Let It Go: THE HUNTSMAN: WINTER'S WAR

The 2012 summer spectacle Snow White and the Huntsman took a fairy tale and turned it into a fantasy adventure with striking visuals, a muddy Dragonslayer look, welcome weight to matters of life and death, and a feminist snap in letting its heroine fight her own battles. If we absolutely must have fairy tales run through a Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones tone, then that movie was the way to do it right. Alas, now it has also been done wrong in The Hunstman: Winter’s War, a combination prequel and sequel that doodles all around its predecessor with extra intrigue, loud noises, and hectic action, but never arrives at a reason to exist. It’s an afterthought looking for box office. Last time the title characters (Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth) teamed up to defeat the Evil Queen (Charlize Theron). This time there’s new threats and old threats and new plot that suddenly wraps around the old as if the one we’re given now is the real story that’ll bring it all together. As if.

The story starts with the old cheap ah-but-the-dead-villain-had-a-sibling trick. It introduces us to another evil queen, the original’s sister (Emily Blunt), a nice enough young woman who goes full Ice Queen when her lover turns on her. She retreats way up north into the mountains where she makes herself an Elsa-style frozen fortress, then kidnaps local kids to make an army of child soldiers. One of the kids grows up to be Chris Hemsworth, in love with a fellow soldier (Jessica Chastain) despite attachment being forbidden by their icy master. This comes to a tragic end, of course, so this is an explanation as to why he was a loner and such a good fighter in the last movie. Skipping over the events of that story with a tidy “Seven Years Later,” we pick up the thread as the Ice Queen decides she wants her dead sister’s mirror. I suppose I’ve seen worse attempts to find new conflict where it was previously well resolved the last time, but they aren’t coming to mind.

The shiny gold mirror (of “mirror, mirror on the wall” fame) was left behind when the Evil Queen died. Being a tool of evil, it sits in the castle leaking malevolence – killing wildlife, browning grass, that sort of thing. We hear from a messenger (Sam Claflin in a cameo) that it has poisoned Snow White, leaving her incapacitated for the duration of the runtime. (This is screenwriters Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin’s best effort at writing out Stewart, who doesn’t return. It stinks of a movie hobbled by contracts, schedules, and other disputes as it bends over backwards pretending that this is a story worth telling.) Snow sent the mirror to be destroyed, but it disappeared. So it is up to the heroic Huntsman and some warrior dwarves (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon, digitally shrunk) to track it down and stop the Ice Queen from swooping in and destroying everything they accomplished.

The idea of dealing with power vacuums and loose weapons of mass destruction in a fantasy context is interesting, but the movie is too thin and empty to do anything with it. There’s nothing here new, surprising, or interesting. It’s a reworking of the first film’s plot – bad queen must be stopped by band of misfits, the leader of which has a tragic history with her – mixed with action beats – fighting goblins, swirling gobs of magic – we’ve seen in every other fantasy film for decades. Helmed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, a visual effects artist making his directorial debut, the thing looks fine and has some fleeting moments of visual interest. I liked a gold-plated Theron, tricky ice walls, tendrils of tar, and a porcelain spy owl, but that’s not much to hang two hours on. This isn’t a particularly rich or novel fantasy world, and it is certainly not enriched by this new experience.

There’s a tremendous cast involved, but they have nothing to work with. Blunt and Theron sell a sniping sisterly chemistry, but of course they have the big goofy camp-adjacent parts decked out in resplendent shimmering gowns and arching eyebrows. The rest of the performers merely fit the tailored leatherwear and look competent swinging old weaponry as the predictable plotting accumulates around them. A passable diversion at best, and thudding boredom at worst, Winter’s War plays like a movie that had to be made before the public forgot about the earlier hit and consequently never figured out what story it wanted to tell or why anyone should care. The irony is that its bland action, routine story beats, and trite love-conquers-all theme is precisely what its predecessor could have been but for the spark of imagination that kept it distinctive. This is the sort of sequel that misses the point of its inspiration entirely.

How Low Can They Go? THE HANGOVER PART II

Say what you will about the 2009 surprise comedy smash hit The Hangover, it had a pretty great premise. Four guys head out to Vegas for a bachelor party, wake up the next morning with no memory of the night before, and find that they’ve lost the groom. It becomes a mystery comedy that involves stumbling through various clues to piece together enough memory of the night’s debauchery to find their missing friend and get him to the church on time.

Director Todd Phillips and writers Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong didn’t use the great premise to make a great comedy. In fact, I would say they made a solid effort that succeeds to the extent that it does despite itself. They made a mystery first, a comedy second and that’s why it works. Sure, it can be funny, but that’s not the main interest for me. It’s filled with unexpected incidents and genuine surprises that bounce along and manage to cover over the ugly aftertastes of some of the jokes. It looks good and moves quickly and, at the end of it all, the mostly unlikable characters have learned their lessons and are now, hopefully, better people for all the torture and punishment they have to face as a result of the consequences of their actions.

And that’s precisely where The Hangover Part II starts to go wrong. These characters have completed their arcs. They have gone through a hellish party and a worse aftermath and have emerged with their flaws exposed and ready for mending. The sequel takes these same exact guys (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, and Justin Bartha) and has them make all the same mistakes only much more dangerously and much more repulsively. It takes a once moderately enjoyable premise, runs it straight into the ground and keeps on digging.

This time it’s a wedding for Ed Helms, not Justin Bartha. This time, the wedding is in a small village in Thailand, the hometown of the parents of the bride (Jamie Chung). This time, the guys set off for Bangkok with the bride’s pre-med little brother (Mason Lee) in tow. He’s the guy who gets lost while Bartha manages to skip out unscathed so its once again Cooper, Helms, and Galifianakis stumbling through the city the next morning discovering the extent of the damage done. Turns out, the damage is more or less what you would expect if you’ve seen the first film, but uglier and much, much less humorous.

The events of The Hangover Part II are beyond unfunny. They’re actively repulsive and deliberately upsetting. Watching the movie is hardly enjoyable; it’s an act of endurance. It’s crass and putrid in its unquestioning giggling at a white, rich, heterosexual, ethnocentric, xenophobic, American male rampage through the squalor and poverty of the backstreets of Bangkok.

How bad is it? It’s a movie that has an extended gag about transgender sex workers with the full extent of the joke being “tee-hee, she’s a he!” There’s a joke about underage prostitution that goes something like this. Helms to a strip-club owner, asking about the missing college student: “We’re looking for a kid!” Owner: “How young?” The end credits include, among various still images, a shockingly jocular reenactment of a famous Vietnam War photograph of a close-up gunshot to the head. These aren’t jokes; they are lazy attempts to provoke laughter through ugly observations that are wrongly assumed to be funny just because they push buttons and cross lines.

What makes it all the more troubling is the relative skill with which the whole thing is put together. It’s a glossy Warner Brothers’ production with real skill in the cinematography, the editing, the set design, and in the casting, which even includes a part for the great Paul Giamatti, of all people. He gets a chance to play a Bangkok crime boss with great growly gusto that’s saddening in how much of a wasted opportunity it is. I would love to see the same performance fleshed out and put to good use in a much better movie.

All of this skill has gone down the drain and straight into the gutter with the material itself. This isn’t merely a comedy that fails through its lack of laughs or its lack of imagination (it’s practically a beat by beat transposition of its predecessor), though those are certainly big counts against it. The movie fails most of all in its mistaking vileness for standard, run-of-the-mill vulgarity and in mistaking flawed characters who learn something for beloved characters loved for their depravity. Though that last bit about why, exactly, some audiences like these characters so much may be truer than I’m willing to admit. If this makes as much money, or even nearly as much money as the first, here’s hoping that someone takes the advice of one Zooey Deschanel, who tweeted that “Perhaps hangover pt. 3 should just be called "intervention"”