Out in Theaters: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

August 7, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Jonathan Liebesman, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tohoru Masamune, Will Arnett, William Fichtner

Like eating an entire pepperoni pizza to yourself, Jonathan Liebesman‘s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is an exercise in corpulent gluttony. The jocular quips drip just as much cheese as the pizzas they scarf. An unnaturally meretricious Megan Fox oozes virginal sex like fat from a pepperoni. The CG eye-candy glistens like glitter on a stripper. But like that greasy, calorie bomb of a meatlover’s pizza in the wreckage of a hangover, it works. The solitary fart joke even lands.

Like Norville Barnes, people have insisted this effort is, you know, for the kids, but I’m not entirely convinced. Firstly, TMNT rides in on the parent-frightening PG-13 wave, even though the violence is inconsequential and entirely bloodless. And involves turtles. Add to that the fact that a good spell of the humor riffs around a few hardly risible rapey jokes and the fact that one of the turtles courts an unrequited sexual obsession with Fox’s April O’Neill. From this we can pretty much conclude this isn’t solely intended for the kids. Unless they’re really into rape jokes now.

Continuing on that note…WAIT WHAT?! Are you telling me that not one but two of the characters (Will Arnett, shame on you) actively promulgate the fact that they want to lay a bone down on our pea-brained female protagonist? Even though she’s more 6th grade science fair student here than voluptuous femme fatale? Yes. And yes. Hmmm, I think I might be talking myself out of semi-liking this movie.

But I can admit up front that this was never a movie crafted with me in mind, making the fact that I found myself under the spell of a fair many turtle-chortles all the more miraculous. Not with the rapey stuff though. That’s still pretty weird.

In lieu of turtles forcing themselves on supple female jokes, what does actually work is the brothers themselves. Hell, why not throw that into the catalogue of adjectives to precede the word turtle: Teenage Mutant Ninja Brother Turtles! Because when you really break it down, the defining feature of this film adaption is the familial aspect of it. That and bulletproof shells.

I’m getting ahead of myself and thinking it’s probably time to actually break down the plot, as if that’s really a requirement for a movie called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Fox is April O’Neil, a low rent reporter with stars in her eyes. She wants the big stories. It’s Pulitzer or bust. Concurrently, she’s straight up bummed when she gets assigned news stories that have her bouncing on trampolines for the latest fitness craze. As if that’s a coincidence.

When she gets wind of a local terrorist group known as the “Foot Clan”, April takes matters into her own hands and decides to investigate Watergate style. Minutes later, she’s discovered the existence of the shell-bound ninjas. Soon after that, she realizes they’re the product of her own dead father’s experiment. Minds are blown.

As April cohorts with the turts, the judiciously evil Eric Sacks (William Fichtner) schemes with the blatantly bad, full metal jacketed Shredder (Tohoru Masamune). Their plan, world domination. Their strategy, does it really matter?

Step one: poison city. Step two: everyone’s a leper. Step three: sell cure for ONE MILLION DOLLARS! (Pinky to lip). It may be Doctor Evil-level silliness but, let’s be very clear here, Shredder is confirmed BA. The guy has a smattering of swords that he shoots out like they’re Spiderman goo and then sucks back up magnetically. If I may quote Jesse Pinkman, “Magnets bitch!!” It makes for some pretty geeky nerdgasms. Especially when everything is all fuzzy and scrambled.

Liebesman’s scenery is draped with clumpy snow, which not only got me excited for next year’s skiing season but set the table for some exquisite “high” stakes action sequences. As the set pieces comes to life, the cameras zip around like on a Nimbus 2000, keeping things hectic, fluid and fun. Though the Turtles keep their weapons mostly holstered, Liebesman whips his out like a kid leaving summer camp. His touch is perfectly puerile, his tone nefariously juvenile.

As TMNT rips to a rather forecasted conclusion, it’s quite clear that Liebesman’s goal has been accomplished. His film is a puckering cherry bomb. But rather than blow up in his face, it erupts in the toilet. Us feckless few snicker. His film is crapulously inconsequential. It’s the epitome of dumb summer movie. And it pulls in at under an hour and 45 minutes. For that alone, it’s way better than the latest Transformers flick.

C

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: INTO THE STORM

August 6, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Into the Storm, Jeremy Sumpter, Matt Walsh, Max Deacon, Nathan Kress, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Richard Armitage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Steven Quale 2 Comments

Into the Storm encounters a litany of problems right from the get-go, many of which focus around the complete lack of talent in the acting department. Storm‘s stable of actors consist primarily of those that popular cable shows have chewed up and spit out, including The Walking Dead‘s Sarah Wayne Callies, Friday Night Light‘s Jeremy Sumpter, Veep‘s Matt Walsh and iCarly‘s Nathan Kress. Each bring their own unique ineptness to the table, failing to gel together as a cohesive cast even on the most basic of levels whilst embodying characters who we hope to see offed from the very moment we encounter them. This assembly is quite literally a wind tunnel of talent; a crew that raises the bar for the “Worst Acting of the Year” award higher than a tornado peak and drops it on its head. The scariest moment is realizing that it’s going to last for 89 minutes; the most disturbing, that all these people have careers.

Director Steven Quale and his team of effects “specialists” conjure up a series of tornadoes that make 1996’s Twister look cutting edge. Add to that the complete and utter lack of internal logic of the film – especially it comes to the potency of any given twister (a smallish ‘nado is able to suck bystanders off their feet from 100 yards away whilst one about a mile wide that tosses 747s like they’re toothpicks cannot) – and you have a movie that can barely stand on its own two feet even on dry land.

The film starts with a groan as Donnie (Max Deacon) introduces us to his autocratic father (Richard Armitage) and swoop-bangs of a brother, Trey (Kress) in inglorious “found footage” style. You see, he’s making a time capsule to look back on in 25 years because nostalgia and fuck you. It’s an obvious way to establish the mechanics of the film but goes on to become an overbearing, embarrassing ploy to dish out concocted melodrama and false tension. Characters dish on “discovering” the real meaning of life after the disaster has had its way with them; they ooze over the importance of coming together. It makes for trumped up, on-the-nose Americana hooah. Even the ripped up flags wave in the background.

Quale spends the first twenty-odd minutes introducing us to an assemblage of the most obnoxious people ever to inhabit the lands once known as the Louisiana Purchase. There’s the techie dweeb who can’t act, the helplessly love interest who can’t act, the nosy brother who can’t act, the overbearing dad who can’t act, the stubborn principal who can’t act, the noxious storm chaser who can’t act, the cowardly cameraman who can’t act, the four-wheelin’ rednecks who can’t act and the grumbling scientist who can’t act. Unfortunately, we only get to see one sucked into a firenado.

The plot is as simple as “Some say there’s a storm comin’, some say it’s already here.” When two storm fronts converge into one superstorm, Into the Storm becomes the Perfect Storm on land. It’s Syfy’s Shartnado. Five minutes in, a friend turned to me and asked if this was made to go straight to RedBox. Somehow, it escaped that fate. Somehow…

Perhaps the most miraculously bad portion of the film lies within the simple fact that nothing and no-one makes a lick of sense. In the midst of this small town, middle-of-nowhere cornburbia, an airfield the size of LAX materializes just so Quale can throw a baker’s dozen 747s through the air. The vice principal of the school has literally no idea how to navigate the small town he’s lived in for an innumerable amount of years. Characters ask if everyone’s ok even after literally watching town’s folk sucked into the maw of a viperous cyclone.

The grievances go on. Professionals stare down tornadoes ripping towards them without second guessing the imminent danger they’re in. A school bus full of children are evacuated into a sewer drain to inexplicably disappear a scene later. Characters disappear and reappear at the convenience of the story inventions like they’re Neo zipping through the Matrix. It’s as if the script (obviously written on a cocktail napkin or two) got blown away with the passing wind. How else to explain this logical shit storm?

If there is a saving grace to Into the Storm (and I’m almost willing to admit that there is), it’s that it contains some of the most hysterical unintentional comedy of the year. None of the intended jokes land but when Quale tones it down for a tearful confession or lets his characters bicker over who’s to blame for another character’s demise and then quickly has them console each other, the belly laughs come a’rolling out. It’s the movie equivalent of a dog shitting in your dockers; it’s so accidentally funny that you can’t help but want to scruff its hair and forgive it immediately.

Looking over Quale’s resume, it’s really no shocker that he served up such a trash heap of an experience, considering he only has super-sequel Final Destination 5 to his name. That being the case though, I would expect a little more invention in the “kills” department. I think we can all agree that the firenado was appropriately daffy (and a suiting end for a character who was fifty shades of fey) but that’s really all Quale offers up for human sacrifice. No-one gets ripped to shreds by the sheer power of wind? No knifenados? Wa’ happened?

Instead of satisfying our bloodlust, Quale dumps out a sludge of over-the-top twisters that would only look at home on the Syfy channel. As if that will make up for it. The only footage we’re really intended to pay attention to are those shot from behind character’s shoulders as they play chicken with the impending deathwind. With the exception of one or two scenes, it’s as visually interesting as a fan on its highest setting. It’s as exciting as rolling your car window down.

By the third act, Quale beckons forth a superstorm so girthy and otherworldly that I fully expected the perfunctory Weather Channel newscaster to spew, “My god. This one’s ten miles wide with wind speeds of up to a million!!” Taking a cue from the pastures upon pastures of incoherence that pollutes the rest of the film, it wouldn’t really seem like that much of a stretch.

But as the CG winds wind down, we’re left with the inexcusable knowledge that the people onscreen presumably once took an acting lesson or two and I feel compelled to tisk tisk them for their work here. Seriously, this ought to be embarrassing for everyone involved. Hand slaps for all.

Whilst the inadvertent humor disqualifies Into the Storm from the most painful movie experience of the year accolade, that’s still not something you want to pull for the box art quote. It’s a disaster of a disaster film, never meant to exist outside the shadow of Twister. As trucks get hucked and characters chucked, at least Storm can claim to have made me cackle. It can’t be denied that while laughing at you may be worse than laughing with you, it’s still better than not laughing at all.

D

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: GET ON UP

July 30, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Biopic, Chadwick Boseman, Dan Aykroyd, Get On Up, James Brown, Nelsan Ellis, Octavia Spencer, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Tate Taylor 1 Comment

Get On Up doesn’t know how good Chadwick Boseman is. Bursting with energy, filled with soul and one-hundred-and-sixty-nine percent committed, Boseman is a firecracker. Hell, he’s straight dynamite. How appropriate that he plays the man they once called Mr. Dynamite. It’s a certifiable shame then that the movie that surrounds Boseman’s accomplished concerto of a performance is overstuffed, poorly edited and, like the king of soul himself, doesn’t know when to quit.

Tate Taylor‘s (The Help) second feature starts, as all musical biopics apparently must, with the long, lonely saunter up to a final show of sorts. Old and beleaguered with regret, the icon is but a silhouette dwarfed by the enormity of a vacant hallway. Cut to Old Man Brown quite apparently hopped up on something of the Schedule 1 variety ranting at a room full of bootstraps-business folks and waving a shotgun over his head. This made-up Boseman’s all gums and shades but the scene only manages to paint the man as a Looney Tune.

Cut to bedazzled, toe-tapping Brown all get-up and no humility barking at a press conference. Cut to 6-year old Brown and his backwoods family eking by in some pinewood shanty. His momma turns to prostitution and his daddy beats him raw. All he wants is a lullaby. Cut to a teenage Brown stealing a three-piece suit and getting five to 13 years for it. Cut some more.

Cut, rinse, repeat. Cut, rinse, repeat. It allows for some mighty good scenes but makes for some mighty long-winded ones too. And while there’s lots rave-worthy stuck in there like gummies in a Cadbury Black Forest bar, the convoluted mess that is traveling from one scene to the next is an exercise in reckless abandon.

If only the editors had the good sense to slash 30 minutes of the film, we could have been dealing with something great. Had he tightened it up like Brown did his facial skin around the 90s, Taylor might have been working towards a gold statue nomination. Trim the fat, Tate. Trim the fat.

As is, Get On Up is a mostly pleasing patchwork of scenes that each contribute to a time, a place, and a feeling that then gets all that jumbled up and mismatched. Elephant heads end up on rhino bodies. A scene where friends feud with no sign of respite fades into them being immeasurably close confidantes. It’s not that we’re not smart enough to connect the dots, it’s that we shouldn’t be forced to do that work for Taylor and co. It’s like watching someone try to piece a puzzle together with one bright, shining star at its center; a star so massive and so bright, it apparently blinds, distorts and sucks in everything around it.

And boy oh boy is Boseman a star. As the one, the only James Brown, he’s surpassed impersonation, he’s transcended imitation. He lives and breathes James Brown. Every rubbery dance move, every superhuman split is Brown’s. That sagging eye and sneering falsetto; bonafide Brown. His salt-and-pepper speech crackles like a record player. I can’t tell if he’s actually singing or just doing the world’s best lip-synching. In all aspects, he’s Brown reborn.

Usually cloaked in beads of sweat, the character even gestures towards the camera every once in a while, occasionally monologuing in head-shaking fourth-wall breakage, but Boseman’s so catastrophically good that you actually welcome it. And props to the makeup team who for once hit the nail on the head when they age the 32-year old talent well past his prime. He doesn’t look the flour-face abomination that is Leonardo DiCaprio’s J. Edgar. But then again, Brown 55-year old visage looked like a drooping eggplant anyways. He’s a supernova but he’s paying the hefty price of admission for it. You can’t be a sun and not get burned.

But again and again, we must reckon with the fact that Boseman is merely the Shamu to Get On Up‘s Sea World. He’s a mighty presence but you’ll soon discover there’s not much else to the park. His role in Get On Up is the equivalent of using morels to make a cream of mushroom soup. You’ve got the finest ingredient in the world and you’re watering it down with a pool of a blasé, sometimes even flavorless, base.

It’s as if the editors found his each and every scene too indispensable to hack so they just shrugged and left it all in there. But you’ve got to trim even the prized rose if you want to win the trophy. Taylor seems too scared to bust out even the measliest of trimmers and ends up stabbing himself in the foot for it. His repetition of form is so ad nauseum that you’d think the prankster was trying to rickroll us. But goddammit if Boseman is not his savior; his knight is shining purple sequin. He’s so good, I can’t help but hyperbolize some more.

As Brown, Boseman’s got the magnetism of Tom Cruise, the jitters of Jagger, the paranoia of Scarface, the drive of Jordan Belfort and the moves that only Brown can call his own. He’s plays the Godfather of Soul like a black Marlon Brando. Commitment is his cup of tea. You believe it when he tells you he feels good. He even manages to dance circles around Academy Award-nominated co-stars Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis. And how perfectly suiting for a story about a man who the world could never keep up with.

And as much as it’s the story of Brown’s triumph, it’s also the story of his defeat. About his pride getting in the way of friends and family. About his shark and minnow relationship with Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis) and how that would become the defining relationship in a string of failed ones. After all, you can move a million miles a minute but what’s all that fancy footwork worth if you don’t have anyone to share it with at the end of the day?

C+

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

July 25, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Bradley Cooper, Chris Pratt, Dave Batista, Guardians of the Galaxy, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Zoe Saldana

In 1977, George Lucas gifted the world Star Wars. Neither studio execs nor film critics could have ever predicted the momentous cultural phenomenon that Lucas’ strange little space opera transmogrified into; how it would touch every corner of the globe to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars; how it would leave an inimitable legacy for people to talk about from Boston to Beirut, Maine to Myanmar; how it would, quite simply, become one of the most important movies to ever be made. Everyone has seen Star Wars and if they haven’t, there’s a 97% chance it’s because they were born blind. Culturally, it’s a behemoth. Socially, it’s a must-know. Taste-wise, you like it or you’re a POS. It is the hive mind dictator itself; the all-encompassing King Shit. I’ve owned Star Wars toys since I could walk because who hasn’t?

Even now, almost forty years later, the prevailing zeitgeist within the science fiction community – from books to movies, TV shows to comic books – is populated by Star Wars‘ DNA, nearly to the point of pollution. Even when Lord Neckfat himself tried to capture lighting in a bottle again by making those junk jettisons that are the prequels, he forgot that his magnus opus was never about the special effects. Consider that Star Wars was for all intents and purposes a space samurai movie that shoed in equal parts Eastern philosophy and glo-stick swords. So what if the effects don’t hold up? We’re still dealing with giant slug gangsters and unforgettable cantina tunes and little green dudes who knew the force. And this is why we’ve witnessed such vehement backlash against Lucas’ irreparable re-tweaks, his ‘special ed’-itions: they take us out of the feeling of his dusty, late 1970s sci-fi sprawl. And it was always all about the feeling. And the feeling was good.

And like that untouchable trilogy, Guardians of the Galaxy may be poorly acted (Chris Pratt aside) but I’ll be damned if it’s not the closely thing we’ve ever got to that 1977 original masterwork. It’s wonky, weird, wild, completely cartoonish and fun as fuck. It’s Star Wars Revisisted. Its space crawl is Chris Pratt dancing to 70s top forty songs. It’s got an emperic baddie lording over all on Hologram Skype. It’s everything that Harrison Ford has every done melted down into one. It’s even got a Chewbacca. There’s quirk overflowing from every end, and enough tips of the hat to Star Wars to make even Sam Elliot nervous. I’m already Indiana Jonesing to revisit it because it feels good and frankly, I’m hooked on a feeling.

Unlike the pantheon that is the MMU, cross-pollination with the outside Marvel Universe is kept to a minimum (with no mention of Tony Stark, Steven Rogers, or that big green head-case). Guardians of the Galaxy is able to stand on its own two feet and for it, I’m willing to stand on mine and applaud. After all, it was this ceaseless commercialization that cheapened the massively over-rated Captain America 2; the same sludge that made Iron Man 2 such a nightmare. Rather than lean on the platform of a larger universe, Guardians creates its own, expanding on the worlds that Marvel’s created naturally and with a sense of lively misadventure largely missing from its more club-footed counterparts.

In this regard, Guardians just might be Marvel’s crowning achievement. It’s pure unadulterated fun, made magical by hundreds of millions of dollars in top-of-the-line computer animation and made lovable by its plenitude of quirk and its narrow-yet-mammoth scope. The guardians may be set to save the entire galaxy but there’s an intimacy that’s lacking in similarly-sized superhero blockbusters. And did I mention how weird it is?

Guardians, more than anything that I can think of in the past decade, celebrates said strangeness like it’s a Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco. It’s not dark, it’s not gritty, it’s not “an untold origin.” It’s double-filtered, locally sourced, FDA-certified organic mirth. An anthropomorphized tree and a shit-talking, gun-firing, whiskey-slugging raccoon aren’t even the weirdest elements of this symphony of strange. I mean James Gunn isn’t known for being reigned in so you better believe there’s plenty of weird to go around.

Michael Rooker (because who better?) is dyed blue and rocks a glowing metallic mohawk. His signature weapon is a magic arrow that zips around when he whistles. Gunn even let Dave Batista try to act. Sure he fails desperately but it’s not like Mark Hamill was ever a shining beacon of thespian promise. But seriously, Batista is a talent vacuum. The guy couldn’t act his way out of a First Grade Thanksgiving play.

As for the story, it starts on Earth with Peter Quill (Pratt). His death-bed occupying mother reaches out for his hand and he runs away, too frightened to face the reality of his mother’s demise. Cue a looking up at the stars bit as the heavens open up, a beam shoots down and little Quill is sucked up into a space ship. Alright, alright, alright.

Twenty years later and Quill’s an outlaw ravager, scavenging planets for goods to pawn. When his sights are set on a mysterious orb, a series of mishaps land him under the gun with a sizable bounty on his head. This is all a MacGuffin to assemble the eponymous Guardians as they all come together looking to score on Quill’s asking price.

This ragtag collection includes Groot (Vin Diesel), the walking, not-so-much-talking tree; Rocket (Bradley Cooper who sounds nothing like Bradley Cooper), a gun-toting, vest-wearing, expletive-yelling raccoon; Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a mean, green, alien-fighting machine; and Drax the Destroyer (Batista), a simple-minded, scarification-covered thug with a dead family. They’re as rag-taggy as the Millennium Falcon’s passengers, as disjointed as the Fellowship of the Ring. Some characters are better than others – I could do without Batista’s Drax ever opening his mouth and Saldana is surprisingly flat – but that’s par for the course.

The whole tree/raccoon angle though works wonderfully, their odd relationship giving weight to what could otherwise feel distant or simply strange. Continuing with my ploy to mainstream Star Wars analogies, Groot is very much the Chewie of the equation. His only utterances consisting of “I am Groot”, he offers little to a conversation other than a sympathetic expression or some much needed shrub violence. It’d be smart to avoid playing him in a round of Dejarik. Rocket, like Han Solo before him, is the only one who understand Groot, a bit that Gunn returns to whenever he needs to conjure up a chuckle or two. It’s weird but dammit, it works.

And for how much we fawn over Groot and his pet raccoon, our relationship with Quill isn’t one that neatly fits a description. There’s a distance we feel to him and his wise-cracking ways, but it’s a distance by design. Born of the general distrust of the world around him, he’s an alien that just happens to be human. Him being an abducted orphan and all, you sympathize with his armor of sharp witticisms, you sneer with him at a galaxy that’s too tidy and needs to be knocked down a couple pegs; you’re ok with him being a butterfingered outlaw.

Chris Pratt’s sarcastic banter is a weapon that he wields like a lightsaber. His each and every retort earns a snicker and Pratt has earned the right to play dumb and bumbling and yet oddly charming, a combination he wears perfectly here. From our first encounter with him, he’s a goon of an explorer, a whiff of an adventurer. He wants to be called Star Lord but he just hasn’t earned the handle (his ongoing relationship with said handle goes on to be one of the film’s many highlights.)

Guardians, in all rights, is about the creation of a mythology. It’s about carving out your stake in the world. It’s about grabbing a whip and a fedora and making the name Indiana Jones mean something. It’s about calling yourself Star Lord and not being satisfied until everyone else calls you that too. Darth Vader didn’t become the most feared name in the galaxy overnight. You gotta hone that shit (*hangs head that this was NOT what the prequel trilogy was about*).

Unlike previous Marvel movies, Guardians doesn’t rely on a cliffhanger; it’s not a sleek, flawless package; it’s not busy setting the table for what’s next; it’s not just another commercial for the inevitable team-up with Iron Man and Thor and Hulk and Black Widow and Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver and Captain America and The Winter Solider and Falcon and War Machine (er, Iron Patriot?). It’s a well-balanced breakfast in itself: it’s properly buttered toast and scrambled eggs and orange juice and a little bit of Dave Batista trying to act all served up with a smile.

For once, you won’t demand “But where are the other guys?!” Gunn’s triumph is happy to exist in its own little universe and for it, trumps Marvel’s other heroes. In 1977, George Lucas gifted the world Star Wars. In 2014, James Gunn gifted the world Guardians of the Galaxy, in all its strange glory.

A-

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: HERCULES

July 25, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Brett Ratner, Dwayne Johnson, Hercules, Ian McShane, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Rock

Hercules is the equivalent of hiring a day laborer only to discover them dozing under the cabana 20 minutes later. You weren’t really ever expecting that much, just a tidy little one-and-done job, so you can’t help but flabbergast at the flagrant display of utter laziness. It’s truly an epic tableau of “who gives a fuck?” It’s so imposingly boring, you’d think you walked into a documentary about dust mites. It’s so recklessly rattlebrained that you think the screenplay is the product of ‘Myths by Charlie Kelly’. It’s the Kitten Mittens of sword and sandals movies. Every character and plot line is so mismanaged you’d think Halliburton were producing it.

In such, Hercules is not so much a movie as a movie impersonator. There’s characters and they’re doing stuff, and there’s fight scenes and fire and a CGI lion but when all is said and done, nothing happens. It’s the same story we’ve ignored and forgotten a hundred times before. Plot deviations are as satisfying as zero snickers bar. Surprise “twists” are as curvaceous as Calista Flockheart. It’s so aggressively blah that a cocaine fiend could doze off in the midst of it (because lord knows I did.)

I guess we can cover the “plot”, if for no reason other than to dissuade you from submitting yourself to it. Hercules, you see, isn’t really all he’s cracked up to be. He’s a hulking gun-for-hire; a wig-wearing mercenary. The muscley chump doesn’t even fight solo; that pussy needs a small troop of misfits (whose names we never bother to learn) backing him up at every turn. We’ve all been duped! If you’re gonna give Herc sidekicks, at least toss in Xena Warrior Princess, amiright? And for a guy who’s “half-God”, his bulky shoulders have been all but torn at the seams, with stretch mark highways recoiling against his unnatural mass of “Good God, I didn’t even know those muscle groups existed”.

Speaking of that half-God thing, it’s still unclear by the end of the movie whether “screenwriters” Ryan Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos (oh ok, so he’s where all these mouth-heavy names are coming from) intended for Hercules to actually be a demi-God or if he’s just rocking the title for namesake purposes. Ian McShane offers something that’s supposed to resemble a stirring speech about Herc taking up the mantle of the name but that just muddies the waters on the matter. But that is characteristic of the whole endeavor. Again, who cares?

And the story goes a little like this: blah blah blah, I only fight for gold, blah blah blah, pretty princess needs help saving kingdom, blah blah blah, villages burned to the ground, blah blah blah, hired for twice his weight in gold, blah blah blah, evil Reeses and his centaur army, blah blah blah, Hercules trains good king’s army, blah blah blah, please make it stop. I mean you name your villain after a candy bar and don’t expect jeers? Come on.

And while we’re on the topic of Reeses (I know his name is actually spelled Rhesus but, again, who cares?), what an abortion of a character he is. I don’t even want to mention where his character goes (spoiler: nowhere.) I quite honestly think they forgot that he existed by the last act.

It’s all well and good to poke fun at Hercules but in all seriousness, it’s an abomination of storytelling, so bereft of skill and care, so mindlessly inconsequential that you will literally (fine, figuratively) be worse for wear having seen. After bearing witness to a completely unnecessary 300 sequel this year, we had hoped that the meat and potatoes warrior action thing had been put to bed for 2014. Brett Ratner manages to dredge it up again and make it improbably more boring than it was there.

But that Ratner guy really does possess an undeniable gift for making movies that lack a soul. Let’s just say he’s swung for the rafters here. So long as you manage to keep your eyes open, he will stun you with his complete and utter lack of storytelling prowess. He will wow you with characters speaking out the “themes” of the movies. He will try to hypnotize you into falling asleep so you won’t remember that you actually paid money to watch this.

If Hercules were a food group, it’d be French Fries. And not those extra crispy, uber-delectable French Fries. We’re talking the limp, soggy, sitting in oil all night French Fries. The “oh god, I’m just gonna throw these away” French Fries. The “did someone re-fry these French Fries?” French Fries. The ‘Rock with a Wig’ French Fries.

But let’s be honest with ourselves here, The Rock is good enough when he’s in something half-decent. Throw him in something with “Fast” or “Furious” in the title and he’s immensely watchable. Hell, I quite enjoyed him in Pain & Gain. Even The Toothfairy pushed the boundaries of…. wait, no, let’s just not go there. But while that formerly mentioned movie is an embarrassment, this is even more of an inglorious let down. I mean every time he’s called on to do something great, it usually involves pushing something huge or pulling on something strong. For both, The Rock sports a face like he’s pitching a legendary deuce.

For a movie all about being fit as shit, he’s only bashing things in the shadows or beating up on CGI. Once more, who cares? It’s a complete and utter waste of what that modern day Andre the Giant has going for him. With Hercules, Dwayne Johnson has hit Rock Bottom.

Driving home from the theater, I passed by a dojo in which a bunch of kids in stark white gis were thrusting their spindly elbows and yelping dramatically. A mom videotaped in the corner. I would rather watch that video than any given five minutes of this movie. It would have more life, energy and nuance than all of Brett Ratner’s Shatner of a film.

Hercules is the movie equivalent of having a pube stuck in your throat, you just want to cough it up and be free of it. Just keep telling yourself it will pass. Its legend will tell of how you’ll never get that 98 minutes back. I went in fully expecting to see a C- movie, too bad it was a full blown….

F

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: A MOST WANTED MAN

July 25, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged A Most Wanted Man, BLAH, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe

NOTE: I’ve tried to write something about this movie but I just can’t do it. It’s too dull to summon the energy to write more than one lousy sentence about. So that’s what I shall do. Behold: the one sentence review.

“Procedural to the point of blinding boredom.”

That is all.

D+

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: LUCY

July 24, 2014 by Chris Bunker Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Luc Besson, Lucy, Morgan Freeman, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Scarlett Johannson, Sci-Fi, Transcendence

Watch enough movies and they all start to look the same. Prescribing to an Ebertian view, that’s because they are the same, just with the details swapped in and out. Stereotypes and movies seem to be kin in this way: they’re developed from commonality. Like it or not, there’s a lot of bad smelling French folk, and it’s hard not to find a recent sci-fi movie that doesn’t stink.

Transcendence was borne from a growing fear of technological advancement and artificial intelligence. Really, it asked the right questions. The only problem: Wally Pfister was the one to raise his hand. Somehow he turned a good concept into I Spambot, a joke of a movie. Johnny Depp transforms into a computer and subsequently takes over the world. From nothing, he grows tentacles and conquers death, quite literally reviving people from the grave, even at one point building himself out of dark cyber-matter. The whole “is he a computer?” question hinged on figuring out whether Captain Crack still had any emotions. Except, no one really gave a shit. Whatever Pfister was going for, he failed miserably. Transcendence was so monumentally bad that no one could figure out who the joke was on.

Neil Burger’s Limitless wasn’t bad; it was just a nothing film. A mansion built on an eroded mountain slope is set to crumble. Anyone who’s ever opened a Psych textbook knows that 10% brain theory is a crock of shit fallacy. So … Bradley Cooper can take a pill that makes his brain more effective? College kids have a name for that: Adderall. At least he didn’t grow any tentacles. Limitless, just like its premise, was limited from the start. What happens when a human can use 100% of its brain? Well, apparently, Transcendence.

Lucy is a Luc Besson lucid dream. You don’t realize it isn’t real until halfway through. At the start it’s more of a nightmare.

The French director decided to expand the transhumanistic concept Transcendence garroted with a desk chair. “The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity. Imagine what she could do with 100%,” reads Lucy’s tagline. When they’re so blatant about a putrid concept like this, it’s tough to figure out if they can access their brain at all.

For what initially seemed like a brainless film, Scarlett Johansson felt like a good fit. The jury’s still out on whether she’s any good as an actress. As the eponymous Lucy, she goes from dumbfounded to unbounded in spurts. Her green eyes are a window into what appears to be a great big void. Caught in a massive scheme, she’s accidentaly drugged by Asian drug lords with “CPH4,” a brain-activating powder the kids are going to love, her mind starts to explode and her eyes circle the color wheel. Besson loads her brain like a phone charging: as she gets access to more and more brain power, her percentage flashes on screen.

She goes from 0-100 like Jason Statham in Crank. When her body intakes the drug, she starts seizing up. Besson throws in insert shots of cells splitting and blue energy surging through her bloodstream. Then she starts to float. All of a sudden she’s on the ceiling, tweaking out. None of it is remotely possible, though it’s made not to feel surreal.

Reprising his exact role in Transcendence, Morgan Freeman serves as Lucy’s resident cerebral professor. At the podium, he waxes about the cerebellum like he’s unveiling a new iPhone. What happens when the brain reaches 20% usage? 100%? Freeman, concerned, says there’s no way to tell.

With movies like Transcendence and Limitless getting more and more common, common sense seems to be going out the window. Things explode because they have to, else why would anyone care? Humans are given unfathomable powers—impossible even. Unnatural is made out as normal as an excuse to throw in big effects. Characters have endless capabilities. Don’t think about it. Eat your popcorn and be entertained by crazy CGI and bad writing. When did we turn into Androids?

I’m not sure quite when it clicked that I’d been duped. Besson’s got the uniquely weird French sense of humor that lends well to the satirical. Les Français always seem to be good at making fun of themselves, but they’re way better at making fun of everyone else. Lucy’s a truly awful adventure/sci-fi film. Seen through the lens of a bizzaro comedy though, it’s the funniest film of the year. It might just be the best superhero movie in years. Lucy is 86 minutes of eloquent parody.

Lucy’s powers quickly become insane. With a frenetic, hectic pacing, Besson fits in references to ET, Transcendence, Limitless, Inception, Planet of the Apes—basically any sci-fi movie that’s ever hit the big screen. She reads minds, steals memories with one touch; feels no pain; mind-controls German Shepherds; stops time and speeds it up; hacks into every cell phone, TV, computer; detects cancer and travels at the speed of light. She is limitlessness embodied, everything Transcendence should have been.

By the end, she’s swiping her way through time like she’s on an iPad. This movie has dinosaurs. At one point, she witnesses creation itself. None of it coheres, but it looks gorgeous. Nonsense platitudes about life and death are thrown in like the shots of zoo animals humping tossed in for fun. Freeman and Johansson babble about ones and twos and science—complete gibberish. ScarJo de-materializes and turns into a pseudo-Tomb Raider. Then she turns into a computer. A character asks what she’s doing and Freeman replies that she’s “searching for life and matter.” Obviously. Besson’s film is the Condescendence to Pfister’s Transcendence.

Lucy is a masterpiece of mockery and wit, made Hollywood by gorgeous, over-the-top CGI and Johansson’s and Freeman’s hilarious self-depricating work. With a first act that’s egregiously terrible, Lucy is one big trap that never fully lets you in on the gag. Shot in Taipei, Paris and New York, Lucy is stunning, unpredictable and laugh out loud funny. All of this packed in at less than an hour and a half, you leave the theater refreshed and giddy. What a shocker: a French guy made a movie that doesn’t stink.

A-

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

July 22, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Hamish Linklater, Jacki Weaver, Magic in the Moonlight, Marcia Gay Harden, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Woody Allen 9 Comments

First of all, one must excuse that Colin Firth is almost 30 years older than Emma Stone (28 years, 1 month and 27 days to be exact) in order to feel the least bit comfortable watching Magic in the Moonlight. After all, a romance with a man twice your age is creepy in all world’s but Woody Allen‘s. If we can forgive him this gross miscalculation of acceptable age gaps – allowing that it’s not some dolled-up plea bargain appealing to our more arcane, patriarchal notions of male-female relationships – then there’s much to love about Magic in the Moonlight; Colin Firth, pithy dialogue thrown away like used handkerchiefs, a prevailing sense of misanthropic disillusionment with the world. Ahhhh, all the Woody standards are carved aptly and well displayed. Well, all but one.

In his celebrated past, Woody Allen has been the harbinger of great female roles. With Annie Hall, he introduced us to a wise-cracking, no-nonsense, nouveau flapper-type that may as well have been beamed in from the roaring 20s. In Manhattan, Woody’s bittersweet, troglodyte edge was a perfect cocktail when mixed with Mary Wilkie’s vibrant, larger-than-life pomposity. Diane Keaton‘s star has never shined so bright.

To this day, that helplessly neurotic, New York, near-messianic Jewish comedian turned filmmaker is still hailed as one of the original feminist filmmakers. Set on a diabolical heading to disprove Hollywood standards that women are but window dressings in a Bechdel Test-less world, Woody introduced the world to the chick with attitude. With Moonlight though, it’s as if he’s forgotten his roots, offering a female character, a la the lovely Emma Stone, who is but a circumstance to the masculine manipulation storming around her. If Woody has neglected one thing here, to the chagrin of his story and film, it’s to round out his leading lady; a charge rarely brought against the man. After all, without Woody’s squally writing to back her up, Cate Blanchett wouldn’t be an Academy Award winner as of this year.

His latest yarn falls into place when a world renown magician, Stanley (Firth), catches wind of a youthful psychic, Sophie (Stone), who’s taken up with a wealthy clan of manicured socialite oafs, predicting future dalliances and offering tranquilizing reassurances on events past. A dear friend of Stanley’s – close colleague and rival magician, Howard (Simon McBurney) – has already been up to visit the bewitching mystic but can’t figure out any of her parlor tricks. Howard insists that she looks like the real deal.

In keeping with past practices, Stanley sets out to debunk her, as he has with many palm readers, seanse-seers and prophets and prophetesses past. Sophie’s the coquettish type but beneath her fawn-worthy veneer, she’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or so Stanley is intent to prove. When he lays eyes on her though, he’s just as likely to fall under her spell as he is to reveal her gambit for what it is.

That spell she so casually casts is as much misdirection as erection. Certainly not hard to look at, she’s a soothsayer that soothes his sai of a personality. She may be an oracle but it looks like he just wants to cull some oral from her (Heyo!) And though it’s kinda icky having a 53-year old man ogle the 25-year old Stone, it sets the scene for some rib-tickling comedic beats, particularly when Firth’s firing off in sardonic, breathy outbursts.

As the more carnal elements of unforeseeable affection takes the forefront in the later minutes, Woody’s film turns from a terse zing-fest into a cloying bout of love tennis; a ball-less Match Point, if you will. For it’s not Stanley’s courtship but his crustiness that churns out the chuckles. In truth, the deeper he falls for Sophie, the less compelling his character and the film as a whole.

And then there’s Stone. For all Sophie’s underwritten flatness, Stone gives her all, grasping at straws to give depth to a plateau of a character. It’s unfortunate that Woody of all people would settle on characterization a la strawberry hair and sweet ta-ta’s but Stone’s natural hippy chic aura matches up nicely with Sophie’s blander elements.

Throwaway character though Stone’s may be, Firth’s is an absolute delight. The berserk pragmatist may be far preferable to the man suffering oleaginous love fits, but Firth plays both brilliantly, offering up one of the finest, and certainly most gut-busting, performances of 2014. Manic looks devilishly good on him.

Dissecting Woody’s latest is easier than scalpelling apart a frog. The three acts are built on loose seams, as easily identifiable as cheap Indonesian jeans. And though they might fit together awkwardly, like said pair of Indonesian jeans, you can’t but admire the brilliant recklessness of those first two acts. The result is further entrancing when backed by Darius Khondji‘s delightfully dated cinematography – characterized by a preternatural sense of natural lighting – and Allen’s delicately crafted old-timey but sultry musical score. Though Woody slips towards something far more muted and monochromatic in the third act, the beginning is so full of magic that you can almost let it slide. Almost.

B

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: I ORIGINS

July 21, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Brit Marling, I Origins, Michael Pitt, Out in Theaters, Reviews

David Hume was a Scottish Empiricist who believed that knowledge comes only from those things that we can directly observe. We know that double bacon cheeseburgers exist because we can see them, we can smell them, we can taste them (Mmmmm.) God on the other hand cannot be seen, smelt or tasted, so his existence is improvable (not to be confused with impossible.) Something like love though is more tricky for the empiricist philosophers because, we experience it acutely but not through any of those five basic senses. So what is love? Hell if I know. Thankfully, that’s pretty much what director Mike Cahill has to say as well.

Our Mr. Hume also made an important correlation between the advancement of scientific progress and a decreased frequency of miracle reports. In essence, as we became more prone to understanding the world through scientific means, mankind’s knee-jerk reaction to label anything beyond the ordinary as “miraculous” became more tempered. So while a volcanic eruption once seemed like the wrath of God manifested in hot globular chaos, we now know that it’s simply the result of pressurized magma forced out of mountains because of tectonic shifts. Still, the miracle doesn’t become the mundane; it’s equally mind-rending to behold a volcano blowing its top for the casual observer and even that “scientific” explanation is pretty insane and magical when you really think about it. Faith, in a way, can be science.

I Origins‘ Ian (Michael Pitt) is a substitute for Hume. He’s a molecular biologist who lives by the belief that he will someday find scientific fact to disprove religious cornerstones. One particular religious cornerstone that Ian has set his sights on disproving is that of the human eye being a creation of intelligent design. All he and lab partner Karen (Brit Marling) have to do is build an eye for a non-seeing creature and wham, bam, thank you ma’am, there goes the intelligent design argument. It’s not that Ian necessarily has a vendetta against the idea of faith so much as he sees himself and his field of study on a crash course with religious zealotry and has set out to safe-guard his work with indisputable facts. In his mind, you can’t be a scientist and a spiritualist. Accordingly, his secular mindset is all-encompassing. The scientific approach, the only one worth his time and thought.

But this concept becomes irreversibly challenged when self-occupied, occasionally magnanimous and always very French Sofi (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) meets Ian and an indelible mark on his mind and soul. “What if there were more to the world than what you see?” Sofi ponders. If a blind creature cannot perceive light, isn’t it possible then that you could be “blind” to a sixth, seventh, eighth sense? Hell the mantis shrimp has sixteen color-receptive cones to our three, meaning it sees colors that we can’t even begin to imagine. Like salmon blue, mud pink or white-black. Not gray. White-black. Why can’t there be white-black spiritual beings hovering in and around us all the time?

Mike Cahill isn’t afraid to ask questions like this, nor does he feel obligated to answer them. In effect, I Origin is an exploration into the messy nature of faith that refuses to take a definitive stance and is that much richer for it. Rather than showing us the folly of science and the triumph of faith or vice versa, Cahill’s offered up the shortcomings to each and left us in a morally ambiguous zone that challenges us to flesh out and face our own conclusions. He treats the battle between faith and science as a sparring match between a blind woman and a deaf man. There’s no way for either to win but it’s still fun to watch them duke it out.

Pitt in this lead role has come further out from under the shell of Boardwalk Empire, carving out a character all his own who is totally compelling, especially when faced with crippling mental roadblocks. Ian’s transformation is delicate and played with potent poignancy from Pitt, who is matched every step by Brit Marling. This is largely due to Cahill’s more sensitive side showing through as across the board, the performances are largely elevated; the characters, clearly deeply cared for.

The empiricist can only know what’s there in front of them and on that basis alone, we can deduce that I Origins is a bold, immensely watchable philosophical journey. Rich with thematic nuance and stuffed with just the kind of questions that will keep you up at night pondering, I Origins is a brave addition to a growing collection of heady sci-fact pictures from Mike Cahill. He’s certainly set an intriguing course, one that I’ll look forward to tracking, but for now, we just have to hope he’s not scooped up to direct the reboot of the rebooted Spiderman.

B+

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: SEX TAPE

July 18, 2014 by Chris Bunker Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Cameron Diaz, Ellie Kemper, Jake Kasdan, Jason Segel, Kumail Nanjiani, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rob Corddry, Rob Lowe, Sex Tape 8 Comments

Apparently women love to blog. Hollywood seems to think they like narrating their blog posts too. You’ll see bad movies open and close with it like they’re Kevin Hart’s mouth.

When a woman starts blogging in film, that’s when the red flag goes up. Cliché alert. Sex Tape starts with Cameron Diaz hard at work on her latest mommy post with her mom sweatpants and her tired mom hair. Uh-oh. But wait—this time she’s blogging about erections. She’s completely bonkers for her husband’s boners (Jason Segel) and she can’t stop talking about it. “I love erections.”

Her post— narrated over shots of Segel and Diaz tainting every square foot of a college campus—reads like a government censored item from the Dr. Seuss explicit collection. Would you like them here or there? Would you like them in a house? You may like them in a tree? Would you beat them in a box? Would you beat them with a fox? Would you, could you in a car? A train! A train! Could you, would you on a train? Would you, could you, in the rain? Beat them! Beat them, here they are!

She’s like Julie & Julia for dongs. Or Dr. Seduce. Call it Obscene Bags & Ham.

Some see pornography as an addictive, brain chemistry altering evil; some see it five times a day. When Annie (Diaz) and Jay (Segel) decide to spice up their lustless marriage by making a sex tape, the concept seems forced. We’re more curious about what these people do than what they do.

Jay appears to work with a lot of iPads? That seems the only logical explanation for why his work life revolves around gifting tablets to his neighbors, his parents, total strangers and the mailman. Annie is apparently accomplished as a mommy blogger who writes about erections. Hank Rosenbaum’s (a very Chris Traegerian Rob Lowe) toy company (?) wants to buy her blog.

Sex Tape plays a lot like HD porno. Bad outfits and writing headline the beginning; no one cares about the plot. Plug your nose like a dog given a pill and you can make it out of the first act without bursting out of there. When they finally get to recording the action—Jay and Annie banging out the entire Kama Sutra like a Bruce Springsteen concert—things get juicier.

Jay forgets to delete the three-hour video and instead uploads it to the elusive Cloud™ and all the iPads he’s gifted out. Sex Tape turns into a high-paced pseudo-heist comedy with Segel as Con Jeremy and Diaz as Scamela Anderson. Rushing to delete or destroy the tape off the iPads, they quickly develop chemistry that isn’t sexual. He’s got the girth for it. You’re not sure if she can pull it off. The bacchanal that ensues comes as a surprise gift.

Sex Tape doesn’t set out to be sexy. Cameron Diaz is 41 and Segel’s no Zach Efron. As she’s aged, Diaz has played roles where her beauty is suggested. It’s like she had to play slutty instead of performing pretty. In Bad Teacher, The Counselor and Knight and Day,her performances were drunk, like a binge. Maybe she thought we were bored: no one would think she’s hot unless she role-played it. In Bad Teacher, she goes for skanky educator. Stale and flat like old beer, she’s just bad. In The Counselor, she swings for seductive trophy wife. Wearing tattoos like a one-piece swimsuit and some fake jewelry, she pouts her lips and you can smell the liquor coming off her breath. Didn’t anyone tell her she’s aged like wine?

Jason Segel acts from his core—with his penis. He’s on the other end of the spectrum: he’s fully bare where there isn’t any room for pretending. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he flops out his member and he’s more naked than any of the women he’s with. Segel doesn’t seem to have any reservations. While he isn’t particularly handsome, his sense of humor and sly delivery make up for it. When you see him in I Love You, Man, he’s often an object of ridicule more than one of sexualization. Same goes for The Five-Year Engagement. Yet, he brings depth that’s sexy, not sexual. His timing is too good to notice—you’re too busy looking at his junk.

As such, Segel was probably the best fit opposite Diaz, especially after they’d already been in Bad Teacher together. Diaz and Segel have a lot of sex in Sex Tape. They’re pretty much naked half the time. We see just as much bare-ass from Diaz as we do from Segel. While she doesn’t have his humor, he takes the onus off of her to perform. In a film where the man is just as naked and vulnerable as she is, Cameron doesn’t have to worry about acting. Nothing is pornographic about Sex Tape. With Segel, they’re boinking, not banging. Their mating doesn’t turn you on—it’s just funny.

When Jack Black shows up to stop Jay and Annie—who’ve broken into his YouPorn warehouse along with their two kids—from destroying his database, he asks who sent them. Hustler? RedTube? He goes on to list off about 50 other sites uninterrupted. Hot Goo? BangBros? BangBus? Some sites are ridiculous—all of them are real. That’s the kind of movie Sex Tape is: non-stop and no mincing on their raunch. It’s a world where Jack Black can be a porn magnate and Rob Lowe can be addicted to cocaine.

Oh, yeah. The kindly Chris Traeger is a heavy-metal head-banging, blow-blowing CEO. He’s mistakenly gotten an iPad which the couple tries to retrieve from his mansion; Diaz distracts him while Segel’s “diarrhea” forces him to lurk the house. With his typical upbeat, smart manner, Lowe’s character is pluperfect.

A seeming milquetoast Jewish goody, he offers Diaz some coke to get the night started. As Segel’s chased through the house by a massive German Shepherd, we see paintings of Lowe as various Disney characters: Raffiki holding up Simba, Geppetto crafting Pinocchio, Peter Pan flying through the night… it’s all glorious and uproarious. Lowe’s scene and character are the funniest in 2014 film.

Critics are giving Sex Tape a hard time and I can see why. Often it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet; other times you’d rather skip the meal. The story elements seemed crafted at YouPorn headquarters and there’s a lot of nudity. Grandpa and Grandma definitely won’t like this movie. Sex Tape is bellicose in getting a belly laugh and more often than not they draw one out: as a comedy, it’s more Shake Weight than workout, more pull-out than pull-up. Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper and Kumail Nanjiani show up to bend you over and they get the job done. At the very least, Director Jake Kasdan’s done a much better job with this film than he did with Bad Teacher.

In a world filled with sex tapes, there’s not a lot of room for originality. Sex Tape shows the consequences that come up when something private is made starkly public. At least it’s genuine. There’s a lot of discomfort around pornography in today’s culture. If anything, Sex Tape shows that it’s always better to have the real thing.