Popcorn Kernels: Q2 Review Purge

In which we run through some mini-reviews of current 2018 films that I either didn't have time or interest to review fully.

Tag

Year: 2018
Director: Jeff Tomsic
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jake Johnson
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A group of five grown men play the same game of tag every month of May, and they're pulling out all the stops for their final season, interrupting the wedding of the only friend who has never been tagged.

Tag is a hangout comedy through and through, and luckily you mostly do want to hang out with these people, even if they're textbook examples of the white heterosexual man-children that occupy so much space in the comedy arena. It doesn't hurt that one of these people is Jon Hamm, who takes to comedy like a fish to water, and excels in any of the few places that ask him to be funny. Ed Helms is also never a bad personality to spend time with, Jeremy Renner's asshole character is in too little of the movie to make a negative impact, and Jake Johnson's cartoon stoner character isn't as foregrounded as another movie would have made him,

OK, well now that it's laid out like that, maybe I don't want to spend time with these people. Who I do want to spend time with is Isla Fisher as Ed Helms' wife. She occupies the Rose Byrne in Neighbors role here, as the supportive wife who is eighteen times more invested in the antics than her partner, to the point that it's almost psychotic. She steals the movie like she's auditioning for Ocean's 9, with a relaxed confidence that is effortlessly cool and compelling.

Where Tag fails is anytime it tries to apply any sort of dramatic subtext to the goings-on. We don't care about Jeremy Renner's relationship with these people for the same reason that it's troubled: he's never with them. There is no rapport established at any point in the movie, even in the many lame slow motion flashbacks to kids running around like gremlins.

Although his character is no good for drama, Renner does give the movie its best sequences, where it turns into a slapstick action movie. He channels the Robert Downey, Jr. Sherlock Holmes with a perfectly calculated inner monologue that show what an absolute machine he is when it comes to the game of Tag. These sequences are probably a bit too violent for how seriously the movie takes the rest of its characters and their situations (there is a really bad bit where the fakeouts and reality blend in a way that is much too brutal for what the stakes of this game really are), but they're also energetic and fun bright spots in a movie that mostly presents its world in a drab color palette of slate greys and shadow.

It seems like it's trying to be one of those indie comedies that isn't really funny, but an occasional Paul Feig burst of energy emerges to save the day. This doesn't add up to anything particularly special, but I had a decent time watching it, if only to see some fun personalities chill with one another and chatter pleasantly about the good old days.

Rating: 6/10

Upgrade

Year: 2018
Director: Leigh Whannell
Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Rosco Campbell
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A man whose wife has been murdered, leaving him a paraplegic, gets a computer chip installed in his spine that allows him to exact bloody revenge.

Have you heard of the odious movie trope known as "fridging?" The more you're aware of it, the less you'll like the first act of this movie, which uses a dead woman as a kick-off to a man's arc like many an action flick. This is not forgivable by the fact that Upgrade transparently wants to be a sci-fi version of Death Wish, though maybe it's a little more comprehensible why anybody thought that plot line was a good idea in mid-2018. Maybe.

That aside, I liked Upgrade quite a bit. Other than its obvious Death Wish ties, it also seems to be a pre-remake of the upcoming flick Venom, with a murderous symbiote grafted to a Tom Hardy lookalike. It's like an Asylum studios project, only actually fun!

Set in a Blade Runner-esque near future (the fact that this movie only serves to remind you of other movies could have been a liability, but the way it mixes and matches the tropes its pulling does give it a certain madcap playset energy that does it well), Upgrade exists in a beautifully conceived setting. It's not a particularly wide world they have created, but the honeycomb design of most of the futuristic spaces combined with the still-recognizable remnants of our current society that haven't quite been phased out is a triumph of mid-budget production design.

Although the characters are stock archetypes and the plot is predictable as hell, it's still fun to watch this roller coaster ride play out through this world, and the action sequences contained therein are pretty phenomenal. Logan Marshall-Green gets a chance to show off his best Bruce Campbell impression as his body performs incredible stunts, much to the shock of his face. The duality of the two characters inhabiting one body is never forgotten, and his physical performance is terrific, adding a boost to well-choreographed fights that end in ecstatically gruesome gore gags.

Sure, Upgrade isn't the most original or provocative movie that tumbled into theaters this year, but it was a hell of a turn-your-brain-off good time. Leigh Whannell knows how to entertain an audience, and in the summer season that's exactly what the world needs.

Rating: 7/10

The Death of Stalin

Year: 2018
Director: Armando Iannucci
Cast: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

After the death of Josef Stalin, his political comrades struggle to fill the power vacuum he has left behind, with hilarious [sic] results.

The Death of Stalin is a comedy for fancy people. I like to consider myself a fancy person every now and again (at least in my movie tastes, though that fact that I give equal marks to Breathless and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre probably disqualifies me from the club), but boy was this movie a chore. If you took the most forgotten sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus and expanded it into a feature film, it would be exactly like this movie. Except funnier.

This is Monty Python through a game of telephone, with characters jostling for attention through a series of comic vignettes that quietly refuse to land. It's a very meat and potatoes comedy, relying on setups and gags that are creaking and musty with age. But that's probably not fair to the movie either, because Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times uses every comic trick in the book and it's still fresh nearly a century later. It just kind of doesn't work, at least for my personal sense of humor, which is obviously extremely subjective.

The thing I think people are having a hard time separating here is the difference between "something smart" and "smart humor." Sure, this movie knows a heck of a lot about Russian politics, but faithfully presenting that throughout multiple extended scenes of murder and torture isn't funny. It just... is. Death of Stalin works better as a low budget History Channel documentary than a comedy, faithfully presenting so many events that it leaches the humor right on out of them in favor of historical footnotes and endless cameos from political figures of the time.

Maybe I'm just an uncultured boor who likes things to be loud and in my face, but this one just wasn't doing for me. And the less said about Jeffrey Tambor's presence, the better.

Rating: 4/10

Deep Blue Sea 2 (For the Scream 101 episode about this title, click here.)

Year: 2018
Director: Darin Scott
Cast: Danielle Savre, Rob Mayes, Michael Beach
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A businessman brings a team of experts to an ocean facility where he's experimenting on sharks to create a pill that increases intelligence, and obviously the sharks eat most of those people.

And here is the movie that I'm going to give the same rating as Death of Stalin, even though my enjoyment with it took me about ten million light years further than the former. I contain multitudes, everyone.

I have seen my fair share of direct-to-video, many years later sequels, and I must say, Deep Blue Sea 2 delivered exactly what I was expecting (a pale wisp of the original that acts more as a remake than a bona fide sequel). And yet, there's some spark about it that kept me invested more than usual. I wouldn't go so far to say that it qualifies as a true bad-good epic, but it certainly flirts with being entertaining more often than not, which is more than I can say for a lot of its ilk.

There are certainly a great deal of budgetary limitations that lead to a drab set, subpar acting, and an alarming lack of shark mayhem for long periods. But those limitations also lead to some very special moments, most notably a completely indelible scene where a shark puppet spies on a conversation through a porthole. Also, the one element where the film truly feels like a sequel is by far its best: instead of the giant sharks being the villains this time around, it's a herd of baby mutant sharks that have been let loose in the facility.

These baby sharks are the stuff that B-movie dreams are made of. They're adorable partially because of their low-fi nature, they allow for some creative kill sequences that wouldn't be physically possible with a larger specimen, and they allow this film to have some sort of feeling of generational legacy and passing the baton that gives it the air of a sequel, even if it's really nothing of the sort.

Sure, I could do with a lot fewer scenes of the characters wandering down the same metal hallway and bleating about their divergent philosophies. But for my money (which, mark you, was $1.75 at Redbox, I ain't no big spender), I had a decent time with this one. Recommended to anyone who likes sharks and isn't discerning.

Rating: 4/10

Sicario: Day of the Solado

Year: 2018
Director: Stefano Sollima
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner
Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

American operatives attempt to ignite a cartel war by kidnapping the daughter of a kingpin.

I have no large amount of love for the original Sicario, which is a beautiful but deeply unpleasant experience. But the deeper I got into the cumbersomely titled Day of the Soldado, the more I realized the value of that film. Because this is exactly the movie Sicario could have been if the script wasn't guided by the firm hands of director Denis Villenueve, cinematographer Roger Deakins, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, and star Emily Blunt.

Replace those people with an Italian TV director, the dude who shot the "Eternal Flame" music video, the cellist from The Revenant, and, well, nobody could replace Emily Blunt, and you have stripped away everything that made Sicario great. Instead of being a slick, tense, visually stunning descent into bleak nihilism, this film is just a shotgun blast of misery that begins to falter in the third act and falls face first in the mud before credits roll.

This film has a lot of problems, but it starts by introducing a wholly unnecessary terrorism element in favor of being "topical" before completely ignoring that plotline to continue their heavy-handed drudgery about the Mexican border (a topic that in the age of Trump is even more unpleasant to engage with, by the way). This allows the movie to reintroduce Josh Brolin's amoral character in a torture scene that reminds you how unsympathetic he is, before forcing you to spend the entire movie with him.

Also returning is Benicio del Toro, whose entire motivation has been corrupted by the need to bring back somebody else from the original film. He at least gets to act across from one of the only two interesting people in the movie, the young and talented Isabela Moner (the other is also a newbie - Elijah Rodriguez as a Mexican-American living in a Texas bordertown).

But the movie is still an endless repetition of shots and elements of the original, but worse. Even the overhead shots of helicopters soaring over the Mexican desert are more boring and ill-framed, and those were literally just shots of objects moving in a straight line. This is a sequel that never should have existed in the first place, and every single thing it does serves to remind you of that fact, especially the two worst elements in the movie: a pair of pulled punches in the third act that convert the film into a half-hearted fist-pumping hero flick, and Catherine Keener as Brolin's boss, totally lost in her nothing of a character. One to miss.

Rating: 3/10
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Reviews In This Series
Sicario (Villenueve, 2015)
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Sollima, 2018)

Popcorn Kernels: Movies I Missed (On Purpose)

In which we release mini-reviews of two fairly recent comedy films that managed to pass me by until now.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Year: 2008

Director: Kevin Smith

Cast: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In order to make enough money to pay their rent, two slacker friends decide to produce and star in a porn film, but how will this affect their relationship?

Pretty much any movie starring Seth Rogen between 2007 and 2010 was created explicitly to cater to the greasy, speckly daydreamers of the world who wanted to believe the busty blonde down the hall would find the lovable oaf buried deep beneath the Cheeto dust-crusted exterior. It’s the kind of nerd-fulfillment fantasy Judd Apatow has been trafficking in since day one, and the only person I can think of who is more suited to bring that icky feeling to life is Kevin Smith. …Enter Kevin Smith.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about Elizabeth Banks falling for Seth Rogen and while both are admirable performers, the spark isn’t even there on paper. I’m not even talking about their disparate physical attractiveness. Zack could be played by Hugh Grant and Miri’s interest in him would still be deeply questionable. It’s all in the writing, which is skeevy and sweaty in a deeply disconcerting manner despite the supposed sex positivity of the script. 

The film crows over the female form like a cackling magpie, exempting men altogether from its bone-chilling leer. This is a movie strewn with completely naked women that treats its one full frontal male scene like it’s something shocking and disgusting. Male perspectives in sex films are just the worst, aren’t they? Despite Banks’ attempt at creating a shaded, multi-dimensional human being, Miri is merely a prize to be won: a fun fair sack of flesh, blood, and mammary glands. 

And Zack and Miri treats its minor characters even worse, if you can believe it. Craig Robinson is forced to contort into every stereotype in the book, and some that have been scribbled in the margins (whipped sitcom husband, wise best friend, irrationally angry black man), and the rest of the porno cast are given no introduction, with personalities ranging from one-note (Jason Mewes’ clueless sex fiend) to topless window dressing to “no seriously, who are you?” Then they’re sent floundering through a fundamentally broken story with a distended first act that swallows half the run time, a bungled time jump that kills the momentum at a climatic juncture, and a central relationship that vomits out manufactured filler drama in an unending stream. There are such deep cracks in the narrative here that James Cameron wants to make a documentary exploring them.

Is it funny? I suppose. Justin Long has an excellent extended cameo as a gravel-throated gay porn star, and there are jokes throughout that work when they’re not being extravagantly racist, sickeningly misogynistic, or they completely miscalculate the film’s capacity for scatological humor. Zack and Miri aims to shock, and it succeeds, but hardly in the way it intends to. Its sex is too tame to be titillating, and it can’t sustain such a deeply disjointed story on a pocketful of dick jokes. I say Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a tremendously lazy film, and the Windows Movie Maker credits that grace its front and back end seem to agree with me. I’d love to see this material handled by another director, but unfortunately Zack and Miri – and especially Kevin Smith – just don’t turn it on.

Rating: 4/10

Vacation

Year: 2015

Director: John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein

Cast: Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo 

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A now grown-up Rusty Griswold decides to take his family on a road trip to Wally World in an attempt to smooth over their problems.

Now, here’s a movie I never thought I’d see, let alone like. A belated straggler from the 2000’s remake boom (seriously, other than Ghostbusters, who’s making remakes anymore? Remakes are so passé, sequels are what’s In this season), updating material that nobody has given a passing thought to in over a decade, Vacation seemed like the most obnoxious kind of family comedy. And to be honest, it doesn’t really try to be anything different. All the scatological gags, picked-clean sexual references, and oddly violent slapstick that you might expect are front and center, but Vacation prevails in spite of that.

I blame the cast. Ed Helms has always been a reliable comic presence, even if he doesn’t stand out in a sea of funny 40-something white guys. And he’s surrounded by a bevy of delightful professionals, first and foremost Christina Applegate. I’ve never paid much attention to Applegate beyond her cameo appearance on Friends, but she’s utterly brilliant here, wrapping up the classic Apatowian pent-up manboy archetype within the guise of a tired suburban mom. And then we have, packed in like sardines, Leslie Mann, Charlie Day, Caitlin Olsen, Michael Peña, Keegan-Michael Key, and f**king Chris Hemsworth, who Ghostbusters has taught us is a bona fide force of nature.

This cast elevates the mostly generic material, making it funny enough that when the script hits its patches of actual genius, they don’t seem out of place. The family car is a bubbling fount of hilarity with its endless absurdities and M.C. Escher-esque design, the young brothers are a wonderfully mismatched pairing, and there is a spot of psychosexual terror that cold-cocks your funny bone. It’s not highbrow, to be certain, but there are actual laughs here - laughs that Vacation comes by honestly, and that is a remarkable achievement.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 953

Archive: May 26, 2013

Never Drinking Again - The Hangover Part III

Year: 2013
Director: Todd Phillip
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Let’s start with the good. Evidently, the filmmakers listened to the critics ofThe Hangover II. The major complaints about that film were as follows:

 1) It was an exact rehash of the events of the original.

 2) The series unabashedly reveled in offensive frat boy comedy, relying on bodily humor, and generally being homophobic/racist/misogynistic/offensive to whatever groups those categories might have missed.

Part III’s plot certainly did manage to avoid the established Drug/Party/Hangover/Lather/Rinse/Repeat cycle of the first two, and the crude humor was at a low ebb – not entirely absent but generally not too aggressive.

Unfortunately, this was at the cost of alienating any fans the franchise might have had left. I’m in no way supporting the direction the movies were going, but by removing the elements the critics found unappealing they also removed anything that might make this film worth watching to anybody who actually enjoyed the first two.

A Hangover movie without the frat comedy is like a smore without the chocolate and marshmallow – less unhealthy but still not a satisfying treat. Without its trademark style, Part III didn’t have a leg to stand on – it’s not like there was a probing character drama hidden underneath the veneer of fat jokes.

 
Not exactly the Meryl Streep of comedy

I suppose I can’t call this a review if I don’t briefly touch on the actual plot of the film.

Alan (Zach Galifianakis)’s lazy manchild behavior has finally gotten to his father (Jeffrey Tambor, always a welcome presence) who loses his patience and begins a tirade which ends in his collapse on the floor. Cut to that scene from the trailer where Alan sings Ave Maria, which would be funny if I hadn’t already seen it 21 times.

His sister (Sasha Barrese) decides to hold an intervention for… something? I guess? He’s off his meds. Is this intervention to get him to start taking drugs? Anyway, she invites the Wolf Pack - his friends Stu (Ed Helms), Phil (Bradley Cooper), and her husband Doug (Justin Bartha, who is tragically underused in these films – and, may I say, much more handsome than Mr. Cooper in my opinion. Sorry Aunt Jill).

Also Melissa McCarthy is in the movie for approximately 12 seconds

So blah blah blah the Wolf Pack is driving him to the New Horizons rehabilitation center in Arizona. Before we continue, two things: First, these centers are almost always called New Horizons. I guess it’s a national chain. Second, I’m still not entirely sure why he’s going here. After some deep digging it seems that they are seeking to stop him from being such a lazy unmotivated weirdo. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this man doesn’t need rehab. He needs a firm slap in the face.

Then after some truly impressive narrative strong-arming, gang boss Marshall (John Goodman, who is phoning it in so hard that I can practically hear a dial tone) has captured Doug and is threatening to kill him if the Wolf Pack doesn’t track down Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), who is on the run, having escaped from a Thai prison. Chow has hightailed it to Tijuana and he is the only person who knows where Marshall’s 21 million dollars of stolen gold bars are hidden.

There follows an inexplicably large number of scenes where the gang tries to drug Chow, after which he (rightly) locks them in a basement, pinning the blame for a robbery on them. They chase him back to Vegas (because of course) where he has taken up in the penthouse of Caesar’s Palace (because of course). Mr. Chow is basically a Bond villain at this point, hiding in his Evil Lair.

Anyway, things happen and the movie ends. I don’t want to spoil it and I don’t really care enough to write about it anyway. The events presented are largely devoid of discernable jokes, unless you think “haha, Alan’s a three-year-old” is so hilarious that it can carry an entire film.

The film is consistently dull, and in the patches where it isn’t, is mostly just annoying. One of the central relationships of the film is that between Alan and Chow, two lightning in a bottle characters who have no business having an entire plot built around them. At this point they are shrieking caricatures of what they used to be and prove once and for all that sometimes a bit part in a film is so effective because it is so brief.

It’s funny because he’s Asian

The strongest moments of The Hangover Part III are unambiguously those that call back to the original Hangover – the sequence with Heather Graham and her son in particular is alarmingly sweet and sincere. Of course, it’s much too early to feel nostalgia for a movie that debuted in 2009, but it was a far better film than this one and the scenes allow some relief from the plodding story of Part III while also reminding us that there was once life in these listlessly jerking marionettes known as Alan, Stu, and Phil.

This film is presented as the finale to the Hangover trilogy and, assuming that box office revenue isn’t so large as to necessitate a sequel, it’s nice to finally put a nail in the coffin of this uninspired, shuffling comedy. This film will undoubtedly fade into history as a milquetoasty nothing, which I suppose is better than being universally reviled.

TL;DR: The Hangover Part III is the third installment to a crass comedy franchise that is neither particularly crass or particularly comedic.

Rating: 3/10

Should I spend money on this?  If you are devoted to these characters or are a member of that resolute minority group that call themselves fans ofPart II, it might be worth it to watch their storylines be tied off. If you aren’t, skip it.

Word Count: 1027