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)

Chartreuse Overkill

Year: 2015

Director: Pierre Coffin & Kyle Balda

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm, Pierre Coffin

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Two films came out this weekend. One was about an eternal, murderous presence laying ruin and waste upon all who come across it, and the other was The Gallows. I’m not kidding when I say that – of these two films – Minions left the most lasting emotional scars. Children’s films have a long history of embracing the macabre*, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a kiddie flick so grimly invested in depicting murder, torture, and mayhem.

It’s all tangential of course, like in the equally inexplicable Seinfeld insect massacre classic Bee Movie, but it’s quietly alarming all the same. And that’s but one facet of the massive, hyperactive, inert conglomerate that forms the sweaty, heaving, surreally self-deluded mass that is Minions, the spin-off of the Despicable Me franchise that focuses on its most marketable and least narratively viable characters: the thousands of tiny yellow sight gags that bumble around Gru’s villainous laboratory.

*I still have physical injuries from the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Bello.

Minions tells the story of three Minions in particular, who set off in 1968 to find a villain to serve and thus save their tribe from extinction: Kevin (director Pierre Coffin), the headstrong leader, Stuart (director Pierre Coffin), the lazy musician, and Bob (renowned egotist Pierre Coffin), the obligatory Dumb One. Bob has a teddy bear named Tim who you will grow to love far more than any of the malign growths we shall henceforth call characters. Through a series of delightful (to someone, I’m sure) misadventures, these Three Minionteers end up in the service of the baddest villain in all the land: Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), and her groovy, gadget-peddling husband Herb (Jon Hamm).

Scarlett enlists the Minions to help her steal the crown of the Queen of England because this films feints at empowering women include her sole motivation being “wanting to be a pretty princess.” Through a series of delightful (see above) escapades, the Minions end up accidentally overthrowing the monarchy. Scarlett hangs out in her lair while this is happening, because Sandra Bullock doesn’t come cheap. Beyond this, I’m at a loss to explain the plot because there really isn’t one.

Despite its surprising ingenuity in creating a scenario for this cash-in prequel that has potential and feels organic to the universe of Despicable Me, Minions has an astonishing lack of narrative drive. It’s like a building abandoned in the middle of construction. The framework is there, but the wind echoes hollowly through it.

Coincidentally, that's the title of my upcoming poetry collection.

It’s a curious thing. Show the opening scenes of Minions to any producer or screenwriter worth their cocaine and they could fill in the rest, giving you a generic but marketable movie: Kevin wants to save the tribe himself. Bob and Stuart accidentally save the tribe. Kevin learns to swallow his pride and value teamwork over fame and recognition. Bam. It’s treacly but its sells. 

And that’s clearly where Minions wants to go, but despite its obvious setup, it forgets its purpose, sloughs off any recognizable conflict or resolution, and sets its villain on a bungee cord of incomprehensibly shifting motivations, all in order to fit in a series of scatological gags, high-pitched jabbering, and heaps upon inexplicable heaps of nostalgia for a franchise that began a scant five years ago and has only had two films, only one of which was any good, all of which relies on an interminable series of jokes extrapolated from literally one line in the first film about bananas.

That would be like a Star Wars spin-off all about Wookies playing chess.

That said, Minions isn’t all bad. It’s shallow and childish, of course, but it’s family entertainment in 2015. We’re not exactly re-animating Walt Disney’s frozen head here. Relying heavily on the cultural touchstones and iconography of the 1960’s is a peculiar touch, considering that this film’s target audience was still in diapers when Britney was shaving her head, but it provides a quirky, groovy backdrop for some of the film’s silly humor.

Here’s the thing, though. The Minions were consistently the breakout stars of the previous two films, but - as we have constantly been failing to learn, seeing as we got a second season of Joey – giving a beloved side character an expanded role is an exercise in despair. Where the Minions were charming in small doses, here they are wan and overwrought, wrung out and exhausted of every last ounce of their potential. They still show glimmers of their previous buoyance, but are crushed by the sheer weight of the material they are called upon to perform.

Kind of like Britney, actually. Maybe that’s why they’re bald.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Despicable Me flick if it wasn’t trafficking in hideously distorted stereotypes! Nobody is safe from the broad scope and closed mind of the film. The British, of course, get a thorough dress-down, as is to be expected (nobody cares), but Minions also goes out of its way to mock the Indians, the elderly, and the gays before the credits roll, fret not. Before this franchise is buried in its tiny yellow grave, it’ll have achieved a blackout on its minority bingo card.

It’s a shambling disappointment to say the least, especially after the trailers made it look like maybe somebody tried even a little bit to make it palatable. The best thing I can say about the film is that it at least provides us a solid Jon Hamm performance, though he is forced to deliver lines across from Bullock who is phoning it in something fierce. Heck, she’s texting it in for everything but the lines they play in the trailer.

What I’m trying to say is that I like the Minions, the characters. I really do. But I did not like Minions, the film. I don’t suppose there is any reason on Earth that anybody with more than a single digit in their age should particularly want to go see this film anyway, but if you do, stop. Just watch Despicable Me again. Give Steve Carell your money, not this pile of squeaky toys masquerading as a film.

TL;DR: Minions is a spectacularly messy, plotless, if slightly charming kids' film.

Rating: 4/10
Should I Spend Money On This? No.
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