High Buffoon: THE RIDICULOUS 6

I can’t imagine The Ridiculous 6 will exist in the public imagination as much more than the response to a slew of trivia questions. It’s the answer to: What was Adam Sandler’s first direct-to-Netflix feature? What 2015 comedy had some of its Native American extras walk off the set in protest? What movie featured David Spade as General Custer, Vanilla Ice as Mark Twain, Blake Shelton as Wyatt Earp, and Dan Patrick as Abraham Lincoln? As you can see, the bar isn’t set too high for this Western riff starring and co-written by Adam Sandler, who continues his attempts to make comedies with as few jokes as possible. It’s part of a peculiar pattern in which a passable Adam Sandler comedy (like the nasty, gross, and more funny than not That’s My Boy) does worse at the box office than his movies that are lazy (Grown Ups 2) or lethargically offensive (Blended). At least with Netflix keeping a tight lid on their viewing numbers, it’ll be hard to say how much audiences respond to an irritatingly insensitive movie that’s mostly lukewarm Western tropes pushed a few inches further into silliness.

The plot is awfully simple. (If you think, “the better to hang a bunch of jokes on,” you’ll be sadly mistaken.) Sandler plays White Knife, a white boy raised by an Apache tribe after his mother died. He discovers his long lost father (Nick Nolte) only to find that the old man has run afoul of a mean band of bandits (led by Danny Trejo). In order to save his dad, he wanders around rounding up a Ridiculous posse of his six freshly-discovered half-brothers, the joke being that pop slept with such a variety of women in the Wild West that he’s the biological father of a diverse group of men including Terry Crews, Taylor Lautner, Rob Schneider, Jorge Garcia, and Luke Wilson. They get into arguments and confrontations in all manner of typical Western locales involving a whole bunch of actors (Harvey Keitel, Steve Zahn, Will Forte, John Turturro, and more) who must’ve decided they’d like a Netflix paycheck. No one on screen seems to care, projecting a low-energy void of interest in every direction.

Stretching out to two hours in length, the movie putters around saloons and High Noons, prairies and campfires, hangings and shootouts. Once in a while there’s a funny joke – an Apache chief says, “Sometimes the white man speaks the truth. Like one in 20, 25 times” – but mostly there’s dead air, or attempts to wring humor out of mental disabilities, musty racial stereotypes, and anatomical references (and fluids of every kind). It’s the sort of movie where Sandler’s attractive Native fiancé (Julia Jones) is named “Smokin’ Fox,” a tone-deaf, cringe-worthy hat-trick of objectification, appropriation, and ignorance. Sandler with co-writer Tim Herlihy (in their eleventh collaboration) could’ve straight-up parodied Westerns (the title clearly looks back to The Magnificent Seven and forward to The Hateful Eight) loading the frame with ZAZ-like anything-goes goofs Airplane! style. (Somehow I doubt Blazing Saddles social satire was ever within their reach.) Instead they often play things relatively straight, hoping peculiar casting, oddball characters with prominent physical traits (buck teeth, false eyes, etcetera), and disgusting gags (like decapitation or defecation) will elevate a subpar script into something funny.

It’s not actively repulsive, but the jokes aren’t there and the pace is beyond belabored. At least director Frank Coraci (who previously directed the star in Blended, Click, The Waterboy, and The Wedding Singer) provides filmmaking of a marginally less lazy type than usual Sandler fare, though not as smooth and fast as Chris Columbus did last summer with the better, but still mediocre, Pixels. More interested in looking like a Western than having good jokes, Ridiculous 6 hired cinematographer Dean Semler, whose work on the likes of Dances with Wolves and Young Guns certainly informs his widescreen landscapes here. It looks and moves like a real movie, which is faint praise, but when you’re comparing it to the inert overlit blandness of something like Grown Ups 2, it’s worth pointing out. But reasonably pleasant framing doesn’t alleviate the desert of humor so dry and slow tumbleweeds roll through with greater regularity than laughter. It's depressing and endless.

Love and Death: THE BOOK OF LIFE

Inspired by Mexican legend, The Book of Life is a computer-animated film that gives itself the freedom to make its own distinct visual style. Where other CG family films are content with plasticine cartoony versions or finely detailed approximations of our world, this energetic creation unfolds as a constant and consistent visual marvel all its own. Director Jorge R. Gutierrez and his team of artists invent a world of the imagination, a 19th century Mexican village populated by archetypes and passions sitting atop a fantasy realm. The character designs look like carved wooden puppets, hinges for joints, clothes and facial features painted on. It’s a unique look, a blend of 2D and 3D that places computerized bounce and expressiveness over ancient techniques. This tension in the style helps animate a story explicitly about history, about remembering, about myth and fate.

The screenplay by Gutierrez and co-writer Douglas Langdale is a set of nested episodic stories. We start with a museum guide (Christina Applegate) leading a tour group of silly kids through a display of Mexican history, preparing to tell them an old story about a special Day of the Dead, the November holiday for remembering those who have passed on. And so back we go into a mythic, exaggerated past Mexico where, in a small village, two little boys are in love with the same girl. One of them might just marry her. The rulers of the underworld, a calavera-faced doll with a candle-topped sombrero for a queen (Kate del Castillo), the other a snaky, bearded, winged sorcerer king (Ron Perlman), make a bet on which boy will get that chance. The film then plays out on two planes of existence, a mortal realm where the trio grows into young adults turning friendship into potential romance, and a supernatural realm populated with spirits, ghosts, and magical beings.

Warm voice performances flesh out the central romantic triangle, with a conflicted bullfighter who’d rather be a singer (Diego Luna) and a town hero with a magic medal (Channing Tatum) vying for the attention of the kindhearted mayor’s daughter (Zoe Saldana). In a refreshing change of pace, the jealousies aren’t too fraught and the girl makes clear she’s not even sure if she needs a man in her life, and certainly not one who’d hold her back. Eventually, fate steps in and traps a character in the afterlife, forcing a scramble through phantasmagoric imagery alluring, morbid, and madcap to resolve plot threads in a way that can bring living and dead together to make things right. Imagery includes skeletons, deities, flames, buffets, floating walkways, waterfalls, flickering candles, a rolling labyrinth, and a sentient book, to name a few.

Told in typical family animation style, the movie has fast paced romance and daring do, zippy throwaway gags, musical numbers, and lessons about believing in yourself and loving your kith and kin. But under Gutierrez’s direction, the film is more eccentric than the usual CG family friendly fare. The musical numbers are a collection of sweet new ditties and preexisting tracks from a bizarrely diverse group including Biz Markie, Radiohead, Elvis, and Mumford & Sons. But it’s really the copious cultural specificity that sells it, from those songs played in a fun mariachi influenced style, to the thick accents, luchadores, bullfighting, and authentic Mexican touches in every corner of the design. It’s worth seeing just to marvel at the sights, appreciate the attention to detail, and to hear an endless parade of wonderful Spanish and Latin American voices (Hector Elizondo, Danny Trejo, Placido Domingo, Gabriel Iglesias, Cheech Marin, and more).

But it’s not just a delight to see and hear. The story has genuine weight and wonder, ultimately moving in its portrayal of familial and cultural history and the restorative power they can bring. The love story is broadly appealing and sturdily constructed, and the trapped-in-the-underworld plotline has mythic resonance while being a great excuse for beautifully imagined fantasy. I was invested in these little CG wooden puppet people’s lives and wanted to see them work their way to a happy ending as brightly colored, briskly paced, and vividly fantasized as their trials and tribulations.

Best of all is the tenderness with which the subject of death is treated. It treads lightly and compassionately in creating a fantasy about life and death that respects old traditions and meets its target audience on their level. It’s an exuberant and gentle macabre tone that’s entertaining and weirdly comforting. Death is natural, it says, but the lessons and love left behind by the dead can provide you the strength and courage to keep on living. Their stories can help you write your own. That The Book of Life can do that and be fast, funny, and stylishly involving as well makes it feel all the more welcome.

Not-So-Perfect Getaway: IN THE BLOOD

I’m rooting for Gina Carano. As an action star, she has plenty of promise. She’s a former mixed martial arts fighter who carries that physicality with great calm and capable choreography into a screen presence that’s compelling and intriguing. Her weird blend of unruffled expression and tight body language gives her a real ease that draws me in, even in the center of the terrible cheapo actioner that is In the Blood, her latest film. After her first lead role in Steven Soderbergh’s sleek Haywire and a choice supporting turn as The Rock’s right-hand woman in Fast & Furious 6, she deserves better than the woefully generic, bungled B-movie she’s headlining here. It’s the kind of movie that should have a simple hook, but takes its nugget of pulpy interest and muddles it up with belabored backstory and dropped subplots that add up to nothing much, stuck somewhere frustrating between trying too hard and not trying hard enough.

Director John Stockwell has made that his trademark as of late, with slight B-movies like Cat Run and Dark Tide that are too lazy to be effective and too clumsily plotted to fully activate what small simple pleasures they could generate. It’s no wonder that his best film of this kind (leaving out his actual best film, the nicely observed 2001 teen drama Crazy/Beautiful) is his simplest. That’d be 2005’s diving-for-treasure thriller Into the Blue which used a nicely photographed beach-side setting as an excuse to stage sequences of moderate suspense when it’s not ogling stars Jessica Alba and the late Paul Walker, hired to look good in swimwear and filling their roles splendidly. Still, it’s nothing more than a barely passable matinee diversion on a lethargic day.

In the Blood also takes place by the beach, looking at times like a nice paid vacation for all involved. But the movie spends little time in bikinis and almost as little time taking in the scenery. Just as well, since the movie is shot on some of the cheapest, ugliest digital video I’ve ever seen professionally projected in a movie theater. Sometimes, Stockwell cuts to pixilated cell phone video (shot on what appears to be circa 2003 technology), smeary surveillance feeds, and chunky GoPro footage, the better to make us grateful for what subpar cinematography we get, I suppose. The story follows Carano as a newlywed honeymooning on a small Caribbean island with husband Cam Gigandet. He goes missing in the aftermath of a suspicious zipline accident. She sets out to find him and get to the bottom of the apparent conspiracy to keep her from the truth about why he was taken.

As if that’s not enough, we also get flashbacks to Carano’s character as a teenager. She’s toughened up and taught to fight by her father (Stephen Lang) who tells her “scars are tattoos with better stories.” She has killed multiple people in self-defense on separate occasions. We hear she met her husband at Narcotics Anonymous. So she’s had a hard life. Why all this overly tragic backstory is loaded on top of this relatively simple story is beyond me. If a movie’s going to traffic in stereotypical character types as thoroughly as this one, why bother explaining? Maybe screenwriters James Robert Johnston and Bennett Yellin thought we would want to know why Carano is such a good fighter. Thanks, but no thanks. No Gene Kelly movie ever felt the need to take the time to painstakingly let us know how his characters became great dancers.

Into the Blood is lazily plotted, with little energy to the mystery. Methinks a problem might be the movie’s assumption that we’ll miss Cam Gigandet. He’s so painfully unconvincing in the opening scenes I was all too happy writing him off as an unseen MacGuffin character for most of the movie. (The reveal of the details of his fate is a big let down, too.) As Carano goes looking for him, scene after scene is shaggily, sloppily assembled. The action is sporadic, in murkily shaking shots, and torturous without impact. When not brawling, scenes are brightly overlit. You can see the actors sweating and squirming in front of the camera, trying and failing to make the tortured twists and clunky dialogue work.

The ensemble includes Ismael Cruz Cordova, Amaury Nolasco, and the always-welcome Danny Trejo as locals who spend their time helping and hindering the search. They’re fine, I suppose, but utterly indistinct. Most everyone is just there to move things along and not pull focus from the star. She’s great, but so underserved by the material that she fails to live down to it. If the story was sharper or the ensemble more vividly sketched, maybe she’d have something to work off of. The best part ends up being the wonderful Luis Guzmán as a laid-back local cop who has exactly zero interest in the situation in which Carano’s found herself. I liked that about him. I could relate.

Together Again, Again: MUPPETS MOST WANTED

Muppets Most Wanted finds Jim Henson’s loveable felt-and-fur goofballs up to their usual good-natured meta trickiness and bountiful warm-hearted silliness. Writer-director James Bobin, co-writer Nicholas Stoller, and songwriter Bret McKenzie, who revived the franchise in 2011 with the surprisingly nostalgic and emotional – but no less gut-bustingly funny – The Muppets, are upfront about what their new picture is. It’s a sequel with the Muppets fresh off the success of their last movie setting off on a European tour where they cross paths with a jewel heist in progress. If that sounds partly like a riff on 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper, the original Muppet sequel, it is and the movie owns up to it, winking right from the start. The opening musical number is “We’re Doing a Sequel,” a song full of funny barbs at the business of Hollywood and a clear tip of the hat to Caper’s curtain raiser “Hey, a Movie!” It’s a movie that loves movies, but loves the Muppets even more. And that’s irresistible.

In their opening number, which starts right after the closing number in the last movie, the gang sings about being a “viable franchise” and preparing what’s technically their “seventh sequel,” warning that means it’s “not quite as good.” The Muppets are perpetual optimistic underdogs, lovable misfits who scramble around with manic showbiz energy, eager to tell you that the show must go on. Their personalities are so agreeably constant, chaos and order held in perfect, immutable manic amusement. It’s fun to see them, as performed here by Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson, Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta, David Rudman, Matt Vogel, and Peter Linz, bounce off of each other in the old ways. Fearless leader Kermit the Frog, exasperated, is always wrangling Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Animal, and all the others, competing egos and eccentricities that constantly threaten to derail their variety shows.

As usual, story exists mainly to provide a rigid genre form for the Muppets to push against, moving through charmingly near-slapdash sequences of jokes and songs. Most Wanted’s plot involves the world’s greatest criminal mastermind, a Kermit-lookalike frog named Constantine. He plots to swap places with the showbiz icon and use the cover of the Muppet tour to burgle museums at every stop. Most of the movie finds the fake Kermit faking his way through interactions with the characters we know and love, while the real Kermit plots to escape a goofy Siberian gulag. Tina Fey plays the warden, snarling, but softhearted underneath. Fellow prisoners include Ray Liotta and Jemaine Clement with thick Russian accents and Danny Trejo playing himself. (His description of his “triple threat” attributes is priceless.) At least the guards and the prisoners can agree on something, when they sing a song about how their prison is the best state-funded hotel in all of Russia. Kermit just wants out of there.

The Muppets gang moves along unaware of the switch for a while, though some grow suspicious about the changes in their old pal Kermit. He talks with a gargling vaguely foreign accent now, but their new tour manager Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais, playing up his shiftiness) assures them their friend just has a cold. They continue with their plan to stage Muppet Shows in a collection of European cities, every place an occasion for good culturally specific jokes. In Berlin, the theater marquee reads “Die Muppets.” Seeing this, Statler and Waldorf wryly wonder if the reviews are in already or if that’s the suggestion box. Meanwhile, a French INTERPOL agent (Ty Burrell, with a chewy Clouseau accent) and Sam the Eagle bumblingly investigate the robberies that seem to be following the Muppets around.

The impostor storyline allows the franchise a level on which to comment upon its own evolution. Once more Bobin, Stoller, and McKenzie prove their love for the Muppets. Their version of these characters is not an exact recreation. How could it be? The Muppets haven’t been exactly the same since Jim Henson died, and later when Frank Oz stepped away. No matter how good, Bobin and his crew are impersonators. But Most Wanted, like The Muppets before it, is filled with such affection for the characters and the smart silliness of Henson’s original vision, we’re better off with these films than none at all, or, worse yet, soulless profit-driven corporate property perpetuation. It’s a movie that knows what made the Muppets most lovable and sets out recreating it as best it can, with love and care. The filmmakers are true to the Muppet spirit without suffocating their own comic sensibilities in an effort to recreate the work of the irreplaceable original Muppet artists. The film’s story is resolved because Muppets are true to themselves and to each other. I’m glad to see their new stewards are as well.

Muppets Most Wanted is very good entertainment, loaded up with smart references and broad craziness. It’s a satisfyingly warm and inviting brand of inspired high/low comedy, a barrage of puns, vaudeville sketches, dry asides, sloppy slapstick, and cornball dad humor, with wall-to-wall witty musical numbers, lovable homage, and tickling satire. There’s also a fleet of random and inspired cameos, a good half of which kids today won’t get and most are sure to baffle kids of the future. In other words, it’s a Muppet movie. I had a smile on my face the whole way through. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Needs Sharpening: MACHETE KILLS

With Robert Rodriguez, there’s never a question of authenticity in his pulpy prefabricated cult films. He’s a filmmaker following his passions and interests, which largely sit squarely within a desire to reconstitute comic books, B-movies, and exploitation pictures in a variety of partially-postmodern configurations. At his best, he doesn’t just borrow from iconic and disreputable genre ideas and finds a way to create some honest iconic moments of his own, images that stick in the brain long after context starts to fade. I’m thinking of the opening rival-spies-in-love montage of Spy Kids (his greatest), Johnny Depp’s bleeding eyes partially hidden behind sunglasses in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and Laura Harris soon to stalk out of the skin she’s showing off to reveal her otherworldliness in The Faculty. His best movies are movie movies, pure playful pleasure.

That’s what made Machete, the 2010 expansion of a spoof trailer from his Grindhouse collaboration with Tarantino, enjoyable. Its clever blend of button-pushing political commentary and bloody Tex-Mexploitation action swirled around a stoic performance from craggy tough guy character actor Danny Trejo as the eponymous ex-federale defender and protector of underdogs everywhere. The movie was knowing without being too knowing, laugh-out-loud exciting, not because of faux-shoddiness, but through sheer force of earnest silliness. You could never accuse Rodriguez of being above cartoony violent gags. I still smile when I recall the sequence that found a baddie stabbed with a meat thermometer, a funny enough moment that becomes even better when the building explodes and the man’s corpse flies into frame, the thermometer still in place, now reading “Well Done.”

Rodriguez is always having fun. The question is whether the audience gets to have the fun with him. In the case of Machete Kills, there’s not a single moment as enjoyable or memorable as what happened to that meat thermometer. It’s a movie that’s content to run its gory gags into the ground. I mean, you’ve seen one guy get sucked up into the propellers of a helicopter or boat engine, you’ve seen them all. One is a shock. A dozen is quite literally overkill. The deliberately silly sequel finds Machete recruited by the President of the United States (Charlie Sheen, credited here under his birth name, Carlos Estevez) to track down Mendez (Demian Bichir), a Mexican madman. This mastermind wants the U.S.A. to invade Mexico with the goal of cleaning up the drug cartels and thinks threatening to launch a missile towards Washington D.C. will help make up the President’s mind. Not while Machete is an option.

The convoluted plot soon involves a motley and intriguing cast made up of Oscar winners and nominees, disgraced celebrities, a sitcom actress, former child actors, and a pop star. Amber Heard plays Miss San Antonio, who is secretly a federal agent assigned to be Machete’s handler on this mission. On his way to find Mendez, he runs across a brothel filled with militant prostitutes (led by Alexa Vega, a dozen years ago a co-star of Spy Kids) under the direction of a madam (Modern Family’s Sofía Vergara) who takes the term maneater uncomfortably literally. Her daughter (Vanessa Hudgens) supposedly knows how to find Mendez. Complications arise, and soon a string of assassins (killer cameos for Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Antonio Banderas, and Lady Gaga) and a villainous weapons tycoon (Mel Gibson) want a piece of Machete too. Eventually Michelle Rodriguez, returning from the first film with her army of underground justice-seeking Mexicans, rolls into the picture as well.

It’s all fairly self-involved as it largely ditches the sociopolitical digs of the first film for adolescent snickering, repeating gags over and over with diminishing returns and otherwise overstaying its welcome. The balance is all off, running through CGI viscera repetitively splattered, twisting around without much momentum, and picking up a nasty habit of offing its female characters with little thought the instant the plot is done with them. This is a movie that thinks a machine gun bra is the height of humor and then proceeds to go no further. It’s worth a smirk, but not much else, especially when the whole movie plays out like one half-baked idea after the next. I bet screenwriter Kyle Ward (working from a story from Rodriguez) thought they seemed funny at the time.

And yet, as exasperating and only fleetingly entertaining as I found Machete Kills, Trejo doesn’t overplay his hand. Machete remains a great pulpy character, tough and no-nonsense, ready to get the job done. Even as the film grows unsatisfying around him, he’s a steady presence that keeps things from falling apart entirely. The movie doesn’t end so much as stop, a series of faux-advertisements promising that Machete will return in Machete Kills Again…In Space! These clips from an as-yet-unmade film, a groovy sci-fi shoot-‘em-up with late-70’s Roger Corman-style effects, are the best part of the very real movie you have to sit through to see them. Now that looks like fun. Maybe Machete Kills is too much of the same thing. I’m ready to launch with Trejo and Rodriguez into the stratosphere and they’re stuck retreading the same old ground.

On High: A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR 3D CHRISTMAS

Writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have found the sweet spot for Harold & Kumar silliness and it only took a hit of Christmas to do so. (But, not even a week past Halloween, don’t you think it’s a little early for Yuletide in the multiplex?) The first film to feature the stoner pals was 2004’s Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, an ambling, crude film in which they were too high to find their way to hamburgers at White Castle without running into all kinds of problems. Was it funny? Some thought so. I found it had its charms, but, even at 88 minutes, it was a tad on the tiring side. Then came 2008’s Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which took away most of its predecessors defiantly ambitionless smallness and replaced it with self-important Bush-era satire that, while agreeable, sucked out much of what made the first film so low-key.

Now here we are with A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, a title that seems to scream out that the screenwriters have gone further astray when in fact they’ve dialed back. As this picture begins, Harold and Kumar haven’t spoken for years. They’re living very different lives. Kumar (Kal Penn) lives in his old small apartment, constantly smoking weed with his new nerdy roommate (Amir Blumenfeld) and stewing, lamenting the loss of his relationship with his old girlfriend. Harold (John Cho), on the other hand, is a married banker trying desperately to make sure Christmas will be perfect for his wife (Paula Garcés) and her family. Not only will his very scary father-in-law (Danny Trejo!) be spending the holidays with them, but he’s also bringing the whole extended family along as well as the Christmas tree that he has personally grown for 12 years to be the perfect holiday adornment. Needless to say, Harold is finding full-fledged adulthood stressful.

As luck would have it, a giant joint addressed to Harold is delivered to the old apartment on Christmas Eve, so Kumar does the right thing and brings it over. Harold’s father-in-law has loaded up the whole family and driven them into town for midnight mass, leaving the tree in his son-in-law’s care, so he’s there alone to greet his old friend. As they haltingly reacquaint themselves, Kumar lights up the joint. Harold, who has long given up the habit, scolds him and tosses it out the window. A gust of wind flips it back into the house and burns down the tree. Now, the two guys have to head out and find a tree of the same size and perfection in order to save Harold’s reputation with his father-in-law.

It’s a plot that turns out to be perfectly pitched for these guys, with higher stakes than merely getting to White Castle, but not so overheated to include Guantanamo Bay. It also proves that these characters have a charming knack for finding trouble, even when they’re sober, at least some of the time. Their race to find a tree gathers reluctant support from Kumar’s roommate and one of Harold’s co-workers (Thomas Lennon) and his baby. Their difficult, but not impossible, task is interrupted by strange obstacles punctuated by bouts of bad taste. The search soon involves a car crash, the Russian Mafia, drugs, guns, random violence, a giant Claymation snowman, surprise encounters with old friends, beer pong, intimidating tree salesmen, Neil Patrick Harris, an elaborate song-and-dance number, a waffle-making robot, a painful recreation of A Christmas Story’s tongue-on-a-cold-pole scene recreated with an even more sensitive body part, and Santa Claus himself, complete with his flying reindeer. It’s gleefully goofy, with first-time director Todd Strauss-Schulson further enlivening the sometimes disgusting and, truth be told, often funny script by chucking things at the camera in 3D just to make sure we’ve gotten the full extent of the jokey concept.

This is a film that will go anywhere for a joke. But, unlike the first two, which felt blunter and coarser, this installment balances its crudeness with sweetness. This is a thoroughly, irreverently secular, spectacularly hard-R, Christmas movie that nonetheless, in its shocking, subversive way, reaffirms the basic meaning of the holiday. Beneath the non-stop crude references and raunchy dialogue, this is essentially a story about friendship and family and uses its holiday setting to help the characters learn to appreciate each other, reconcile their differences, and become better people in the process. In that way, it’s also a casually sweet riff on evolving male friendship. That may be the biggest surprise of all, that this loose, aimless, goofy movie with enough vulgarity to ensure it’s self-selecting audience will be a small one, is at its core just a particularly filthy spin on pure sentimentality. Harold and Kumar have (sort of) grown up! Like its predecessors, this third H&K adventure feels less than the sum of its riffs, but it hangs together better as a movie, complete with actual narrative momentum and the series’ highest rate of inspired scenes to insulting ones. Besides, can any movie that puts Danny Trejo in a Christmas sweater be all bad?

Schlock and Awe: MACHETE

The latest film from Robert Rodriguez, this time sharing director’s credit with editor and special-effects artist Ethan Maniquis, is Machete. It’s based on a fake trailer that he created to show before Planet Terror, his faux 70’s exploitation film that was half of Grindhouse, his genre double-feature throwback collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. But you don’t need to keep up with all the levels of meta filmmaking at work here to enjoy Machete. Sure, it’s loud and sloppy, simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped, but this movie is alive, ambulatory with a crazed B-movie spirit and chockablock with goofy, groovy grindhouse gore. It’s the type of movie that, when you hear a doctor explaining the length of the human intestine, you know that it will be valuable information in an upcoming action set-piece.

The great, craggy Danny Trejo slashes his way through the film as the mysterious man known only as Machete. He’s out for revenge on not just one, but two clearly defined revenge paths. Machete’s out to avenge the death of his wife at the hands of an evil, samurai-sword-wielding Mexican drug lord (Steven Segal, of course) and out for revenge against a double-crossing political slimeball (Jeff Fahey). Then again, to put the plot so simply is to ignore great swaths of exposition that are occasionally relevant to the forward momentum and ultimately needed for the film’s big shootout climax.

This racing explosion of schlock and awe manages to work in plot threads about a sort of Underground Railroad for illegal immigrants led by Michelle Rodriguez and a government agent who is on her tail and is played by Jessica Alba. There’s also a group of vigilante amateur border patrollers led by Don Johnson and a red-meat xenophobe senator, none other than Robert DeNiro, who whips up his supporters with ugly racism. After all of that, there’s still room enough in the movie for the troubled wild-child played by Lindsay Lohan and the Catholic priest played by Cheech Marin. One of them is playing against type.

The cast gets to riff on their personas just as much as the movie itself riffs on its inspirations. Trejo steps up and ably fills a role to which a career of playing tough-guys has led him. Lohan’s entrance is great, as is her character’s arc, which is a perfect metaphoric blueprint for a comeback. Segal is the most purposefully entertaining he’s been in a long time, maybe even ever. Fahey, fresh off his scene-stealing stint on Lost, is a perfect growly villain, DeNiro is fantastic, if a little underused, and Don Johnson is made exceptionally sinister with his eyes constantly hidden behind gleaming sunglasses.

This is easily Rodriguez’s best film since Spy Kids, though that says more about the weakness of Rodriguez’s last decade of work. Machete is a rush of junky influences with a spirited 70’s vibe. With so many plot threads and character types mingling with the brute-force efficiency of the bloody action beats, the movie is inescapably messy. But those action scenes are more fun than not, hyper and stylish while still perfectly understandable in construction. And the movie’s a wicked satire that’s, you know, about something real, current and tangible and actually dares to draw blood with its bite. This is sledgehammer-satire that moves with a force and purpose that agitates for basic human rights and sensible immigration policy. The satire’s not exactly coherent, and it’s certainly not clearly explained, but it’s sharp and hilarious nonetheless and the images have lingering power. A priest’s bank of surveillance monitors is arranged like a crucifix. A senator’s racist rant of a campaign commercial intercuts footage of border crossings with extreme close-ups of wriggling insects. A heavily armed Machete walks unharmed into a villain’s house because the guards think he’s the gardener. This isn’t exactly great art – it’s not even an entirely consistent piece of action filmmaking – but it has a raw excitement that carried me along and kept me entertained.

Night of the Hunter: PREDATORS

With Predators, director Nimrod Antal continues his streak of consummate B-movie craftsmanship, following the better-than-you’d-expect Armored, by making his creature feature chill and thrill with efficient, streamlined artistry. Of course, his film is no less silly at its core than its Predator predecessors, but it still manages to work, on average, better. It’s certainly not Antal’s fault that the film ends up not that great. It runs out of stream just when it should be ramping up, but for the majority of its runtime, Predators is just diverting enough.

The film transposes the original’s earthbound alien hunter concept into a more otherworldly setting. It opens with Adrien Brody, as an ex-military mercenary, waking up while plummeting from the sky, wearing a parachute that automatically opens. When he lands, he finds himself joined by other tough figures from around the world. There’s the grizzled Danny Trejo, the tough Alice Braga, the overwhelmed Topher Grace, the slimy Walton Goggins, the gruff Oleg Taktarov,the stoic Louis Ozawa Changchien, and the strong Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. They’re all deadly – well, except for Grace – and they’re all very angry. It soon becomes clear that they’ve been kidnapped and dropped onto an alien planet to be hunted by the Predators. Why does it become clear? Because Adrien Brody’s a really, really good guesser.

For most of the film, the characters dodge traps, shoot at aliens and try to survive. Antal deploys the special effects with a surprising visceral force. The mix of practical and digital effects is very convincing; the images have a heft and danger that is hard to achieve in this age of cheap, easy CGI. When the actors tumble down a hill, avoid falling spikes, or splash over a waterfall, it looks and feels like real people performing physical stunts. This extra spike of old-school danger is enhanced by Antal’s great eye for compositions and ability to hold a shot for longer than modern schlock usually allows.

And the movie’s certainly schlock. The Predator series strikes me as having one of the most limiting concepts of any franchise. I mean, once you’ve seen one ugly alien hunter stalking a group of people, you’ve seen them all. But, it’s to Antal’s credit, and to the credit of screenwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, working from a concept by producer Robert Rodriguez, that this picture moves and thrills as much as it does. It’s convincingly exciting and scary, moving with a slimy speed that zips things along. The movie really works, bringing the low-rent summer fun in mildly satisfying, if often unsurprising, ways.