Prince Avalanche starts slow, aims lows and won’t make any dough. It’s a pretentious channeling of Terrence Malick, infected with self-importance and devoid of any meaning. Attempts to pull an “Emperor’s New Clothes” gag, Green’s film openly mocks you if you don’t “get it”. But it’s clear, there is nothing to get here, little to take away and zero to cherish. The equivalent of an imitation Jackson Pollock, this is a festering pile of trash wrapped up with fancy names and presented as craft. From the childish performances to the wandering story, and all along the gimmicky art-house road, this is a bad movie that made me jealous of the people storming out in the middle of it.

To get a grasp on what exactly makes Prince Avalanche so bad, first comprehend what it could have been. The combination of director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch screams comedy gold. Even the trailer presented this as a quirky comedy about two offbeat guys doing goofy things – nothing could be more misleading.

In reality, this is the story of Alvin (Rudd) and Lance (Hirsh) – two strange, moody, unlikable blue-collar workers who do the most boring job in the world: hammer posts into the side of the road. How do I know it’s the most boring job in the world? Because Green spends a good tenth of his movie showing us just exactly how boring it is to hammer in post after post on the side of the goddamn road. But does this make good filmmaking? Do I even have to tell you “no”?

Living together out of a tent in the woods, they run into weird situations like Hirsh beating off in the middle of the night and Lance getting dumped via snail mail and getting super-duper bummed about it. While events like these and the Odd Couple-in-the-woods living situation could make for good comedy beats, every attempt at comedy is eyebrow raising and wildly disappointing. It’s awkward in all the wrong ways and excuses this faltering comedy with attempts to “get deep”. An unnamed truck driver (Lance LeGault) gets a slight raise from the corner of the lip, but that’s the extent of our comedic enjoyment in a film that’s as confused as a Saturday night bag-lady and as funny as watching Grandma die.

More important, and more devastating, than the misfired attempts at comedy, is the lacking sense of fluidity between events and total absence of any driving sense of stakes. Without either, the film never even stood a chance at getting us the least bit invested in the trials and tribulations of these characters. If anything, we can’t stand them.

Lance is off-putting and childish and Alvin is a solitary type who seems to be slipping off his rocker in the most introverted and banal of ways. A moment where Alvin finds an abandoned house in the woods and goes about an impromptu game of “house” is most likely the moment where it all starts to come undone. A random elderly woman wanders into the scene (a local who was in no way a part of the production nor a character scripted in the story) and becomes a focal point for what seems like a lifetime, but is probably about five minutes. As this complete sidetracking indicates, there is simply no importance to anything. Instead, everything Green does feels as trivial as an extended Vine video. There’s no connective tissue, no fibers linking one scene to the next, and the backbone, if there even is one, is so bent with scoliosis that the only humane option is to put it to a long and wakeless sleep.

With a production schedule that only lasted a few weeks, it’s clear that little prep work was involved in storyboarding as well as with the performances, which come off as hackneyed and adolescent. Being immature and acting immature are two separate entities – one that Green, Hirsch and Rudd fail to delineate here. You don’t go to a playground to watch kids run around and yell at each other for fun much like you don’t go to the movies to watch actors saunter and tear around like children. You go to experience character, to be sucked into a story, to feel something. Prince Avalanche fails on all counts.

With the appeal of watching a book mildew, the film is basically to adults what Where the Wild Things Are was to children – confusing, stilted and just plain, off. Don’t take that as an attack on Where the Wild Things Are, just a well-deserved critique that that movie was very clearly not meant for kids. The dark themes and tragic, mature elements went over their heads and the meaning was lost on that younger generation. This, similarly, takes aim at an intended audience (adults in this case) and misses wildly. If anything, this is a movie for kids. But even more so, it seems like a film made for none. If you are however interested in good actors performing poorly, not doing anything of interest and then doing a lot more of nothing, than this is most surely the film for you.

I don’t doubt there will be droves of art-film enthusiasts lining up to put in their two-cent defense of Green’s latest but I can’t foresee any conclusion that would sway my strong distaste for this dead-on-arrival “film”.  It’s the worst case scenario of “artsiness” and someone has to hold art film’s feet to the fire when they fail… and fail this one has. Green proves that being both smug and dull are a lethal combination and results in a film that I, for one,  couldn’t wait to end.

F

At times prone to bluntness, Elysium packs wads of conventional sci-fi action amidst a ravaged view of the future. Nailed together with biting political satire, it’s a savage message board that hammers home director Neill Blomkamp‘s cynical ethos. Offering a glum look at an Earth spoiled by overpopulation and rampant authoritarianism, Blomkamp has perfected his signature sardonic voice and here uses his ruminations on wealth inequality as entertaining, and meaningful, ammunition.

Expanding on the political edge he utilized in District 9, here Blomkamp shifts from apartheid to global health, convicting the duplicitous members of the elite for their crimes against humanity as a whole. As much a pot-shot at the one percent as a sci-fi actioner, this caliber of blockbuster is of the rare intellectual breed, emboldened by Blomkamp’s knack for world building. Overflowing with sly wit and stylish cinematography, Elysium is a meaningful addition to a genre that is as much about prognosticating events to come as it is about action.

Hugging Earth’s atmosphere, Elysium is an asylum for the über-rich, an omnipresent symbol of wealth inequality – a mere 12-minute shuttle ride away. Beneath the veneer of a presidency, the wheel-shaped space station is run by merciless and ambitious defense autocrat, Delacourt (Jodie Foster) – an ends-justify-the-means type with a power-hungry streak. Elysium is the equivalent of a country club in space. A verdant spread of manicured grass and sparkling lakes, teeming with ivory-pillared mansions and palm trees, its appeal is in its exclusivity. Also, machines that can heal any and every affliction, from busted bones to blown-up, hollowed-out faces. While it can’t quite bring anyone back to life, it can do pretty much anything else.

But the citizens of Elysium keep these coveted machines and their sculptured paradise lifestyle to themselves. Making disparaging commentary about the pauper life of the Earthling, they live a sheltered fantasy that acts as the envy of every child back on Earth’s surface. When Earth folk hop aboard pirated shuttles and head towards the alluring omnipresent utopia lingering always on Earth’s horizon, their unblinking execution is seen as acceptable measures to ensure that Eden goes unspoiled.

Back on Earth, we meet Max (Matt Damon) as a child, shot in amber-toned retrospect. An orphan raised by Spanish nuns, Max dreams of someday going to Elysium. When he meets fellow orphan Frey (Alice Braga), Max makes a promise that he will someday buy a pair of tickets to the hovering space Arcadia. But Max’s turn to a life of crime split the two apart, only to reunite years later right before Max is dosed with a terminal amount of radiation. His only option for survival: the machines harbored on Elysium.

While many of the story beats to follow have been seen before (the platonically-grounded romance, the hunt for the last-man-standing, kidnapped loved ones used as collateral, and a series of escalating showdowns), they shine because the world around them is so fleshed out.

For example, Sharlto Copley‘s primal gun-for-hire, Kruger, may be little more than a broadly colored action trope but his character is an allusion to the corruptible power of wealth and the lows that those in power will stoop to ensure they stay in power. In backroom arbitrations, Delacourt employs Kruger’s shady tactics, the exact brand of at-all-costs methodologies that Blomkamp belittles. The lengths to which these characters will go to either ensure their position or work their way up the ladder is troubling, yet credible, in a world where greed is rewarded and power, a thing to be seized.

While the characters themselves are somewhat admittedly thinly written, they serve their purpose as foundations upon which the house of cards is built. As pieces building towards a darkly satirical judgment on disproportional fiscal distribution, they stack up nicely. Working with archetypes to spell out a crystal clear proletariat message, Blomkamp is a fighter – an auteur staging the last remaining vestige of a fractured and defeated Occupy campaign.

Because of his refusal to go quietly, Elysium becomes an exciting and powerful metaphor that packs as much message as it does punch. Though some may take shots at Blomkamp for over-ripening the overtly present politicking seeping from Elysium, his satirical tongue gives the film a startling sense of real-world application that few recent blockbusters dare to engage in. Blomkamp’s heavy-handed musings may be too forceful for the enchanted drones but it is gospel for the disenfranchised brigades of the modern workforce.

By bringing his distrustful and partially misanthropic eye back into focus, Elysium proves that District 9 was no chance occurrence. Like his characters, Blomkamp is a daring hostile who’s willing to burn the gates of the industry while manipulating its hyper-violence to his advantage. In sum, he’s solidified his place as a maverick filmmaker. While some might think that having the wealthiest citizens hoard life-saving machines is a plot MacGuffin of sorts, we have only to turn to current global wealth inequalities to realize that this is already manifesting itself in our own current state of affairs.

As mentioned earlier, one of the most important elements of the sci-fi genre is its willingness to predict what is to come. To this point, it’s interesting to examine how our perception of the future has changed. Putting our shifting cosmology under the microscope, the future has transformed drastically from the 1980s to the modern day. Compare the shiny tech-explosion seen in Back to the Future with its instant-food microwaves and hover-boards to more recent fare.

With films like Elysium, Looper, and Dredd, the future is a grimy place – bleak, crowded and hostile. As a reflection of our global fears, its seems that our minds have collectively turned towards issues of overpopulation, inequality and authoritarianism. The future is no longer a promised land; it’s a hellhole.

With globalization constantly accelerating yearly, the Earth is transforming. Accordingly, it’s no surprise that Spanish is the common denominator language in the film, nor is it a surprise that police work has been transferred over to affection-less AIs. It’s a world veering from empathy into a pit of enforced entropy – literally, hell on earth.

But to discuss Elysium without mentioning the gorgeous cinematography by Trent Opaloch would be to skirt a major attraction of the film. Hovering shots of Earth glimpsed from the space station aim to incite regret, to fuel second-guessing and deserve to be seen in the theater. The set design is equally enviable with Blomkamp’s hawk-eyed attention to detail and overwhelming use of practical effects and set pieces that make this world feel like a lived in, and much reviled, place.

With metaphors as explosive as the beautifully realized action, Elysium is a breathless experience with outbreaks of genius. Prone to coercive measures, Blomkamp pokes the rubble of the future and churns the ash towards our face. Subtlety is not his game, nor should it be. He knows he is onto something here and dares to execute it candidly without the common glaze of apathy. There may be moments of stumbling, particularly in the character development department but it’s nothing than can’t be fixed by an exoskeleton mech-suit. Problems notwithstanding, Blomkamp has again made a rare film that is as purely awesome as it is meaningful.

B+

Filler entertainment for sure, We’re the Millers is caught somewhere in between the hard-R, cuss-laden adult comedy and your run-of-the-mill, PG-13 family comedy with a soul. It stokes enough laughs to keep the engine churning for its 110 minute run time but when all is said and done, it’s just another comedy kept buoyant by chuckles with little living behind the curtain, sloppily saddled with a moral message far out of its natural reach. You won’t walk out regretting what you’ve seen but you’ll be hard pressed to remember it by name a year down the line.

Proving that he knows how to milk a good laugh, director Rawson Marshall Thurber is no stranger to comedy. Back in 2004, he directed the much revered (at least by this guy and his high school buddies) Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. In case you are wondering, yes, that is the movie you’re thinking of. Apparently the world just forgot about the most unnecessarily tacked on post-colon fragment of all time in the whole “A True Understory Story” bit but trust me (and IMDB), it’s part of the name.

While Thurber was the solitary writer behind the laugh riot that was Dodgeball, We’re the Millers has an exorbitant six writers. If writing duties were shared evenly, that calculates to about 18 minutes from each scribe. No wonder the film feels so tonally jarring, rocking back and forth between sweet and sour, shmaltzy and irreverent. When you finally feel like you have a read on Thurber’s voice, it turns on a dime from lewd to sentimental and back again. Like an amusement park ride that spins more than it moves forward, the result is dizzying, disorienting and may make you wanna puke.

Theexalted Dodgeball also had Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and a pre-pariah Lance Armstrong working for it while We’re the Millers rests on the comedic shoulders of Jason Sudeikis and Jennifer Aniston. Sudeikis was a pleasant surprise in Horrible Bosses but he’s still something of an unproven talent while Aniston has largely played the same girl next door with boy issues every since her role as Rachel on Friends. She certainly did break character in Horrible Bosses as the pushy sexual deviant boss, which ultimately resulted in one of the biggest breaths of fresh air in her entire career. For some of her onscreen time in this, she captures a similarly charmless aura but, about halfway through, descends to the flippant level we’ve come to expect of her.

And although this isn’t Sudekis’s first rodeo, it is essentially his first go-around as the leading man. As a supporting character, Sudekis thrives with his bohemian dude-isms. He’s that silent bomber that swoops in and steals the laugh but here, he owns the pony show and is happy to try and strike at all the bells and whistles. Even in moments where the film stagnates, he satisfying leads the cast with his easygoing, quip-laden energy and eager beaver physical comedy.

Sudekis plays the role of David Clark, a 30-something burn out drug dealer working for his nerdy-college-buddy-turned-pot-kingpin (Ed Helms). When David gets robbed by a fuzzy-haired pack of hoods, he is enlisted to carry a smidge and a half of pot (read two hundred pounds) over from the dusty lawlessness of Mexico. In an attempt to be inconspicuous, he employs stripper neighbor, Rose (Aniston), apartment twerp/dork/loser/virgin, Kenny (Will Poulter), and hood-rat hobo with an iPhone 5, Casey (Emma Roberts) to impersonate a hapless, all American family on an RV vacation. Naturally, the border guards wouldn’t suspect a pink polo-sporting family to be smuggling tens of millions of dollars worth of sweet, sticky ganja across the heavily guarded US border.

There are moments of stitch-inducing laughs peppered throughout but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is a minor experience in a minor film. Nonetheless, there are moments that really got a rise out of me, such as an impromptu learning-to-kiss seminar that is gruelingly awkward as well as various asides from Sudekis, spoken or even just mouthed, but two days after watching the film and the effects have already mostly washed off. Regardless of its relative levity and how easy it is to write off, it was a film that I didn’t feel bad snickering at alongside the audience exploding in a cacophony of laughter around me. In terms of the immediate experience of having a good time at the movies, We’re the Millers accomplishes that goal.

What I did have an issue with is the shoehorning in of moral lessons surrounding the troubles of drug dealing. There’s a sort of implied agreement that if you’re going to see a stoner comedy about a sourpatch burnout slinging bags of weed with names like “Fucking Awesome” and “Alaska Thunderfuck” then you don’t really have any moral credo against the illicit substance. We don’t need to be told that drug dealing is bad and, by extension, don’t need to see our hero turn away from it in order to understand that he’s actually a good guy.

There was never a “Cheech and Chong Turn Narcs!” for a reason just as Pineapple Express didn’t end with James Franco and Seth Rogen swearing off the substance forever. It’s an unnecessary turning point for a film that already is trying to stand for the importance of the family. Being a comedy with a little bit of a message is one thing. Being a moral guard of the US War on Drugs is quite another. Had they just stuck by the idea that things are better in twos, or threes, or fours, it could have had enough of a sugarcoat to satisfy the older demographics but instead it tilts too far into preachy, moral guardianship. By the end, two is two too many ethical judgments for this comedy to cram in.

But, let’s not get too down on it. It’s a fun movie right? That’s the point, right? Surely, but it’s also the reason why I won’t be prancing through town singing its praises. I thought the ongoing Scotty P. “You know what I’m sayin'” gag was hilarious, I laughed a lot when Kenny was in the throes of a kiss gangbang and even Jennifer Aniston hit more than she missed (even if she should retire stripping from her resume as soon as possible). But in the end, it’s not much more than throwaway entertainment that’ll see a meager return on its investment, have a quick HBO run and disappear into the same discount bin that Horrible Bosses lingers in today a mere two years after its release.

C+