I didn’t know that a movie franchise could “present” a spinoff, but I’m not sure if anybody would buy a ticket to “Hobbs & Shaw” if they didn’t know it was part of the “Fast & Furious” universe. But it made its pile of money, helped by the branding as well as the star power of Dwayne Johnson and, to a much lesser extent, Jason Statham.
They played late-addition fringe characters next to Vin Diesel and his company of street racers, and here get their own 2-plus-hour movie to smack people around and toss strangle-throated one-liners and occasionally drive cars.
I pretty well loathed “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw,” because it’s a totally uninteresting garbage movie. The silliness of the title, complete with dueling ampersands, only adds to the reasons to mock it.
Personally I would’ve called the movie “Bald Guys Grunt and Kick People” and be done with it.
Johnson is Hobbs, a U.S. government badass who gets loaned out for all sorts of tough jobs. Statham is Shaw, a criminal turned British MI6 agent who appreciates the finer things in life. They’re thrown together to track down Snowflake, a viral weapon with the potential to kill everyone on Earth.
Idris Elba plays the villain, Brixton Lore, who’s been cybernetically augmented so he’s more than a match for Hobbs and Shaw in hand-to-hand combat, even together. Vanessa Kirby plays Shaw’s sister, a capable agent in her own right who gets in between the two alpha dudes.
There’s a car-chasing-a-helicopter scene that’s not too bad, and later on the gang travels to Hobbs’ homeland of Samoa so they can have an old-school beat-down against the bad guys using medieval weapons and traps.
This is an egregiously dumb, ugly movie. I’m torn between laughing at it and hating it.
Bonus features are in inverse proportion to the quality of the film. There’s a feature-length commentary track with director David Leitch; extended and deleted scenes; an alternate opening; and a baker’s dozen of documentary shorts focusing on various aspects of production, from the star duo pairing to the stunt coordination.
My gosh, it just keeps going and going, doesn’t it?
Officially the runtime of “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” -- and yes, Hollywood title insanity has reached the point of two ampersands -- is two hours and 15 minutes. But it feels much, much longer. If it’s possible to be bored by a movie in the middle of slo-mo explosions, then here it is.
For my money, the secondary characters of Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) were the least interesting of the F&F universe. The latter is a thief/mercenary turned British MI6 agent, while the former is a badass agent of the Diplomatic Security Service (Google it, it’s a real thing) who is often loaned out to the CIA.
They clashed in some of the earlier movies, or so I’m told, those movies coming so fast and so furious -- and ever further afield from a simple story of street racers -- that they long ago became a blur in my mind.
The gig is they’re brought together on a job, and spend that 135 minutes sneering and snarling at each other, in between a whole lot of beat-downs, the aforementioned explosions and some occasional car chases. Of course, we know they’re going to bond in the end.
Watching this movie play out is an exercise in foregone conclusions. We know there will be some early double-crosses. There will be a beautiful woman they can fight about. There will be a bad guy who somehow seems more than a match for two action-movie heroes. And Dwayne Johnson will wear T-shirts three sizes too small for him, with one obligatory shirtless scene for the two weeks he was doing extreme water weight cutting.
I had high hopes for Johnson once. He was doing quirky comedic roles in “Be Cool” and developing into an interesting performer. Somewhere along the way he got obsessed with being a 1950s-style screen muscleman. His body has become a grossly swollen mass of veins. His star persona is indelibly linked to freakishness now.
I guess it gets box office, but he’s lost something along the way -- realism and relatability, to start.
Vanessa Kirby plays a rogue MI6 agent accused of stealing CT17, aka Snowflake, a deadly virus that could kill everyone on Earth. Actually, she was set up by the evil Eteon corporation, and injected herself with the virus to keep it from falling into their hands. Hobbs and Shaw are brought in to locate her and secure the MacGuffin.
Idris Elba plays Brixton Lore, a cybernetically enhanced villain who actually refers to himself as “the bad guy.” Later on he brags to our boys that he’s “black Superman.” Certainly he seems to have the upper hand in their early encounters.
I usually enjoy Elba in just about anything, but he doesn’t see to be having much fun here. Before every fight he says something cryptic and then his eyes briefly glow amber to let us know he’s Terminator Lite or something.
Director David Leitch piles on the shaky-cam like a 4-year-old put in charge of dispensing the whipped cream. Screenwriters Chris Morgan and Drew Pearce ladle in copious one-liners, our two bald badasses growling in that strangled croak all action heroes seem to use now.
Where will it all end? Are we going to keep getting Fast & Furious movies -- and now spinoffs -- until absolutely everyone in the world objects? As long as people keep buying tickets, or Johnson’s pecs finally fall or fast cars are outlawed.
I’ve frequently complained about Dwayne Johnson’s choices of role. After doing some interesting work during the early part of his movie career, he downshifted into musclebound lunkhead action roles, the sort of braggadocios alpha male type I’ve come to loathe onscreen -- basically, Schwarzenegger II.
Then he turns around and actually tackles a more complex part, playing a disabled ex-military guy with PTSD and a lot of self-doubt. And the movie bombs, at least at the domestic box office.
This is why no one should take career advice from movie critics.
Johnson plays Will Sawyer, an Army/FBI team leader who switched to designing security systems after an op went bad, leaving him with a prosthetic leg and a lot of regret. His buddy Ben (Pablo Schreiber) hooks him up to do the security work on The Pearl, a next-gen building in Hong Kong that will be the tallest in the world.
While they’re doing the final run-through some very “Die Hard”-esque international bad guys show up and start blasting the place apart with bullets and explosions. Will has brought along his family (Neve Campbell, McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) for the trip, so of course they’re caught up in the peril.
The movie itself is a pretty straight-forward action/thriller, with plenty of fight scenes and CGI action. It’s nice to see Johnson -- or anyone, for that matter -- playing a hero who’s not automatically the most physically capable person in a room. And he even refrains from the usual quips, eye rolls and bicep-flexing that has become his M.O.
It’s not a great movie, and you kind of have to tuck your sense of logic aside at points. But “Skyscraper” is a genuinely entertaining FLICK with Dwayne Johnson showing a little ambition as an actor.
Bonus features are decent, cemented by a feature-length commentary track by director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who also worked with Johnson on “Central Intelligence.” Pity the actor didn’t join the director for this track. Thurber also provides commentary on a number of deleted or extended scenes.
There are also six making-of documentary shorts that focus on different aspects of production. The most interesting is a talk with Jeff Glasbrenner, the real-life amputee and motivational speaker who inspired the character of Will.
“In order to be brave,
we gotta be a little scared.”
--Will Sawyer
My first thought about “Skyscraper” was that it looked dumb as
a bag of rocks. And it is. But at least it’s a small bag.
I admit I liked this movie a lot more than I ever thought I
would. It actually manages to coax a performance out of Dwayne Johnson that
could be credible considered as… acting. No curled eyebrows, no winking at the
audience, no ‘roided-up bicep flexing. He actually inhabits a character and
invests him with something like dimensions.
All this is set against a backdrop of fires, explosions and
machine guns, of course. The former WWE wrestler known as “The Rock” still
knows his audience, who like the smell of his cooking, and insist that he keep
on cooking that recipe -- or something.
(I never watched a lot of wrestling.)
Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former military badass turned
FBI badass who… got blown up in bad op, lost his leg and now has become a
rather self-doubting family man. Looking a little thick in the face, with a
scraggly grey beard and doe-ish eyes, Johnson manages to project a decent
amount of vulnerability for a guy the size of an NFL linebacker.
“I just kinda put my sword down,” he says to his old squad
mate, Ben (Pablo Schreiber), who has recruited him to do a security assessment
of The Pearl -- the world’s newly christened tallest building, courtesy of an
ambitious Hong Kong billionaire, Zhao Min Zhi (Chin Han). He even brings along
his wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), who’s also the military surgeon who saved his
life, and their adorable, peril-prone moppets (McKenna Roberts, Noah Cottrell).
Of course, nefarious bad guys with vague European accents
(Roland Møller chief among them) are up to no good, sealing off the building
and setting the 96th floor ablaze, while also disabling the fire
control systems. The flames gradually higher as our hero battles the villains
in a confined space while striving to protect his loved ones.
If all this sounds like “Die Hard” shotgun married to
“Blazing Inferno,” that’s because it is.
Still, it’s hard to deny this is a fun flick. And it’s nice
to see a character with a disability as the hero of an action thriller. Will
gets around pretty well on his prosthetic leg, and even manages to use it as a
prop several times during some of the more acrobatic sequences. Writer/director
Rawson Marshall Thurber, who previously teamed with Johnson on “Central Intelligence,”
resists the urge to have him take the leg off and start whacking bad guys with
it.
Of course, you've got to swallow a lot of action movie
stupidity along the way. Like a tall building being lit on fire in the middle,
the flames gradually engulfing higher stories, yet somehow the superstructure
remains perfectly intact without collapsing in on itself, as basic engineering
principles would dictate.
It's not like there's a real-life contrary example from the
recent past that literally every single person on Earth is aware of...
Speaking of which, I talked to a few people afterward who
admit they were a bit triggered by the 9/11 resemblance. I was more bothered by
the transgressions against Physics 101.
Just a short review today; Manuel Fernandez is handling the main review at The Film Yap, so head over there to check it out.
"Rampage" is the best based-on-a-video-game movie I've ever seen. Granted, that's not saying much.
The roll call of these flicks ranges from the merely boring to the tragically awful. These movies tend to be big, loud and dumb. "Rampage" is too, but there's enough genuine fun in between the silliness to recommend it.
Dwayne "Not The Rock; OK, You Can Call Me The Rock" Johnson has his shtick down pretty well these days. I describe it as Flex and Smirk, Smirk and Flex, Flex and SCOWL... and Flex.
His characters (Davis Okoye) may have some other job description -- he's a primatologist here -- but he's always the biggest, baddest dude around. Woefully inadequate T-shirts fail to contain all his muscley muscleness. He is accomplished at hand-to-hand combat, firing big guns and piloting helicopters, because isn't that a skillset everyone at the San Diego zoo has?
If you don't remember the 1986 arcade game, it allowed players to control one of three giant monsters -- an ape, George; a wolf, Ralph; or a lizard, Lizzie -- destroying the city. You got to smash buildings, punch fire engines to smithereens and eat distressed damsels. It was great fun.
"Rampage" gets us to this scenario by way of some convoluted mix of corporate greed and scientific mumbo-jump. A nasty company named EnerGyne was conducting illegal experiments in space, one got loose and exploded the place, but not before three samples of the genetic editing MacGuffin landed on Earth, turning normal creatures into gigantic, aggressive smash machines.
One of them was George, an albino gorilla at Davis' zoo with whom he has a special relationship. They communicate with each other via sign language, and even joke around and flip each other the bird. The CGI for George and the other critters is quite good, especially the expressions on George's face. Ralph has spikes and a few other tricks, while Lizzie seems to be part alligator, part boar.
Naomie Harris plays Kate Caldwell, the do-gooder scientist who's helping Davis save the day; Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy are the sneering sibling villains; Jeffrey Dean Morgan does his Negan thing in the guise of a Southern-fried FBI agent who apparently has the wherewithal to go anywhere, summon any resources, give lip to anybody he wants.
Once George gets infected and starts growing at a geometric rate, Davis tries to keep the authorities from going all bang-bang on him. But it doesn't work, and soon he's tracking the path of destruction Chicago, which is about to get a big bag of hurt.
"Rampage" isn't a great movie by any stretch, but it's a decent popcorn flick to kick off the summer movie season.
Stretching is good if you’re exercising but not if you’re making movies. “Baywatch” is a sorta-spoof of the television show that has about 30 minutes’ worth of decent material, but then tries to string that out to a two-hour movie. The end result is a flick with a few good laughs and a whole bunch of filler in between.
Dwayne Johnson plays Lieutenant Mitch Buchannon, the veteran leader of the local lifeguard crew. (Motto: “Risking Our Lives and Flexing for $9/hour.”) The running joke is that he takes his job way too seriously, behaving more like a special ops operative than a dude in jams and flipflops.
As the story opens Mitch is recruiting two new spots on the team. Matt Brody (Zac Efron) would seem to be the top candidate, an Olympic swimming star who can cut through the water like nobody else. But he’s also an arrogant ass who disgraced himself and is looking to take the next steps.
Summer (Alexandra Daddario) is the competition he takes a shine too, who’s too smart to fall for his bro-dude antics. Rounding out the cast of contenders is Ronnie (Jon Bass), a schlubby but good-hearted guy who would seem to be a long shot to make the team.
It’s a pretty raunchy affair, with the boys showing off a lot more skin than the girls. The plot is a forgettable lark, something about an evil businesswoman buying up the beach. Mitch and his fellow lifeguards take on the extra duty of solving some murder and fraud in between elliptical workouts.
There’s been a whole slew of old TV shows turned into movie spoofs in recent years. I’m not opposed to the idea, but I can’t think of a one of them that’s been better than mediocre. “Baywatch” doesn’t sink, but it doesn’t exactly swim, either.
Bonus features include an extended version of the film with new and longer scenes, plus four-making of featurettes. They’re only available on the Blu-ray, though, as the DVD edition has none.
I never watched a single episode of the "Baywatch" TV show, or wanted to. They couldn't just have lifeguards resuscitating poor swimmers every week, so they brought in drug dealers, inter-squad passion/spats, earthquakes and even a serial killer to spice things up.
It sounded like a weird amalgam of a crime procedural and fleshfest, complete with the slo-mo running "jiggle cam" that became its signature.
Basically, it was a stripper cop show.
"Baywatch" at least seemed aware of its own silliness, and to the extent possible, embraced it. So the logical thing to do if you were going to make a movie out of it is to spoof the TV version, in the way that "21 Jump Street," “The A Team” and the more recent “CHIPS” did.
(Though perhaps these are not the… best examples.)
Director Seth Gordon, a TV and film comedy veteran (“Identity Thief,” “Horrible Bosses”), and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift start off reasonably well, gathering together a gaggle of eye-pleasing hardbodies and concocting a bunch of goofy, raunchy scenarios to put them through.
But the film loses steam pretty early, and then hangs around way too long -- nearly two hours. If any movie needed to rock an 82-minute run time, it’s this.
It’s very aware of what it’s trying to do, at least for a while. The actors mock the TV show while paying homage to it. For instance, one of the women questions why it is their familiar fire red one-piece bathing suits ride so far up their rear ends. It makes us faster in the water, or something, the other responds… and we all know it’s the “or something.”
Interestingly, a whole lot more male flesh is on display than female which, other than some cleavage and the aforementioned butt-age, is pretty much kept under wraps. That is largely provided by Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron, two famously buff actors who butter their bread with getting their kits off.
Johnson is built like the former WWE and NFL prospect he was, massive in the Schwarzeneggerian mold. He basically looks like an 18-wheeler encased in flesh. Efron, a former teen idol, seems intent on completely ridding his body of all fat to the point he resembles those “visible man” cut-out models you saw in biology class, where every muscle strand and the guts are naked to the eye.
Apparently, this is considered attractive nowadays. I guess the next step is for people to start making their internal organs visible. Soon there’ll be a market for cosmetic surgery of the liver.
There is one schlubby guy, a new recruit named Ronnie (Jon Bass), because it’s supposed to be funny to have the rippled crew running on the beach together, and here’s this big belly sloshing around in slo-mo. But the movie awards him… other attributes as compensation.
Other newbies to the Baywatch team are Alexandra Daddario as Summer, a tough and smart girl, and Efron as Matt Brody, a former Olympic champion more famous for his out-of-the-pool tomfoolery than his gold medals. Think Ryan Lochte with gastrointestinal issues. He’s cocky as all get-out and must be put in his place, starting with Summer responding to his brodude overtures.
Johnson is Lieutenant Mitch Buchannon, a legend on the beach with hundreds of confirmed saves. One of the running jokes is that Mitch acts like a military special-ops badass -- the exact origin of his rank is nebulous -- and people have to keep reminding him he’s just a lifeguard.
Ilfenesh Hadera plays Stephanie, Mitch’s seasoned and capable #2. Rob Huebel is the jerk suit ostensibly in command. Kelly Rohrbach rounds out the team as CJ, whom Ronnie is smitten with, and she might just have a little smit running the other direction, too.
There’s a plot, but that’s not really the point. Something about a powerful businesswoman buying up beach properties, muscling politicos and offing anyone who gets in the way.
“Baywatch” actually starts out pretty funny and fresh, but they only really had about two solid “SNL” skits worth of material to go on. The rest is unfunny filler. But I guess they spent so much effort trimming the fat from the beach bods, they couldn’t bother to do the same with the script.
As we already knew from the movies, you can outrun an
explosion, provided it happens in slo-mo. Now from “The Fate of the Furious,”
the franchise that started out about illegal street racers and somehow morphed
into full James Bond-esque international intrigue and action set pieces, we
learn you can block an explosion simply by parking a car in front of it.
It’s true -- the flames won’t go above, below or around the
vehicle at all! Thanks, Furious!
I know, I know; nitpicking the “Fast and the Furious”
franchise, now in its astonishing eighth iteration, is like criticizing the
dancing bear’s form. People pay to see it because it does what it does, not
because it’s particularly good at it or whether the whole enterprise makes a
lick of sense.
The thing is, people got hooked on these movies because they
combined hot rods, bulging muscles, macho preening, hoochie mamas and lots of
hard-throttle racing. Most of that has gone by the wayside in “Fate.” Oh, there
are a few cool cars, and neither Vin Diesel nor Dwayne Johnson seem to own any
shirts that include sleeves.
But at this point the Furious movies are big, messy,
sprawling orgies of pomposity and ridiculousness. It’s all about Russian
separatists and nuclear codes and elite cyber hackers and no-name American spy
agencies. There are eight gazillion characters, and apparently we’re supposed
to be able to remember some sideshow guys from four movies ago.
When last we left Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and his “family”
of driver/robbers, they’d finally found some peace after pulling off one last
big job. We learn they’ve been staying in Havana, which in this depiction is a
true socialist paradise of cruising cars and women with cheeks hanging out of
their skirts.
Dom gets a visit from Cipher, a computer hacker and
criminal mastermind, played with hollow eyes and a taunting smirk by Charlize Theron.
She shows him an image on her phone, and as a result he turns his back on his
crew and becomes her mercenary in some very big heists against the Russian
military. His actions are so bewildering, his friends keep wondering aloud:
“Has Dominic Toretto finally gone rogue?”
Hint: Dominic Toretto has not gone rogue.
You may remember the other players: Michelle Rodriguez is
Letty, Dom’s fiery lady love, now wife; Johnson is Luke Hobbs, a special ops
badass who used to chase Dom & Co. but now allies with them; Tyrese Gibson
is Roman, the wisecracking, cowardly one; Chris “Ludacris” Bridges is Tej, the
brainy tech expert; Nathalie Emmanuel is Ramsey, a hacktivist who created some
spying software called God’s Eye in the last movie and now fends off lame
sexual innuendo from Roman and Tej.
Jason Statham returns as Shaw, a bad guy for at least one
other movie, maybe two. (I really can’t remember.) Now he and Hobbs are in jail
together for about a minute and a half, then they’re forced to team up against
Cipher. They keep threatening to have a fistfullicious throwdown when their temporary alliance
is ended; it gives us something to look forward to.
Kurt Russell shows up as the helpful spy guy pulling some
strings, and Scott Eastwood is his dorky young apprentice who eventually wises
up. I get the sense Eastwood is being groomed to assume the role of Bland
Straitlaced White Guy vacated by Paul Walker.
The movie, directed by F. Gary Gray from a script by Chris
Morgan, is big, loud and dumb, but perhaps not big and loud enough for its own good.
There’s an astonishing amount of jabbering and people tapping away furious on
computer keyboards. This is one of those movies where virtually every object in
the world can be controlled by computers, including an army of self-driving
cars and even a nuclear submarine.
(Quibble: If you leave the hatch of a sub open, as the
characters clearly do, it tends to flood when it submerges. OK, I’ll stop.)
There was one clever and funny bit where Shaw fights a bunch
of people on a plane while carrying a very important object, about which I’ll
say no more. It’s basically the movie’s MacGuffin, but cuter.
“The Fate of the Furious” is a transcendentally silly movie,
rock-headed and testosterone-fueled, but one not without its charms. The car stunts are fun, the bad guys are
hiss-able, and even the hyper-masculine peacocking gets so silly the guys start
laughing at each other in between boasts and threats.
I wish the thing was 40 minutes shorter. Come to think of
it, I wish they’d stopped making these two or three movies ago. But I hear two
more are coming, whether we like it or not. Just pay your money and clap for
the bear.
As it happens, my family and I watched “Moana” right before the Oscar telecast, just in time to see it lose to the solid-but-inferior “Zootopia.” I actually think “Kubo and the Two Strings” was better than either. But still, this has to go down as one of the bigger travesties in recent Academy Award history.
While “Zootopia” is virtually indistinguishable in look and themes from various other critter cartoons to arrive in theaters in recent years, “Moana” is a completely original tale that pulls its inspiration from the mythology of the various Polynesian cultures.
The central (though not main) character is Maui, a legendary demigod who committed great acts of heroism, and mischief, on behalf of humans. He’s voiced by Dwayne Johnson, who actually looks like a pipsqueak next to the blocky, stocky hero festooned with tribal tattoos. Johnson even gets to sing a song, and shows off some solid pipes.
But really the story is about the title character, a teenage chieftain’s daughter – not a princess! she insists – who goes on a voyage of discovery and quest. She has been charged with returning the glowing heart of Te Fiti, the earth mother who spawned much of island life, after Maui stole it eons ago. Since then, a slow rot has crept over the lands, eventually making its way to the shores of Moana’s idyllic village.
Her job: find Maui, convince him to return the heart while battling any number of monsters, from a massive lava creature to spear-chucking pygmies wearing coconuts as armor. There’s also a stop along the way to retrieve Maui’s massive, magical fish hook from Tamatoa, a huge crab with a penchant for bling.
It’s a terrific-looking movie, the cartoony creatures set off by amazingly realistic seas and lands. And the music and songs are eminently hummable.
“Moana” made something like half what “Zootopia” did at the box office, perhaps explaining the oversight at the Oscars. Make sure to check it out on video to see what truly audacious animated filmmaking looks like.
Video extras are quite good, though most of them aren’t on the DVD version. Still, that contains the music video for “How Far I’ll Go,” the animated short film “Inner Workings” and feature-length audio commentary with directors John Musker and Ron Clements.
Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack and you add a new mini-movie starring Maui, “Gone Fishing”; the inspiration of the Pacific islands people for the movie; making-of featurettes on various aspects of production, from costumes to hair and special effects; deleted scenes; and a deleted song, “Warrior Face.”
I’ve always thought “Pocahontas” was one of the weakest Disney animated films because it seemed like it simply wanted to present a multicultural experience and didn’t care about what story they used as the vehicle to do it. “Moana” stands as stark counterpoint, a completely enthralling, original tale that just happens to immerse us in the vibrant traditions of Polynesia.
Disney has hit another home run with the story of Moana (voice of Hawaiian actress Auli'i Cravalho), a teen who breaks the grip of her people’s land-bound laws to go out into the deep seas and try to restore the dying lands. Part anthropology, part mythology and pure imagination, it’s an action-filled musical romp that will delight parents as much as kids (and possibly more).
Directors Ron Clements and John Musker (“The Princess and the Frog”) are old Disney hands who came up in the hand-drawn animation tradition and with this picture segue completely into CGI. Jared Bush’s screenplay employs actual Polynesian history and lore to come up something old and something new.
According to the epilogue, the far-flung islands of the Pacific were created by the goddess Te Fiti. But when her heart was stolen by the demigod Maui, she began to slowly die, with the festering creep gradually spreading to the other lands. Maui, who wields a massive magic fishhook that grants him the power to shapeshift into multitudinous creatures, was lost after a battle with a terrible demon that desired the heart for itself.
The brave and pure-hearted Moana is chosen by the ocean itself -- represented as tentacles of glowing water -- to take the heart, find Maui and compel him to heal the rift he caused.
Voiced by Dwayne Johnson, Maui is presented as a gargantuan man, almost as broad as he is tall, his body covered in tattoos that chronicle his Herculean exploits. One of his tats, a miniature version of himself, even moves around and acts as the fool whispering in the king’s ear.
Maui is quite full of himself, but not necessarily a bad guy. He stole Te Fiti’s heart because he wanted to give humans the power to create life itself. True, upon meeting Moana he traps her in a cave and steals her boat, but the relationship improves -- gradually.
Other voices include Rachel House as Moana’s wise but kooky grandmother, Temeura Morrison and Nicole Scherzinger as her parents and Alan Tudyk as Hei Hei, an idiotic chicken who stows away on Moana’s journey, so dumb he has to be continuously rescued from certain demise.
Jemaine Clement has a funny, memorable turn as Tamatoa, a massive crab who dwells in the realm of monsters and has a personal history with Maui. He sort of looks like the massive mutated cousin of Sebastian from “The Little Mermaid,” and has a penchant for collecting trinkets.
The music is just terrific -- rollicking, hummable and helps carry the story along. Songs were written by Mark Mancina, Opetaia Foa’i and Broadway sensation Lin-Manuel Miranda of “Hamilton” fame. The three best are “How Far I’ll Go,” Moana’s dreaming of a life beyond; “We Know the Way,” a paean to their tribe’s voyager past; and “You’re Welcome,” Maui’s signature self-introduction.
And yes, in case you’re wondering -- Johnson, formerly “The Rock,” shows off an unexpectedly fantastic singing voice.
The movie even displays some sly humor goofing on past Disney movies, like when Moana protests Maui’s assertion that, as the daughter of a chieftain, she constitutes royalty: “If you wear a dress and have an animal sidekick, you’re a princess,” he says.
Fun and funny, full of adventure, a sense of danger and a deep feeling of hope, “Moana” is Disney’s next animated classic.
I like both Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson. They have winning personalities, beaming smiles and great screen presence. I’m not sure if either one of them is nearly as funny as he thinks he is, though.
It’s the same way with “Central Intelligence,” their new buddy cop comedy. It’s an agreeable picture with some outrageous jokes, wacky setups and a few harder-edged action scenes to spice things up. A laugh riot it is not.
Most of the attempted humor comes from Hart playing his type and Johnson playing against type. Hart, by virtue of his diminutive height and comedic personality, is always the nervous nelly trying to front that he is cooler/tougher than he really is. Johnson, playing a lot of hyper-masculine action roles lately, is a dweeb who loves unicorns, fanny packs and cinnamon pancakes.
This really is part of his cover as CIA agent Bob Stone. Formerly the fat kid in high school who was the subject of a cruel prank -- Johnson’s body is digitally morphed onto another actor’s body for the flashback -- he’s grown up into a tower of muscles who can take out a handful of bad guys without even blinking.
There’s no cockiness to him, though, and in fact Bob is in awe of Calvin “The Golden Jet” Joyner (Hart), the BMOC in high school who everyone looked up to. Flash forward 20 years and his promising life has turned into disappointment, a nowhere job in forensic accounting, a fantastic wife (Danielle Nicolet) but no kids. He’s just… stuck.
Bob shows up out of the blue and invites Calvin for drinks, which turns into a bar fight, which turns into a sleepover, which turns into CIA agents showing up on his doorstep claiming Bob is a rogue agent trying to sell vital intelligence to the highest bidder. From there the movie is a series of chases as Calvin tries to decide if Bob is on the level or not, in between fistfights and shootouts.
Amy Ryan plays the grim head spook who leads the hunt, and Jason Bateman turns up in an uncredited role as one of Bob’s former teenage tormentors who seems to have experienced a change of heart.
Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber from a screenplay he co-wrote with Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen, “Central Intelligence” is all broad humor and telegraphed punchlines. For instance, when Bob encourages Calvin to replicate the backward flip he was famous for back in the day, we just know it’s going to come in handy during a pivotal fight scene.
They do manage to sneak in a few clever throwaway jokes, such as Bob calling Calvin a “snack-size Denzel” for his performance in fooling some bad guys. I also liked the quip where Calvin, after first witnessing Bob in action, refers to his non-badass attire, dubbing him “Jason Bourne in jorts.”
I can’t quite recommend this movie, but I didn’t hate it. It just needed to be funnier and not take aim at the most obvious jokes possible. Sass and charisma will only take you so far.
"Furious 7" features a lot of great stunts and a great deal of silliness. This franchise started out 14 years ago about a bunch of punk twentysomething street racers, and by now it's morphed into a James Bond clan in which everybody does martial arts, spy infiltrations and super stunts in addition to being expert wheel men (and women).
You pretty much know what you're getting with any of the "Furious" flicks: aerobatic car stunts, smashmouth fights, explosions galore, booties shaken, muscles engorged, exotic locales and lots of quips. The first 20 minutes or so features very little action, with main star Vin Diesel repeatedly threatening the camera, vaguely: "They're gonna pay for their mistakes... big time."
That's not actually what he says, but it could be. One of the main failings of these movies is that the dialogue often sounds like it was written by a pair of 15-year-olds who were locked in a vault with a bunch of video games and no contact with other humans.
(Chris Morgan, who penned the first, fifth and sixth movies, is officially given credit.)
Justin Lin, who directed the last four films in the series, is replaced by horror filmmaker James Wan. He adds a few new flourishes of his own, such as rotating the camera to follow the trajectory of an actor spinning through the air during a fight or crash, and then flogs them like a deceased equine.
Still, it's hard to deny that many of the chase scenes in the latter half are truly thrilling. The best are a multi-car road duel on a twisty mountain road, and a super-valuable sports car being jumped from one high-rise skyscraper to another... and another.
Dwayne Johnson, as supercop Hobbs, is actually sidelined for most of the movie after sustaining serious injuries during an early tussle, which is notable for a couple of reasons. First, we don't get to enjoy Johnson and Diesel engaging in another pointless battle of behemoths. Second, this is virtually the only time a character gets more than a scratch during the entire flick, despite an unrelenting barrage of bullets, shrapnel, kicks, punches and sudden g-force trauma.
The plot is an incomprehensible muddle of MacGuffins, red herrings, come-and-go villains and set pieces. Our travels take us from Los Angeles to London, Abu Dhabi, the Caucuses, the Dominican Republic and more.
Ostensibly it's about catching Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the brother of the bad guy from the last movie. He's a British black ops chap who wants revenge, so he starts tracking down the "family" members of Dom Toretto (Diesel), leader of the crew. Dom doesn't believe in playing defense, so soon they're chasing the guy chasing them.
Somehow this morphs into the search for an international hacker named Ramsey, who has created a program called the God's Eye, which uses cell phones, security cameras and virtually every electronic device to track anyone, anywhere.
(You may recall this is the same thing Batman used during the finale of "The Dark Knight"; it was goofy then, and it's still goofy now.)
Other familiar characters include Paul Walker as cop-turned-wingman Brian; Michelle Rodriguez as Dom's squeeze Letty, still struggling with amnesia after returning from the dead; Roman (Tyrese Gibson), ladies' man and comic relief; and Tej (Ludacris), computer expert and Roman tamer.
(Walker's death mid-production is handled by using CGI to paste his face on other actors' bodies; if you're not looking for it, you probably won't even notice. He also receives a send-off at the end that's genuinely touching.)
Joining the fray are Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), head of a vague American government arm that wants God's Eye, and Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou), an African crime lord who desires it, too. Things build up to a spectacular showdown in L.A. with all parties taking part in a very destructive fracas.
"Furious 7" is not the sort of movie you're supposed to spend more than a few seconds thinking about, because if you do it all falls apart like sand. (For instance, how does the God's Eye track Shaw when he drives through a barren desert? Are the geckos rocking Samsungs?)
You're invited to just sit back, drink in the crazy action scenes and sneering attitude, and cheer. There are plenty of moments worth a huzzah, but many others that earn their derision.
Here's the thing about the "Fast & Furious" movies: they're cartoons.
I would think this is fairly obvious to anyone who's watched even five minutes of the series -- the high-speed chase sequences that flaunt the laws of physics, the muscle-bound lunks strutting and blustering, the emaciated hoochies with incongruous combat skills.
The whole enterprise is garish and bogus, like sun-tan lotion smeared over plastic surgery scars.
There's nothing inherently wrong with cartoonish movies -- when they recognize and accept their just-for-kicks nature. But "Fast & Furious 6," like all its predecessors, takes itself way, way too seriously to allow any fun.
At least a half-hour too long at 130 minutes, it interrupts its infrequent car chases with lots of scenes where Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson growl their dialogue, usually at each other. We also have a new villain, Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), who's so busy telling everyone how much smarter he is than them he keeps making obvious mistakes.
Oh, and Michelle Rodriguez, who was pretty definitively offed earlier in the franchise, somehow is brought back with that ol' standby of the lazy screenwriter, amnesia. It's not a very convincing device, nor does it explain away the fact that leader Dom Toretto (Diesel) had already replaced his dead girlfriend with a new one.
Director Justin Lin, who has now helmed all the "Fast" movies except the first two, appears to have simply grown bored with car chases. There's more hand-to-hand fighting than driving, and what road action that remains is muddled and over-caffeinated, like a yippy little dog that barks so furiously it chokes itself. Screenwriter Chris Morgan, also back for his fourth go-round, hasn't improved with experience.
If you'll remember from the last movie -- and why would you? -- Dom and his team of racer-thieves had successfully heisted $100 million in cash. As the story opens they're living the quiet life of luxury as expat criminals. Then their nemesis lawman, Hobbs (Johnson), shows up with proof that Letty (Rodriguez), Dom's old squeeze, is alive and working for Shaw.
Shaw's exact motivations remain a mystery ... something about stealing computer chips from the U.S. government worth billions. He's got his own crackerjack team of tech specialists, plus some cool low-slung cars that can act like ramps for pursuing vehicles, sending them hurtling.
Brian O'Conner, the former cop-turned-criminal played by Paul Walker, is largely shunted to the side in this outing, other than a set-up about being a new daddy and therefore less wild than the old days.
Also returning are Tyrese Gibson as comic relief Roman, Ludacris as hacker Tej, and Sung Kang and Gal Gadot as crime couple Han and Gisele.
Dom & Co. have plenty of cash and little reason to help out the feds, other than finding out if Letty is really alive. It's the familiar claptrap about sticking together.
Diesel does that strange thing he does where he turns his head sideways to the camera, not looking at the person he's talking to while spouting some heavy-sounding gibberish. Like, "You don't turn your back on your family. Even when they do."
The movie occasionally finds the right gear with some particular piece of roadway mayhem -- a sequence where the good guys take on a tank comes to mind. But whenever the movie detours into characters just standing around talking, it's a complete wipeout.
Here is a movie that is just one painful-to-watch misfire after another. It's about a trio of lunkhead bodybuilders who stumble through a series of increasingly grisly crimes under the hot Miami sun. And it's directed by Michael Bay -- you know, "Transformers, "Armageddon," etc.? And it's a comedy.
Well, at least in theory.
In actuality, there's barely a titter in this overlong, dull and dimwitted tale. I like to brag that I've never walked out of a movie, but "Pain & Gain" tested my mettle to the max.
I am glad I hung around, because the last 15 minutes or so actually manages to find some kind of groove, where the comedy is mostly intentional and the satire of the 1990s up-with-me movement plucks a few ironical notes. It hardly makes the joyless couple of hours that came before any less tolerable.
Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, who sees physical perfection as the answer to a life of disappointment and second-tier status. He spends his days as a personal trainer to the rich and obnoxious, yearning to join them. His sidekicks are Paul and Adrian (Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie), fellow iron-pumpers without a plan, until Daniel supplies a homicidal one.
At first we think this might be a send-up of the muscle craze of the last few decades, particularly the steroid-happy era when bigger was always considered better, not matter what sort of strange chemicals people shot into their bodies to achieve freakishly oversized pecs and biceps.
When we first see Lugo, he's doing upside-down stomach crunches on the roof of the Sun Gym. "I'm hot!" he shouts to himself as encouragement. "I'm big!"
But Bay and his screenwriters, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, end up fetishizing the very warped culture they're trying to mock. Wahlberg, Johnson and to a lesser extent Mackie are pumped up to a ridiculous degree, and Bay's camera lovingly caresses every bulge and curve.
Between this movie and "Magic Mike," it's been a banner year for engorged, tanned and waxed male flesh.
Lugo and his crew hatch a plan to kidnap slimy local businessman Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to sign over his beachside mansion, big boat and bank accounts to them. Despite, rather than because of, their best efforts they eventually succeed, and find life in the fast lane isn't as advertised.
The actors spend a lot of time doing motor-mouthed deliveries of dialogue that are supposed to be funny but just occupy time and space. For Lugo, his tirades are mash-ups of get-rich motivational gimmicks and sports mumbo-jumbo. Adrian dreams of landing a big, beautiful girlfriend despite the, uh, diminutive effects juicing has wrought on his body.
Paul is the most interesting of the trio, a brutal-looking ex-con who's recently sobered up and found Jesus. He ends up bonding with Victor while purportedly guarding him, which leads to complications when their scheme reaches its only logical denouement.
The most unbelievable thing about "Pain & Gain" is that it's actually based on a true story. The fact that they managed to make a movie based on such a wacky premise so limp is almost impressive in a twisted way.
Thus spaketh my neighbor a couple of seats over at the screening of "Snitch," where she and her companion commented -- loudly and frequently -- upon their views of the new movie starring Dwayne Johnson, formerly known as professional wrestler The Rock.
I don't know where these amateur Eberts came from or how they came to be sitting in the press row, but I think she was actually speaking for a lot of people who won't like this movie. Specifically, those who think Johnson and people who look like him should only make big, dumb action movies in which they deliver a quip after blowing some guy away.
You see, "Snitch" is not that sort of the film. It stars Dwayne Johnson, not The Rock, and features Johnson straining to reach for something higher and more honest as an actor ... and succeeding.
It's a gritty drama, not an action movie, and Johnson is playing a regular guy instead of a Superman. When somebody points a gun in his face, he's frozen with terror. While the villains strut and sneer, he cowers and quakes.
Johnson never takes off his shirt, intimidates anyone with his size, and about the only thing he says in anger is to holler at his wife, "Are the sprinklers on?!?"
The film, ably directed by Ric Roman Waugh from a screenplay he co-wrote with Justin Haythe, is based on a true story that was featured on a PBS documentary. It's about a father who will go to any ends to help his son, including breaking the law and putting the rest of his family at risk.
John Matthews is a successful Missouri businessman in the construction/trucking industry. He lives in a big house, has a beautiful wife and daughter, and seems to have few worries. But then his teenage son from a previous marriage, Jason (Rafi Gavron), gets busted for distribution of Ecstasy.
The kid's not a drug dealer, just a sap who got rolled by his friend. But the federal prosecutor (Susan Sarandon) says she's bound by minimum-sentence laws that could put John's son away until AARP age. She'll only reduce his prison term if Jason snitches on another drug pusher, which he refuses to do.
So John takes it upon himself to bring down a big-time dealer on his own. His first effort ends in disaster, but he gets craftier. He recruits one of his employees, Daniel (Jon Bernthal), who did time for drugs, offering $10,000 to make an introduction to some of his old contacts.
This leads to an increasingly dangerous climb up the ladder of the narcotics chain of command, from local kingpin Malik (a sly, charismatic Michael Kenneth Williams) to Mexican cartel boss (Benjamin Bratt).
Intending it to be a one-and-down deal, John finds himself cornered between the drug lords on the one hand and the politically ambitious prosecutor on the other. Meanwhile, Daniel suspects his motives, Malik starts dropping by John's house to terrorize his family, and even the undercover cop (Barry Pepper) handling the case drops hints that maybe he's in too deep.
Johnson does eventually get to do some Rock-ish things toward the end, but he does so in duress rather than out of any sense of righteous rage. These perilous scenes are all the more convincing because his character is ordinary and exposed.
In her own way and without really intending to do so, my loudmouthed, erstwhile fellow critic has delivered a much more brilliant review of "Snitch" than I ever could. For someone like her, this movie could only a letdown, which should be a hint for the rest of us.
The formula for "Fast Five," the fifth installment in the street racing franchise, seems to be:
Put Vin Diesel, who was absent for the second and third movies, back at the center of the action.
Add Dwayne Johnson as a testosterone-pumped federal agent on the gang's trail, setting up a flying-fists showdown with #1.
Ratchet up the computer-generated imagery during the races, to the point cars pinwheel and slalom all over the street with barely a nod to the laws of physics.
The most surprising thing is that this combination largely works, easily delivering the most entertaining movie in the series. At 130 minutes, it's way too long and the amount of juvenile macho posing occasionally reaches choking levels.
Still, there's no denying "Fast Five" is an improvement over the previous four, and it's nice to see a decade-old movie franchise discover it has another gear.
After being framed for the murder of some DEA agents, Vin and the crew (Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster) head down to Rio de Janeiro to hide out, and run into trouble with local crime lord Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida). They're soon snooping out their next big score, assembling some familiar faces to help out.
Hobbs, the all-snarl-all-the-time agent played by Johnson, complicates things with his pesky habit of showing up at the wrong time. We know it's only a matter of time before the two bald brawlers lay the smackdown, and their melee does not disappoint.
Neither does the crazy, culminating chase through the streets of Rio. Like the rest of the movie, it makes not a lick of sense, but it's agreeably fun sitting back and reveling in the mayhem.
Extra features are generous in both Blu-ray and DVD versions.
The DVD includes an extended version of the film, deleted scenes, a gag reel, featurettes on the journeys of Vin Diesel and Paul Walker's respective characters through the series, and another on the introduction of Hobbs. Director Justin Lin also provides a feature-length commentary.
In addition to those, the Blu-ray version adds a breakdown of the fight scene between Diesel and Johnson, a featurette with Lin, another demonstrating how the big final chase sequence was filmed, and a behind-the-scenes look with co-star Tyrese Gibson. Plus, a digital copy of the film.
"Fast Five" pops the highest gear of the "Fast and the Furious" franchise, beating all its predecessors in thrills and sheer watchability.
Of course, calling it the best of this lot is like singling out the tallest Pygmy. These movies are sheer silliness, improbable roadway mayhem interspersed with obligatory fistfights and gunplay, all coated with a noxious layer of adolescent macho posturing.
Still, give it props for (mostly) putting the brakes on the unpleasant stuff and hitting the accelerator on what the audience really wants, which is tons of crazy street action. Cars fly through the air, hurtle sideways and backwards at high speeds, and smash into each other at a prodigious rate.
I think of all the people who worked on this movie, the hardest job must've belonged to the guy in charge of procuring all the vehicles, because every day he had to send all these beautiful machines off to the set to be pulverized by director Justin Lin (who's helmed the last three "Furious" flicks).
Vin Diesel, after being absent for most of the second and third movies, is back as Dom Toretto, growly car thief/racer, who seems to invent chips to place on his burly shoulder. After being sprung from a prison bus by his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) and FBI agent-turned-partner Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker), they head down to Rio de Janeiro to hide out, where they raise the hackles of local crime lord Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida).
As an added bonus, Dwayne Johnson is added to the cast as Hobbs, a super-badass federal agent sent south of the border to bring in the trio after they're wrongfully accused of killing some DEA guys. Personally, I prefer Johnson in snarly action mode to the cuddly kiddie pictures he's been mired in lately. When you resemble The Rock, that's a whole lot of whup-tush staying in the can.
Of course, the audience is being set up for a throw-down between Diesel and Johnson, and the bald behemoths finally oblige around the 75 minute mark. Two 250-pound guys wail on each other for five minutes solid, throwing one another through windows and walls, and by the next scene neither one of them bears so much as a welt.
I also found it curious that Hobbs' law enforcement sidekicks stand with machine guns trained while a suspect pummels their boss, and never do anything to intervene. There's got to be something in the manual about that.
At over two hours, the movie's way too long, and the screenplay (by Chris Morgan) is a structural mess. The entire middle of the film is spent assembling a team (including Tyrese Gibson and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) to crack a vault in the much-hyped "impossible job" that every movie starring criminals seems to have.
After stealing cars, doing practice runs, stalking Reyes to get his hand print and myriad other schemes to beat a specific set of obstacles, it all gets tossed out the window for a last-minute case of "let's wing it." The payoff is a pretty spectacular sequence of CGI-assisted absurdity through the busy streets of Rio, but it sort of invalidates all the build-up.
I can't quite give the green light to "Fast Five," but any film franchise that's following an upward arc in its fifth go-round is welcome to rev it up again.
