“Smallfoot” is a better idea than movie. The twist is that in this story, bigfoots really exist, except to them we’re the mythological and frightening creatures. It’s a cool concept that gets watered down into a standard kiddie film with boingy action and a slathered-on life-lessons theme.
Channing Tatum voices Migo, a young yeti who is about to take over the prestigious job of gong-ringer. This means making the sun rise by catapulting himself across their Himalayan mountain village and slamming his head into a massive gong. His dad (Danny DeVito) has held the position for many years, and has literally shrunk in the job.
A lot of the things the yetis do are like that -- they’re fun but don’t make much sense. Still, it’s a bustling place with a lot of joy.
They have some strange laws, though, enforced by the stoic Stonekeeper (Common), who wears a robe consisting of stone tiles, each one inscribed with a law known to be true. One of them reads, “There is no such thing as a smallfoot.” Odd that they would have a word and a rule for something that supposedly doesn’t exist.
Soon enough Migo stumbles across a real smallfoot, aka human, in the form of Percy Patterson (James Corden), a down-market wildlife television personality who has come to the Himalayas in order to fake a bigfoot sighting and pump up his ratings. Then he runs into the real thing, they become fast friends and Migo takes him back to his mountaintop village.
This puts him in conflict with the Stonekeeper and the yetis’ entire belief system. But with a few musical numbers and antics, everything will turn out all right.
“Smallfoot” is animation for the whole family, or at least the sort under age 10. It’s a perfect movie for home video, since parents can hit the ‘play’ button and then find something better to do.
Video extras are decent, and include a new animated short, “Super Soozie,” about a yeti toddler. There’s also a sing-along mode, three music videos and a couple of making-of featurettes.
In this age of peak tribalism, people tend to cluster in like groups and don’t question the precepts of what they’re told. Especially for those whom life is good, it’s easy to stay in the bubble and enjoy. Everyone else is a potential enemy.
That’s the message of “Smallfoot,” a modestly entertaining animation flick that will certainly thrill wee ones more than adults. I found the themes heavy-handed and the pacing rather draggy.
I bet kids under age 10 will love it, though, and that’s who it’s aimed squarely at.
Channing Tatum, really reaching for the upper register of his voice, plays Migo, a young yeti -- as in bigfoot, sasquatch, etc. It turns out bigfoots (feet?) are real, and living in bliss at the top of a cloud-covered mountain the Himalayas. Daily life is a pleasant grind of chores, some of which make little sense, and good times.
Migo goes about 20 feet tall, has luminous ivory-colored fur, no nose and two horns on his head, one broken. He sort of resembles a distant cousin of Sully from the “Monsters Inc.” movies.
Migo’s dad, Dorgle, is the head gong-ringer, whose job is to be catapulted across the top of the village each daybreak and smash his head into the giant gong that beckons the emergence of the sun, which in their lore is a sun-snail traveling across the sky. (Sounds loopy, but it isn’t worse than some human mythology I’ve heard.)
Time has taken its toll: Dorgle is rather short for a yeti -- Danny DeVito does the voice; get it? -- but used to be taller than the towering Migo. Soon he will pass the mantle to his enthusiastic son.
The yetis have their laws written in stones, quite literally. Their leader is the Stonekeeper (Common), who wears tiles of stones formed into a robe, each one inscribed with a truth that goes unquestioned. The weight of the law is a real thing in this case. “It takes a strong backbone,” Stonekeeper says.
Chief among their laws is, “There is no such thing as a smallfoot,” which is their word for humans. You might think it odd that there is a law just to disprove a negative, and there are a few quiet naysayers amongst the yeti. Among them is Gwangi, the largest of their kinds voiced quite well by LeBron James, and secretly their leader is Meechee (Zendaya), the Stonekeeper’s daughter.
Migo meets up with a smallfoot but his claims are discredited and he is banished. In his exile he journeys to the human town below the mountain and bumps into Percy Patterson (James Corden), a schmaltzy British wildlife broadcaster. Think Steve Irwin, but less brave and more annoying.
His plan was to fake a yeti sighting to save his fading career. So when Migo carries him back to his village as proof, it’s a boon to them both.
I liked how screenwriters Clare Sera and Karey Kirkpatrick (the latter also directed) handle the language barrier. To the humans, yetis sound like roaring bear-lions; to the yetis, humans make squeaky mouse-talk.
There are several songs in “Smallfoot,” though I’d call this more a movie with musical interludes than a straight-up musical. By far the best is “Let It Lie,” with Common rapping out the hidden history of the yeti.
A middling bit of animation, “Smallfoot” is built for small children to love and parents to endure. Business proposal: movie theaters start featuring double bills in which grownups drop off their kids to see this in a supervised theater while they pop next door for something more to their tastes.
“Kingsman: The Secret Service” was a dashing, original and highly entertaining flick that spoofed the conventions of the spy genre while generally adhering to them. Its much-anticipated sequel, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle,” is none of those things.
This bewilderingly limp follow-up brings back the same cast and creative team, yet fails to recapture the magic. It’s got too many characters, a non-scary villain and seems too in love with itself to spare any affection for its audience.
You may remember that in the last movie, veteran superspy Galahad (Colin Firth) was killed, shot through the head. This proves only a mild inconvenience, as he’s resurrected in short order, minus one eye and lacking any memories. Though we just know his killer skills are residing there, Bourne-like, underneath the timid exterior.
Galahad protégé Percival (Taron Edgerton) takes center stage, as nearly the entire Kingsmen coterie of spies is wiped out by Poppy (Julianne Moore), who controls the world’s drug trade from her secret headquarters deep in the jungle, which she’s built to resemble her nostalgic middle America childhood. She has a plan to hold the world’s drug addicts hostage unless the governments pay her a massive ransom.
The key new wrinkle, the introduction of an American version of the Kingsmen, turns out to be the film’s biggest disappointment. They’re Statesmen, Kentucky whiskey-brewin’ cowboys in Stetsons – which suggests the British filmmakers can’t distinguish the New South from the Old West. Channing Tatum turns up as their best and brightest, but he’s soon sidelined in favor of a lesser operative (Pedro Pascal). Jeff Bridges chews his dialogue like cud as their top kick.
Director Matthew Vaughn still has the chops for some seriously fancy action scenes, as the camera spins around the combatants like an untethered raven, the action speeding up or slowing down as aesthetics needs be.
Whenever the bullets and blades aren’t flying, though, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” is a cringe-worthy retread that’s more embarrassing than enjoyable.
Bonus features are pretty decent. The DVD comes with the “Kingsman Archives,” a collection of concept art photos and behind-the scenes stills, plus “Black Cab Chaos: Anatomy of a Killer Case.”
Upgrade to the Blu-ray edition and you add a feature-length making-of documentary film focusing on everything from the Kingsmen and Statesmen’s respective gear, “Suited and Booted,” to visual effects and Elton John’s guest-starring appearance.
I absolutely adored 2015’s “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” It was a dizzy, daffy parody of the spy genre that nonetheless was in unabashedly in love with cool gadgets, dastardly plots and slo-mo action scenes. And it featured a bunch of dashing guys in swanky British suits to boot.
So here comes the sequel, subtitled “The Golden Circle,” using the same core cast and creative team, and it’s a discombobulated hot mess of a movie. It's like going to a party where you like all the people, but somehow the conversations are lame.
What I enjoyed about the first film was the brash, giddy tone that combined R-rated mayhem with sharp comic zingers. It featured Colin Firth as Galahad, the oh-so-suave top agent of the Kingsmen, a private spy agency working secretly to keep the world safe. Their cover is as tailors, so they all sport the same style of clothes, right down to the striped tie and spectacles, which double as X-ray goggles and tactical display.
So why does the follow-up go so awry? Director Matthew Vaughn is back along with his co-screenwriter Jane Goldman, based on “The Secret Service” comic books by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Firth also returns -- despite the slight inconvenience of Galahad being killed in the last movie -- along with Taron Edgerton as Eggsy, his young Cockney protégé, and Mark Armstrong as Merlin, their Bond equivalent of Q, the master outfitter.
I’m not giving anything away by saying that Galahad does indeed turn up again, missing an eye and most of his memories, though he does put all the pieces back together again in the end.
(Well, not depth perception...)
It’s also not a spoiler that the Kingsmen are attacked and mostly wiped out by this movie’s villain named Poppy, a bubbly billionaire drug dealer played by Julianne Moore, who’s built her own 1950s nostalgia town in the middle of a remote jungle for reasons that are never entirely clear. Her signature thing is burning a solid gold emblem onto her henchmen.
She’s got some robot guard dogs, a huge meat grinder (guess where that's heading!) and a plan to poison the entire world population of drug users, holding their lives hostage unless the U.S. president (Bruce Greenwood) legalizes narcotics.
Never mind that that would immediately put her out of business. But the conniving POTUS -- who seems to be a cocktail of the worst traits of Clinton, Bush and Trump -- has his own chess move to make.
The other big twist is that Galahad, Eggsy and Merlin team up with their American counterparts, the Statesmen, who are in the whiskey business and dress as drawling cowboys. I guess the Brit filmmakers don’t understand the difference between Kentucky and Wyoming.
Jeff Bridges shows up as their boss, and we think Channing Tatum is going to team up with the Kingsmen, but then something happens. Their real pardner is Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), who carries a mean electrified whip and a few grudges of his own. Halle Berry plays Ginger, their counterpart to Merlin, who secretly yearns to get into the field.
The action scenes are energetic and fun, as the camera swoops around the combatants, the speed picking up and slowing down as needed to highlight an especially nifty move. This movie’s not nearly as gory as the last one, which may be a relief to some but was a letdown for me.
Elton John shows up as himself, kidnapped by Poppy and forced to play his songbook for her entertainment, right down to the iconic feathers-and-star-glasses outfit. It’s one of the most bizarre celebrity cameos I’ve ever seen, bloated and peevish and dropping f-bombs all over the place. I can’t imagine Sir Elton needs the money, so somebody must have talked him into this.
I haven’t even mentioned Poppy’s cyborg lieutenant, Eggsy’s Swedish princess girlfriend or the European rock concert where a tracking device is implanted in a very squirmy location. This movie has too many characters and a lot of moving parts, and many spin merrily in their own, untethered orbits.
“Kingsman: The Golden Circle” feels like pieces from three or four sequels, cut into bite-sized pieces that aren’t enough to satisfy and don’t taste good together.
“The Hateful Eight” struck many observers as a sharp departure for writer/director Quentin Tarantino, who tends to love freewheeling stories with lots of locations, walk-on bit characters and sudden twists of the plot. “Eight” was essentially a bunch of strangers stuck in a single room for three hours, the tension slowly ratcheting up.
(The blood, however, pools much more quickly.)
But in a lot of ways it’s a return to the form of “Reservoir Dogs,” Tarantino’s first feature film, which relied heavily on enclosed spaces in which violent characters try to make sense of shifting loyalties.
It’s not quite in the top tier of Tarantino films, like “Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.” But it firmly belongs in that second rank, along with “Django Unchained,” boasting plenty of entertaining face-offs and spouted soliloquies. For a three-hours picture, it goes by pretty quick.
The set-up is simple. Eight (for now) people are trapped by a terrible blizzard in a remote Wyoming cabin sometime in the years after the Civil War. They struggle to figure out who is not who they say, who’s loyal to who, and who deserves to be gunned down.
Answer to that last question: all of them, for one reason or another.
They include an infamous bounty hunter who always brings his quarry in alive (Kurt Russell); his current “client,” a foul-mouthed lady gangster (Jennifer Jason Leigh); a proud and decrepit ex-Confederate general (Bruce Dern) searching for his lost son; a black Union officer who’s also turned to the bounty hunting game (Samuel L. Jackson); a former rebel raider who claims to be the new sheriff at the closest town (Walton Goggins); a prissy British hangman (Tim Roth); a near-silent cow puncher (Michael Madsen); and Bob (Demián Bichir), a mysterious Mexican almost completely hidden by his coat, hat and beard.
Various alliances form, natural and otherwise, then break apart. The bounty hunters have an easy affinity for each other, and those on the side of the Confederacy soon square off against the Union loyalists.
Each character gets at least one moment where they step to the fore of the rhetorical stage, but there’s no single protagonist. Perhaps closest is Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren, who gives a long speech that’s notable for both its righteous anger at the injustice of slavery and the absolutely filthy way he goes about gaining some small measure of revenge for it.
“The Hateful Eight” is a long, blood-soaked but engaging dance through Western tropes.
Oh, and don’t forget to keep an ear out for Ennio Morricone’s Oscar-winning musical score.
Bonus features are nothing to brag about. Tarantino is among a number of high-profile filmmakers who are disdainful of participating in promotional material. (Despite the mountains of press they do when their movie is coming out.)
There are exactly two featurettes: “Beyond the Eight: A Behind-the-Scenes Look” and “Sam Jackson’s Guide to Glorious 70mm.”
At some point the Coen brothers are going to remember they're funny. Not this time, though.
"Hail, Caesar!" is the latest from the writer/producer/director siblings, Joel and Ethan, and the latest strikeout. It's not nearly as dour as "Inside Llewyn Davis," nor does it have the dragging sense of self-importance of the overpraised "No Country for Old Men."
But the fact that "Hail" is actually trying to be caustic and funny, and fails pretty miserably at it, perhaps makes the disappointment even more keen.
It's a daffy send-up of the Hollywood studio system circa 1950, when chiefs ran the show and stars were just playthings to be shuffled and traded like cards in a deck. It's the sort of movie in which everybody comes off looking bad -- the behind-the-scenes overlords, the dimwitted actors, the narcissistic directors, the nosy press, the whole kebab.
Even the screenwriters, who usually get portrayed as the put-upon heroes of the trade, are seen as stooges of the Communists, happily spouting Marxist theory but really desiring more of the dough and limelight for themselves.
The Coens doubtless intended this as caricature, a joke-within-a-joke about how artistic types were often viewed during the McCarthy era. Call me old fashioned, but I just don't find the Blacklist every funny.
The central character is Eddie Mannix, the fixit man for Capital Pictures. The sign on his office door says Head of Physical Production, but he really runs the studio on a day-to-day basis while the man ostensibly in charge keeps a careful remove in New York. Mannix's job is a quotidian nightmare of putting out fires, making sure the trains run on time, preventing the embarrassing stuff from getting into the press and keeping the tantrums/temptations of the stars to a manageable minimum.
Things go haywire when his biggest star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), is kidnapped from the set of the Roman drama that bears the title of this film. It's Mannix' big prestige picture for the year, and soon the gossip columns have heard about the disappearance -- including rival sisters, Thora and Thessaly Thacker, both played by Tilda Swinton.
The kidnappers are... not terribly organized. They're a bunch of egghead scriptmen who bring Baird to a beatific beachside home, still in his Roman soldier get-up. They don't even bother to lock the doors, and we wonder why he doesn't simply walk up the driveway and thumb a ride back to town. But Baird is fascinated by the lefty "scientific theory" of the crew, who apparently just requisitioned it from a visiting professor. He happily chats them up, trading stories about drinking with Clark Gable, having to shave Danny Kaye's back and such.
Hanging around the periphery is Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy star in the mold of Audie Murphy who's just been asked to change his image with a switch to erudite romantic dramas. Deliciously played by Alden Ehrenreich, Hobie is hopelessly ill-equipped for anything more than ridin' and ropin', but gamely gives it a go.
If Baird is dim, then Hobie's mind is just about pitch black. But somehow the simpleminded, earnest young star always seems to point himself in the right direction, while Mannix and his henchmen are confounded by the kidnapping.
Also turning up in bit roles -- just a scene or two apiece -- are Ralph Fiennes as Laurence Laurentz, an uppity director trying fruitlessly to whip Hobie into thespian shape; Scarlett Johansson as DeeAnna Moran, a swimsuit beauty a la Esther Williams who's more Bronx moll than angel; Jonah Hill as the ever-ready fall guy; Frances McDormand as the editing whiz toiling in her cave; and Channing Tatum as a Gene Kelly-esque song-and-dance man.
Tatum shines in one of the better scenes, a homoerotic romp with a bunch of Navy sailors already missing the dames as they're about to put to sea. Kelly was light as a feather on his feet, while Tatum's tapping has a more of a lumbering quality to it, but I still appreciated the effort.
"Hail, Caesar!" is a wonderful-looking picture, photographed by Roger Deakins in the saturated colors and crisp tones of the era. The Coens seem to be having a grand old time, amusing themselves with musical numbers and other homages to Golden Age Hollywood -- while simultaneously undercutting the whole industry as trivial and silly.
It's a schizophrenic film without much narrative semblance or sense of purpose. A few bits dazzle, fool's gold for those of us who used to believe the Coens could do no wrong.
One of the largest box office bombs in recent memory, “Jupiter Ascending” just may mark the end of big-budget filmmaking for the Wachowski siblings. After lighting up imaginations and accountant spreadsheets with “The Matrix,” the Wachowskis have failed to capture lightning in a bottle again.
This lackluster sci-fi adventure represents their last, dim spark.
Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum are two underwhelming performers, and their combination yields exponential results in sheer thespian dreadfulness. Kunis substitutes a pinch-faced pout for emotion, and Tatum’s expression when his character is in turmoil mostly closely resembles constipation.
She is Jupiter Jones, lowly maid who turns out to be the inheritor of the Earth – literally – who’s being hunted by her family (sorta), an all-powerful galactic clan who harvest entire planets for the life essence of the inhabitants. Eddie Redmayne slithers and whispers as the main baddie.
He is Caine Wise, a disgraced military man-turned-bounty hunter, who becomes Jupiter’s protector and, inevitably, romantic interest. It’s essentially one big chase story, with Jupiter being repeatedly kidnapped and rescued by the various warring factions.
There’s a plethora of cool, bizarre creatures, but they’re here and gone so fast they barely have time to register. Similarly, the action scenes are filled with nifty CG special effects, but are staged confusingly.
“Jupiter Ascending” is the sort of disaster that is best experienced as unintentional comedy. Invite some friends over for some “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-style spoofing.
Bonus features consist of a number of making-of featurettes. The DVD comes with “Jupiter Jones: Destiny Is Within Us” and “Jupiter Ascending: Genetically Spliced.”
Upgrade to the Blu-ray and you add “Caine Wise: Interplanetary Warrior,” “The Wachowskis: Minds Over Matter,” “Worlds Within Worlds Within Worlds,” “Bullet Time Evolved” and “From Earth to Jupiter (And Everywhere in Between).”
I admired director Bennett Miller’s first two movies, “Capote” and “Moneyball,” but I feel “Foxcatcher” is one of the more overpraised films of 2014. It’s a deeply odd exploration of a famous murder of an Olympic athlete by the scion of a super-wealthy family, an exercise in mood that eventually gets lost in its own dirge-like fog.
Steve Carell is virtually unrecognizable as John DuPont of the chemical fortune clan, who uses his riches to host the men’s Olympic wrestling team on his palatial estate, Foxcatcher Farms, during the late 1980s. He brings in Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), a somewhat dim but big-hearted gold medal winner, to head things up.
DuPont is the coach of the team, at least titulary, though he actually knows very little about wrestling. He treats Mark as a combination underling/surrogate friend, someone he likes to keep around to make him feel more valuable and less lonely.
With his prosthetic nose and feral fake teeth, Carell resembles a stunted bird of prey, who knows great things are expected of him, and resents it.
Mark Ruffalo is terrific as Mark’s more accomplished brother David, whom DuPont also tries to woo into the fold. With his ambling gait and cocked head, Ruffalo seems like a great, strong, sensitive ape who knows both how to fight and how to nurture with equal aplomb.
The story is essentially the intersecting trajectories of these three men, with Mark initially bonding to DuPont as a manipulative father figure – with an unspoken undertone of sexual attraction. But later the lines of loyalty shift, with tragic results.
Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman do a wonderful job of setting up the characters and evoking a disquieting sense of dread. But they don’t really find any place to go with it, and the film ends up replaying the same emotional chords over and over again. It’s not helped by Tatum’s stilted acting juxtaposed against two top-flight talents.
Watch “Foxcatcher” for Ruffalo and Carell’s masterful performances – just don’t expect the film as a whole to win gold.
Extra features are pretty disappointing, and are the same for DVD and Blu-ray editions. Both come with a handful of deleted scenes, and a single making-of featurette, “The Story of Foxcatcher.”
"It's the sort of awful where you don't even really want to complain or criticize. You just feel bad for everyone involved."
That quote is from me, answering an email from a colleague who missed the screening of "Jupiter Ascending" due to circumstance. Normally I don't presume my e-scribblings to be worthy of sharing. But I realized as soon as I dashed it off that it's a perfect 22-word version of everything else you're about to read.
The Wachowski siblings made "The Matrix," which will stand the test of time as one of the great science fiction films. Their work has gotten more head-scratching as time has gone on, through two increasingly worse "Matrix" sequels, a daffy Day-glo romp in "Speed Racer," and the confusing-yet-still-grand "Cloud Atlas."
You can always count on the Wachowskis for sumptuous visuals, dazzling CG action and mind-trippy plots. "Jupiter Ascending" has all that, minus anything resembling a soul or artistry. If "Cloud Atlas" was nearly incoherent, this one gets us all the way there.
Watching it feels like being stuck in a bad video game we can't turn off.
The action scenes are so frenetic and fast-paced, you can barely even follow what's happening. And when things do slow down, you've got Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum to stumble, glassy-eyed, through some ridiculous dialogue. Over the years I've riffed on them separately as lifeless performers, but finally we have a movie where they can combine their wondertwin powers in terrible acting.
She is Jupiter Jones, daughter of a murdered Russian astronomer spending her days as a maid in Chicago, cleaning toilets along with her mother and aunt, and hating life. Then one day Tatum shows up as Caine Wise -- I know, I know, these sound like porn actor names -- to protect her.
Tatum's get-up in this flick is just seriously weird. He's got brown hair but a blond goatee that looks like a Brillo pad spray-painted and stuck to his chin, plus heavily mascaraed eyes and pointy elf ears. Caine claims to be a genetically spliced half-wolf ex-military legionnaire "skyjacker" who used to have wings but they got cut off when he was court martialed for biting someone, and now works as a bounty hunter.
Y'know, just a boy from the block.
It seems the universe is actually controlled by competing siblings of the noble Abrasax clan, who like to let inhabited planets fill up with people and then harvest them to be turned into this blue goo that they use to stay immortal.
What's more, Jupiter is not just a lowly maid but the genetic "reoccurrence" of the Abrasax matron, which means she's actually royalty who owns the Earth, or something. The Abrasax overlords compete to see who can control Jupiter's fate, and she ends up getting kidnapped so many times we lose track of who's on first.
The worst of the lot is Balem, played by Eddie Redmayne using a strange low whisper/moan like he's trying to channel Greta Garbo on Valium. He sees Jupiter and her kin as mere playthings for the amusement and profit-making of their bettors.
"Life is an act of consumption. The humans on your planet are but a resource waiting to be turned into capital," Balem says, just in case the we-are-the-99-percent motif wasn't obvious enough for you.
Each of the three Abrasax factions has their own set of spaceships and henchmen, so we're treated to a constant parade of bizarre figures who appear and disappear quickly, including androids, lizardmen and a little elephant guy. A lot of the imagery is imaginative, but we're barely given enough time for it to register before more eye candy is thrown at us.
At one point, Gugu Mbatha-Raw turns up as a flunky with ears so ridiculously big and fake, they actually make Caine's seem cool.
The only time I smiled was when Jupiter and Caine wade into an intergalactic bureaucracy to establish her birthright, and it's a dense Dickensian steampunk fantasy of hobbit-like figures and gadgetry, and I thought we'd suddenly wandered into a Terry Gilliam movie. And we did, or at least a brief homage, complete with Gilliam himself.
But then it becomes "Jupiter Ascending" again, and how depressing is that?
If you're tempted to make a joke about "22 Jump Street," the sequel to the hit comedy starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, continuing with future iterations of "23 Jump Street," and so on, don't bother. The movie has already beaten you to the punch at poking fun at itself.
In fact, one of the most refreshing thing about this reboot of the 1980s TV show is that it gleefully wallows in its own crass commercialism. It's a wicked send-up of not only the whole buddy-cop genre, but of itself.
Our film comedies have now reached the level of ironic detachment where the snake is eating its own tail. Nothing we see is meant to be taken at face value. So the stars aren't playing the roles of undercover cops posing as college students -- one the brainy dweeb and the other the lunkhead bruiser -- but the parody versions of them.
At one point, Hill and Tatum walk into their new "undercover" police headquarters, which happens to be right across the street from their old one. Next door, the "23 Jump Street Apartments" are currently under construction.
If you think that's hip and hilarious, wait till the end credits, which takes the same joke and runs it into the end zone, spikes the ball, bursts out of the stadium into the parking lot, and keeps going.
After inept rookie cops Schmidt and Jenko (Hill and Tatum, respectively) managed to break up a huge high school drug ring, they're tasked with doing the same thing again at MC State. When Schmidt tries to suggest other approaches, their deputy chief (Nick Offerman) sternly enforces the rule of sequels: do exactly the same thing as last time.
This they do, with the socially awkward Schmidt struggling to fit into the college party scene, while Jenko makes the football team as a walk-on and bonds with their charismatic quarterback (Wyatt Russell), who may or may not be lynchpin of campus narcotics trafficking.
The specifics of the plot are so tiresome that co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and their trio of screenwriters barely even bother to pay attention to them. The movie mostly jumps from scene to scene, generally involving Hill and Tatum spewing out motormouth gibberish, making fools of themselves while also commenting on the proceedings as they're unfolding. The movie doesn't so much do jokes as stages uncomfortable situations.
This is the comedy of embarrassment. Much of this is painful to watch, and in seeing our boys squirm we are intended to derive laughs.
And there are a lot of them, though there are long stretches in the middle where we feel more sorry for the people we're following than amused by them.
The lead actors are both in their 30s, and look it, and one of the running gags is that absolutely no one they meet believes they are college age.
"I'm 19," Schmidt says, straight-faced.
"Nineteen minutes late to the pinochle game?" a snarky girl responds.
After awhile, though, the shtick starts to wear thin and we know everything that's going to happen -- like that no gunfight can commence without an extended back-and-forth of insults and quips between the antagonists.
At nearly two hours long, "22 Jump Street" far outstays its welcome. Like an actual college party, it's raucous and intoxicating for awhile, but after 90 minutes you've seen all there is to see, and the music shuffle starts to repeat.
Big, dumb and fun – that’s the definition of what a good summer popcorn movie should be, and “White House Down” delivers on all counts. This big-budget thriller bombed hard at the box office, but now that it’s hitting video you’ve got the perfect chance to indulge in its schlocky charm.
Jamie Foxx plays President of the United States James Sawyer, in a thinly-veiled riff on our real-life POTUS. And Channing Tatum plays John Cale, a D.C. cop looking to break into the Secret Service. While on a job interview at the White House, it gets invaded by a pack of right-wing paramilitary types.
Cale gets to pose as Bruce Willis in the “Die Hard” movies, the lone do-gooder trapped in a confined space with nihilistic terrorists and a bunch of helpless captives – including his own young daughter (Joey King). Bloody mayhem ensues, and before long the wannabe guardian and the cat-cool president have teamed up to take out the bad guys.
Watching these two trade quips like a buddy-cop duo is both silly and sublime. Because the movie is in on the joke of how goofy it is, we’re invited to laugh along rather than at it.
To call the plot improbable is a compliment. It’s a totally absurd hodgepodge of gunfights and one-liners, culminating in a car chase around the White House grounds with RPGs flying hither and thither.
It may have all the plausibility of a teenager’s video game, but this movie is a total gas.
Video goodies are ample and lightweight, just like the movie. The DVD comes with four making-of featurettes, focusing on the two stars, supporting cast, stunts and director Roland Emmerich – a seasoned hand at flicks like this (“Independence Day”).
Opt for the Blu-ray version and you add a gag reel and nine more featurettes focusing on various aspects of production, including what it’s like to recreate the White House down to the smallest detail – and then blow it all up.
I think I’ve put my finger on what this summer’s spate of movies has been sorely lacking: fun.
Everything’s so gosh darn dark. Iron Man’s wrestling with his psyche. Superman’s all angsty. Vin Diesel can’t spare a smirk. Heck, the new “Star Trek” flick put “Darkness” in the title. Even the comedies have seemed more a chore than a lark.
Count on Roland Emmerich, the auteur of disaster/action spectacle, to remind us what summer movies should be all about: goofy, cheeky, action-packed and silly. The man who launched his Hollywood career blowing up the White House in “Independence Day” now merely has terrorists invade it in “White House Down.”
And it’s up to one lone lawman to rescue the likable President, perforate the bad guys, save a cute kid and give an inside-man-turned-traitor his comeuppance -- preferably messily.
If this plot sounds overly familiar, that’s because we saw almost the exact same story in this spring’s “Olympus Has Fallen.” Which, come to think of it, was also one of the year’s most enjoyable cinematic jaunts.
Whereas “Olympus” was grim and tight, “Down” is giddy and loose. Emmerich and screenwriter James Vanderbilt infuse plenty of light moments and outright humor into the proceedings. Leads Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx take these soft pitches and gleefully wallop them over the wall, at times resembling a buddy-comedy duo.
You might think all the hoots would undermine the action sequences. But in acknowledging its own preposterousness, the movie invites us to laugh along with, rather than at, all the loopy plot points.
I’m not saying this is a dumb movie. But it is the sort that asks you to lower your suspension-of-disbelief shields and just go with it. For me, this happened right around the moment Tatum and Foxx were screaming around the White House grounds in the presidential limousine, terrorists chasing them in Hummers outfitted with machine guns, with more bad guys firing RPGs at them from the roof.
Absurd? Over-the-top? Fun as all get-out? Yes to all.
The set-up is that President James M. Sawyer (Foxx) is pushing a Mideast peace plan, and a lot of people are nervous. So when a bunch of mercenaries invade the White House, it seems much more motivated by vengeance than the $400 million in cash they’re demanding.
John Cale (Tatum) is an Army veteran and D.C. police sergeant who’s got a mind to join the Secret Service – mostly to impress his precocious tween daughter, Emily. He takes her to the White House for a tour while he has a job interview – which turns out to be with an old college flame (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who lets him down easy.
Emily is played by Joey King, whose mix of smarts, screen presence and moxie virtually guarantee greats things ahead. In one moment of extreme duress, Emily growls at a gunman, “Get away from me” – quite possibly the gutsiest character moment in the movie.
Michael Murphy plays the vice president, who’s a little overeager to take on the POTUS mantle, while Richard Jenkins is the humbler Speaker of the House, next in line. Jason Stenz is effective as the paramilitary leader, Jimmi Simpson has fun with the over-caffeinated computer hacker role, and Kevin Rankin is memorable as a loathsome skinhead baddie.
I also liked Nicolas Wright as the comic relief, an enthusiastic White House tour guide, and Lane Reddick as the by-the-book military man. James Woods shines as the grizzled Secret Service chief closing out his last week on the job.
If “Olympus Has Fallen” had a distinctive right-wing flavor, it’s hard to ignore an obvious but unobtrusive liberal tilt in “White House Down.” Foxx’s Sawyer is a thinly-veiled Obama substitute, a young academic with a cooler-than-thou attitude, flashy wife and Nicorette gum habit.
At one point Sawyer dons his favorite sneakers during their flight, and when one of the villains grabs his leg the president forcefully delivers a kick and a quip: “Get. Your. Hands. Off. My. Jordans!!”
Say what you will about Emmerich, but the man knows how to do popcorn movies right.
All I know is we’re almost at the year’s halfway point, and if you asked me to name my Top 10 List right now, it would include two ludicrous movies about the White House getting taken over. Hey, fun’s fun.
"Haywire" is a gimmick movie, and not a very good one. Its entire premise is built around the now-ubiquitous figure of the globe-trotting super-spy, a la Jason Bourne, who has amazing hand-to-hand combat skills. Except in this case, the butt-kicker supreme is a woman -- specifically, novice actress and MMA star Gina Carano.
Director Steven Soderbergh doesn't do anything particularly bold or imaginative with this tired genre other than flip the gender of the protagonist. It's almost as if he and screenwriter Lem Dobbs are saying, "See! We can make a movie with a female lead where the characters are just as stilted, the combat is just as repetitions and the plot just as much a nonsensical bramble as one starring a dude."
Imagine any Jason Statham movie with long hair and breasts, and you've pretty much got the flavor.
The film stars a lot of recognizable male actors -- Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender -- most of whom get into fisticuffs with Carano, seemingly just to see them get pasted by a girl.
Carano, who resembles Rachel Weisz on human growth hormones, isn't asked to do much beyond scowl and kick. If the movie's entire reason for existence is to prove that a woman can be convincing as a brutish action star, then Carano certainly passes muster.
If, on the other hand, the idea is to create a believable, identifiable character and see how they react to seemingly insurmountable circumstances, then this mixed martial artist is out of her league.
Soderbergh keeps threatening to retire from movie-making, and un-clever projects like this don't exactly give us a reason to convince him to stick around.
Extra features, which are the same for both Blu-ray and DVD editions, are mercifully brief. There's "Gina Carano in Training," a 16-minute featurette whose title says it all, and the 5-minute "The Men of Haywire," which also pretty much says it all.
I give "21 Jump Street" a lot of points for trying. What looked to be a cynical reboot of an '80s TV show is actually a decently funny spoof that doesn't take itself too seriously.
It's the sort of flick in which the 30-ish stars seem slightly mortified at the idea of passing themselves off as high-schoolers, even as undercover police officers looking to infiltrate a ring of drug dealers. The joke-within-a-joke, of course, is that nearly every Hollywood movie set in high school regularly features actors in their mid- to late-20s portraying teens, and plenty north of 30.
I appreciated the nudge-nudge-wink-wink scene where two bumbling cops get told about their assignment to the 21 Jump Street program, which the police chief describes as revived thing from the 1980s that's being brought back because nobody has any new ideas, so they're just recycling old ones.
Pretty cool when a movie will zing itself.
Jonah Hill came up with the story along with Michael Bacall, the screenwriter who also penned the inventive "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World." Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller previously made "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," making them the latest in a string of animation guys to jump to live-action films. (Though "Meatballs" was their first feature film, so it wasn't like they were cartoon for life.)
Hill plays what his become his typical character, the nerdy loser who discovers untapped reservoirs of talent and confidence. In the amusing opening sequence, set in 2005, he's decked out in Eminem 'do and outfit, clumsily asking a girl to prom and being shot down very publicly. His chief tormenter is Tatum, a popular jock and would-be prom king, except his grades were so bad the principal wouldn't let him go to prom. (Not quite sure what academic system allows you to graduate but not go to a party, but there you have it.)
Hill's character is repeatedly teased for being fat, which is curious because of course Hill had a well-publicized massive weight loss, and could not even properly be called chubby now.
Flash to the present, and the two become best buds at the police academy. Unfortunately, they're assigned to the bike patrol in the city park, and somehow manage to mess up even that. As a last resort, they're assigned to Jump Street, where Ice Cube plays the captain, an angry black man who knows he's a caricature, but with these two idjits it's hard not to be P.O.'d all the time.
They're passed off as brothers and sent to infiltrate Sagan High School. In one of the movie's funnier riffs, the cool kids are no longer status-seeking snobs but politically correct ego-advocates. Tatum, trying to replicate his brash BMOC routine from back in the day, finds himself ostracized for punching out a gay kid and his gas-guzzling vintage muscle car. Hill, though, unexpectedly finds himself accepted as part of the new ruling elite, causing friction between the best bros.
There are plenty of good laughs, some witty and some crude, like the scene where they score drugs but are forced to take them on school grounds to prove they're not narcs, and try to make each other puke by sticking their fingers down the other guy's throat.
But the movie goes sideways somewhere in the middle, getting bogged down by Hill's budding romance with the cool drama girl (Brie Larson) and Tatum's bonding with some science nerds.
I liked the way "21 Jump Street" played around with the conventions of the genre -- including the two cops' repeated disappointment that more things don't explode during their big car chase. I didn't quite like it enough to give it a full green light, but it's nice to see a flick that far exceeds your expectations.
This line, delivered in the opening moments of "The Dilemma," is used to describe Vince Vaughn's character -- which is pretty much the same as every other Vince Vaughn character.
Vaughn's become a bankable star employing the same charming motormouth routine over and over. His signature move is to get rolling on a verbal treadmill from which he cannot easily climb off. We've seen it so many times ("Couples Retreat," "Wedding Crashers") that we've come to understand that what he says isn't important -- it's the feat itself, keeping the words coming faster and faster as he bounces around from one thought to the next.
The standout example of this in "The Dilemma" is when his character, Ronny, is giving a toast at his girlfriend Beth's (Jennifer Connelly) parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Ronny has recently learned that his best friend Nick's (Kevin James) wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) has been playing around on him.
He tries to use the toast to talk about the importance of honesty in marriage, as a way of shaming Geneva into confessing her affair to Nick so Ronny won't have to spill the beans himself. But he gets off on a tangent about temptation, imagining scenarios of Beth's mother dallying with the pool boy, and it's all downhill from there -- zigging and zagging all the way.
"The Dilemma" bounces around a lot, too. The movie can't quite decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
Ostensibly it's a comedy about Ronny's predicament -- whether to tell the man he loves like a brother about his wife's infidelity. The movie simply forgets to be funny for long stretches, as in one sequence where Ronny prays to God for guidance. "I know I'm supposed to give you things, but I'm scared to give you this," he tells the Almighty.
The biggest thing that's missing from the story (screenplay by Allan Loeb) is a sense of how important these relationships really are. Ronny's supposed to cherish his friendship with Nick so much that the prospect of telling him about Geneva tears him up inside. But we never see them doing much more than normal buddy-buddy stuff.
Ronny's relationship with Beth is off-kilter, too. He's a 40-year-old commitment-phobe, and can't bring himself to ask her to marry him. But what she gets out of this pairing is rather murky.
Geneva doesn't make a lick of sense, either. For awhile it's suggested she might actually be nutso, as demonstrated in a scene where Ronny confronts her and she cows him by threatening to claim he's made advances toward her.
Even Ronny and Nick's business partnership is goofy. Nick is supposed to be a brilliant engineer, but their dream is rather mundane: To make electric vehicles that look and sound like muscle cars. So basically they're just installing speakers under the hood to simulate the rumble of a gasoline engine.
(The movie has caused some controversy for a scene where they're pitching some General Motors executives, and Ronny calls electric cars "gay." I'll decline to enter the fray other than saying I think "South Park" already covered this topic sufficiently.)
Queen Latifah pops up as Susan, the liaison between the car company and our boys, who has a tendency to talk in inappropriate, hyper-sexualized terms. The joke is supposed to be that usually it's the guys in movies like this who speak that way. But she just comes across as another unexplained weird quirk of the movie.
The strangest thing about "The Dilemma" is that it was directed by Ron Howard, and has to be the most un-Ron-Howard-like film he's ever made.
The depressing part is not that it's not very good, or that a guy who's mostly done serious Oscar-bait movies has returned to his comedy roots. It's that this movie could have been directed by anyone.
Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum make for a cute couple in "Dear John," a romantic drama about a soldier separated by war from the girl he loves. But I never quite bought them as a real, passionate pair of star-crossed lovers as in "The Notebook," which like this movie was adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks.
OK, let's be frank here: Ryan Gosling of "Notebook" is one of the finest actors of his generation, with an Oscar nomination for "Half Nelson" and edgy performances in movies like "Lars and the Real Girl." Tatum starred in the dancing movie "Step Up" and its sequel, the street boxing movie "Fighting" and that execrable "G.I. Joe" flick.
So although we may believe Tatum as a big, tough Army Special Forces warrior, he's less convincing when he's making goo-goo eyes at Seyfried.
He plays John Tyree, who catches the eye of Savannah Curtis when he dives off a beach pier to rescue her fallen handbag. She invites him back to her place for a party, and pretty much overnight they're an item.
There are hurdles. Savannah's preppy friends don't care for the working-class soldier, and there's some indication that John's past is marred by troubles with his temper. Also, John's father (Richard Jenkins) is a virtual recluse who spends all day puttering around with his coin collection, barely speaking to his son or anyone else.
Savannah thinks John's dad has a mild form of autism, with which she is familiar because her next-door neighbor (Henry Thomas) has a young son with it. Her attempt to break through dad's shell creates friction between the young couple.
Being a soldier, John soon hears the call of duty that takes him far away. I don't think I'm treading into spoiler territory by revealing that she eventually dumps him via a letter. The movie's title, after all, is synonymous with such wartime separations.
Since this happens a little more than halfway through, it obviously isn't the end of their story together. But more than that, you'll have to discover for yourself.
Director Lasse Hallström ("Chocolat") and screenwriter Jamie Linden avoid the worst pitfalls of the romantic genre, with a story about a group of people that feels untidy but authentic. The romance between John and Savannah is the center of this little world, of course, but it's hardly the only thing going on.
Unfortunately, the stuff in the background is more interesting than the main action. Seyfried has a nice, slightly goofy charm. Tatum is certainly movie-star handsome, but doesn't project much of an emotional center.
(A quibble: I found it odd that the movie is explicitly set in Charleston, but only one character is ever heard with a Southern twang. Carolina accents are not exactly easy to miss.)
I just didn't have any strong reaction to "Dear John." I give it points for avoiding predictability. But it's never a good sign when the best way to describe how you feel about a movie is indifference.
