensual sexual congress comes cloaked in contracts, a fact that should be an immediate red-flag for any self-respecting female. “Oh, I need to sign my rights away in order to bone you? Sounds legit!” When asked what she gets out of the deal, Grey purrs, “Me”. Fucking spare me.

When Mr. Grey does let his demons out of the closet and sparks the engines on his lingering dungeon tools, his coital playbook is closer in form to The Rapes of Wrath and Ho-piercer than the soft femininity of Nicholas Spark’s The Throatbook. Even then – in the midst of an aggressive buttocks bludgeoning – I had trouble feeling anything towards the lip-biter on the receiving end because she asked for it AND had a carefully-outlined safe word prepared. If only there had been a safe word to make this movie stop.

Those sexually-repressed tittering housewives looking to get their jollies off in the biggest budget, softest soft-core porno ever, will find their faces fully flushed, hooting and hollering as the hot bodies on screen run their whips across bared flesh and eventually insert themselves in one another. Those who’ve gotten lost in a Borders to find themselves surrounded by self-same covers of disposable romantic novels – those with the bare-chested hunks and the impossibly helpless damsels dangling from them – and have run screaming, those poor few ought prepare for the absolute overdose of senseless smut that is Fifty Shades of Grey.

At the screening I attended, they distributed Fifty Shades fashioned blindfolds before the showing. You wouldn’t be worse off wearing it during the film.

D

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Out in Theaters: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Colin Firth, Dave Gibbons, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Mark Millar, Matthew Vaughn, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Samuel L. Jackson, Taron Egerton

Absurdist superspy farce that tips its top-hat to the JB’s (James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer) while rampantly assaulting its way into the 21st century, Kingsman: The Secret Service is filmic reassurance that ridiculous fun can still be had in the theater. Over the past decade, the spy spoof (Austin Powers, Spies Like Us) has mostly gone the way of the Crocodile Dundee (unless we’re counting the underwhelming, geri-action Red films. Note: we shouldn’t be). Leave it to genre revivalist Matthew Vaughn to inject that tired and trying genus with the same eye-widening, pulse-quickening hit of adrenaline that he’d previously brought to the superhero and crime genre with Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class and Layer Cake. Brimming with tactful homage and just enough youthful zest to make its balls-to-the-walls-ness truly one-of-a-kind, Kingsman is a shining, shimmering, splendid example of why we go to the movies.

In Vaughn’s murderous opus, the titular Kingsmen are a copacetic society of mustache-twirling gentleman/gun-totting acrobats renown for their secrecy, military effectiveness and hand-tailored suits. When world leaders want the job done right, they hire the Kingsman and if everything goes according to plan, you don’t hear peep about their success in the papers. One might assume from the cut of their jib that the Kingsmen are a group of pacifist nancies but Vaughn wastes little time conveying just how deadly his crew of well-dressed gentlemen is.

The stage is set with a fortress under siege, explosions tumbling block letter title cards to Dire Straight’s pounding “Money for Nothing″. Through a window, a masked agent informs an Arab man bolt-strapped to a chair that he will count down from ten and if he doesn’t have the information he needs in that time frame, ten will be the last thing he ever hears. There’s no deliberation, no hesitation, just counting. At five, he caps both the captive’s knees. There’s no breathy drawls, no pregnant pauses. This ain’t that kind of movie, bruv. Harry Hart, code name Galahad, counts down like a metronome.

Caught unawares, Galahad is too late to stop the prisoner from pulling the pin on a stashed grenade, but finds himself and his fellow Kingsmen saved when a fellow super-agent in training throws himself on the explosive. Seventeen years later, Galahad feels indebted to his savior and, with a recently opened spot on the team, seeks out the promising-but-problematic son of the man who saved his life so many years ago, Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton). Eggsy is a kind-hearted ruffian, loyal to a fault and entangled with the wrong crew because of his mother’s not-so-cunning choice of gentlemen friends.

What transpires next involves a global climate change world domination plot, X-Men: First Class-style training montages, an ultra-violent blitzkrieg in a church that will assuredly go down as one of the year’s most memorable and visually-arresting sequences, Samuel L. Jackson playing a despotic billionaire with a lisp and a soft stomach for blood using the subterfuge of free data plans to “clean the slate” and loads of not-so-subtle James Bond references. If the above does not at least pique your interest, Kingsman is probably not the film for you.

The film again pairs Vaughn with the authors of the comic book source material on which Kingsman is based; Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons (Kick-Ass). So again if you weren’t won over by the wacky, violent antics of Kick-Ass, this is likely not going to amuse you. And though shy a Hit-Girl, Kingsman has plenty of fun, memorable characters to play with, most notably Colin Firth as Galahad. Liam Neeson reinvented himself as an action hero in his twilight years so why not the King with the lisp? asks Vaughn. Firth makes the most of his pithy dialogue and provides an adroit aging action hero – a lovingly rendered throwback to the age of the smooth-talking British spy. Engaged in a carousel of gun shots and knifings, Firth shines in the action scenes too, even if it’s a fair gamble to say that most of his stunts are mostly the work of computer animations.

There are a few notable sequences that feature spotty CGI work (Eggsy’s mid-air, knife-tipped shoe stab makes him look like a plastic action figure) but in the center of Kingsman go-for-broke, give-em-all-ya-got approach to breathless bombast, it couldn’t matter less. The eyebrow-raising smarm and au courant irreverence of Vaughn’s rhapsodical vision just make for one hell of a show. Plus, there’s nothing quite like capping off your film with the prospect of slamming the back door of a princess. In the end, isn’t that the point of this whole spy venture anyways?

A-

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Out in Theaters: LEVIATHAN

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alexeï Serebriakov, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Elena Liadova, Foreign Film, Leviathan, Oleg Negin, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Roman Madianov, Sergueï Pokhodaev

Leviathan is the work of an artist struggling with his heritage. Hailing from Novosibirsk, Russia, Andrey Zvyagintsev paints a Roman tragedy with Biblical implications into the modern seascape of Northern Russia’s Barents Sea and the result is staggering. Interpersonal power struggles and structural corruption pollute the scenery of Zvyagintsev’s vision presenting a modern man’s saga of David and Goliath as a simple mechanic faces down an nefarious but forceful mayor.

Russia’s official selection for the 87th Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (and a strong contender for the win) also took home the prize for Best Screenplay at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in large part due to the many layers of Leviathan’s searing and potent critique. Zvyagintsev’s pages cut deep emotional and intellectual slashes, destined to linger long after the curtains are drawn. Aided by Oleg Negin, Zvyagintsev has written a screenplay that reveals itself a piece at a time, delicately peeling back layers of a narrative onion until we’re at its nasty center and likely as tearful as after dicing an onion.

The plight of Zvyagintsev’s characters – each a flawed shade of simpleton doing their best to get by – give emotional weight to his cold, procedural dealings but it’s what he does with the idea of institutional extortion that really transforms Leviathan into a foreign epic worth remembering. After all, when is red tape an equal villain to a vodka-slugging Mafioso?

Kolya (Alexeï Serebriakov) leads an earnest life with new wife Lilya (Elena Liadova) and son Roma (Sergueï Pokhodaev) as a part time auto-repair mechanic. Recently under one roof, Roma and Lilya have yet to come to an understanding about their newly forged stepson-stepmom relationship, forcing Koyla into an unwelcome focal point between two occasionally feuding forces. Pressure from corrupt major Vadim Shelevyat (Roman Madianov) only further yaws their domestic equilibrium and an all out land war erupts in the form of paperwork, blackmail and eventual murder.

Zvyagintsev’s curt and gloomy voice shines through in every scene, lending a pessimistic but pragmatic air to the overwhelming fogginess of his feature. Hope is a long shot but events never feel forcibly grim. Even when they are, there’s an understanding that Zvyagintsev courts his catastrophe with a fair potion of verisimilitude. No matter how black and bleak his world becomes, he approaches despondency from a position of hard-won credibility; credibility that can only be won first-hand from a lifetime of institutional injustice.

This begs the question: is Zvyagintsev’s film a condemnation of his country? According to his own statements, no. “I am deeply convinced that, whatever society each and every one of us lives in, we will all be faced one day with the following alternative: either live as a slave or live as a free man.” Zvyagintsev continues, “And if we naively think that there must be a kind of state power that can free us from that choice, we are seriously mistaken.” A chilly message blasting like a bullet from an even chillier film, and one seriously worthy of your attention.

B

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Out in Theaters: JUPITER ASCENDING

February 5, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Jupiter Ascending, Mila Kunis, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Wachowskis

The Wachowskis have been getting blank checks from Warner Bros since pulling off The Matrix in 1999 and with Jupiter Ascending have likely made their last boundless blockbuster. In 2012, Cloud Atlas turned a budget north of $100 million (though no official budget was ever released) into a pitiable $27 million domestic return, a figure almost as bad as the lowly $43.9 domestic box office cume from a $120 million investment on 2008’s Speed Racer. With their latest, they’re about to pull off their biggest magic trick yet, making a $175 budget disappear into thin air. To say the bloom is off the rose is a lie by degree. This movie’s gonna get crushed.

And rightly so. The Wachowskis have always skated by on their awesome sense of spectacle, often at the expense of a cohesive story, but Jupiter Ascending is not just their latest but their most egregious offender of complete and utter style over substance. In their defense, the style is often blindingly cool, if only for a brief moment. No scene better utilizes their captivating handle on big budget pageantry than a first act escape scene, one that reportedly took upwards of six months to film. The issue remains: why dump so much time and resource into a glorified stunt and so little into plot, character and general story cohesion? The answer is mindbogglingly unaddressed.

With Jupiter, one established Wachowski mainstay remains in their FX-driven manipulation of gravity. Bullet time has been replaced by gravity boots and Keanu Reeves’ wooden acting is subbed in by a frequently shirtless and rarely compelling Channing Tatum. Tatum plays the role of a warrior “splice” – a genetically engineered part-man, part-dog. He once had cyborg-enhanced wings but got them hacked off Maleficent-style when he bit the wrong rear end. Or was it ear end? His is a lackluster bit of back story that’s never explained or accounted for in a movie full of lackluster bits of back story that are never explained or accounted for. But such is Jupiter Ascending.

Tatum’s effortlessly seductive (or so we’re told) Caine Wise is tasked with retrieving an Earthling woman at the center of a galactic land grab but in a guns-blazin’ fix gets mixed up and ends up with the wrong chick: a Russian toilet-scrubber by the name of January “I Like Dogs” Jones (Mila Kunis). The maid mix-up winds up COMPLETELY forgotten about as it turns out our heroine is actually an heiress of the highest order – the reincarnation of an interplanetary Tzar and somewhat recently deceased head of family to the Abrasax clan. With a hefty sum of a birthright (including, ya know, the Earth), the rest of the Abrasax fam-damily tries to win over the pea-brained January with various schemes and assaults of paperwork. You can almost hear Wachowski’s whine, “Bureaucracy’s a bitch.” After a few queues to get the ol’ inheritance files in order, many things explodes and Tatum’s dog-boy is called to the rescue – like Lassie with a six pack – more times than I’d like to report on.

In a pinch, Kunis’ Jupiter Jones is as compelling a female lead as Denise Richards’ Christmas Jones and just about as believable as Richards’ is as a rocket scientist. She’s a perma-damsel in distress, haplessly entering herself into laughably dumb situations and finding herself subsequently incapable of getting out without being rescued by her half-canine prince. It makes me wonder why the Wachowskis even bothered making a film with a female protagonist when they’re just going to make her so pathetic and pitiable. It’s an asinine step backwards in an industry that demands two forward. The gross lack of chemistry between Kunis and Tatum doesn’t help either, nor do the odd bestiality undertones.

And just as Channing Tatum is a dog genetically spliced with a human, Jupiter Ascending is The Princess Bride genetically spliced with Star Fox, a bombastic video game of a space-set fairy tale that feels like it needed something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue in order for the studio to marry it to a budget so high. The result is a rip-off by assault; kitchen sink FX hogwash laid upon tired narrative tactics.

What is truly visionary in terms of set production, lavish costumery and creature design results in something totally and tonally defunct in the story department. As Eddie Redmayne greedily dismantles everything great about his work in The Theory of Everything as a necky, whispering, totally bratty villain, the Wachowskis make a mockery of their own legacy as storytellers. Even when they haven’t been firing on all cylinders, the sibling filmmakers have been able to provide dazzling, heady escapism. Jupiter Ascending though just makes you want to escape the theater.

D+

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Out in Theaters: THE BOY NEXT DOOR

January 21, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Ian Nelson, Jennifer Lopez, John Corbett, Kristen Chenoweth, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Ryan Guzman, The Boy Next Door

Ugly, rapey stalker thriller The Boy Next Door doesn’t get the first thing right about stalking, nor does it care to. Starring the curve of J Lo‘s booty and an Oedipal whelp of man meat, Rob Cohen‘s delightfully crummy feature probes madcap, self-deprecating territory but squarely settles for a damning self-serious tone. Had Cohen (he of Fast and Furious, XXX, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and Alex Cross acclaim) just gone for intentionally laughable bombast, we could have been howling with him, not at him.

Wasting no time revealing how laughably bad it is, The Boy Next Door opens with exposition as information dump. J Lo’s husband cheated on her, divorce papers appeared but were never signed, forgiveness is on the horizon. All of this narrative hooey is communicated in a 30 second flashback/montage clip, making for one of the worst openings this side of Blackhat‘s “inside the computer” start. The only foil to J Lo’s marital reconciliation is the fact that hubby (John Corbett) is scheduled for a trip to San Francisco, hometown to his partner in infidelity.

Enter Noah Sandborn (Ryan Guzman), your garage-fixing, alternator-switching boy of the next door persuasion. The guy’s got an enviable six pack – which inexplicably occupies more camera minutes than J Lo’s most prized ASSets – and J Lo’s Claire Peterson isn’t afraid to peep at them from across the way. Spinning from dating woes and palpably seduced by Noah’s youthful magnetism, Claire winds up bedded by her high school neighbor in a scene that alternates between being sketchy, funny and sexy and is downright useless to the film. (Also: it shows zero boobs.)

In amazingly little time, Noah begins an unhealthy obsession with his hot pepperoncini of a neighbor, even after she tries to put the kibosh to things. Bing, bang, boom, Noah starts showing his bad side as his whole rape fanta…I mean stalking escalate at neck-break speeds.

Pointing out all the little narrative infidelities of The Boy Next Door is like trying to pin down exactly how many men a porn star has slept with. It’s a film that features a race against the clock to discard ribbons on ribbons of smutty photocopies; that features a bully-target of a son with an allergy to…being nervous?; a film where you know the breaks are cut minutes before the car starts swerving. Apparently, it exists in a vacuum of cell communication as well, because aside from one or two instances, we never see our characters disclose critical details to one another. You have to count the instances in which near death experiences occur and then are never spoke of again.

Step Up‘s Guzman is awful in the leading man’s shoes, all kinds of ham and cheese in a role that might have even thrived in the hands of a Dan Stevens type. The parallels to Adam Winguard’s infinitely superior The Guest are so many and so obvious that a fellow film critic turned to me at the end, postulating that it might end in the exact same fashion. For what it’s worth, Jennifer Lopez is the best part of the film – managing to skimp her way through Barbara Curry‘s hackneyed script mostly unscathed – but she’s also the only one trying. Kristen Chenoweth playing a low-rent Cameron Diaz offers up miffed comedic relief while relative newcomer Ian Nelson is more breakfast cereal goody-two-shoes than Walt Jr.

The effort just isn’t there and the product shows it. There’s a late scene sequence – all engulfed in flames and shot to shit – in which Cohen seems to fully abandon the serious tone and go for broke, making for some absurdist, genuinely funny material. It’s not entirely clear if this is his throwing in the cards moment or a side-glancing wink at the audience but it’s exactly the kind of bonkers “what the hell is this crap?” moment that the movie needed much, much more of. Or could have done without entirely.

D-

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