Review: "Barely Lethal"

There are a lot of young and charismatic performers in “Barely Lethal,” and I wanted to hug each of them, tell them how talented they are, and comfort them with the knowledge that appearing in this movie won’t ruin their careers.

This teen action/comedy is the sort of forgettable film that you make when you’re breaking into Hollywood and just want to get some credits under your belt. You get a paycheck, learn from the experience, and try to choose better projects from then on.

The strange thing is that many of the people involved are already bona fide names in showbiz.

Hailee Steinfeld, an Oscar nominee for her terrific turn in “True Grit” and part of the “Pitch Perfect” crew, is the lead. Sophie Turner, best known as Sansa Stark on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” is the bitchy adversary. Toby Sebastian also was in “Game of Thrones” in a smaller role. Gabriel Basso was in “Super 8” and “The Kings of Sumer.” Plus Samuel L. Jackson, Jaime King and Jessica Alba turn up.

So what are they doing in this silly flick about a teen super-spy who decides she’d rather experience high school instead? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

It’s essentially “21 Jump Street” except instead of being a cop, Steinfeld is Agent 83 of the Prescott School for Girls, a place where orphans are raised to be deadly assassins. Jackson is the stern taskmaster. But 83 yearns for something more, and after dousing herself in a raft of teen movies like “The Breakfast Club,” she decides to fake her death and do the John Hughes thing.

Dubbing herself Megan, she poses as a foreign exchange student – from Canada! – and embeds herself with a family in wholesome Newtown. Soon she’s navigating the familiar obstacles of mean girls, clueless teachers and romantic angst.

Dove Cameron plays Liz, the acerbic daughter of her foster family, who wants nothing to do with her. Sebastian plays Cash, the dreamy wannabe rock star of the school whom all the girls swoon over, including, soon enough, Megan. Thomas Mann is Roger, the geeky-but-nice guy who develops a crush on her. Basso is the Gooch, local athlete-meathead.

Director Kyle Newman and screenwriter John D’Arco put all these actors through the familiar paces without much flair or originality. You know it’s just a matter of time before Megan’s spy life invades her high school one, with Alba playing the evil renegade agent who wants revenge on the Prescotts. The comedy is broad and the storylines worthy of cable TV.

I think “Barely Lethal” is trying to be a parody of dumb teen movies, but ends up turning into one itself. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then becoming that which you mocked must be the cruelest insult.

Review: "Machete"

To anyone who ever criticizes movie critics for having a cushy gig, we now have a ready response: "Hey, at least you didn't have to sit through 'Machete'."

Robert Rodriguez' loopy, overlong and just plain boring "grindhouse" film is actually based on a fake trailer that appeared with "Grindhouse," the faux cheapie exploitation flick he and Quentin Tarantino made a few years ago. It featured a Mexican badass played by perennial sidekick Danny Trejo, who takes his name from the weapon of choice he uses to dice his enemies.

People were fairly indifferent to "Grindhouse," with many commenting that the previews for fake movies looked more entertaining than the one they were watching. Rodriguez, no dummy, took their advice to heart, and here we are.

Except for one thing: "Machete" is almost completely devoid of any entertainment value. It's trying to be a spoof of low-budget action movies, except it keeps forgetting to poke fun and becomes that which it mocked.

Trejo is an interesting choice as a protagonist. His face, an arid landscape of crags and canyons, is entirely watchable. But after a career of playing henchman and C-list villains, Trejo has never been called upon to use that great face of his to convey any range of emotion. It's a wall of non-communication.

I'm guessing Rodriguez directed Trejo to underplay in the long cinematic tradition of Men With No Name. But heck, even Charles Bronson showed a glimmer here and there. Trejo displays only two expressions: Contorted in rage, and preparing to contort.

He's also on the smallish side physically, and the reason Trejo has that wonderfully etched face of his is ... well, he's frackin' senior citizen! Trejo is 66 years old, and walks with the stiff ambling gait of a former bodybuilder whose muscles are drooping and weighing him down.

Rodriguez does his best to cut around his star's immobility during the action scenes, but it makes for some really dull hand-to-hand stuff -- which should be the best thing in the movie.

The plot is a screwy farce set to the backdrop of the illegal immigration problem. I'd call the movie's approach to this serious issue cartoonish, but that would be an insult ... to cartoons.

At one point, Jessica Alba, as an immigrations officer turned Machete sympathizer, rallies the day laborers to take up arms against their white oppressors: "We didn't cross the border! The border crossed us!"

Well.

Don Johnson plays the leader of an army of racist vigilantes who want to blow 'em all back across the border. Of course, they're secretly funded by a Mexican drug lord, played by Steven Seagal, doing an (I hope) intentionally bad accent. Their unwitting partner is Robert De Niro, playing a Texas state senator and anti-immigrant hardliner. In the opening sequence, the senator gleefully shoots a Mexican couple sneaking across the border for sport.

Machete is a former Mexican drug enforcement agent who had his wife and daughter killed by the druglord. He's now hiding out in the U.S. as a day laborer. He meets up with Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), who's the head of the local underground railroad for illegal immigrants.

The action scenes are surprisingly infrequent, and at 105 minutes the movie feels about a half-hour too long.

There's occasionally an inspired moment of over-the-top blood-letting -- such as Machete slicing open a man's chest, grabbing his intestines, and then using them as a rope to jump out a window and swing down to the next floor. This, of course, happens right after a doctor has helpfully told us that the human intestine is 60 feet long.

Jeff Fahey plays the senator's right-hand man, and Cheech Marin shows up as Machete's priest brother, who doesn't let his holy vows interfere with his prowess with a shotgun. Lindsay Lohan plays Fahey's daughter, a budding Internet porn star who arrives at the film's climax decked out in a nun's habit and a machine gun. I'd say her career has arrived right about where it should have.

Look, I'm all for tongue-in-cheek exploitation -- if there's a drive-in showing "Return of the Living Dead," sign me up -- but this movie isn't nearly as much fun as it seems to think it is.

1 star

Review: "Valentine's Day"

"Valentine's Day" is more a marketing push than a movie. I have no doubt its genesis occurred in a cynical producer's office with dreams of opening weekend box office tallies -- not the den of a writer with a burning story to tell.

It's a manufactured film about a made-up holiday.

The movie boasts a huge roster of stars in one of those ensemble-casts-with-intersecting-storylines dealies. The boyfriend who proposes to his girlfriend is best friends with the woman who's a teacher with a boy in her class who buys roses from the first guy's flower shop, and so on.

Every time a new character arrives, we wonder where they will fit into this ever-expanding puzzle.

It's like "Crash," but everyone's moony.

I guess it's nice seeing so many cute young couples (and one older one, but still pretty cute) making big declarations of love and encountering romantic surprises. Some of the couplings are more interesting than others, and some of the characters you wish would go away.

The Meet Cute between Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts is one of the better ones. They're on a long plane flight, she falls asleep on his shoulder and they get to talking. She's an Army captain making a 28-hour round trip so she can spend a single day with someone special. He plays it coy but is impressed by her dedication.

Anne Hathaway and Topher Grace are a couple who've only been dating a couple of weeks when they have to face the daunting holiday that commands romance. She's got a rather kinky side job that might just send him for a loop.

"I'm from Muncie, Indiana," he explains. "The wildest thing I ever did was ... leave Muncie, Indiana."

Less intriguing is the sports newscaster (Jamie Foxx) forced to do man-on-the-street pap for Valentine's Day, when he wants to pursue the story of the NFL quarterback who has something big to announce. The quarterback's agent (Queen Latifah) is the boss of Hathaway's character, while his publicist (Jessica Biel) holds an anti-Valentine's Day party every year.

The movie starts with flower guy (Ashton Kutcher, who apparently actually has a career beyond Tweeting). He proposes to his sweetie (Jessica Alba), and he wants to tell the whole world about their engagement, while she advises keeping it quiet, which sorta hints where things are heading.

And so on. New love is found, old love is shaken, what was thought to be true love is shown to be not.

"Valentine's Day" is directed by feel-good king Garry Marshall ("Pretty Woman," "The Runaway Bride") from a screenplay by Katherine Fugate. It's smarmy but not cynical. What it mostly is is unnecessary -- sort of like a holiday reminding people to be nice to the one they love.

2 stars