Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

Year: 2018

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña 

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

So this is how the Marvel movie year ends, not with a bang but with Michelle Pfeiffer. A scant two months and change after Avengers: Infinity War ravaged theaters worldwide, we're getting Ant-Man and the Wasp, a wispy summer treat before the MCU goes dormant until 2019, giving us some much needed rest. In which time we'll be getting Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Teen Titans GO to the Movies, Venom, Aquaman, Hellboy, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. 

Never say Hollywood doesn't try to capitalize on a trend.

So, we pick up nearly two years after the events of Captain America: Civil War (remember those? me neither). Ant-Man is on house arrest for violating the Sokovia Accords (yeah, I don't know), and he is three days away from being allowed to return to the world. Unfortunately, right about this time is when he discovers a quantum entanglement with Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), the long-thought-dead wife of original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). This reunites him with Hank and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, who for continuity's sake has to wear her original bowl cut wig in several scenes, causing me to giggle for about twenty minutes straight because I did not remember how stupid it looked and it really caught me by surprise), and they struggle to rebuild their relationship while figuring out how to rescue Janet from the quantum realm. I promise I reduced as much pseudo-science gobbledygook as I could from that paragraph. It was a Herculean effort.

While our heroes run through a video game-esque gauntlet of "Need Object A? Acquire Object B to gain access to Object C to get it," they must avoid the FBI officer Jimmy Woo (my boy Randall Park), the rogue tech black marketeer Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins), and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a girl whose particles keep expanding and contracting, allowing her to phase through objects, but keeping her in intense pain. She thinks she can cure her condition by sucking the science juice out of Michelle Pfeiffer, or something.

Though honestly, the pain seems like a fair trade for such a rad evil suit.

So far both Ant-Man movies have felt like a bit of a break from the MCU at large. The first one had a stronger separate core for its own story (namely, the heist element), whereas this one does have to deal largely with the implications left behind from a previous spinoff, but for the most part it's equally contained. The plot itself is a bit more sprawling, but it doesn't spill over into any other characters or plot lines, which is a welcome respite after the world-shattering character collisions of Infinity War  that required an MCU encyclopedia to get through.

And also much like the first one, there isn't a lot of meat on these bones. Anytime the story turns its focus to its feeble character drama, it becomes almost laughable. Lilly and Rudd's total lack of romantic chemistry exposes the mechanical artifice of the script. Whenever they exchange a glance or a kiss, you can hear the plot gears chunk into place. These things don't happen because they want them to, they happen because the narrative needs them to. The same goes for this film's wrinkle, the fact that Ant-Man's suit is a prototype and sometimes malfunctions, randomly changing his size at inopportune moments. But this happens only when its most convenient to the plot for a joke, and doesn't cause any major strife other than yet another one of the film's endless video game side missions.

"Alright, who ordered the plot contrivance?"

Honestly, I'd be more content if this was just a comedy about being on house arrest, because as usual the humor is by far the strongest element of the movie. The bulk of this is delivered by Michael Peña, who returns to once more prove that the entire movie lies in the palm of his hand, but we also, blissfully get an appearance by Randall Park. I've long been a proponent of Park, but this is the first side role he's gotten in a comedy where he really gets to shine, allowing his character's businesslike exterior and seriousness convert into awkward ineptitude and confusion at the drop of a hat. It's his best work in a long time, and he's always doing his best work.

Paul Rudd is of course on fire as well, but whenever he has to deal with Lilly and her bleating nothing of a character, he flounders a little bit. He flounders a lot bit during a scene where [SEMI-SPOILERS] he channels a woman's spirit into his body, which he plays like a high school freshman trying drag for the first time in drama class [SPOILERS OVER]. But come on. He's Paul Rudd. He acts his way back out of that paper bag over and over again. And then there's Michael Douglas, who at this point is just expensive window dressing. 

At least they fixed Hope's hair. This is an even bigger triumph than Jurassic World correcting Bryce Dallas Howard's footwear.

But even if the drama is firing on zero cylinders, the action is solid enough to provide a satisfying popcorn superhero romp. They really lean into our heroes' abilities to change size here, turning various small rooms and San Francisco cityscapes into wonderful Alice in Wonderland playsets, finding new, creative uses for everyday objects that is tremendously satisfying, even if it's not particularly groundbreaking.

Really, Ant-Man and the Wasp does what it needed to do. It provides us a (blissfully short, for one of these movies) two hours of distraction from the world outside (and, if you live near me, the blistering heat wave we got last Friday). It doesn't try your patience or test your brain in any way, it just lets you sink into a morass of fun, funny people doing spectacular things and not asking you to feel too much about it other than excitement. It won't go down in the pantheon of great summer movies, but it hits the spot, for sure.

TL;DR: Ant-Man and the Wasp is a forgettable popcorn movie, which is exactly what it needed to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1048
Reviews In This Series
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)
Ant-Man (Reed, 2015)
Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)
Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016)
Black Panther (Coogler, 2018)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

We've Got Fun And Games

Year: 2017

Director: Jake Kasdan

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart 

Run Time:1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Franchise filmmaking is full of some spectacularly bad ideas. But even in a year that featured a live action remake of Beauty and the Beast in which neither lead could really sing and Flatliners - a remake of a boring horror film that didn't do particularly great the first time around - the very worst idea they pulled out of that infinitely deep Mary Poppins bag of branding was Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

Consider that awful, awful subtitle. Consider the continuation of the insipid 90's nostalgia pandering that caused Fuller House and Will and Grace to be borne into the world unbidden. Consider the fact that the plot hinges around a video game in a flailing move to update the material for the kids of today. Consider the fact that the spirit of the original was the novelty of seeing wild animals prowl through the streets of modern suburbia and that this film completely ignores that and places them in their natural jungle setting for no good reason. 

I was ready to eviscerate this movie. And yet, against all odds, it's kind of... dare I say... good.

Isn't that wild?

The plot of Jumanji is pretty simple. A diverse quartet of kids are stuck in detention cleaning out an old basement, where they discover a dusty cartridge game titled Jumanji. They plug it in, select their characters, and suddenly the game sucks them into a real life, real dangerous jungle world, placing them in the bodies of their much-more-famous video game avatars. In order to escape, they must win the game. They have three lives, and to lose them all means they'll die in the real world. The object of the game is to return a stolen magical jewel to the eye of a giant jaguar statue, thwarting wicked villain Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale) who used the gem's magic to turn the animals of the once-peaceful jungle into vicious, man-eating monsters.

The four obviously learn about the power of teamwork or friendship or whatever, but the film is mostly a loose series of comic adventure vignettes, propelled by something I haven't seen in a family movie in what feels like ages: actual character-based comedy. More on that miracle in a minute, but I suppose I should introduce you to the characters in brief.

First we have Spencer (Alex Wolff), a dweeby, shy kid who is afraid of everything thanks to his overprotective mother, who suddenly finds himself in the body of Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), a dashing swashbuckler. Then there's Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain), a popular football player who has conscripted once-friend Spencer to do his homework for him, who winds up in the diminutive form of zoologist/weapons valet Mouse Finbar (Kevin Hart) - there is a joke about them initially reading his nickname as "Moose" that they don't even attempt to land. They are joined by nerdy girl and potential Spencer love interest Martha (Morgan Turner), now inhabiting the body of seductive, bad-ass Killer of Men Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), as well as popular, bubble-headed Instagram princess Bethany (Madison Iseman), now trapped in the middle-aged, portly form of cartographer Professor Shelly Oberon (Jack Black).

One of these things is less famous than the other.

OK, back to my point. The character comedy here is remarkable just for existing, but it's also a pretty delicate, layered approach that boggles the mind. The no fewer than four people who contributed to the script must have had a hell of a mind meld going on, because this screenplay is tight. 

To start off, the plot makes a big deal out of the strengths and weaknesses of each character in the game, as literally detailed by the game (Ruby Roundhouse's weakness is "venom", whereas Mouse Finbar's is "cake," and wouldn't you know it but those jokes around Kevin Hart still just refuse to work). But in addition to that, it weaves in the strengths and weaknesses of the teens as seen pre-transformation, and their personality traits interlock and dovetail from those of their avatars in a way that's a pure delight to watch.

These are unusually well-crafted characters, but they'd be nothing without the performers attached to each (well, most) of them. Dwayne Johnson and Karen Gillan seem like they could have been mo-capped by Alex Wolff and Morgan Turner for how much they physically inhabit the posture and movements of dweeby teens who don't know what to do with their bodies. It's an astoundingly anti-movie star set of performances that showcase their pure, unadulterated commitment to the roles. And then there's Jack Black, who steals the show so effortlessly that Danny Ocean is putting him on his Rolodex. I so wasn't ready to like Jack Black again, but he throws himself completely into playing the role of a teenage girl, and while the trailers made it seem like it would just be a grotesque caricature, he actually delivers a nonstop barrage of genuinely funny lines that push the envelope of gender representation in blockbuster filmmaking and dear God, I can't believe I'm writing a sentence like this in a review of Jumanji, for crying out loud.

I know, I'm just as surprised as you.

The only liability, as you may have noticed from my oh-so subtle hinting, is Kevin Hart. Not only is he given the film's worst material to trudge through, he in no way attempts anything other than his "shriek every line" schtick. He never manages to channel his teenage counterpart in any meaningful way, to the point that when you see Fridge again you have completely forgotten who he is, whereas you still feel like you've spent time with all the other characters even though they've been offscreen for over an hour. I'm not particularly a fan of Hart in anything, but never has he been so incompatible with an ensemble.

Luckily Mouse is used sparingly, so he doesn't drag the movie down too much. He's just a reminder that, for as much as Jumanji is surprisingly fun and engaging, it's still a generic family adventure movie. Maybe it's a tad edgier in the PG-13 department than you might expect, but it's no more emotionally complex or stylistically daring than, say, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

However, that doesn't stop it from being lighthearted popcorn movie fun. It's a shame that the movie's low stakes prevent Bobby Cannavale from really getting to dig his teeth into his villainous character (which he was clearly relishing), but other than that it's a rollicking, fizzy thrill ride from start to finish. I take back all my grumblings from every time this trailer came on in December.

TL;DR: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is far better than it has any right to be, with a solid ensemble bringing a set of unique characters to life.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1165

Right Ingredients, Wrong Recipe

Year: 2014

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Jon Favreau, John Leguizamo, Sofía Vergara

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

All the online reviews for Chef are populated with unbearably awful cooking puns. I swore never to stoop so low, but the film is way too overbaked for me to avoid their siren call.

I'mma give it to you straight, guys. Chef is roughly three times as long as the amount of time it takes to make a tray of Nestlé Toll House cookies. It would be a much better choice devouring all 180 of those cookies in a row than watching Chef especially considering that it would still be less saccharine than the movie itself.

Indie comedy or Disney Channel original series? You decide!

Chef opens with its title. White on a black background. No frills. The title itself isn't even all that interesting. This lack of imagination permeates the film down to the last frame. I imagine that the plot (which involves an estranged workaholic dad struggling to reenergize his career while connecting with his estranged wife and son) would seem fresh and new if you'd spent the last twenty years inside a test tube (I would have made a "born yesterday" joke, but these plot beats could be sensed even from the womb), but it fails to amuse, especially in the wake of the far superior Begin Again.

In brief. Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) was once a promising young chef, but has been brown-beaten by Riva (Dustin Hoffman), the owner of his restaurant, to simply make the old favorites over and over again. His feelings of being trapped creatively are exacerbated by the food critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt) when he trashes Chef Casper's cooking on his blog.

While Casper struggles to regain his dignity, he ignores the transparent neediness of his son Percy (Emjay Anthony) and generally blows him off during the few moments Percy is not with his mother Inez (Sofía Vergara), who is filthy rich and has no definable job, yet remains the most solidly three-dimensional woman in a script dominated by males written by a man (Jon Favreau himself) who evidently has lost any and all perspective on how the female mind works. 

And a question. Has Jon Favreau ever not had money? The script would seem to indicate that he can't conceive of a world in which poverty might be an issue. In one memorable but certainly not unique scene, the ostensibly broke and maxed-out Casper offers to take his kid to Disney World. As if! Bill Gates himself could only afford about three tickets to that place.

As evidenced by Jon Favreau's wife, Chef does not exist in a universe that operates by the same internal logic as our own.

When he quits his job after butting heads with Riva and accidentally starting a flame war with Ramsey, ending up becoming a phenomenon on Twitter, Carl must struggle to earn back his dignity and status by... borrowing his wife's money and starting an instantly successful food truck. Remember what I said about this script coming from a place of upper-class privilege? The stakes in this film are so low that they wouldn't even pose a threat to the most thin-skinned of vampires.

And that's just but one tonal issue within this supernaturally inept screenplay. The idea of a food truck is bluntly introduced in the first scene (before his job is even on the line) in a piece of dialogue so clumsy and forced that it barrels into your ears like an actual truck. The gags are endless, Carl is shown working day and night but never actually sleeping, conversations go in circles and hit the same points over and over (a single line repeats the same word upwards of three times), side characters teleport across the country to blindly serve the protagonist, and Scarlett Johansson is wasted in a role that involves practically reaching orgasm while watching an overweight man cook pasta.

I mean I've heard of food porn, but this is just overkill.

And that's not all. Either the editing is jarring or the characters have taken some Hogwarts Online™ courses in apparition. Glaring continuity errors spice up some of the blander moments, alarmingly ugly rack focus is brought out to unnecessarily spruce up otherwise normal scenes, and some scenes make you wonder if they only ever got one take and were forced to stick with it.

If I were them, I would have done as many takes as possible while eating that barbecue.

To be fair, this movie isn't all bad. In fact it's not bad at all. It's a frothy fun bit of food porn-infused pop entertainment. But it's so self-indulgent and routine that it's hard to avoid noticing all the manifold flaws in the craftsmanship. Perhaps three duties was a tad too much for director-star-writer Mr. Favreau, who is spread too thin to excel at a single one of them.

However, the man surrounds himself with capable actors. John Leguizamo and Bobby Cannavale operate at a pitch perfect level as a sort of Greek chorus of support staff. Their energy is only brought down when they are forced to interact with Chef Casper, who sinks their chemistry like a stone. Vergara and Johansson work magic with supremely limited roles. And Robert Downey, Jr. injects Chef with a much-needed energy boost at the halfway point.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of the film and one of the only things that recommends it in any major way is its handling of technology. I've made my fair share of complaints and theories about the "texts on the screen" effects of films like The Fault in Our Stars, but Chef brings that trope to its inevitable next level.

Chef Casper's tweets appear onscreen, but in an organic three-dimensional manner that allows them to interact with their environment. They appear differently when viewed from different angles and are even occasionally blocked by other objects. And when they are sent, the text boxes turn into little birds and fly off, perfectly integrating the sound, design, and permanence of a tweet.

It's a tad unfortunate that the best thing about the film is its tweeting, but it's enough to keep the bloated and messy thing afloat. I can't recommend it with quite the fervor that it appears to have been receiving, but Chef is a decent enough diversion featuring a couple solid performances as long as its sybaritic star stays out of the way.

TL;DR: Chef really isn't very good, but it features a unique view of technology and several memorable performances.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? No, but you won't regret choosing it on a lazy RedBox night a couple months from now.

Word Count: 1127