Review: "Crisis"

Writer/director Nicholas Jarecki had the idea to make his drama “Crisis” about the opioid epidemic as three parallel storylines. It’s not a new concept, but it can be an effective one when woven together artfully. Instead, the movie feels like three different tales rather than a gripping whole.

Individually, the pieces work. But two of them only intersect very late in the story and the third one… never does.

Armie Hammer plays Jake Kelly, a gruff, hard-charging DEA agent on the verge of a huge bust after spending a year infiltrating himself into the pill-mill trade. Evangeline Lilly is Claire Reimann, a suburban mom distraught over her teenage son’s death from overdose who decides to take matters into her own hands. Gary Oldman plays Tyrone Power, a scientist who’s been signing off on the big pharma’s studies in exchange for funding but undergoes an attack of conscience.

All three of these have enough narrative momentum, not to mention compelling performances, to merit an entire feature film. Together they are less than the sum of their parts.

It’s part cops-and-robbers, part revenge cycle and part corporate intrigue. I’m guessing the notion was to take a look at the opioid crisis from a variety of angles, but we actually see very little of the end effects on the users. Jake’s sister (Lily-Rose Depp) is an addict, which works to stoke his passions, but she only gets a couple of substantive scenes.

Tyrone is a chemistry professor at a small college that relies upon donations from a huge pharmaceutical company to fund his research, with Luke Evans playing the heavy. They believe they’ve stumbled upon a new form of painkiller that isn’t addictive, which will revolutionize the use of opioids -- not to mention rake in billions. But some lab technicians discover that the drug, Klaralon, is killing off their mice test subjects and needs to be pulled for more study.

He decides to go up against the big powers -- including his friend, the college president played by Greg Kinnear -- and progressively gets chewed up.

Claire insists that her son was not actually a drug user, and with a little digging and the help of a private investigator, she believes he was actually murdered rather than overdosed. She travels to Canada to look into the big pill operation behind it, which has recently moved into the even more deadly trade of fentanyl. It’s mentioned, but only lightly explored, that she used to be a user herself.

Meanwhile, Jake has set up his own front clinics where shady doctors dispense prescriptions to dangerous narcotics like candy (they hire homeless to obtain the pills, then immediately buy them back so they’re not putting more drugs on the street). With his new boss (Michelle Rodriguez) putting the pressure on, he has to set up a multimillion-dollar deal between his operation, the Canadian manufacturers and the Armenian distributors.

If that sounds like a lot of characters, that’s because it is. And I haven’t even mentioned the various supporting characters, spouses, friends, henchmen and so on.

I liked all three main actors in their roles. Claire is fragile but determined, Jake glowers so much he seems to positively steam, and Tyrone’s keening, high-minded oratories about doing the right thing pluck the heartstrings. It’s not enough, though.

“Crisis” is an ambitious movie that I think fails because of a lack of bigger ambition. I can imagine this as a trilogy or limited series that gradually sucks us deeper into an international epidemic, with each story showing the full breadth of every side. What we get feels like a CliffsNotes version of something bigger and better.

Review: "The Fate of the Furious"

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.

Review: "Smurfs: The Lost Village"

Last week I reviewed “The Boss Baby” and said it’s one of those movies parents struggle to get through, but you do so because little kids will love it. Normally there are only a handful of those films per year to endure, but this time we didn’t even make it seven days before encountering another one.

I’ll say this: I enjoyed “Smurfs: The Lost Village” a lot more more than that weird live action/animated hybrid from 2011 and its 2013 sequel. If there’s one thing that can make cutesy blue gnomes who substitute the word “smurf” for most every verb even more grating, it’s a heaping helping of Neil Patrick Harris.

This computer-animated version has no real humans clomping around, thank goodness. It’s a complete reboot with no relation to the NPH films. Under director Kelly Asbury’s hands, the look and feel is more of a throwback to the purity of the Peyo comics where the Smurfs originated, while giving them more texture and snark.

It manages to entertain in a simplistic way, featuring straightforward physical humor and zippy action scenes. It even manages to explore the reason why there are only boy Smurfs, except of course for Smurfette, who was actually created out of clay by the evil bumpkin wizard Gargamel before Papa Smith used some of his own magic to turn her good.

(And from brunette to blonde in the process, about which I’ll say no more.)

The story (screenplay by Stacey Harman and Pamela Ribon) reintroduces us to the Smurfs, who each have a one-word first name that defines their personality: Grouchy Smurf, Jokey Smurf, etc. But then we pick three main Smurfs – Brainy (Danny Pudi), Hefty (Joe Manganiello) and Clumsy (Jack McBrayer) -- to accompany Smurfette (Demi Lovato) on her quest.

Mandy Patinkin provides the voice of Papa Smurf, who shows up at the beginning and again at the end to provide some sage wisdom. He’s essentially the Santa Claus of Smurfs, along with a little Father Knows Best.

If you’ll remember, Gargamel (Rainn Wilson) is continually hatching plans to steal the Smurfs’ magical blue essence to grow his powers. He learns of a new source hidden deep inside the Forbidden Forest that lies behind a great wall, thanks to the unwitting help of Smurfette. She’s been feeling down in the dumps lately because she doesn’t have a preassigned role like all the boys do.

Spoiler alert: after many adventures, the foursome encounters a lost tribe of all-girl Smurfs. I don’t feel like I’m really giving all that much away, because the title does warn you about a lost Smurf village. Of course, the female Smurfs don’t consider themselves lost, and to them the forbidden part of the forest is the other side from theirs.

Sometimes you just have to Smurf yourself up some perspective.

In the lost village, the Smurfs put their identifying name after instead of before Smurf; so the tough one is Smurfstorm (Michelle Rodriguez), the overly friendly one is Smurfblossom (Ellie Kemper) and Julia Roberts is the wise old leader, Smurfwillow.

(I know, I know, using the words “old” and “Julia Roberts” anywhere near each other feels like an insult to the natural order, but she’s 50 later this year. She seems a lot cooler about it than I am.)

I enjoyed the look of this movie, such as the way the Smurfs’ eyebrows hover in thin air above their faces, or the curious nature of Brainy’s forever-falling-off glasses, which don’t connect in the middle or appear to contain any actual glass.

I don’t laugh all that much, but then the humor is pitched a few decades south of me. All I know is my boys giggled like crazy and had a blast. Fingers crossed we’ll Smurf us an animated film this year we all can appreciate.

Review: "Furious 7"

"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.

Review: "Fast & Furious 6"

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.

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

DVD review: "Fast and Furious'

The "Fast and Furious" franchise comes full circle with the fourth film, which reunites original cast members Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Michelle Rodriguez as gearheads driving tricked-out cars through an improbable and seemingly endless series of chases.

Justin Lin, who also directed the third movie, "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," delivers an aggressively stupid action film in which all the women are hoochies with ample cleavage and booty shorts, and all the men are so overpumped with machismo that every exchange of dialogue becomes a duel of glares and snorts.

The cars are the real stars of the movie. Both Diesel, as criminal Dom Toretto, and Walker, as undercover fed agent Brian O'Conner, drive a variety of cool vehicles during the course of the movie, nearly all of which end up in a pile of twisted debris. Toretto's black Charger makes a return from the first film, along with a number of American muscle cars and tuner imports.

The plot involves Dom and Brian infiltrating a Mexican heroin-smuggling ring. There's a big race to determine who will get to join the faceless drug lord's crew of drivers. Dom wins, but then Brian inexplicably is allowed to come along too, which kind of renders the race pointless. It's undoubtedly galling to the drivers who crashed during that race, at speeds that must have left them in the hospital, or mortuary.

"Fast and Furious" comes in single- and two-disc versions. Both include a gag reel and director's commentary by Lin, which tends to stick to pedantic shot-by-shot descriptions.

The two-disc version also includes a digital copy of the film, a short movie called "Los Bandoleros" about Central American crime, and a variety of making-of featurettes. One shows Vin Diesel attending stunt driving school in preparation for the shoot, will another is a breakdown of how they shot the opening heist of a big rig towing five fuel tankers.

Movie: 1.5 stars
Extras: 3 stars