“Get Hard” is the sort of comedy you laugh at, then feel bad about it later.
This buddy flick from Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart is about as politically incorrect as you can get. It contains all sorts of stereotypes about black people, white people, gay people, incarcerated people … basically, people.
Yet it’s also undeniably funny.
Ferrell plays James King, a high finance type who’s been convicted of securities fraud, and has a few weeks to prepare before going off to maximum security prison. He’s innocent of his crimes, but guilty of being an over-privileged jerk. James hires Darnell (Hart) to help toughen him up because, well, he’s essentially the only black guy he knows.
Darnell is actually a hardworking young business owner with a family – if anything, he’s kind of a squeamish nebbish. But he’s happy to play the gangbanger for pay.
Soon Darnell is running James through his concocted prison boot camp, turning the latter’s mansion into a simulated prison, with his servants happily playing the oppressors. James learns how to front a “mad dog face” and hide contraband in, uh, dark places.
“Get Hard” won’t win any originality awards – it’s basically an unauthorized remake of “Trading Places.” But if it wallows for its laughs, it still earns them.
Video extras are pretty good, though you’ll need to buy the blu-ray combo pack to get most of them. The DVD comes only with a gag reel.
The combo comes with deleted scenes and a bunch of featurettes – some touching on production, others just opportunities for more comedy. Consider some of the titles: “Twerking 101,” “Bikers, Babes and Big Bangs” and “Put Your Lips Together and Blow.”
"Get Hard" wins zero points for originality, or subtlety. It's basically a rip-off of "Trading Places," with Will Ferrell as the snooty-yet-decent rich white guy who gets wised up to the hard knocks of life by a wiseacre black man, Kevin Hart, who pretends that he's more ghetto than he really is.
This comedy relies on multitudes of stereotypes, homophobic fears about prison rape, and a heaping helping of just plain old raunch to get its laughs. Yet get its laughs it does.
This is the sort of movie that you roar with laughter at, then feel ashamed about it afterward.
Ferrell plays James King, a young(ish) master of the universe who's about to move from being really rich to disgustingly rich. It's basically the line between people who have cavernous homes with servants around 24/7 and those who own their islands.
James has just been made partner at Wealthrop Fund Management, Los Angeles' top investment firm, and he's marrying the daughter (Alison Brie) of the CEO (Craig T. Nelson) to boot. He treats those around him as chattel, not out of innate meanness but just because that's the world he was brought up in. It's the 1 percent of the 1 percent, where you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps ... with help of $8 million in seed money from your daddy.
One of those underlings he occasionally hobnobs with is Darnell (Hart), who owns Hollywood Luxury Bubbles, the low-rent car wash company that services the chic fleet of James and company. Darnell needs a $30,000 loan to launch his own storefront and get his family out of a crappy neighborhood, but James would rather dispense condescending advice than startup money.
When James is arrested and convicted of securities fraud, however, he's forced to reevaluate his priorities. The silver spooner is facing 10 years of hard time in maximum security -- "I'm going to be attending San Quentin," is how he puts it in his fey way. Petrified by the prospect of becoming the target of gay sexual overtures, he hires Darnell to toughen him up before his stint begins.
Darnell is actually a striving family man with an adorable wife and daughter (Edwina Findley Dickerson and Ariana Neal, respectively) who wears khakis and has never had so much as a parking ticket in his life. But if the rich white dude is willing to shower him with money, he's happy to act the gangster. He gets by through borrowing the plot of "Boyz in the Hood" for his own life story, and copping tips from his cousin Russell (T.I.), who really is a scary gangbanger.
Things go from there, with the two bonding over Darnell's concocted training regimen, which includes turning James' mansion into a simulated lockdown, with his servants acting as his oppressors. (They are only too happy to comply with the play-acting.) James learns about "mad dog face," shivs and "keistering" any necessary contraband.
At various points they infiltrate a white supremacist gang and a gay hangout, since Darnell surmises that because James is so hopeless at self-defense, he either needs to recruit someone to protect him or, ah, learn how to be a people-pleaser.
Directed by rookie Etan Cohen, who also wrote the screenplay with Jay Martel and Ian Roberts, "Get Hard" is a gleefully un-politically correct comedy that doggedly pursues humor no matter what dark crevice in which it may hide. Ferrell and Hart do amiable variations of their familiar character types, and share good onscreen chemistry and comedic timing.
You may cringe while watching this movie, but it'll be with a smile on your lips.
Not everything is awesome about “The Lego Movie” -- despite the assertion of that obsessively earworm-y song from Tegan and Sara featured in the kiddie animated flick from earlier this year. However, it is a boingy, entertaining thrill ride that is sure to keep younger children occupied for a goodly chunk of their summer vacation.
It might get old pretty quick for parents – I’ve already watched it three times with my 3½-year-old, and am ready to bring a book to our next couch time together. But this hyperactive flick isn’t made for oldsters.
Told mostly in Lego format, with the people, places and things made up of the iconic construction toys, the film follows the adventures of Emmet (spiffily voiced by Chris Pratt). A normal, generic, rather anonymous worker, he lives in a world where everyone follows the rules of their banal society.
Then he falls in with Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a member of the gang of Master Builder insurgents rebelling against the tyrannical Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who hates it when people use their imaginations rather than following the instructions that come with each Lego set.
There’s also a wise wizard (Morgan Freeman), a cop who’s both good and bad (Liam Neeson), pirate/robot Metal Beard (Nick Offerman) and Batman (Will Arnett), who’s additionally Wyldstyle’s bad-boy beau.
The animation is funky, and funny. It’s meant to look low-tech, as if everything really were made of the blocky toys. So the characters have drawn-on faces (watch out for nail polish remover!) and claw hands. Yet the computer-generated look is flashy and textured. I loved how when Emmet takes a shower, blue blocks representing water spill over his body.
Just like the song, “The Lego Movie” will grow increasingly irritating with repetition. But your kids will enjoy it the first time, and the 47th.
The movie comes with a host of video extras, including a feature-length commentary track. There are also outtakes, deleted scenes, storyboards, animations tests, making-of featurettes and spotlights on particular characters like Batman. There are even short movies made by fans using Lego blocks.
The first “Anchorman” movie was spectacularly overrated, and the sequel is a heaping helping of seconds.
Oh, you’ll laugh during “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” Probably chortle quite uproariously on a half-dozen or so occasions. The rest of the time, though, is waiting around for that next big ROFL moment to arrive. During these portions, which make up the bulk of the overlong 119-minute runtime, the movie barely edges into tolerable.
Will Farrell returns as Ron Burgundy, the worst newscaster in history (circa 1980). As the story opens he loses his job and his marriage simultaneously, but gets a second chance at the then-new enterprise of television news broadcast 24/7.
Relegated to the wee hours of the morning, he and his crew of nitwits (Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner) soon make a splash by giving the audience exactly what they want – car chases, cute critters and jingoistic patriotism.
As a critique of TV news, “Anchorman 2” is pretty weak tea, hitting all the obvious notes without much originality or flair. So the movie has to rely on its characters and humor, which are the very definition of scattershot.
Director Adam McKay, who co-write the script with Ferrell, favor an ad-lib approach in which actors do take after take, and (supposedly) the best stuff is used for the movie. Ferrell & Co. stand there, barking out absurd dialogue until something sticks.
Their comedy mantra seems to be “Try, try again.” But is one hit to every 20 misses worth your time?
This zany M.O. does, however, allow them to try something truly audacious for the video release. They are giving us three different versions of the film, including a “Super-Sized R-Rated Version” that reportedly includes 763 new jokes.
It’s essentially an alternative edit of the theatrical version (also included), with different lines swapped out. It also includes an unrated version with even filthier gags and language.
Is the “new” version of the movie better than the one we saw in theaters? You’ll have to decide for yourself.
The Blu-ray/DVD combo pack also includes a making-of doc, gag reel, table read by the cast, deleted and extended scenes, audition tapes and more.
You have to spring for the Blu-ray pack to get all these goodies, though; the solo DVD contains only the theatrical version of the movie, and that’s it.
"The Lego Movie" is utterly forgettable but also undeniably fun. It's aimed straight at the single-digit age group, and is so fast-paced that older, slower minds may have trouble following all the action. But as disposable entertainment for kids, its hits its mark square-on.
If you're not aware of the franchise of Lego entertainment based on the iconic snap-together toys, then you must have had your head buried or not be a parent to young children. Often used to recreate populist favorites like Star Wars, they are near-ubiquitous in videos and gaming. Those little Lego-people with blocky bodies torsos and hook hands are the stars.
This is the first feature film featuring the yellow gang, and they've brought in a team of animation veterans with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ("Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"), who co-wrote and -directed. They keep the movie bright, light and zany.
The set-up is rather cute: all the people live in a multi-faceted universe divided up into realms that match various Lego theme sets -- medieval, pirates, wild West, etc. All are ruled by Lord Business (voice by Will Ferrell), who likes for everything to be put together exactly according to the instructions to match the pictures on the front of the box. Any "weird stuff" is perpetually torn down and rebuilt.
Emmet (a terrific Chris Pratt) is an ordinary construction work -- so ordinary, in fact, that he's virtually indistinguishable from the crowd and doesn't have any friends. But like all the others he's been brainwashed into a life of superficial happiness, where everyone watches the same TV show ("Where Are My Pants?"), eats only at chain restaurants and sing and dance to the same omnipresent song ("Everything Is Awesome!", which actually is catchy in a supremely annoying way.)
But there is a rebellion afoot led by the Master Builders -- figures who can instantly piece together complex objects and vehicles from the various Lego pieces lying about. Emmet stumbles right into their plot and finds himself stuck to the Piece of Resistance, a nondescript block, that marks him as the Chosen One who will lead the overthrow of the tyrannical Business.
Trouble is, Emmet is such an unimaginative, vanilla type of guy that he seems to lack the basic skill set of a savior. A better choice would be Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a super-smart and talented rainbow-haired rebel who hitches on as Emmet's resentful sidekick.
Emmet is soon smitten by her, though she's in a committed relationship with her boyfriend, Batman ... yes, the Batman, deliciously voiced by Will Arnett. In this universe, anybody can appear in Lego form, so Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern also make cameos.
Rounding out the cast are Morgan Freeman as Vitruvius, an old sage and prophet; Nick Offerman as pirate/robot Metalbeard; Liam Neeson as Bad Cop/Good Cop, whose mood is determined by which way his head is turned; Uni-Kitty (Alison Brie), a cat/unicorn hybrid; and Benny, a "1980s space guy" voiced by Charlie Day.
The animation looks deceptively simplistic at first, since everything and everyone is made up of Lego parts. But the CG is actually quite detailed, and the pieces fly together so quickly it must have been a chore to animate.
"The Lego Movie" surprises with its carefree attitude and zippy antics. This won't make anyone's best-of list, but as throwaway entertainment during cinema's frigid season, it's a superb fit.
I admit I never got what the big deal was about "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy." The 2004 comedy was a modest commercial hit that somehow went on to gain near-iconic status as a comedic masterpiece. Word of a long-delayed sequel set off a flurry of rapturous attention, followed up by a marketing campaign so omnipresent that folks living in the Himalayas must be thinking Will Ferrell & Co. are becoming a tad overexposed.
The first film had a few uproarious laughs interrupted by long dull spaces in between, and the sequel is much the same.
I will further admit that I laughed three or four times during "Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues" as hard as anything I've seen this year. But it's a hard slog in between those wonderful moments, particularly in the dull-as-toast second half.
Are a handful of truly great comedic moments enough to make a movie worth a dollar bill with Andy Jackson's face on it, plus two hours of your time? I vote no, and I got to see it for free.
If you're a novice to the world of Burgundy: he's the world's worst newscaster, a dim-bulb egomaniac played by Ferrell with trademark obliviousness. Ron's the sort of guy who can be offending everyone in the room and not even be aware of it.
His look is pure late 1970s: neon-hued suits with ties as wide as a Buick, cheesy mustache, sideburns and a hairdo that's over-primped into ridiculousness.
As the story opens, Ron gets dumped by his San Diego network and his wife (Christina Applegate) in one fell swoop, and ends up as an announcer at the local Sea World. His drunken binges doom even that job, until a new gig lands in his lap with a crazy idea: news 24/7.
Of course, their Global News Network is a barely-concealed spoof on the early days of CNN and the fracturing of the news audience into a thousand little pieces.
Burgundy assembles his old crew and heads to New York, only to find he's relegated to the 2-5 a.m. slot, while slimy top dog Jack Lime (James Marsden) gets the primetime slot and becomes Burgundy's chief tormentor.
They respond by giving people what they want -- cute animals, car chases, jingoistic patriotism and other pap. The audience eats it up, vaulting Burgundy into the stratosphere.
The M.O. of Ferrell and Adam McKay, his director and co-screenwriter, is pretty familiar by now. The characters stand there and spout ridiculously off-the-wall nonsense in the hopes that some of it will be click with the audience.
And some of it does. Steve Carell puts the most points on the board as Brick, the innocent naïf weathercaster. As played by Carell, Brick has the social skills of an infant who was suddenly zapped into adult form. Because it's married to that sweet, dumb persona, his ramblings are funnier because it comes from a place of utter simplicity.
"A black man follows me everywhere when it's sunny," Brick says.
"I think that's your shadow," Ron offers helpfully.
At one point, the gang attends Brick's funeral, and he shows up to give the eulogy, and has to be convinced that he's still alive. He even gets a love interested in Kristen Wiig, who plays his female intellectual and emotional equivalent.
Other weirdo plot twists include having Ron date his black producer (Meagan Good), just so we can have a scene where he sits down to dinner with her family and spout one racially insensitive malaprop after another.
Things culminate in a massive battle between news teams that's more notable for the incredible number of celebrity cameos -- Will Smith, Kanye West, Jim Carrey and Tina Fey among them -- than for any actual humor generated. It's a fitting end for a movie that seems to have fallen in love with its own hype.
"Everything Must Go" will quickly be labeled as Will Ferrell's "Punch-Drunk Love," in which juvenile funnyman Adam Sandler went into serious dramatic mode and proved he had real acting chops, when he cared to exercise them.
"Everything" isn't nearly as good and Ferrell doesn't show nearly the range and depth Sandler did. But it's an engaging character study, solidly handled by rookie writer/director Dan Rush, and gives a little insight into the sort of career Ferrell might have had if he hadn't made his bones playing nincompoops and running around bare-assed.
"Everything Must Go" bills itself as a comedy-drama, but there are no laugh-out-loud moments or even wry smiles. The film aims to draw a portrait of human foibles, not puncture them for humorous effect. It's based on a Raymond Carver short story, "Why Don't You Dance," and he wasn't exactly a bundle of mirth.
Let's hope the studio isn't marketing this movie to Ferrell's usual fan base, because the people who enjoyed "Step Brothers" and "Land of the Lost" are going to storm out in a huff. Those who remain, though, will enjoy the film's bittersweet charms.
Ferrell plays Nick Halsey, a veteran salesman having the worst day of his life. He's fired from his well-paying job after his six months of sobriety end in a major relapse on a business trip.
After slashing the tire of his smarmy boss' (Glenn Howerton) car, he loads up on beer and arrives home to find all his possessions moved out onto the front lawn. The locks on the house are changed, and a letter from his wife informs him she's left him. For good measure, his bank account is frozen and his company car is repossessed.
Lacking the means to do much of anything, Nick's ambitions end at getting plastered and camping out in his recliner. (His one bit of fortune is living in Phoenix, where it doesn't rain much or get very cold.)
The irritable next-door neighbor (Stephen Root) complains, and Nick appears about to be run off by the cops, until his friend and AA sponsor Frank Garcia, a police detective, intervenes. Frank gets a permit for a five-day yard sale to get the authorities off his back, after which, Frank promises, he'll come back and arrest Nick himself.
At first humiliated and angry about being a squatter on his own property, Nick soon becomes surly and resentful. He recruits Kenny (a terrific Christopher Jordan Wallace), a clever neighborhood kid left by his mother to his own devices, to coordinate his sale. Of course, he refuses to actually sell anything when made an offer.
Across the street is Samantha (Rebecca Hall), who's just moved in. Nick makes a tepid overture toward friendship, and she reciprocates. She's a photographer waiting for her husband to wrap up his job in New York and join her. But after learning Nick's whole story, she finds herself the target of his less sunny side.
"I'm no different from any of you," Nick insists, indicating the whole neighborhood. "I just don't hide in my house."
"Everything Must Go" has the feel of a short story. The narrative is carefully bookended, so we can only pick up hints of Nick's life prior to meeting him. He was a high school jock with a lousy father. Nick and his (unseen) wife have a serious fascination with Japanese culture, even turning their swimming pool into a koi pond.
And there's even the suggestion that Nick's alcoholic blackouts are more than just binges, but wellsprings of malevolent behavior. When Nick seeks out an old high school acquaintance (Laura Dern) and she tells him he has "a good heart, and that doesn't change," we wonder if she's right.
The problem with Will Ferrell in this role is that his comedic persona is built around presenting a seemingly normal front, showing us the cracks in that quotidian facade, and then gleefully diving into and widening those fissures.
Watching "Everything Must Go," I kept expecting Ferrell to do a double-take and start riffing to the camera. I'm glad he never does, but the fact that we wait for it subtracts from the experience.
It's a testament to the wondrous state of animation we know find ourselves in that "Megamind" registers as a routine feature rather than something amazing. The computer-generated animation from the DreamWorks crew is top-notch, crisp and full of lots of little details.
But this super-villain tale just doesn't have the storytelling sophistication of a "Toy Story 3," "The Illusionist" or "How to Train Your Dragon" -- which explains why those three films got Oscar nominations, while "Megamind" didn't.
Will Ferrell sassily voices the main character, a blue-skinned evil scientist type with a giant head and even bigger plans for conquering Metro City (which he mispronounces badly, like many other common words). His nemesis is Metro Man (Brad Pitt), a fellow traveler -- they both were rocketed off their respective dying planets as an infant, Superman-like, to find greatness on Earth.
Metro Man is the white-costumed defender of the city, while Megamind decks himself out in studded black leather and builds robots and other gizmos to do his bidding. Roxanne Ritchie, the plucky female reporter (Tina Fey) continually kidnapped by Megamind, who secretly adores her.
It's good clean fun aimed at children under 10, though their parents might long for something a little less doofy.
"Megamind" hits video stores Friday, Feb. 25.
Extras are quite plentiful, and are heavy on interactive games and such aimed at kids.
The single-disc DVD comes with a solitary deleted scene, commentary track by the filmmakers, and a meet the cast feature. It's notable, like the rest of the video features, for the complete lack of participation by Brad Pitt. Too good for goodies, Brad?
The double-disc DVD adds a bunch more featurettes, including a look inside Megamind's lair and the animation process. The highlight is "Megamind: The Button of Doom," a new 16-minute short that's an amusing look at Megamind's post-movie life.
The Blu-ray/DVD combo pack includes all these features, plus four more featurettes and interactive stuff.
Movie: 2 stars out of four Extras: 3.5 stars out of four
"Megamind" is in the unfortunate position of being the second animated movie this year where a super-villain plays the hero (or at least the main character). "Despicable Me" was a disappointment, but the sheer fact it came out first inevitably gives "Megamind" a patina of staleness.
Not that it isn't a wonder for the eyes. The animators at DreamWorks are now on par with the wizards at Pixar, and everything about it visually is a triumph. I especially liked the various robot contraptions built by the blue-skinned, big-skulled mad scientist title character, which have a clunky, mid-century retro look reminiscent of "The Iron Giant."
For those convinced the 3-D fad is just an excuse to squeeze a few extra dollars out of ticket-buyers: I saw "Megamind" in IMAX 3-D and can report that the layered effects were especially sharp and crystal-clear. I can't say as the film would be much diminished by seeing it on a regular screen, though.
The set-up is a takeoff on the old Superman origin, with a babe being blasted off his dying planet to find greatness on Earth. The tweak here is that in addition to lantern-jawed hero Metro Man (voiced by Brad Pitt), another infant traveled through space at the same time on a parallel course, setting up their lifelong enmity.
"Even Fate picks its favorites," Megamind (Will Ferrell) intones during the opening narration, and it's not hard to see why he thinks so. Instead of being endowed with awesome strength, laser vision and the ability to fly, Megamind was born with a big ol' noggin that made him an outcast at school.
While Metro Man landed in a rich couple's home and had everything handed to him, Megamind's spaceship splatted into a prison where he grew up educated by career criminals. Megamind also has the requisite minion, named Minion (David Cross), who's actually a fish whose bowl is connected to a robot exo-skeleton that for some reason resembles a gorilla.
I can't say as I'm the biggest fan of Ferrell's comedic abilities, but I thought his voice work here was proficient. His Megamind has a preening, boastful cadence, and has a tendency to mispronounce commonly used words. (For example, "Metro City" rhymes with "ferocity.")
Tina Fey voices Roxanne Ritchi, who exists in the comic book tradition of plucky, alliteratively-named girl reporters.
The next part of this review contains a spoiler, but since it happens so early in the film, and is so central to the story, I feel compelled to comment upon it.
After years of very public battles, Megamind suddenly is able to defeat his nemesis, annihilating Metro Man with his sun-powered death laser. But without an arch-enemy to fight, he finds himself growing bored. So he stumbles upon a plan to create a new hero by infusing some schlub with Metro Man's powers.
Unfortunately, he chooses Hal (Jonah Hill), Roxanne's lovesick dweeb cameraman, turning him into a rampaging mass of muscles called Titan. For reasons never explained, Titan changes this to Tighten.
Anyway, Tighten decides that being a hero is for chumps and starts tearing up Metro City, leaving Megamind to act the hero to keep things in order. Also, he begins a sneaky romance with Roxanne abetted by one of his nefarious gizmos.
"Megamind" was directed by Tom McGrath, who helmed the "Madagascar" movies, from a script by rookie screenwriters Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons. It's reasonably entertaining, though aimed more at the single-digit-age crowd than most such fare.
But in this golden age of "Toy Story 3" and "How to Train Your Dragon," Megamind looks like second-tier goods.
Just in case you were wondering, a foursome of New Orleans teens did not really make a pact to lose their virginity, pledge to smoke a ceremonial bong every time one of them crossed the finish line, and use cell phone cameras to record the mortifying misadventures of one member's pathetic attempts to deflower himself.
This may seem obvious to you, even if you didn't know that "The Virginity Hit" was produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay as sort of an extension of their "Funny or Die" web site. But in a day when hoaxes like "I'm Still Here" and "Exit Through the Gift Shop" abound, it's best to make clear we're smack dab in mockumentary land.
The film, written and directed by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, contains plenty of clues that it's a put-on. The one that jumps right out is that all the girls in it are super-cute, while the boys they hook up with are dweebs who are not, shall we say, teen versions of Brad Pitt.
Only in fiction do gorgeous high school gals fall for skinny nerds, even if they have a great personality, and Matt Bennett most certainly does not.
Matt -- like most of the cast, he uses his real name -- is the least outgoing of the group. He wears glasses and tends to fade into the background in social situations. He has been dating Nicole Weaver for two years, but in another bit of claptrap that exists only in Hollywood, she wants to have sex while he wants to wait until it can be "perfect."
Matt lives with an adoptive family, his mother having died when he was young and his father flaking out on drugs. His "brother" is Zack Pearlman, who looks and sounds way too much like Jonah Hill for it to have been a coincidence. Zack is a budding filmmaker who documents everything that happens, and also pulls Matt's strings like a master puppeteer.
To wit: Matt finally agrees to do the deed with Nicole, even renting out a swanky suite at an old downtown hotel. Little does she know the room is festooned with microphones courtesy of Zack, who along with the rest of the gang is camped out in the adjoining room, listening to the proceedings.
This is pretty much a total rip-off of the webcam scene from the first "American Pie," of which this movie is more or less an update with slicker technology.
I like the idea for this movie more than the one they actually made. It's just not consistently funny, and plays more like the home movies of a bunch of well-to-do partying teens. A few grown-ups float in and out of the background, but these kids have no real parental supervision.
Once things sour with Nicole, Zack makes it his mission to pop Matt's cherry, which leads from one ridiculous set-up to another.
After posting the disaster with Nicole on YouTube -- Zack posts everything on YouTube -- they field a random offer from a hot 25-year-old to do the honors herself. But she demands that he wear a very specific, very expensive brand of suit, and do some personal alterations down below.
This is a probably the cleverest part of the movie, as Zack and his camera are banished, but then we watch Matt's adventures with this woman continue from angles Zack could not possibly have captured, and ... well, you'll have to see.
Sort of a "Porky's" for the age of YouTube, "The Virginity Hit" isn't nearly as raunchy as it pretends to be, and not nearly funny enough as it needs to be. If it were on Ferrell and McKay's site, I'd vote Die.
"The Other Guys" is less a buddy-cop movie and more just a comedy where jokesters play around with guns. "48 Hours" and the "Lethal Weapon" flicks had plenty of laughs, but you never doubted Nick Nolte or Mel Gibson as legitimate cops who could bust heads (or shoot them) if called upon.
The entire joke of "Guys" is premised on the assumption that Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are entirely implausible as police detectives. With Ferrell, I think that pretty much goes without saying, but Wahlberg actually got an Oscar nomination for playing a cop in "The Departed."
The solution director Adam McKay (who co-write the script with Chris Henchy) came up with is to turn Wahlberg's character, Terry Hoitz, into a failed badass. He's still got the snarl and the hand-to-hand moves, but he's become a laughingstock for shooting Derek Jeter while working a Yankees game.
For his sins, Terry is stuck with a pencil-pushing dweeb as a partner. Allen Gamble (Ferrell) came up in the accounting department, and always begs off going out on exciting calls for murders or bank robberies because there's so much paperwork to finish.
That happens when you're constantly volunteering to handle the scutwork for the department's undisputed stars, Highsmith and Danson.
Played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson in all-too-brief cameos, the duo star in an over-the-top chase sequence to open the film, including crashing their car into a city bus, and then taking over the bus to continue the pursuit, with the car still stuck inside it.
Alas, the hot dogs are soon sidelined by fate, leaving an opening for the losers, Hoitz and Gamble, to step up.
The movie is more plot-heavy than I would've liked -- something about a shady investor (Steve Coogan) plotting nefarious activities involving illegal scaffolding, and a billionaire who's been bilked, and an Australian black-ops guy (Ray Stevenson) -- the pieces of which never really fit together.
But the back-and-forth between Ferrell and Wahlberg has some real spit to it, with lots of great throwaway jokes and ad-libbed one-liners.
I especially liked Terry's left-field accusation that "the sound of your (pee) hitting the urinal sounds feminine." Or, "You want to disarm that guy? Take the batteries out of his calculator!"
I laughed when Allen, after being egged on by the other detectives into shooting a hole in the squad room, has his gun confiscated by the captain (Michael Keaton) and replaced with a wooden one. Later, this is downgraded to a rape whistle.
There's also a running joke about the geeky Allen being irresistible to improbably hot women. Eva Mendes plays his wife, who's so gorgeous and brainy that upon being introduced to her, Terry keeps insisting, "No, really. Who is that?"
It's scattershot comedy, spewing a thousand jokes against the screen to see what sticks. Some of it doesn't -- an excursion to see Allen's ex-girlfriend keeps setting up a gag that never arrives -- but plenty of it does.
Even if they're totally unbelievable as cops, Ferrell and Wahlberg are convincing as comedians pretending to be cops.
So a lot of people are linking to this video from the "Funny or Die" site with a sarcastic take on the health care debate. Humorous stuff, to be sure.
But has anyone else stumbled across the gobsmacking irony of Hollywood actors poking fun at insurance company executives for being overpaid?
I mean, hello?!?
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not a fan of most insurance companies. The one I use for my property and car coverage is a non-profit, and my take is that health insurance should not be an area of the economy where profit is a driving factor.
But I'm sorry, if a bunch of millionaire showbiz types are going to gang up to mock others for raking in the big bucks, then the ones who should be shame-faced is them.
I looked it up, and for 2008 the compensation of the CEOs at the top seven insurance company averaged $9.5 million. (It would have been a lot less, but the Aetna guy got $24 million, so he brought the average way up.)
Now, $9.5 million is a lot of money. But has anybody asked Will Ferrell how much he banked for making the craptastic "Land of the Lost"?
Yes, in case you were wondering how the film version of "Land of the Lost" would go, it's full-out Will Farrell bumpkinness coupled with gross-out humor perfectly pitched to the mentality of a 14-year-old.
Thus, there's a scene where Farrell and his gang witness a pair of the slow-moving reptile man knocking boots ... er, claws. Mercifully, it's more implied than seen, since this is a PG-13 flick.
Look, it was obvious to all concerned that the only way to translate this phenomenally cheesy time-traveling kids' show from the 1970s to the big screen was to go the parody route. I mean, would you rather have seen a super-serious version with a lantern-jawed hero and a ton of CGI stunts?
Well, there's still plenty of computer-aided action, mostly due to a grumpy T-rex that chases around Ferrell, Danny McBride, girl scientist Anna Friel and Chak-Ka -- a prince among the ape-men. That's pretty much the whole movie -- big action scene interrupted by goofy one-liners from Ferrell and McBride.
A few jokes hit the mark. There's one bit where Ferrell gets bitten by a prehistoric mosquito, which proceeds to suck out enough blood to supply a small blood bank. And in another genuinely funny scene, Ferrell instructs his team to douse themselves from a large jug of dinosaur urine in order to hide their scent, which turns into an inquisition about how exactly he acquired said urine.
But the rest of it is pretty dreary stuff, and there are long stretches where the movie drags almost to a dead halt.
I don't mind the idea of making fun of kitschy old TV shows. But if you're going to do that, it should at least be ... fun.
