Water Disappointment: MOANA 2

There’s a telling line about two-thirds of the way into Disney’s Moana 2 in which the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) tells our disheartened heroine (Auli’i Cravalho) that he understands her pain. He sighs and says “No one likes sucking at their job.” Ugh. Such prosaic, contemporary crassness is all you need to know about a sequel that studiously replaces everything magical, warm, and clever about its predecessor with empty, cold, and slapdash effort all around. Where the first had soaring melodies and life-and-death pathos, this one has wet flatulent jokes and ghostly wisecracks and endless repetition of small-scale stakes. So dispiriting. I also wondered, half jokingly, if that line was a secret cry for help from within the writing and animating ranks of the project. Maybe they, too, could see this was a pretty terrible piece of work all around and were trying to send up a flare to let us know that, yes, we’ll think they’re sucking at their job. Simply put: this is not a movie a healthy animation studio would release to theaters. That this hastily reconfigured straight-to-streaming mini-series has fallen into multiplexes as an awkward movie-shaped thing is clearly a panic decision. (I wish it’d stayed a TV show; then I wouldn’t have seen it.) After last year’s flop 100th anniversary princess musical Wish was a critical and commercial whiff, it’s clear the studio wanted something theoretically safer, more guaranteed to win back some attention and money this year. Instead, the resulting feature made me think that, for as half-baked as Wish was, at least it was trying something with its hand-drawn/CG blend and unusual (if undercooked) plotting. Moana 2 is a new low for Disney animation. It tries nearly nothing at all and thinks we’ll eat it up anyway.

It follows up the moving and amusing original 2016 effort’s well-plotted, deeply-felt hero’s journey with catchy songs—the usual Disney mode!—by giving us exactly none of the original’s charms. Its music—without the melodies or lyrics of a Lin-Manuel Miranda or equivalent—are generic poppy nothings. Forget a lack of memorable melodies; this one doesn’t even have one memorable note. Its characters have no interesting inner journeys. Even the actual journey is a flat, predictable, one-thing-after-another trip with little at stake. Moana has to find a mythical island. Then she does. Along the way she meets some new obstacles and new characters—a crew of sailing pals, a semi-villainous demi-goddess, a few wiggly monsters—and not a single one pops with delight or interest. (One’s even a grumpy old guy who keeps complaining about the story he’s in, annoyed by the unmemorable singing, awful clunky rapping, and flat attempts at comedy. I related to him the most.) Some supporting characters just fall off the narrative entirely as if their episode is over and we need not circle back around. Its a symptom of its jumble of half-hearted subplots, abandoned gags, interrupted themes. But its thin plot and dead-end characterizations were a match for the frictionless plotting and bland animation that lacks the detail and glow that the other Disney works manage. I sat stupefied as it kept slipping under my lowering expectations.

I found my mind wandering—and stay with me, this will seem like a tangent at first, but will make sense by the end—to this year’s surprise hit video from YouTuber Jenny Nicholson: The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel. I couldn’t believe I actually liked it, let alone watched the whole thing. The video really shouldn’t work. Anyone with allergies to chirpy, weirdly-lit, direct-to-camera monologues of nerd-culture exegesis (complete with some cute cosplay), not to mention those who’d never want to hear about a stranger’s vacation, would be rightly suspicious, especially as this one ticks methodically toward the four-hour mark. I was skeptical. But it’s somehow improbably one of the year’s best documentaries as Nicholson, an engaging storyteller, only starts with a thorough recounting of her miserable stay at Disney World’s poorly executed, and sooner than later shuttered, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel. She's comprehensive in her dissection of the attraction's lifespan and every error along the way, threading it into her actual footage of experiencing its failures in person. Her thoroughness itself becomes a great source of humor that accumulates laughs as it goes. Who’d have thought a recurring cutaway to a pole obstructing the view of a dinner show would be one of the funniest moments of the year? Each new stumble in her trip becomes not a self-pitying home video, but a new plank in the scaffolding for a larger argument about the current failures of the company at large.

Along the way she’s built up the evidence to land a bigger point about the dreary state of Disney’s modern business practices. From this one ill-conceived hotel—wrong on everything from the technology to the price to the design of the over-promised, under-delivered role-playing experience—she widens the lens to consider the increasingly consumer-unfriendly corner-cutting at the customer’s expense. It’s a picture of a company that thinks its name-recognition and family fandoms will keep people paying more for less. In her conclusion, she says “…maybe Disney's right, and they're too big to fail, and people won't like it, but they'll just keep coming back and paying more and more…and feeling worse and worse about it.” Moana 2 strikes me as a product of the same corporate thinking. Here’s something vaguely like what you loved before. It’s awful now, but Disney hopes we’ll keep paying for it. I found myself feeling sorry for the kids who’ll be seeing this for how low its opinion is of their interests and capacity. I found myself sad for the adults who’ll get their time wasted chaperoning those kids. I found myself depressed for the fine artists and storytellers at the studio who could do better if given the resources and directive. And I found myself, strangely enough, feeling disappointed for Moana. She was such a strong, interesting, lovable character that it seems insulting that this is what’s she’s been reduced to.

Tis the Season:HOT FROSTY, THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER, RED ONE, and CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER'S POINT

How has it been two decades since we’ve collectively added an entry to the Christmas movie canon? By common agreement that last addition has to be 2003’s Elf, which has long since passed into beloved family comedy status. You could also make arguments for its fellow 2003 adult-skewing ensemble rom-com Love Actually and 2004’s motion-capture Polar Express, if only for their perennial appearance in squabbles over their qualities or lack thereof. Since then, though there are small gems of one sort (Kasi Lemmons’ Black Nativity’s blend of musical fantasy and social issues drama) or another (the Kristen Stewart-starring playful closeted-lesbian farce Happiest Season), there’s nothing approaching the New Consensus Favorite. This, despite the past twenty years being a period with more Christmas movies per capita than ever before, thanks to Hallmark Channel’s flood-the-zone approach to made-for-TV holiday fare and streaming services’ attempts to keep up. We get what feels like hundreds of new formulaic Christmas movies every year, and the studios have more or less ceded the territory to the small screen. It’s a genre that’s been oversaturated, and it prevents good—or even memorable—ideas to surface for wide consumption and acceptance.

It says a lot about the state of cheap Christmas movies that the buzziest one of those so far this year is Netflix’s Hot Frosty. It stars Hallmark staple Lacey Chabert as a busy single woman who puts a scarf on a sexy snowman. Unbeknownst to her, it’s a magic scarf, and the snowman comes to life as a flesh-and-blood man (Dustin Milligan). There’s something unnatural and eerie about that whole thing, but an attempt at warmth and cheer follows. The holly jolly Golem proceeds to guilelessly stumble into her life and somehow cause her to fall in love. It’s a little Splash, and a little unhinged, but it’s all so sweetly, smoothly handled that you believe the characters believe it, even if you might never get convinced. It’s perched on the precipice of playing out like a parody of the TV movies it suggests passing resemblance to in its blandly digital sitcom staging. (The director is most recently a Schitt’s Creek veteran.) The supporting cast—Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio, Katy Mixon, Lauren Holly—have certainly been called upon to do arch comic work in the past. But the surprise here is that the movie is resolutely not a parody. It just is an inexpensive unambitious Christmas rom-com. The screenplay by Russell Hainline is earnestly oddball at heart, but in the execution gets its wild premise to run the most routine paces. It picks up some easy, pre-fab would-be heartwarming stuff about small towns and grief and the warmth of the season—even as it doesn’t really have anything to say about that except to have it around like so many multicolored lights and snow machines. It’s not good, exactly, but it sure is what it is. That’s par for the course on the small screen these days, when that’s just one of dozens upon dozens of seasonal time-fillers.

At least the big screen has its fair share of Christmas movies this year, too. Multiplexes are currently screening The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a pretty low-key indie family comedy based on a popular kids’ book from the 70s. It tells the story of preparations for a church Christmas pageant thrown into uncertainty by the town’s troublemakers. A family of poor, neglected children of which everyone assumes the worst show up hoping for free food from the rehearsal snack table, but soon learn the Real Meaning of Christmas. In the process, the so-called Christians involved in judging these poor children reluctantly remember that Jesus asks them to care for such as these. The adaptation is a 70s period piece done on a budget, which means sparse production design and cramped soft-focus establishing shots. It’s not helped by director Dallas Jenkins having no real vision behind the camera, leaving lots of unmotivated camera movement and stilted blocking haphazardly cut together. The thing simply doesn’t flow, and an oddly hollow sound design has a cheap echoing emptiness that does nothing to smooth over the arhythmic editing. It made me appreciate the baseline craft competency of even the most empty-headed homogeneous Hollywood product. Jenkins, best known as creator of the New Testament TV show adaptation The Chosen, clearly has an earnestness, though, and that carries across the movie’s best moments when its obviousness and simplicity strike something sentimental. It’s all a little sweet, if over-determined. But it is so thoroughly undone by its plodding, textureless craft—badly directed down to even the smallest performances, which leaves several cute child actors stranded—that what fleeting moving moments it finds are almost accidental. Not even casting Judy Greer and Pete Holmes as the kind-hearted parents of a family that wants to help the outcasts can lift the overall amateurishness.

And yet, for all that’s awkwardly small and incomplete about that picture, Red One is there to remind us big, galumphing Hollywood competence has its own irritations. Unlike director Jake Kasdan’s better action comedies—the recent Jumanji pictures, which are good crowd-pleasers built with some charm and personality behind the digital noise—this production is an entirely soulless and heartless product from beginning to end. That’s an especially tough sit for a movie ostensibly about Christmas magic. That’s literally the plot, as it follows Santa’s top security elf (Dwayne Johnson) teaming up with a smarmy bounty hunter (Chris Evans) to rescue an abducted Saint Nick (J.K. Simmons) from the clutches of a wintry witch (Kiernan Shipka). She wants to steal his Christmas powers to spread punishments to the bad instead of presents to the good. (Early on, Johnson solemnly informs Santa that this is the first year that more people are on the Naughty List than the Good List. Hmm.) What follows is lots of boring zipping around as we careen from one mirthless action-comedy sequence to the next, before ending in the same endless phony computer-generated fisticuffs in which these things always end up. It’s an enormous production with a fine foundation built entirely out of dependable cliche and then whittled away and sanded down until nothing even that complicated or funny or interesting could possibly survive. It has good makeup effects and bad green screen compositing and shimmering CG backdrops. It cuts together smoothly and always sounds loud. It has a few twinkling sparks of personality from its best actors—Simmons is good on a mall meet-and-greet, and his wife is Bonnie Hunt—and zero from its leads. (Johnson is entirely vacant in a nothing role; Evans is playing his like he’s Ryan Reynolds’ understudy.) And then it swiftly moves to stamp all of the above out, starve them of oxygen, and charge ahead into empty expressions of hollow holiday cheer. It’s a fight to save Christmas, but it can’t even save itself, let alone articulate what the holiday might actually mean.

Leave it to writer-director Tyler Thomas Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point to give us the closest we’ve got to a new great Christmas movie this year. It does so by doing something so simple that it’s really difficult to pull off: it feels like Christmas. This experiential indie is a warm, bustling, amusingly detailed and beautifully busy little picture set almost entirely within one family’s gathering on December 24th. We follow one nuclear family into a cozy house in small town Long Island where a few generations of aunts, uncles, and cousins have squeezed in for food, drink, music, presents, and traditions. Filmed with a grainy warmth by cinematographer Carson Lund, here’s a movie that captures a mood and a place and then lets its eyes and ears wander from room to room and happening to happening. There’s a generosity of spirit and casualness of approach that lets an audience gather an understanding of the characters, their histories, and their interpersonal dynamics through observation and eavesdropping, as if we’re a guest in a stranger’s home trying to figure out how they do things here. It’s a movie that paints in subtleties, attentive to small expressions, fleeting gestures, the unspoken or half said. It gathers up a group picture of this family in this moment, surrounded by a soft-glowing blur of multicolored lights, and with a wall-to-wall wall-of-sound song score (an instant plucking of nostalgia for anyone whose secular Christmas soundtracks are even partially intertwined with Phil Spector, for better or worse). It skips across this holiday night chronologically from sundown to sunup, narrowing to the early-morning experiences of a few youngsters who sneak out to spend hours wandering with other teens underneath flurries fluttering in the glow of street-lamps and strip malls. As we grow aware of various character’s conflicts, foibles, and thwarted ambitions—it’s grandma’s last year in this house, for instance—the movie grows melancholic. It becomes a moving, and quintessentially Christmassy, picture about how tradition and togetherness just barely keeps sadness and loneliness at bay. And that’s what makes it all the more special to find.

Anti-Hero: BLACK ADAM

Here we are again. Black Adam is another walloping might-makes-right superhero power fantasy. It mistakes noise and movement and non-stop violence for excitement, and assumes loud frantic explanations can pass for story. It has some good visual designs and an atypical setting that engages some novel ideas, but it’s also cloaked in a dour, murderous tone and a pace that’s so quickly cut there’s no room to catch a breath. Yet I’ve also come to appreciate the DC movies for their willingness to go overboard, for their sense of careening out of control with more characters and world-shaking developments than one cluttered feature film could contain. That seems to suit the mythological dimensions of even the lesser efforts in this particular cinematic universe. Unlike Marvel’s tidy decades-long planning and homogenous style, DC has been more often than not a chaos of outsized comic book visuals and nonsense plotting that’s concurrently too thin and overstuffed. This one locates a potentially provocative story of exploitation and imperialism—and the need for the enslaved to rise up and take over their own destinies—and buries it in a hurry-scurry plot that gets nowhere fast amidst breathless exposition and cheesecloth characterizations. It’s unsatisfying in its miss, but not in its swing.

After an endless prologue, it introduces a Justice Society (not to be confused with the Justice League) that apparently works with the Suicide Squad’s leader (Viola Davis) to tackle superpowered problems. In this case: Black Adam. He’s an ancient protector of the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom Kahndaq. He was a slave granted god-like powers by the same wizard (Djimon Hounsou) who gave the kid in Shazam his boost. Adam was asleep for thousands of years. Now awoken in modern day by a freedom-fighting professor (Sarah Shahi), he mostly just wants to bring death and destruction to the imperialist gang that rules what was once his city. They fly around on their sci-fi jet bikes and amass an entirely undifferentiated and vaguely defined army. Adam, played by Dwayne Johnson with a stony edifice and rumbling monosyllabic pomposity, floats like an indestructible block through these armies of Bad Guys, exploding them in surprisingly intense ways given the ostensible bounds of the PG-13. He loves killing those who get in his way. But instead of a simple fight for his country’s freedom, the conflict for most of the movie is that the team of shiny heroes sent in to get him under control would rather he not indiscriminately murder people with his lightning hands and speed and strength and flight. Sure, the enemies are bad, the likes of Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan) tell him. But that doesn’t mean you can just blow them apart.

So Black Adam fights these and other heroes—invincible action figures who slam power into power over and over beyond all reason—until they agree that they instead need to agree to disagree and stop the real bad guys together. The villain who basically sits out the first chunk of the movie suddenly, and literally, turns into a demon from hell, complete with devil horns and a pentagram on his puffed-up CG chest, inaugurating a whole new round of super-punching. It’s all a deadening too-muchness of a repetitive spectacle. The performers are game, and director Jaume Collet-Serra (the B-movie expert in his recent, less effective, A-budget phase) manages to whip up some appealing bombast here and there amidst the otherwise fuzzy, muddy visuals. (I especially liked the fractal planes through which Brosnan travels.) But the swirling frenzy deadens and dominates more than it entertains. I could imagine a version of the movie where it had a slightly sharper take on its politics. Coding the Justice Society as clueless American interventionists is already a step in a clever direction. Explaining their existence even a little bit might’ve been nice. The movie would still need a better shape to its story, though. There’s so much repetition of plot and action beats that one wonder why they wasted their time doing it all so quickly the first time. It may have suitably outsized potential—and a huge, booming orchestral main theme that promises a grander adventure than we get—but it’s just a bludgeoning experience to which you either begrudgingly surrender or give up on entirely.

Call of the Mild: JUNGLE CRUISE and VIVO

Jungle Cruise is a throwback to a throwback to a throwback. It’s Jaume Collet-Serra’s Stephen Sommer’s Steven Spielberg’s homage to adventure serials. And then there’s a whole lot of other recent(ish) live-action Disney adventure movies — Pirates of the Caribbean, National Treasure — thrown in on top of the fact it’s loosely based on an attraction from Disneyland et al. The wonder is that it works at all. The jaunty opening has much promise. It’s 1916, a time when a story like this would’ve made fine pulp magazine reading. We find a scrappy woman explorer (Emily Blunt) infiltrating a stuffy old boy’s club scientific association in jolly old London in order to heist an artifact that will lead her to a magic flower deep in the Amazon. There’s some clever sneaking and light fisticuffs, ending with a near-pratfall involving a window, a ladder, and a double decker bus. Neat. From there, the whole set up is archetypal adventure fun as it goes through some stunt-show paces. To the plucky woman we add her persnickety posh brother (Jack Whitehall) off to the jungle where they hire a punning, slumming skipper (Dwayne Johnson) willing to hire his ramshackle boat for their purposes. Hot on their tail: the Kaiser’s U-boat-captaining son (Jesse Plemons) who speaks in a loopy accent and talks intently with wild animals; and some gloopy undead conquistadors who look like rejected designs from Verbinski’s Pirates.

So the variables are there for a fine adventure, every cog in place. Even the thin, vaguely African Queen dynamic plays off some light crackling dialogue at first. Johnson does sturdy, unsurprising work as a steady rock, while Blunt wears the pants in the transaction, and the character actors spin around the margins to keep the plot and the comedic relief puttering along. There’s a baseline competency here, surely courtesy director Collet-Serra, who, with smaller genre efforts from the disturbing adoption horror story Orphan and economical shark attack picture The Shallows to a string of Liam Neeson’s best thrillers, often does more with less. Here, though, in the grinding machine of the biggest studio around, he ends up doing less with more. As the movie goes on, the stunts get less focused on charming old school pleasures like dangling from ropes and swinging off boats, and more on endless CG haziness and weightless peril that drags on and on. By that point the characters have never really sparked with personality beyond the surface appeal. Even the increasingly boring puzzle that is the central quest — it’s both too simple to care about, and too complicated to figure out without arbitrary exposition — never generates more than a token amount of suspense. The fizz goes out of the confection way too early and then you’re just stuck watching the animatronic figures passing for people as the screenplay’s stiff hydraulics makes them herk and jerk. The whole thing is dopey and baggy and corny and chipper and artificial. In other words: it’s a theme park ride. Guess that’s the point.

Somehow Sony Animation has been more consistent about letting the distinct personalities of its filmmakers shine through their projects. Earlier this year was the charming, hectic, sharply funny The Mitchells vs. The Machines, which definitely fits the Gravity Falls sweet-and-silly creepy-and-clever mold from which its makers hail. Other high points include Spider-Verse making comic panel sense out of CG swoops. Even the Hotel Transylvanias have been an interesting push-pull between the cartoony look of animator Genndy Tartakovsky and the hangout vibe of star Adam Sandler. The studio’s latest is Vivo, the story of an adorable kinkajou, a small critter that looks like a cross between a monkey and a raccoon. He performs with an old busker on the streets of Havana. If you didn’t go in aware this was a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, you’d know the instant the animal opened its cute little mouth to sing-rap his way through an introductory song. It gives the movie that distinct wordy patter and lilting melodies that made Hamilton and In the Heights such good song scores. Sure, Miranda’s seemingly been everywhere the last six or seven years, and sometimes crosses over into the omnipresence that invites backlash — or at least people growing tired of his formula — but I still get a little musical theater lift out of his syncopated enjambment and complicated rhymes. Vivo feels like his work through and through, from its loners longing for belonging, to families struck with loss, and communities coalescing around what makes them special. That the screenplay is credited partially to Quiara Alegría Hughes, Miranda’s Heights co-writer, makes that continuity all the more apparent.  

The plot here is pretty standard kids’ movie stuff, but it’s done up in pleasant style and set to a fine beat. Vivo’s elderly owner gets an invitation to attend the final concert of his old unrequited love, a famous singer who moved to Miami when they were younger. He can’t make it, for sad reasons, but Vivo gets his hands on a love song the man wrote for her explaining his true feelings. So it’s up to the kinkajou to get it to Miami himself, reluctantly tagging along with a rambunctious tween Floridian to get there in time. The simple story jets through the Everglades, meeting other animals along the way, while the girl’s mother gives chase, and the big concert draws nearer. The whole thing has the hurry-scurry energy of some Pixar-style moves, without working up to that level. And there’s never much sense that the ending’s in doubt. But, however thinly drawn, the designs of the characters are cute, and the look of the animation is painted in popping primary colors. And there’s a zip to its plotting that seems to understand the story is simple and the motivations are broad. Even when it leans down hard on sentimentality, there’s plenty of time spent in a sweet spot of cartoon silliness and unexpected little gags. (I liked a despondent love-sick bird, and, elsewhere, some overzealous Girl Scouts in pursuit of our leads.) There’s also the bouncing energy from consistently apportioned musical numbers keeping the project afloat. They may not be top-tier Miranda compositions (maybe the Moana vet is saving his really great stuff for his forthcoming return engagement with Disney Animation), but there’s a certain charm and cleverness to the Latin rhythms in music and lyrics. I couldn’t help but grin when an imaginative girl spins a swirling hallucination out of a dance track about following the beat of her own drum, or at a climactic number in which a speedboat zooms toward a neon Miami as different characters sing about running out of time. And in the end it’s a sweet-hearted all-ages movie about appreciating family you have and what talents you can share. It’s nice.

Jungle 2 Jungle: JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL

These new Jumanji movies Jake Kasdan (of Walk Hard fame) is doing are big frictionless machines of weightless frivolity. They’re adventure films without stakes. They have character based comedy swanning about in broad burlesque stereotypes. They have violence without danger, eccentricities without personality, sex appeal without sex. They’re basically meaningless, and I can hardly retain details of them. And yet they’re something like fun in the moment, and I think of them only fondly. That they happen to be hugely appealing nothings strikes me as a matter of their throwback appeal to a time where a blockbuster can be premised simply on the hook of a high concept and the promise of Movie Star personas on brightest display. The first one — oh-so-loosely inspired by a slim picture book, and the Robin Williams movie of the same name about a jungle board game come to life — took a bunch of teens and yanked them into a jungle adventure video game they had to win to leave. It took obvious delight in seeing The Rock and Kevin Hart and Jack Black and Karen Gillan playing up insecurities of their inner teen players while expressing bewildered curiosity at their adult avatars’ caricature aspects. The Rock is shocked he’s strong, Hart he’s short, Black he’s fat, Gillan she’s midriff-bared male gaze fantasy, and so on. The Next Level does it one better, in the now old fashioned tradition of a sequel just redoing its predecessor with slight twists here and there. This one adds new characters and scrambles the avatars, so even though we’re once more tromping through moderately clever CG action sequences that vaguely comment on the samey repetitions of video games — rope bridge races! dune buggy chases! mountain fortress sneaking! — the personalities are funny and fresh. Now The Rock is impersonating a cranky grandpa played by Danny DeVito by scrunching his face and shouting, and Hart is a charmingly befuddled Danny Glover by lowering his voice and slowing it to just south of molasses. They’re continual delights, surprising and amusing. (And that Black plays the black teen and somehow never irredeemably crosses a line counts as a small Hollywood miracle.) It’s fun! The action is free of sense, while adhering to strict formula. The body swap silliness and jokey quips come frequently enough to keep the laughs coming and the slapstick, though still oddly underutilized for the premise, works just fine. And then where I found the movie oddly half-moving is in its earnest play with identity, a causal, inclusive, warm-hearted fluidity that makes something charmingly sweet out of The Rock looking with grandfatherly love at Awkwafina and calling her "grandson."

Beach Movie: BAYWATCH

Exactly the sort of big, dumb, industrial-strength, R-rated action comedy primed for the chattering classes to claim superiority over, Seth Gordon’s Baywatch movie is so base, so low, and so sincere in its shameless tittering silliness and commitment to creaky formula that of course it’s a good time at the movies. It’s shot with phony glossiness, filled with hot bods in skimpy clothes, and ready to go for endless banter and gross-out tangents alike. (A lengthy sequence of revulsive body horror comedy in a morgue is the movie’s indefensible nadir.) But, although it’s uneven, it’s also largely a good time. It has the grinning comportment of a genial half-sleazy/half-silly goof, just far enough over the top you can see its makers winking as they nudge their borrowed concept – overzealous lifeguards interceding beyond their authority – in the ribs. We’re not talking full on Lord/Miller meta in a screenplay credited to a committee of six writers, but just a dusting of self-awareness to the pleasantly empty formula. 

Gordon fills the ensemble with a collection of aspiring lifeguards under the macho man benevolence of Dwayne Johnson’s master swim survivalist. He’s the best at what he does and, in typical The Rock movie fashion, is only held back by those who won’t let him fix everything himself. It’s how his AWOL rescue chopper pilot in San Andreas doesn’t read as completely despicable when he absconds with Coast Guard property, abandoning his post to save his own family. Here he’s whipping a callow Lachte-lite scandalous Olympic swimmer (preposterously ripped Zac Efron) into shape as his replacement, while the other lifeguards (runway ready Alexandra Daddario, Ilfenesh Hadera, and Kelly Rohrbach, and chubby sight gag Jon Bass) help out where they can. The whole thing could be dripping in leering objectification, a la the original slow-mo bounce. But despite plenty of ogling, it’s all good-natured and balanced between the genders: heaving cleavage and rippling pecs alike, and suits hugging every sculpted tuchus tightly. There’s something refreshingly harmless about its equal opportunity eye-candy frivolity. 

A generic drug-smuggling action plot airlifted right out of the 1980s passes for story – Priyanka Chopra’s kingpin (or should I say “queenpin?”) is a stylish, affable villainous presence – but for all the fireworks that conflict sets off – and satisfyingly so, with action beats pleasantly brisk – it’s the loose hangout vibe of the picture that makes it work more often than not. In its likeably slumming stars, splashy shiny half-faked beachfront cinematography, and sandy shaggy digressions (including some half-painful cameos from the original series), the whole endeavor is so agreeably low. Although I still wonder if Gordon (having made the likes of Four Christmases and Horrible Bosses, decent for middling affairs) will ever make a fictional comedy as good as his 2007 doc The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (still the funniest work of his career), this big-screen junk-TV revival is his best attempt yet.

Fast Past: THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS

No matter how ridiculous or improbable the Fast and Furious series became on its journey from humble street-racing Point Break riff to international heist pictures to blockbuster secret agent spectacles (what an evolution!), it always retained its emotional core. Until now. Even at peak jump-the-shark, when Seven had characters not only jump a sports car between the upper levels of two gigantic skyscrapers, but also survive multiple head-on collisions and a rollover accident down the side of a rocky cliff, it could still manage an emotional sendoff to the late Paul Walker. (Play the opening notes of “See You Again” and even the stoniest of gearhead hearts might melt a smidge.) They may have become unbelievable vehicular superheroes, but they still really cared about each other and even their most outlandish feats made sense in the context of the lengths they’d go to show that love. Alas, the eight installment in the seemingly unstoppable franchise, The Fate of the Furious, ditches its core consistency of character relationships for a misguided attempt to mix it up. It’s almost fun – starting with a silly street race prologue and some dark notes of discord – but then bungles the execution.

This time out Dom (Vin Diesel), the patriarch of the makeshift family, betrays them and joins forces with Cypher (the great Charlize Theron, a welcome if underutilized addition), a hacker bent on sending our team chasing her fetch quests. She wants the world to fear her, so she needs weapons of mass destruction. Makes sense. But the leverage she has over Dom to force him to help her, kept fruitlessly secret for the bulk of the runtime, only goes so far. Sure, it’s a tortured melodramatic twist, but the movie doesn’t milk suspense out of the betrayal. His friends pulled into the conflict (Ludacris, The Rock, Tyrese, Michelle Rodriguez, and Nathalie Emmanuel), chasing him down New York City streets and across frozen lakes, register only mild disappointment in his switch, and shrug when the truth of his double-double-cross is revealed. They’re too busy outrunning a nuclear submarine or avoiding fleets of technologically hijacked self-driving cars. Those are cool, goofy, over-the-top sequences full of revving engines, spinning wheels, and crashes both real and digital. But when director F. Gary Gray (who usually has decent thriller instincts; see The Negotiator or the chases in his Italian Job) simply cuts between careening car coverage and close ups of the people behind the wheels without thinking about what they’re thinking, it’s hard to care. The film has Idiot Plot in the extreme, keeping characters (and often us) outside important information while exhibiting no curiosity about how anyone would react in these topsy-turvy scenarios.

Screenwriter Chris Morgan has created a world in which every villain, no matter how horrible their actions, eventually becomes their friend. It made sense when undercover cop Walker fell in love with their ethos and fell in with their grey-area car culture back in the first movie. And it even (sort of) made sense that lawman The Rock would, despite chasing after them, begrudgingly call on their help in Part 6. Here we have Jason Statham, who has previously murdered one of their best friends and blew up Dom’s house, freed from prison by mysterious government suits (Kurt Russell and Scott Eastwood) to join the team. How do the characters feel about this? Other than a few joshing quips thrown his way and a one-scene threat of Rock-sized retribution, it fades away as he becomes just another familiar face behind the wheel. In this context, no wonder Dom can willy-nilly switch sides and its nothing more than a MacGuffin for the plot engine strung between the action. it hardly matters what anyone does because everyone can survive and anyone can be redeemed. 

Now the stakes can be nuclear war and the movie, aptly dropping the fast from the title, feels turgid and vacant and slow and, worst of all, just plain boring. This has been a series so good at retooling, I hope they can find a better route next time. They had such a good escalation going for six films, building on what works and pivoting before it got stale. But now it’s stuck in a futile need to top themselves with each outing, going bigger, dumber, louder, longer. The strain is showing. This one has apocalyptic stakes and yet nothing to care about. Characters and cars careen through cartoonish outlandish destruction without breaking a sweat, or an emotional beat that lands anything but false. To the extent it's watchable, it is because it's drifting off affection for its own past.