Category: Movie Reviews

2010 has become the Year of the Working Vacation at the multiplex. Amy Adams spent a couple months in Ireland shooting “Leap Year,” knowing full well that the movie she was making was her #2 reason for being there. Adam Sandler got Columbia Pictures to pay him and his buddies millions to play at a water park. Now we find George Clooney shooting a thriller about an assassin who holes up in Italy after a job gone wrong, and wouldn’t you know it, Clooney has a villa in Italy. His character even tells another character that he’s on a working vacation, so at least he’s honest about his motives.

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Being a celebrity does not automatically make someone interesting. Even with the creative license that comes with your typical Hollywood biopic, “Amelia” portrays 1930s aviation pioneer and role model Amelia Earhart as a pleasant but frankly dull person. Even the parts that dealt with Earhart compromising her integrity in order to achieve her dreams – which she did a lot – were boring.

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“Up” is an odd bird, and that’s not just because one of the movie’s co-stars is an odd bird. It’s the first Pixar movie that could possibly happen in the human world, as opposed to the fish world, rat world or insect world. Its story is pretty simple by Pixar standards, but it plunges emotional depths that the studio has not explored since, well, “Up” director Pete Docter’s last effort, “Monsters, Inc.” By Pixar standards, it’s a massive departure on a number of levels, but it also shows just how much smarter – and more courageous – they are about the movies they make. Pitch a movie with a 78-year-old man as the lead character to DreamWorks Animation, and watch them scatter like cockroaches.

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The 2007 “Alvin and the Chipmunks” wasn’t a great movie, but it also wasn’t terrible, which actually makes it the perfect candidate for a sequel, since there is room for improvement. (The fact that it grossed $217 million didn’t hurt, either.) Fox should have considered themselves lucky that the movie was such a hit in spite of its shortcomings; instead, it appears that they thought that they put too much effort into it the first time around, because the most clever thing about “Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” is the title.

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The glass-half-full take on “Alvin and the Chipmunks” is that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. The glass-half-empty take is that it’s still not very good. The kids will surely be entertained, and the movie has a surprisingly wholesome message, but the adults will be smacking their foreheads over the way that the movie all but ignores reality, and for no real reason.

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With all due respect to “The Godfather, Part II,” “Aliens” forever changed the way we looked at sequels. It contains the elements that define the laws of sequel-making – everything is bigger, faster, more elaborate – but the crucial difference with “Aliens” is that the story never takes a back seat to anything. That dedication to telling a good story results in one of the most intense, squirm-inducing movies you’ll see in this or any other genre.

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I like movies that are a little crazy. Crazy movies have passion and ambition, and while that passion can sometimes be misguided, at the very least it results in something interesting. Tim Burton’s 3D take on “Alice in Wonderland,” on the other hand, is just plain nuts. It has style but no heart, an off-putting ‘weird for the sake of being weird’-ness to it that is more alienating than it is imaginative. And the post-“Avatar” viewing public will not be impressed by the gimmicky 3D.

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“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day” is not a good movie, but it’s a damn likable one. The dialogue is snappy, and the performances by the family members are spot-on (this movie does not work without Steve Carell), but the plotting is, well, bad. All characters outside of the family are gross stereotypes, seemingly because it’s easier to make an example of them that way. The pro-family vibe of the movie is so strong, though, that it makes the predictable storytelling easier to forgive.

Alexander Cooper (Ed Oxenbould) is about to turn 12, and per middle school protocol, he’s having an awful day. He wakes up with gum in his hair (sadly, one of only a few nods to the 1972 book on which the movie is based), and proceeds to get humiliated at a school-wide level via text bomb, and is crushed to discover that even his best friend is going to skip his birthday party the next day in order to attend the party of a much cooler kid. Alexander, convinced that he is all but invisible to his family and frustrated that they can’t relate to what he’s going through, wishes on a candle-lit cupcake at midnight on his birthday that they could know how it feels to be him for a day. From the moment they wake up the next morning, Alexander’s entire family experiences a “Liar Liar” form of karmic payback.

Each member of the Cooper family has a designated foil assigned by the screenplay (with the exception of newborn baby Trevor, for obvious reasons). For oldest sibling Anthony (Dylan Minnette), it is his awful girlfriend Celia (Bella Thorne). For aspiring actress Emily (Karris Dorsey), it is her awful theater instructor who expects perfection from tweens. In the case of the parents (Jennifer Garner and Carell), it is her awful boss and his prospective employers, whose awfulness is yet to be determined. (For Alexander, it’s everyone.) All of these awful people exist in the real world, sadly, but when making a movie that features awful people, it helps to make them, well, slightly less awful, or at the very least somewhat human. Celia, unfortunately, doesn’t exhibit a single redeeming quality in the movie. You have to think that Anthony’s parents despise her, and wonder where they went wrong in raising their son.

And then there are these out-of-nowhere moments of pure joy, of a family letting its collective guard down and showing what it means to be a family, that send the movie soaring. Carell’s Ben Cooper is the best dad ever. He never loses his cool, he will defend his kids to the death (the way he dispatches the drama instructor is pithy and spot-on), and finds the silver lining even as the cloud is repeatedly striking him with lightning. He’s so fun to watch that it’s actually okay that he’s stealing the focus from Alexander. Everyone else gets a moment, or a line, but they’re at their best during the group scenes, particularly the bit where the family takes Anthony and Celia to the prom. It is the essence of family, and it’s thrilling to watch.

Judith Viorst’s book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day” would have made a 5-minute movie. In its fleshed out form, it’s an 81-minute movie, a tacit admission that they knew that there just isn’t much to build on here. If it had an equal amount of smarts to match its heart, this could have been something special. As it is, it’s a pleasant distraction, nothing more.

This originally ran October 9, 2014 on Bullz-Eye.com.

Paramount used to pony up big bucks for the movie rights to James Patterson novels. This time around, Patterson’s “Alex Cross,” named after his titular detecto-shrink, fell to Summit Entertainment, and while Summit is raking in headlines and cash at the moment with those “Twilight” movies, make no mistake: for James Patterson, this is a precipitous drop. Look at the script, though, and it makes sense why every other major studio passed: it’s a flat recycling of every late-‘90s thriller ever made, without an original thought in its head. Worse, it just looks cheap, and cheap combined with unoriginal is not a recipe for success.

Detective Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) and his two partners, childhood friend Tommy Kane (Edward Burns) and Tommy’s secret coworker with benefits Monica Ashe (Rachel Nichols), are called to the scene of a gruesome murder, where the ultra-rich daughter of a Chinese businessman is found tortured to death. The killer (Matthew Fox), a hit man for hire and demented psychopath whose name the audience never learns, even leaves a clue as to whom his next target will be. Cross, who “can tell you had scrambled eggs at a hundred yards” (that is an actual line of dialogue), spots the clue and the gang arrives in time to botch the hit, but Alex and Tommy both suffer massive collateral damage in return. At this point, shit gets real.

Whatever you may think of Rob Cohen’s movies, they have always looked good, not quite a poor man’s Michael Bay but at least a less rich man’s Michael Bay. “Alex Cross,” on the other hand, is a poor man’s Rob Cohen. The camera work is downright amateurish: the final showdown between Alex and the killer is a giant blur, as if the cameraman shot it while on fire, and the pan shot of the underground fighting venue is just clunky. Even the big, hyper-choreographed tracking shot of the police arriving at a potential crime scene is not so much flashy as it is laborious. Factor in the story, acting, and the dialogue, and things only get worse.

Final showdown in an abandoned building? Check. Dialogue about the gates of hell and someone appointing themselves judge, jury and executioner? Check. The sociopath who suffers unexplained, out-of-body psychotic episodes? Check. (Hell, we don’t even get the back story of Fox’s character.) Implausible, large-scale kill shot executed to perfection in defiance of all laws of physics? Check. The full-speed, no-look car collision shot from the victim’s point of view that could never, ever happen in real life? Checkmate. The entire film is a walking, talking checklist of ‘90s serial killer movie clichés, and that might actually be all right if they had brought something new to the table. But they don’t, and as a result the movie looks dated and lazy.

Perry is clearly busting his ass to show that he can do these kinds of roles, and while it’s tempting crack some joke along the lines of, “I know Morgan Freeman, and you, sir, are no Morgan Freeman,” Perry is not the problem. He’s not the solution either, but he doesn’t make things worse, at least not in the way the once-reliable Matthew Fox does. Fox looks out of his element here, overacting at random moments like he took his inspiration from Vincent D’Onofrio on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” (not a good idea). Only Edward Burns seems to be in on the joke, playing his role like he just walked off the set of “Man on a Ledge” and fully aware that this was not going to end well, so he may as well have fun.

Nothing about “Alex Cross” makes sense. It’s a movie no one asked for, funded by people who didn’t believe in it enough to spend the necessary money to make it better, and assembled by people who put up a half-assed effort at best, on both sides of the camera. Once they made the decision to go low-budget, they should have sent it straight to video, because the big screen does this no favors.

This originally ran October 18, 2012 on Bullz-Eye.com.

There is no pleasure in putting down a movie that is in love with science, to the point where the screenplay invents a new law of molecular biology – one that won’t be discovered for another 20 years, no less – in order to justify the fantastical plot. Indeed, we’ll give “The Age of Adaline” credit for taking a left-field approach to the love story of the girl who won’t/can’t stop running, but in this case, the opposites don’t attract; the science talk is almost exclusively done via narration (THE MOVIE IS EXPLAINING ITSELF TO YOU BECAUSE YOU WON’T UNDERSTAND IT OTHERWISE), and it’s actually even more jarring when it’s inserted into the dialogue. However it’s delivered, it never gels with the love story. In fact, the love story never gels with the love story.

Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) was born in 1908. She met a man, fell in love, got married, had a daughter, and lost her husband in an accident. One night, while driving to visit her parents, she had an accident that sent her car plunging into a lake. The cold temperatures of the water stopped her heart, but she was revived when her vehicle was struck by lightning (again, the science behind this is decades away, they assure us), and as a result she stops aging. This obviously makes it difficult for Adaline to forge long-lasting relationships (both friend and other), and avoid the suspicions of law enforcement. She eventually learns to guard her privacy to the present day (her daughter is now played by Ellen Burstyn), but handsome philanthropist Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman) refuses to leave her alone. Adaline, who now calls herself Jenny, wants to let him into her life, but decades of running is a hard habit to break. She agrees to spend the weekend with him as his parents celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary, and it is there that Jenny, for the first time in ages, comes face-to-face with her past.

As awkward love triangles go, this is second only to the 1989 film “Chances Are,” where Robert Downey Jr. discovers that in a past life, he was his girlfriend’s father. (Gross.) Adaline has the new love, and runs into the old love, but there are no stakes; it’s obvious that she’s not going to leave new love for old love, so why does it happen? Quite frankly, they need to get her in a car by herself, so they can wrap things up with a tidy little bow. Is that a spoiler? Only if you’ve never seen a movie in your life.

Blake Lively is all sorts of stunning here, achieving Diane Lane/Michelle Pfeiffer levels of gorgeousness, yet Adaline is a specter, floating through the movie without leaving a footprint. There’s a logic to this, though: for her to maintain her life off the radar, she needs to be as invisible as someone who looks like Blake Lively can possibly be. The downside is that that decision offers her little in the way of emotional range, reducing the majority of her performance to polite blandness. Huisman doesn’t fare much better. His Ellis is impossibly earnest, the do-gooder silicon millionaire with a pure heart. They make a dashing couple, and a ridiculously smart one at that, but with neither of them seemingly capable of harboring a dark thought, they are also really boring. The darkest thought Adaline shares is when she chides Ellis for listening to bad jazz.

The most frustrating thing about “The Age of Adaline” is that there is a high-concept, thinking man’s romance at its core, but it is never fully explored. Are we really all connected? Are some of us chosen against our will to endure hardships that will benefit humanity in the future? That’s heady stuff for a romantic drama, and while it’s possible to get both to co-exist in a film, “The Age of Adaline” only flexes its smarts when it’s convenient.

This originally ran April 23, 2015 on Bullz-Eye.com.