Video review: "Fist Fight"

All movies have plot holes. Some you can drive a truck through. Others are meager quibbles that only occur to you long after you’ve left the theater.

With “Fist Fight,” the entire movie is a plot hole. As in, its very premise makes not a lick of sense. It’s hard to take a movie seriously, even a comedy, when it insults your intelligence right off the bat.

The set-up is that Charlie Day is Andy, a nebbish-y high school teacher who gets challenged to a fight by Ice Cube, also playing a teacher, but a much meaner one named Strickland. The fisticuffs are supposed to take place in the school parking lot after the last bell, so the entire student body can bear witness to the beat-down.

Huh?

Even swallowing the stupidity that such a thing wouldn’t immediately be shut down by administrators and/or law enforcement -- especially after the challenge goes viral on social media and YouTube -- why wouldn’t Andy just fake a cough and go home? He certainly looks like he’s ill, trembling with fear as he spends the rest of the day contriving to get out of the fight.

Such roles have become Day’s bread-and-butter, usually as the comic relief or sidekick. As for Cube, his acting style hasn’t really varied in 20 years.

“Fist Fight” has a few scraps of funny. Tracy Morgan plays the inept football coach, and he can garner a few laughs just on sheer force of personality. Jillian Bell scores a few more as a drug-addled teacher desperately trying to hook up with one of her students. (Admittedly, it’s funnier than it sounds.)

Mostly, though, watching this movie feels like spending time in special detention for boneheads.

Extra features are pretty apathetic, consisting of some deleted scenes and (on the Blu-ray version) a feature about the Georgia Film Commission, which gives tax credits for film production. Sounds more like homework than a bonus.

Movie:



Extras: D

Review: "Fist Fight"

So “Fist Fight” is based on a concept that doesn’t survive past its first minute: one high school teacher challenging another to a fight in the parking lot after school lets out.

Sure, it’s a comedy -- but even funny films owe us a certain amount of plausible rectitude.

By all rights, this movie should have died in its infancy. Deserved to be slapped down during the pitch meeting in the producer’s office. Flung objects would not have been unwarranted.

But they went ahead and wrote it, filmed it, edited it and put music to it, and pushed it out into theaters. And I had to watch it.

SO many questions…

• What exactly does Mr. Strickland, the surly history teacher played by Ice Cube, think he’s going to accomplish by fighting his offender? He’s already lost his job for taking an axe to a student’s desk – while the student was still in it -- so is he just determined to end his day by getting arrested?

• Maybe he knows something we don’t, because the law enforcement response to the impending fight is astonishingly tepid. The 9-1-1 operators even laugh about it.

• Andy Campbell, the nerdy English teacher played by Charlie Day, spends the entire movie trying to get out of the fight we know is ultimately going to happen, using all sorts of schemes and contretemps. At one point he bribes a student with an expensive laptop to change his story to the principal (Dean Norris). Why doesn’t he just say, “Hey, I’m sick, going home” around lunchtime?

• Why is it that news about the fight spreads through Roosevelt High School like wildfire, and then onto the Internet, even spawning YouTube videos and the hashtag #teacherfight, but none of the school administrators or Andy’s wife (JoAnna Garcia Swisher) ever hear about it?

I will admit to laughing now and then. Tracy Morgan gets a few as Freddie, the brash and utterly incompetent football coach. And I liked Jillian Bell as Holly, the no-boundaries teacher who openly desires hookups with her teenage charges, and takes meth -- but only before school, not during, she says when admonished by Andy.

“Because it’s a gateway?” she asks.

“Well, it’s the finish line,” he responds.

Other than that, it’s a chore to get through. Subplots involving Andy’s very pregnant wife a talent show competition with his daughter don’t provide much comedic ammo, though the latter ends with a shock.

Charlie Day’s motormouth nebbish routine is good at lighting up other movies (“Pacific Rim”), but a lot of that goes a short way. And Cube is just doing that familiar snarly ‘tude thing that has taken his film career a lot further than it deserved.

If there’s a lesson to be taken home from “Fist Fight,” it’s that sometimes you just have to stand up for yourself. Specifically, your right to buy a ticket to something else.

Review: "22 Jump Street"

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.

Review: "Ride Along"

"Ride Along" is one of those aggressively dumb movies that almost make you feel bad for it, if it weren't vacuuming 10 bucks out of your pocket and an hour-forty of your life.

The set-up makes not a lick of sense, the characters do nonsensical things unburdened by the laws of man or science, and it tries to skate by on the personalities of its stars, Kevin Hart and Ice Cube.

Hart is a young, short, dizzyingly energetic comedian whose onscreen presence resembles early Eddie Murphy on speed. Ice Cube is not so young anymore, known for his surly sneer, and rather shrimpy himself, though sufficiently taller than Hart for his character to crack all sorts of wee-man jokes on him.

Cube plays James, a tough Atlanta street cop, while Hart's Ben is a high school security guard and police wannabe who happens to be dating James' sister (Tika Sumpter). Ben convinces James to take him on a ride along so he can prove he's worthy of his sister's hand in marriage, while James is out to embarrass Ben enough to wash him out of law enforcement before he's even enrolled in the police academy, and hopefully out of his sister's life, too.

Director Tim Story and his quartet of screenwriters cue up every sticky situation imaginable, with James throwing Ben under the bus in various scenarios where he's expected to resolve the situation without even the benefit of a badge or a gun. This includes wrestling a honey-smeared man acting crazy at the farmer's market and confronting a gang of bikers, with one of dubious gender.

Never mind that in an actual ride along you'll be lucky if the police even let you get out of the car, let alone face down psychotics and stick-up men.

There's some vague plot machinations about dirty cops and a mysterious crime boss named Omar whom nobody as supposedly ever seen. Of course, he soon shows himself in the form of Laurence Fishburne, affording the audience a rare opportunity to witness an Oscar-caliber actor slumming in some really poor writing, and somehow making it seem even worse than it is.

I'm not sure what's harder to watch; the fact that Fishburne is called upon to deliver incredibly overwrought gangsta speech, or that he's very, very bad at it.

There are a couple of laughs in "Ride Along," mostly tied to Hart's manic, sporadically funny shtick. But this is one trip worth skipping.

Video review: "Rampart"

"Rampart" is one of those independent movies that get a decent amount of buzz but never quite break free of orbit ... or even show up in theaters in most towns. Woody Harrelson was thought to have a decent shot at an Oscar nomination for his brutal, mesmerizing performance as an L.A. cop whose corruption goes down to the bone.

But in a year in which Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender got snubbed, it wasn't surprising that a little-seen crime drama was overlooked.
Harrelson is indeed hard to take your eyes off of, though the film itself is a little disjointed at times.

It also has one of those unfortunate endings that's supposed to seem ambiguous and "arty," but feels like the movie just stops arbitrarily.

Set in 1999, "Rampart" is the story of Dave Brown, the original dinosaur cop. He's a racist, violent throwback and he knows it -- he just happens to think back in his daddy's day was better. He drinks on the job, extorts favors from businesses, shoots suspects and then plants weapons on them, and every other dirty trick you've ever heard of.

After a quarter-century of bad deeds on the force, Dave gets in serious trouble after a random auto accident ends in him viciously beating a man, the whole thing caught on video and played endlessly on television.

As the noose draws slowly but inevitably tighter around his neck, Dave gets more and more desperate, and woe to anyone who gets in his way.

Director and co-writer Oren Moverman seems to be in the Woody Harrelson business; his first feature behind the camera was the acclaimed "The Messenger," which did get an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay.

Video extras are not bad. There's a feature-length commentary track by Moverman, interviews with the cast and crew, and a handful of behind-the-scenes featurettes.  

Movie: 2.5 stars out of four  
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "21 Jump Street"

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.

2.5 stars out of four