Review: "Midway"

What a good old-fashioned rip-roarer war picture. “Midway” is the sort of movie they made 40 to 60 years ago starring John Wayne or Henry Fonda and a bunch of other guys, but with modern CGI effects for the extravaganza air-and-sea battles.

I went in skeptical that famously schmaltzy conductor of disaster flicks, director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day”), would deliver anything more than another soulless special effects showcase. But paired with screenwriter Wes Tooke, a rookie to feature film scripts, and a solid cast of square-jawed actors of varying fame, I left amazed and more than a little shook.

The aerial combat scenes are just flabbergastingly good. The pilots careen and yaw all over the screen, a concerto of impacts and explosions sounding all around them. There are plenty of dogfights with Japanese Zeroes, with cutaways to how it all looks from the ground.

Best of all are the bombing runs, as the Americans tip tail over nose and dive seemingly straight down vertically, the Japanese aircraft carriers blasting a storm cloud of flak into their faces, pulling up at only the very last moment. Their wingtips kiss the ocean surface before climbing again.

It’s like taking a ride on the world’s longest, deepest roller coaster ridden by yowling demons bound straight for the fiery furnaces of hell.

The story actually sets up the war in the Pacific beginning at Pearl Harbor and all through the important military developments before Midway, including the battle at Marshall Islands and the James Doolittle (Aaron Eckhart) raid on Tokyo. The last hour or so of the movie is the titular battle, which is generally regarded as the turning point of the war.

Like a lot of old-school war flicks, the action flips back and forth between the pilots and ship captains on the front lines with the commanders and intelligence boys back at HQ, and does a good job of seeing how one group played off the other.

Patrick Wilson is Edwin Layton, a dweeby intelligence officer who predicted the attack on Pearl, and now has to pluck up the courage to convince the top brass to rely on the info from his team, which includes military band members turned into codebreakers. Woody Harrelson (!) plays Admiral Chester Nimitz, put in charge of the Pacific effort while most of the fleet was sunken or smoking.

Ed Skrein is terrific as Dick Best, the prototypical hotshot cowboy pilot who flies like he doesn’t care about coming back. Then he’s placed in command and has to become the shepherd to a flock of green newbies. He’s got a sort of hunched-over, laconic rascal charm. Think Han Solo by way of Jersey.

Luke Evans is Wade McClusky, the by-the-book commander who clashes with Best, and Luke Kleintank is Best’s buddy, Clarence Dickinson, another crackerjack pilot. Dennis Quaid plays Vice Admiral William Halsey, Mandy Moore is Best’s wife, Anne, and Nick Jonas plays a puckish machinist who gets into the action.

Surprisingly, nearly all of the characters are actual historical figures. The Japanese commanders are even given plenty of scenes so we can size up the strategy from their side. Though this isn’t an “equal sides” type of film production along the lines of “Tora! Tora! Tora!”.

There's even a little ode to filmmaker John Ford, who happened to be on hand at Midway the day of attack, producing some seminal documentary footage.

The film’s a bit long at 138 minutes -- so many are these days, it seems. I long for a time when editors were powers in Hollywood and had agency to tighten, tighten, tighten. Today’s movies are like Robert De Niro’s out-of-shape scenes in “Raging Bull.” They still can pack a punch, but the flab is distracting.

Still, a few talkie scenes that run long and some clanky dialogue aside, “Midway” is a terrific piece of throwback entertainment that actually gets the history right.

Video review: "Aquaman"

There are trashy movies and there are garbage movies. The former are decent flicks that engage in various tawdry indulgences and lowered ambitions; the latter have surrendered to them completely.

As the late, great Pauline Kael said, there is trash and then there is glorious trash. And while “Aquaman” may not exactly be glorious, it is an entertaining film that revels in its own trashiness.

Yes, Jason Momoa still can’t act his way out of a bag. But if any actor today deserves to have the “Seinfeld” term of “mimbo” bestowed upon him, it’s Momoa. He’s easy on the eyes, if your thing is beefy-but-not-overly-‘roided Polynesian dudes with long dark ringlets.

He doesn’t exactly look like the sort of guy who swims with the fishes and talks to them too, but he’s a charismatic, swarthy presence.

I’ll pause here to note that once again Hollywood has managed to take a blond superhero and turn him brunette. Captain America, the Human Torch, the Flash -- it’s practically an entire super-team’s worth of color changers. Even Thor was revealed to have brown roots when his ‘do got buzzed in his last solo flick. Aquaman at least has a little sun-dappling around the edges.

Anyway, the premise is that Arthur is the long-lost son of the queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman), who fell in love with a land dweller (Temuera Morrison) and grew up estranged from his people. He still has the powers of a high-born Atlantean, including super-strength, durability and swimming crazy fast, plus the additional trick of communicating with sea life.

Worlds collide when his brother, King Orm (Patrick Wilson), declares war on the surface world -- mostly as an excuse to unite the tribes of Atlantis and have himself declared the supreme Ocean Master.

(Sounds like a fad diet.)

Aided by wise sage Vulko (Willem Dafoe) and plucky princess Mera (Amber Heard), Arthur goes on a quest to recover the lost trident of his forbears, depose his wayward sibling and bring about peace. Besides Orm the heavy duties are shared by Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a modern-day pirate who bears a special grudge against Aquaman.

The realm of Atlantis is represented in Day-Glo colors and trippy mood music, as director James Wan and script men Will Beall and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (got enough names, dude?) milk the comedy and science fiction angles.

It’s like “Flash Gordon” meets the briny deep. You may find yourself sniggering at this trashy gen, but doubtless having a good time while doing it.

Bonus features are pretty nice. They include breakdowns of key scenes and the following featurettes: “Going Deep Into the World of Aquaman,” Becoming Aquaman,” “James Wan: World Builder,” “Aqua Tech,” “Atlantis Warfare,” “The Dark Depths of Black Manta,” “Heroines of Atlantis,” “Villainous Training,” “Kingdoms of the Seven Seas,” “Creating Undersea Creatures” and “A Match Made in Atlantis.”

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Review: "The Commuter"

Just a few quick thoughts; Andrew Carr is handling the main review over at The Film Yap, so please head there to check it out.

On the surface, "The Commuter" is a standard issue enclosed-space action/thriller in the vein of "Die Hard," "Speed" and countless imitators. Using the nomenclature that was popular awhile back, this movie would constitute the "Die Hard on a Train" iteration.

What makes it more interesting is the subtext beneath the fisticuffs and nail-biter sequences. The characters talk constantly about "doing the right thing" and how it rarely benefits the do-gooder. The hero is a classic everyman who wanders into a moral quandary through a momentary temptation, and has to spend the rest of the movie climbing out.

The movie has a sense of glum resignation tempered by notions about the bedrock decency of the masses. But their default mode is to expect disappointment.

It's a totem for our times: the rich, the powerful, the corrupt conspire to coerce regular folks into doing their bidding, who usually must go along. And they would've gotten away with it this time, too, if it weren't for this meddling oldster.

Liam Neeson returns for another variation on his Kick-Ass Geezer routine, which has been his bread-and-butter for a decade now. Reportedly Neeson himself has grown tired of such roles and has vowed "The Commuter" will be the last of its ilk.

All I'll say he's still an engaging, energetic presence and I'd personally be happy to keep watching him do this sort of thing until he needs a walker, provided he mixes it up with some dramatic or romantic roles.

The set-up is simple: Michael MacCauley is an Irish-born ex-cop turned insurance salesman. He and his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) live hand-to-mouth and are trying to figure out how to pay for their son's college education.

(Or so they say: their huge, luxurious house  in the New York City exurbs and BMW crossover would suggest otherwise. Hollywood continues to flail at depicting middle-income families.)

He suddenly gets laid off, seemingly for no reason, and Michael knows what that means for a 60-year-old in a competitive job market. Interestingly, Michael explicitly mentions his age several times in the film; usually mainstream movies are much more circumspect about the age of their characters, especially older ones.

After meeting his cop ex-partner (Patrick Wilson) to drown his sorrow in a few beers and bumping into an old precinct rival (Sam Neill) who's recently made captain, Michael boards his normal commuter train to Tarrytown. He's confronted by a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) who, under the ruse of a hypothetical social experiment, offers Michael $100,000 in cash if he can identify a person onboard the train who "doesn't belong there."

That's it. The only proviso is that he doesn't know what will happen to the person, known only by the pseudonym of Prim, but we can probably guess it won't be anything good.

Things go from there with the expected twists and surprises. Michael breaks the rules set forth, and bad things happen. People on board the train who would seem to be allies turn out to be in cahoots with the evildoers, others who seem strange or threatening are actually something else, and so on. I'm not giving anything away in saying that this is the sort of movie where the hero comes to the realization that he's not just a pawn, but the patsy.

The background players are a nice mix of personalities, from the haughty stockbroker to the nervous goth teenager. The cast includes Jonathan Banks, Killian Scott, Shazad Latif, Andy Nyman, Clara Lago, Rolland Møller, Florence Pugh, Ella-Rae Smith and Colin McFarlane.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who made the effective seaborne thriller "The Shallows," from a script by Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle, "The Commuter" does all the things we expect, and a few things we don't.

Review: "The Conjuring 2"

In the real life 1970s, Lorraine and Ed Warren were a dowdy, middle-aged couple with double chins and dreams of being immortalized on film for their paranormal investigations, which they claim ran over 10,000 cases. They finally got their wish in 2013 with “The Conjuring,” a huge horror hit … which could mean there are at least 9,999 sequels to come.

Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson return as the Warrens, and they’re a nice break from the kooky sorts who usually inhabit possession movies. They’re pretty normal people of Christian faith who happen to work – often on behalf of the Catholic Church – to sniff out if reports of unusual activities are hoaxes or not.

Wilson plays Ed as a pure-hearted square, the sort of guy who fixes faucets at the houses he’s exorcising and imitates Elvis on the guitar just to calm some very scared kids. He’s kind of stiff and diffident, but there’s no mistaking his good intentions.

Lorraine is the talent, having the power to sense evil forces and communicate with wayward spirits. Despite her supernatural abilities, she’s the more grounded of the two.

After having a particularly rough outing in the 1976 Amityville case, the Warrens are taking a break from active investigations. It seems the spook followed them home, taking the form of Marilyn Manson in a nun’s habit. Well, not actually Manson, but a dead ringer. Then the Enfield case breaks near London, and they’re back on the hunt.

It seems the spirit of a nasty old man named Bill Wilkins (Bob Adrian) is reluctant to leave the shabby row house he once occupied. Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor) and her four kids live there now, and soon start hearing the old thump-thump in the night – which soon turns into more terrifying incidents.

After initially going after young Billy (Benjamin Haigh), a shy lad with a stutter, the spirit focuses its intentions on Janet (Madison Wolfe), age 11. Even though we’ve seen it a hundred times, it’s still creepy as all get out when a little girl speaks with a ghost’s croaking moan. Then comes flying furniture, apparitions, possessed toys, etc.

Some local experts – Franka Potente plays Anita Gregory – have already dismissed the case as ventriloquism and clever tricks, though Maurice Grosse (Simon McBurney) is a kindly scientist with a receptive ear. The Warrens come in late in the game, just as the Wilkins spirit kicks things into high gear.

The movie takes a while to get going – it could easily stand to be 20 minutes shorter – but director James Wan, who co-wrote the script with four others, is adept at stirring the pot of anxiety. He’ll build the tension for a long moment, then have something jump out at the audience from somewhere we didn’t expect.

As horror sequels go, “The Conjuring” scares up enough to entertain us.

Video review: "The Conjuring"

It’s been a down year for animation but a hot time for horror, with “The Conjuring” one of the latest movie to scare up a lot of cash at the box office.

This summer hit stars Vera Farmiga as a demonologist who’s a clairvoyant to boot. Lorraine Warren and her husband Ed (Patrick Wilson) were normal, everyday people who investigate hauntings and participate in exorcisms as a vocation. In 1971 they encountered one of their worst cases ever, which formed the basis for this rollicking “true life” tale.

A couple moves into a lonely farmhouse with their five daughters and things start going bump in the night. All the clocks stop at the same time in the middle of the night, and a secret lair in the basement produces strange sounds and drafts. Eventually evil forces start threatening the children, so the Warrens have to team up to cast them out.

(Strangely, the film received an “R” rating from the MPAA, despite having no cursing and little gore.)
The strong part of the film is its focus on the exorcism duo as protagonists equal to the haunted couple. By depicting the Warrens as grounded folks who just happen to have made their careers in the occult, it makes the proceedings feel more plausible.

Directed by James Wan (“Saw”), “The Conjuring” starts out rather slowly, but when things get into full brimstone-and-holy-water mode, it’s a heckuva thrill ride.

Extras are just so-so. The DVD comes with a single featurette, “Scaring the ‘@$*%’ Out of You.’ Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo, and you add two more features: “The Conjuring: Face-to Face with Terror,” a making-of documentary, and “A Life in Demonology,” a look at the real-life Warrens.

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Review: "The Conjuring"

"The Conjuring" dredges up nearly every trope of the exorcism subgenre of horror, and faithfully puts its characters and the audience through the paces. It doesn't do much of anything that we haven't seen before, but what it does it does mostly well.

Director James Wan gained notoriety with "Saw," kicking off the (thankfully) now-waning "torture porn" fad. Here he turns to more cerebral frights, based on building a sense of dread mixed with sudden scares. The first half really drags, but once they get to the hard stuff of demonic possessions and thrashing exorcisms, it's a genuine thrill.

(I should point out that the R rating from the MPAA seems hard to justify. There is no cursing, sex or drugs, and though there is a constant threat of violence, very little of it actually occurs. "Overly forbidding" wouldn't seem to be part of the association's charter, but there you have it.)

Usually with these sorts of movies, the focus is on the family plagued with an ominous spirit, and the paranormal experts show up about halfway through. Here, the demonologists are just as much a part of the story as the haunted.

Like many movies of this ilk, we're assured that the events we're seeing are based on a true story. Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) were real-life occult investigators, who tried for decades to get a movie made about themselves. The idea is that although they have a really strange job, the Warrens are perfectly normal folks with a strong marriage, Christian values and a loving daughter.

We get to see them presenting film and audiotapes of their disturbing cases on college campuses, and it's pretty eye-opening stuff. One possessed man has bloody tears and speaks Latin, despite having only a third-grade education. Of course, what they encounter in the movie is far worse than anything they've seen before.

Parallel to the Warrens' story is the Perrons, Carolyn and Roger (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston). It's 1971 and they have just bought an old farmhouse cheap at auction to live with their five daughters, ranging in age from cute little pixie to surly teen. The house seems like a dream come true until, as they say, strange things star to happen.

Things go bump without explanation, clocks stop at precisely 3:07 a.m. every night, and the younger girls start to see things looming in dark spaces. They bust through a boarded-up stairwell and find a basement loaded with all sorts of cool stuff that just screams, "Evil spirits residing here!"

The strength of the film is depicting the Warrens as careful, rational people with lives outside their demon-hunting. For instance, Lorraine is a clairvoyant, meaning she can get a sense of the spiritual aura of things and people just by being near them. But their ghostly encounters each cost her a little piece of her own emotional stability.

Farmiga brings a matter-of-fact calm to her role, an unflashy sort of competence and groundedness that offsets nicely with her character's supernatural talents. The kid actors all acquit themselves nicely, particularly Joey King as the initial target of the spirit's ire.

I respected the craft with which "The Conjuring" was made, and its attempt to insert a little sober rationality into a familiar ghost story. It won't haunt your dreams, but this film will creep you out sufficiently for a couple of hours.

Review: "Young Adult"

"Young Adult" is the egg of a great idea that never really hatches. It's built on an outlandish premise, and after 93 minutes of talking and emoting and frittering around, all we're left with is that same nutty premise.

Here's the nugget: Mavis, the pretty, popular girl from high school returns to her tiny hometown 20 years after graduation in order to win back her teenage beau. Her life hasn't turned out to be the fabulous adventure she imagined when she escaped to the big city, and she wants to recapture her glory days.

One problem: the former boyfriend is happily married and just had a baby. Mavis knows this -- in fact, it's the news of the birth that sets off her unholy mission -- but sees it as merely a bump in the road. She's fully aware that lives may be destroyed in her quest to reignite lost love; she just doesn't care.

So this is a movie about a horrible person who suspects that she's a horrible person, and the audience gets to tag along on her journey to confirm what she already knew.

The acting in "Young Adult" is splendid, especially Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt, who play two fractured souls. Theron is Mavis, who lives in Minneapolis and is the (uncredited) author of Waverly Prep, a teen-lit book series suffering diminishing returns. Oswalt plays Matt, the loser she barely remembers from school, but who ends up being her new best friend when she returns to Mercury, Minn.

Matt is an interesting guy: After struggling to recall Matt -- even though he had the locker next to hers -- Mavis finally remembers him during a chance meeting at a local bar. "You're hate crime guy!" she exclaims. Not exactly a catchy nickname, that.

Matt, who walks with the aid of a crutch, was savagely attacked by some homophobic jocks in high school, who shattered his legs, bashed in his head and maimed his manhood. It was national news as a hate crime, until it turned out Matt wasn't actually gay.

So now he's just a forgotten guy with a limp, who spends his days in an anonymous job and his nights distilling his own brand of bourbon and creating crazy mash-ups of action figures by transposing their parts.

Somehow, though, when Mavis walks back into town they form a deep bond of trust. She tells Matt about her plan to win back Buddy, he old boyfriend, and he tries to dissuade her, though not very hard, having developed a puppyish affection of his own.

Almost irrelevant in all this calculus is the actual ex-boyfriend, Buddy, played by Patrick Wilson, who often seems to get cast as the unattainable object of female longing. Buddy's wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser) -- who looks suspiciously amazing for somebody who just popped out a baby -- is oblivious about Mavis' intentions, despite the fact she's not exactly playing it subtle, wearing va-voom outfits to casual get-togethers.

Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, two of Hollywood's brightest young lights, fail to recapture much of the hip charm of their last collaboration, "Juno." There are a few witty moments, and some black humor that's fairly delicious.

(I especially liked the scene where Mavis visits a local book store and starts signing copies of her novels, until a clerk asks her to stop because they’ll need to return unsold copies to the publisher.)

There is still Cody's penchant for very written-sounding dialogue. Even worse is her tendency to tell the audience what's going on rather than showing them.

For example, when pressed about exactly why she wants to get back with the old boyfriend she's barely interacted with since the 1990s, Mavis essentially bleeps out the movie's entire theme: "He knew me when I was at my best."

Reitman has a great touch with actors, but he's helming a story that never got out of the gestational period. This film takes several characters and puts them through a blender, but we get the distinct sense when all is said and done they will all go on with their lives much the same as before.

2.5 stars out of four

Video review: "Morning Glory"

"Morning Glory" got pasted at the box office and stomped by critics, but I truly enjoyed it. It's sort of the inverse of "Network" and "Broadcast News," where the main character doesn't fret about how television journalism is being watered down by infotainment, but wants to turn the dial on Lite News up to 11.

Still, it has top-notch actors in roles they inhabit with clear enthusiasm, exchanging whip-smart banter at a breakneck pace, alternating sweet and sad moments with unhurried efficiency.

Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, a young, irrepressible producer given the thankless -- and most think impossible -- task of turning around "Daybreak," the last-place network morning show. The studio is literally falling apart, the field reporters are all castoffs, and the creepy co-host welcomes Becky by asking to take photographs of her feet.

After the fetishist is given a quick heave, Becky manages to land legendary anchorman Mike Pomeroy as his replacement. Played with grizzled charm by Harrison Ford, Mike is so disenchanted by his fall from grace that he takes it out on Becky, his brittle co-host (an underused Diane Keaton) and everyone else in his path.

Mike wants the show to pursue hard news, while Becky is committed to making things friendlier and zanier. As they eventually draw closer, Mike also provides a cautionary tale on what letting work dominate your life does to personal relationships.

Like the show it chronicles, "Morning Glory" ain't Pulitzer material, but it is entertaining.

Video extras are a bit skimpy. There is a feature-length commentary track by director Roger Michell and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna. But the rest of the goodies are restricted to a single deleted scene.
Features are the same for Blu-ray and DVD formats.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 2 stars

Review: "Morning Glory"

"Morning Glory" is basically "Broadcast News" flipped on its head. Instead of valuing hard-edged journalism over TV showmanship, "Morning Glory" champions the fluff.

The set-up is that Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, a hard-charging young executive producer brought in to turn around the moribund "Daybreak" morning show. She hires a downfallen Dan Rather-type anchorman, crustily played by Harrison Ford, to shake things up. They spend the rest of the movie battling over lightweight vs. substantive journalism.

As someone who started out covering politics and couldn't wait to jump to the features side of the newsroom, maybe I'm just a soft touch. But I found this movie delightful and often raucously funny, with sharp performances by McAdams and Ford.

McAdams draws a character as distinctive as Holly Hunter's Oscar-nominated turn in "Broadcast News," playing Becky as a borderline neurotic woman whose career consumes her whole life. After she's laid off from her job on "Good Morning, New Jersey," her mother unceremoniously dumps cold water on her dream of one day producing the "Today" show.

"At 8, it was adorable. At 18, it was inspiring. At 28, it's officially embarrassing. I just want it to stop before it becomes heartbreaking," she says.

But a harried network boss (Jeff Goldblum) gives her a shot at "Daybreak," figuring he's got nothing to lose. The show is perpetually in fourth place in the ratings, is stuck with a tiny budget and a shoddy studio where all the doorknobs fall off, and the on-air talent looks like the castoffs of every cheesy show that ever got cancelled.

Becky sends a signal by firing the creepy co-anchor (Ty Burrell) and encouraging veteran Colleen Peck to let loose a little during the cooking sessions and exotic animal segments. But she really lands her white whale when she convinces -- well, strong-arms, actually -- Mike Pomeroy into joining the show.

As Mike never fails to remind everyone, he's had one of the most storied careers in TV news: eight Peabody Awards, a Pulitzer and 16 Emmys. He only agrees to be on "Daybreak" so he can collect millions over the last two years of his contract, and oozes dripping condescension during his every interaction, on-air or off.

With his slicked-back hair and melodious grumble of a voice, Ford gives Mike some depth beneath the growl. Here's a man who's given his entire life over to his job, to the detriment of his personal relationships, and he's been rewarded by getting the boot.

When he watches his successor on the evening news, swilling pricey scotch from a tumbler, Mike glares at the screen and fumes, "That's my chair!" Ford shows us the man's bile.

Director Roger Michell ("Venus") keeps a delicate but firm hand on the film's tone, which combines generous helpings of funny and sad. The original screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna ("The Devil Wears Prada") is clever and zippy, though it apportions too much screen time to some things and not enough to others.

For example, I was disappointed that Diane Keaton has a much skimpier role than previews suggested. We only see Colleen's on-set diva act, and nothing more. There's one scene where she and Mike engage in some acid banter on the show, and we expect it to go somewhere, but it's quickly dropped.

Becky's romance with another producer (Patrick Wilson) similarly feels short-shrifted, trotted out just long enough to remind us what she's missing out on with her crazy work life.

Still, the strong far outweighs the weak in this spirited flick that, like its warring journalists, realizes that sweet and sour mix together quite nicely. See? You're reading a movie Web site right now, so obviously you enjoy a little fluff.

3.5 stars out of four

Review: "The Switch"

"The Switch" is a lot smarter and sweeter than its premise, which sounds like something out of a horndog sex comedy: A guy swaps his sperm out for the donor's when his best friend decides she wants to get pregnant sans marriage. I can just see this movie being made by the Judd Apatow crew, with Seth Rogen as the clueless ersatz dad.

But instead the movie stars Jason Bateman, whose comic sensibilities are more nuanced. He plays Wally Mars, a sad-sack who secretly pines for gal pal Kassie, played by Jennifer Aniston. Officially this is a Jennifer Aniston movie, but Bateman is the real star. And it's less a romantic comedy than a humorous character exploration of Wally.

I particularly liked the scenes between Bateman and Thomas Robinson, who plays his son Sebastian (though neither of them knows this initially). Wally got raging drunk at the Kassie's insemination party -- apparently there really are such things, at least in New York City -- and spilt the spunk delivered by hired gun (pun intended) Roland (Patrick Wilson). Desperate, he decided to, ahem, grasp hold of the situation and substitute his own offering.

Wally remembers none of this due to his extreme inebriation that night, which eventually brought him to the doorstep of his boss, babbling something about "trading Diane Sawyer to the Vikings." (Watch the movie; it actually makes sense.) The boss is played by Jeff Goldblum, in a small but delicious turn filled with terrific comic timing.

Fast forward seven years. After decamping to Minnesota, Kassie has decided to return to the Big Apple with her son, Sebastian, who's like a mopey little Mini-Me of Wally. Sebastian collects picture frames for a hobby (keeping the sample photos of strangers, for whom he constructs elaborate backstories) and frets about the dogs held at the kill shelter. He even does the same little moan-y thing Wally does when he eats.

Wally immediately notices these similarities, despite having just met the kid, while Cassie, who's been around him for every day of his six years, somehow does not.

The interactions between Wally and Sebastian are the best thing about the movie, favorably recalling "About A Boy," where a tenuous relationship grows between a child and a man who is many ways still one himself. Recognizing that Sebastian is super-smart, Wally speaks to him like a regular person, rather than that condescending "I'm-the-grown-up-here" tone most of us unconscious take.

Wally: "You want to tell me about your new school?"
Sebastian: "Why?"
Wally: "Because you're a kid and I don't know what else to talk about."

Despite having her name first in the credits, Aniston is really the supporting role here, and she fills it out nicely despite there not being much there on the page. (The screenplay is by Allan Loeb, based on a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides.)

Of course, there is the inevitable moment when Wally, having finally convinced himself of the truth about Sebastian, must confess his deed to Cassie. This is where the movie does conform to tired convention, as the plot becomes a series of delaying tactics until the truth is revealed, at which point, like a snowball rolling downhill, it has acquired so much weight that cataclysmic occurrences must result.

Directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck previously helmed the dimwitted Will Ferrell (but I repeat myself) movie, "Blades of Glory." "The Switch" may look like another dopey comedy, but it walks and talks like a bird of an entirely different feather.

3 stars out of four

Review: "The A-Team"

"The A-Team" surprises by not being completely awful. The idea of remaking a cheesy television show from the 1980s is one based on dollars and not any sense of creativity. The results are predictably silly, self-referential and soon to be forgotten.

But not, for even a moment, ever boring.

Director Joe Carnahan launches right into one action scene after another, so we feel dizzy at the amount of stuff that's always happening. Even the talkie scenes where the team makes their intricate plans are split up with shots of them actually executing it, so we never feel like the movie has any down time.

If you don't remember the TV show: An elite military squad is wrongly court-martialed, and turns freelance in order to clear their names. The movie opens with the group's first meeting, in an unlikely adventure south of the U.S./Mexican border. All I can say is that for members of the military, they seem to have rather long haircuts and a lot of free time on their hands.

They're led by Col. Hannibal Smith (Liam Neeson), a crafty veteran who says that if you give him enough time, he'll come up with a plan to defeat anyone. His right-hand man is "Face" Peck (Bradley Cooper, clearly having a lot of fun), a confidence man and acquirer of valuable commodities.

Hannibal literally stumbles into Bosco Baracus (Quinton "Rampage" Jackson) in the middle of the desert. Nicknamed B.A. for his bad attitude, Baracus is a mechanical whiz and expert wheel man. Hannibal shoots, then recruits B.A. after they discover they have identical Army Ranger tattoos.

The last member of the team is Howling Mad Murdock (Sharlto Copley), a genius pilot who can fly anything with wings or rotors, but is a bit lacking in the sanity department. Hannibal gets Murdock sprung from a military hospital for the insane, and they're off.

Flash eight years to the future, and the A-Team is now the toast of the military, having single-handedly won the war in Iraq (or so the movie seems to imply). General Morrison (Gerald McRaney, an '80s TV exile himself) greenlights Hannibal for one last job to steal back the engraving plates Saddam stole from the U.S. Mint, allowing him to print his own money.

Somewhere in the background is Lynch (Patrick Wilson, ladling on the smarm) as a CIA boss who's got his hand in the pie.

On the opposing side is Pike -- played by Brian Bloom, who also co-wrote the script with Carnahan and Skip Woods -- the sneering head of a Blackwater-esque private military outfit. He's got his eyes on the engraving plates and pinning the blame on Hannibal and company.

I won't belabor further plot developments, since it's just one big convoy of chase-chase, bang-bang.

The action scenes are heavy with computer-generated assistance, to the point that some of the action was spat entirely out of a computer rather than photographed with any of those actor thingees. But they're so over-the-top daffy, we can't help but smile.

All four of the A-Team seem to be doing a little homage to their predecessors in their respective roles (George Peppard, Dwight Schultz, Mr. T and Dirk Benedict). Neeson delivers all his lines in a combination snarl/grumble, and Copley seems to be doing a South African accent by way of Tennessee.

The world really didn't need a big-budget film version of "The A-Team." But at least they have the good sense to plant their tongue firmly in cheek while grasping for the easy bucks.

Make sure to stick around after the credits for an Easter Egg with some familiar faces.

2.5 stars out of four