Junk Movies: M3GAN, MISSING, PLANE,and COCAINE BEAR

All hail junk movies! This has been a particularly good couple months for low-expectations genre pictures. If the health of the movie industry, and theatrical distribution, can be measured in the sheer number of simple, passably diverting matinee programmers, then 2023 is already looking up. It has given us, variously, killer robots and missing persons and bad flights and a drugged-up bear. Are these great movies? No. But they deliver on their modest promises, and sometimes that’s exactly enough.

Take M3gan, for instance, a killer robot movie pulled off with some panache. It stars Allison Williams as a workaholic toy designer who gets custody of her orphaned niece. To cheer the child up, she brings home a prototype of her latest device—a life-sized A.I. doll in the form of a tween with dead eyes and blonde bangs. The expensive toy takes its programming to protect her new owner a little too seriously. Soon it’s slipping loose from the bounds of its algorithms and hunting down snarling dogs and sneering bullies. There’s not even an iota of suspense as to where it’s all going—it’s a robot-amuck slasher in form, and a cracked Amblin family story in mode, with a bit of arch genre play in its tone. But the telling is fun, with committed performances, particularly from Williams’ frosty yuppie, her cute, sympathetic ward, and the eerie smooth gestures and seamless contortions of the dancer-like stunts from the eponymous robot. There’s even a soupçon of Silicon Valley cynicism to her tech giant’s willingness to crash through ethical concerns to get M3GAN to market. They’d wish they hadn’t, if they live to tell the tale. You couldn’t claim the movie is a fount of originality, but it does precisely what it sets out to do and does it well enough. That’s a fine matinee.

The latest all-on-a-computer-screen movie is Missing, yet another in what could be on its way to its own neat little sub-genre. The best of them remains 2015’s spooky haunted-Skype-call Unfriended, which is exactly as unsettling as the internet and its effects on our young people can be. This new one comes from the screenwriters who brought you the desktop thriller Searching, a movie with John Cho, in a fine performance, stretching credulity by having an improbable number of tabs open and FaceTimes running while looking for his vanished daughter. Leave it to Missing to get a better balance, partly because its Gen-Z lead (Storm Reid) is the one looking for her MIA mom (Nia Long), and partly because everyone knows this is an overheated mystery. It’s mostly compelling all the way through, as Reid clicks around through Gmail accounts and TaskRabbit prompts, scrolls through TikToks and Snapchats and Venmos, and stumbles onto some pretty lurid twists that are pleasingly shocking. And there’s a moderately clever resolution, too, that uses the logic of its technological screen-based gadgetry for a fine finale.

In Plane, Gerard Butler plays a pilot who’d make nervous fliers in the audience feel a little bit better about their next trip. After all, if the guy flying the plane would go through all this to save his passengers, then surely he can safely get you to Detroit on time. The movie finds Butler’s study blue-collar professionalism well-matched for a simple thriller. His plane gets hit by lightening, and he miraculously lands safely on an obscure island ruled by brutal pirates who’d love to have some hostages. Tough luck. The movie then devotes itself to hoping the passengers can dodge violent dangers while the pilot attempts to call help and repair the vehicle for an emergency escape route. The picture itself is merely functional thriller mechanics in style and pace and script, but the professionalism on screen makes it work. Butler is a believably sturdy man of action, a regular guy who can stumble through a fist-fight with the best of them. He’s weary, but worthy. The others in the cast support well, from the anonymous growling villains (a touch stereotypical, perhaps), to the passenger with a shady past willing to help take up arms (Mike Colter), to the guy in the command center back home (Tony Goldwyn). It’s one of those movies that barely feels like its working, but doesn’t not work either, and then has me thinking “go-go-go!” by the time the thing’s about to attempt take off.

Elizabeth Banks directs Cocaine Bear with a cheerful disregard for the value of human life, and, all things considered, a fairly permissive and blasé attitude toward cocaine. (When one innocent kid admits to having sniffed a little, a motherly nurse says, “ah, you’ll probably be fine.”) It’s loosely—looooosely—based on a true story about a 1985 drug runner who dumped his stash in a state park, and then a mama bear got high on it. This telling makes her into a CG serial killer, which makes the movie a bit of a cartoony goofball slasher picture, with a wide range of buffoonish characters traipsing around until they’re inevitably mauled in a variety of half-suspenseful sequences. On one side you get the likes of Margo Martindale and Jesse Tyler Ferguson hamming it up with big comedy energy. On the other you have Keri Russel and the late Ray Liotta acting more or less like it’s a straight drama. Straddling both approaches are Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson, Jr. and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. They all are serious-ish, but know where the jokes are, and toss them at unexpected angles. I suppose they need all of the above to pull off such a strange mix, with sloshing sentimentality and pitiless gore and a queasily sliding morality. That it works at all in its base, dumb way is credit to Banks’ willingness to commit to the strange premise, and the workmanlike excellence of a talented cast and crew that you rarely catch condescending to the material.

False Idols: GODS OF EGYPT

A big, lumbering, gaudy, gold-plated fantasy set in Ancient Egypt, Gods of Egypt is a modest collection of oddball flourishes buried under an explosion of convention and generic effects. It’s idiosyncratic in all the small details, but overblown and undercooked in the broad sweep of its tedious and predictable quest narrative. Behind this eccentric production is Alex Proyas, a director of blockbusters who brings such total commitment to his ideas that you have to admire the force of his personality shining through, no matter what you think of the end results. He’s given us the death-haunted pop Goth The Crow, the sci-fi noir Dark City, the popcorn tech ethicist actioner I, Robot, and the genuinely apocalyptic disaster conspiracy picture Knowing. Those are nothing if not big swings. But they can’t all connect big, hence his latest. Gods of Egypt is his worst, but only because it clearly got away from everyone involved, a mess of ideas and impulses at which a studio kept throwing money when a comprehensive rewrite would’ve been a better idea.

The film finds Egypt ruled by its Gods, towering gold-blooded giants who demand the praise and obedience of their small, humble mortal subjects. Lazy Horus (Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is about to ascend to the throne when his Uncle Set (300’s Gerard Butler) takes the crown for himself. To add injury to insult, Set plucks out Horus’ diamond eyes and locks them in a vault. This casts the land into a villainous darkness that should be familiar to anyone who has seen this sort of thing before. The plot proper kicks off when a spirited human thief (Brenton Thwaites, playing the thin, pretty, bland hero) makes a deal with Horus. If he gets the God his eyes, then the God must find a way to save the poor boy’s grievously wounded One True Love (Courtney Eaton in gowns cut for maximum cleavage) from the clutches of the underworld. That’s all pro forma fantasy nonsense. The real glorious goofiness is in the details.

This is a movie in which a bald Geoffrey Rush pulls the sun across the flat Earth’s sky in a boat floating above the atmosphere, stopping periodically to do battle with a ginormous space worm. It features magic immortals who can turn into grotesque cartoony animals or extrude armored plates from their skin like Egyptian Transformers. It has Chadwick Boseman as an egotistical know-it-all God who clones himself a hundred times over, and Elodie Yung as a Goddess who can find anyone with magic sand, provided her magic bracelet keeps her literal demons at bay. There are waterfalls from outer space, Rubik cube pyramid puzzles, a crumbling sentient Sphinx, a flying chariot pulled by giant scarabs, and a days-long line of deceased souls ready to blissfully commune with a pulsing energy they call the afterlife. This is all pleasantly straight-faced odd, a mix between high fantasy and low cornball camp. Proyas takes the mythology just seriously enough, and stages some fun sequences, like two massive fire-breathing snakes attacking our heroes, or thundering fisticuffs atop a 2,000-cubit high obelisk.

But the screenplay by Dracula Untold’s Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless makes a miscalculation in becoming one of those fantasy stories that spends more time filling us in on its rules, caveats, backstory, prophecies, curses, and other assorted gobs of tedious exposition than in actually running through its main story. As a result the brightly lit movie feels endless and consequence free, since the magic is arbitrary and prone to change (with laborious explanation) if the next scene calls for it. There’s no weight. Add to this a feeling of a salvage job, with mismatched scenes, awkward jumps in logic, and plot holes papered over with afterthought narration and incessant tin-eared exposition, and the whole thing starts giving off a whiff of sloppiness. I mean, this is an Egyptology fantasy with a cast of Brits, Americans, Danes, Aussies, anyone but an actual Egyptian. (Butler’s brogue has to be the least fitting Cairo speaking voice since Edward G. Robinson’s in The Ten Commandments.) This is a clearly a movie that’s the product of an interesting directorial imagination hobbled by more than a few unfortunate decisions. 

High-Flying Adventure: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2

Like all good fantasy sequels, Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes the world its predecessor built and expands upon it. The first film introduced us to the tiny island of Berk where a village of Vikings lived to fight off dragons preying on their flocks of sheep. It followed Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the shrimpy son of the leader (Gerard Butler), as he learned dragons aren’t so bad once you get to know them. By the end, he’d trained a fierce and adorable one he named Toothless as a pet and saved his village from destruction in the process. Now, as the sequel starts, the village lives in peace with the dragons, having realized they’re lovable, loyal, useful animals. There’s no conflict there, so the movie pushes forward, opening five years later on Hiccup and Toothless flying out over the ocean exploring new islands and finding new species. When they land on what is to them uncharted territory, he takes out his hand-drawn map and adds a new page, as fitting a symbol for the start of a new chapter as any.

Writer and director Dean DeBlois, who served as co-writer and co-director with Chris Sanders on the first film, takes the light boy’s adventure and enriches it by foregrounding the boy’s evolution into a man and bringing the cast of background characters more clearly into focus. While struggling with his status as heir, Hiccup, now taller, more toned, and with a touch of stubble on his chin, is drawn into conflict. First, he runs into dragon trappers, led by a hunky, ambiguously bad guy voiced by Game of Throne’s Kit Harington. They’re mercilessly poaching the majestic beasts. But that’s merely prelude to bigger trouble care of a distant warlord (a growling Djimon Hounsou) who threatens hostilities with his army of captive dragons. With a name like Drago Bludvist, pronounced “blood-fist,” he’s born to be bad. Riding out to help quell this new conflict are Hiccup’s father, as well as a likable ragtag band of villagers (America Ferrera, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig) who last time were background color, but this time come into focus as their own distinct characters with subplots and emotional throughlines. 

The first time around, the dragon training was a highlight, a boy-and-his-dog dynamic between a scrawny teen and a jet black, bat-winged, puppy-dog-eyed salamander. Never better than when in flight, the 3D animation dipped and spun with immediacy and vertiginous beauty. It was a thrill. This time, the thrill comes not just from that relationship and the dragon flying, which is as nicely and excitingly rendered as before, but also in the conflicts complicating this fantasy world. The threatened destruction is at a higher magnitude, the characters have more at stake, and the scale towers over them with subwoofer-rattling rumblings. New dragons include a skyscraper-sized alpha beastie that breathes icy breath leaving jagged icicles in its wake. The damage to dragons is also more personal. The introduction of a mysterious figure in the wild, a protector of dragons (Cate Blanchett) who unlocks further secrets of the species, finds time to highlight sliced wings and missing limbs, the result of near-misses with hunters. There’s an ecological weight to this film, a sorrow and responsibility.

The dragon protector has an important connection to Hiccup and much to teach him. The way the plot unfolds finds surprisingly rich emotions to tap into as their relationship is fully explained. The scene where this woman meets Hiccup’s father is astonishing in its tenderness and maturity. It could’ve gone in many big ways – tearful, scary, or regretful – but instead goes for a hushed whisper and a sweet folk song. The film is all about surprising with those kinds of scenes. An early moment between Hiccup and his love interest has a loose conversational quality as they flirtatiously tease each other. A late turn that deepens and darkens the relationship between boy and dragon is unsettling and a real shock, making the resolution all the more stirring. There’s seriousness to the storytelling here that respects both the fun of its colorful fantasy and the emotional lives of its characters.

It’s a movie about responsibility, aging, death, abandonment, and environmental destruction. You know, for kids! It’s bright, vibrant, has a soaring score and rousing action. But there’s a melancholy beneath that’s unexpected in its gravity. I appreciated how respectful of its audience the film is, unwilling to talk down to children and not feeling the need to stretch for adult attention. It’s simply a good story told well. And that’s more than enough to captivate. The animation is gorgeous, digital-painterly tableaus of fantasy landscapes and fluid character movement. The images within stir the imagination. A swarm of dragons flutters about like a flock of birds. Rising slowly and silently out of the clouds, a lone rider wearing a horned mask and carrying a rattling staff, sits atop a massive creature. A boy flies his dragon into the wild, and returns something closer to a man. It’s a terrific, exciting, involving adventure told with great feeling and a good eye.

Blood and Sand: 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE

In many ways, 300: Rise of an Empire is just more of 300. Set before, during, and after the ancient Battle of Thermopylae as slowed-down, amped-up, and all around exaggerated in the first film, this sequel has the same rhythms in cluttered battle sequences, obviously fake CGI backdrops, and unwavering focus on masculine bodies in motion. It has the same attention to chiseled abs, bulging loincloths, big swinging swords, and geysers of digital blood. The Greeks are still presented as wholly good, dudes fighting for nothing more than freedom itself. Their Persian foes are still the darker-hued, effeminate others who want nothing more than to kill because they hate freedom. Setting up such divisions as essentialist markers of good and evil obliterates nuance and grows awfully queasy.

Last time we watched Persians slaughter 300 Greeks, Spartans making a doomed stand for their country. So dedicated to their dunderheaded ideal of authentic masculinity as combat alone, the film was a loud and monotonous gargle of stylized bloodlust. Noam Murro (whose only other film is the 2008 Sundance movie Smart People, for whatever that’s worth) may have taken over the director’s chair from Zack Snyder for the sequel, but Snyder remained co-writer and producer on the project. There’s a consistency of vision here. It’s easy to imagine cutting both 300 films together into one long four-hour slog. Both are almost perversely head over heels in love with martyrdom to the point where the insistent glorifying of war is hard to take.

But where Rise of an Empire manages to best its predecessor, slipping past some of the inherent ugliness, is in its marginally better modulation. The violence is spread out enough to create some emotional dynamics. It’s not all blustery machismo and stop-start slow-mo. We have time to see the new characters, some of which actually stand out from the sea of bare chests and scruff. A blandly noble Grecian naval officer (Sullivan Stapleton) gathers men and boats to meet a Persian fleet heading their way. Eva Green of Casino Royale and The Dreamers plays his Persian counterpart. She’s given a bloody awful backstory and dressed in stylishly flowing battle gear. She storms through every scene she’s in, slicing and dicing her enemies while chewing up the scenery and scene partners with equal vigor. I knew intellectually that she was the villain of the picture, hell-bent on burning Greece to the ground and impaling our freedom-loving heroes to the masts of their ships. But there’s such a delight in watching her storm about, ready to behead anyone who annoys her, quick to snap and growl her threats and strategic decisions with equal venom. I wanted to be on her side.

If the film was leaner and more focused on the clash between the wild-eyed Green and the beige Stapleton it would’ve been quite a kick of bloody artificiality. You’d think it’d be harder to mess up something as simple as bland good guys plus interesting bad guys equal big battle scenes, especially when the screenplay isn’t leaning so heavily on its root xenophobic political undercurrents and embracing its homoerotic visual interests. Instead, we have to sit through endless convolutions. We see the backstory of Persian king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), as if we were all yearning to see how he was a shrimpy, stubbled heir who mourned his father by taking a dip in a magic hermit cave pond and emerged a waxed and bejeweled giant. We also have to listen to Lena Headey grieving husband Gerard Butler by giving a pep talk to her troops in voice over exposition that seems to last about half the movie before finally disappearing, only to return near the end.

But if its greatest sin is boredom, that’s still a great deal better than its predecessor. It’s still an amped up expression of pure violent id, but it’s not as ugly. Because there are characters who are more than reductive warmongering symbols, it’s easier to get invested in their plights. The gender dynamic is far more palatable, even gripping at times in its breathy intensity. Green and Stapleton have a scene of tense negotiations in the middle of the picture that has a curious sensual charge, a spark of physical attraction between them that then filters into their armies’ clashes over the rest of the movie. It’s a love-hate magnetism that’s a welcome undercurrent to the sometimes-exciting over-the-top action surrounding it. And because both armies are balanced in this way, all the shouted prejudices don’t seem so icky. Murro shoots it all in imitation-Snyder style, all gleaming filters and gauzy grain, but instead of simply copying 300’s brownish sludge he invites a bit more color to the palate, using the film's trading the desert location for ocean to his advantage. If we must have a sequel to 300, at least it’s easier on the eyes and not quite so hard on the intellect.

Team America: OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

There’s a lot of literal flag-waving going on in Olympus Has Fallen, an oppressively rah-rah, militaristic, xenophobic slab of red meat filmmaking. Its basic structure is that of a mid-90’s Die Hard rip-off with the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart) and a few other high-ranking officials (including the Vice President) trapped in a bunker below the White House when it’s taken over by North Korean terrorists hell-bent on forcing American troops out of South Korea. Seems like they could have come up with a less complicated plan to get that point across, but a villain’s showmanship is everything in a movie like this, I suppose. The John McClane of it all is a former Secret Service agent played by Gerard Butler. He’s working a desk job down the street when 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is attacked and overrun. Never one to flee from danger, he finagles his way into the burning building and starts picking off the bad guys one by one while trying to rescue the hostages.

Strategy is not all that applicable to anyone’s actions here. It’s like a slasher movie with the slasher as the good guy and it grows tedious awfully quick. Butler lurks around shooting down enemies, getting into bruising fistfights and torturing captives for information about their overarching plans and the identity of their leader (Rick Yune, who, after facing off with Brosnan’s Bond in 2002’s Die Another Day, seems to have suffered a diminution in the complexity of his plotting). As in McClane’s case, there’s convenient radio communication that allows taunts to flow both ways. There’s also a command center of mostly unhelpful suits down the street where Angela Bassett and Robert Forster wring their hands and hope that the nuclear launch codes are not divulged. Morgan Freeman’s there, too. As Speaker of the House, he’s the acting president and gets the biggest (unintentional) laugh of the movie when he gives a speech reassuring the public that the government remains 100 percent operational. Is that like the old joke where the guy asks the doctor if he’ll be able to play piano after the operation and is happy to hear an affirmative, since he’s never played piano before?

With films like Training Day, King Arthur, and Shooter, Antoine Fuqua has proven that he knows his way around suspense or action setpieces. Here, directing from a script by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, he manages a couple, but they both come very early in the runtime are a mixed bag anyways. The first, a quick bit of business involving a limo accident, is a tight and surprising opening. The second, an extended bit of disaster moviemaking, is a jarring and upsetting sequence of collateral damage. It involves the terrorists flying a large military plane right down the National Mall, firing heavy machine guns, casually picking off pedestrians before crash-landing near the White House and serving as a signal to the enemy combatants hidden in the crowd to start the siege. (The plane also takes out a big chunk of the Washington Monument on the way down; I’ll leave you to parse the nationalist Freudian significance of that image.) While this is undeniably effective, it’s also excessive: a bombastic misappropriation of 9/11 imagery to form a jingoistic call to arms with overwrought patriotic bloodlust not too far behind.

Fuqua certainly shoots the whole sorry thing with total commitment to an increasingly ugly premise. But as it drones from one smoldering, darkly lit corridor to the next with the occasional bloody death or two, I lost any interest I may once have had. It’s not often you can say that a movie about terrorists holding the president hostage in order to detonate nuclear weapons within American borders feels like it has nothing at stake, but that’s the case here. As the bad guys’ numbers drop with regularity and Butler barely sustains a scratch and is always correct in his decisions, any sense of danger in the plot is gone. It’s all so over-the-top that it falls entirely apart into generic noise typical of the genre: terse, unfunny quips, fake news clips with carefully non-specific logos, and loud booms now and then to make sure the audience hasn’t fallen completely asleep.

Quick Look: THE BOUNTY HUNTER

As written by Sarah Thorp and directed by Andy Tennant, The Bounty Hunter is a film entirely lacking in interest. It’s a thriller with no thrills, a comedy without laughs, a romance without chemistry or even an ounce of genuine sentiment. This is a shrill, snarky mess that moves slowly and dumbly from plot point to plot point, grinding down any talent to be found in the cast or any goodwill to be found in me. Gerard Butler is a bounty hunter who is hired to track down his ex-wife, newspaper reporter Jennifer Aniston, who just skipped bail. This is a painful, odious comedy which sends two characters that convincingly dislike each other hurtling through set-pieces of uninspired slapstick and then expects us to believe that they fall back in love. Not even Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell could have made such inanity plausible. Could we reasonably expect more from Butler and Aniston? The supporting cast is filled out with talented, likable, funny people like Christine Baranski, Jason Sudeikis, and Jeff Garlin, but the movie is so overlong, ugly and unconvincing, that they don’t make much impact. To see this movie is to nearly drown in ferocious stupidity, gasping for the rescue of the end credits.

Training Day: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

How to Train Your Dragon is a well-crafted and memorable computer-animated film. It has likable characters, crisp dialogue, and smooth, detailed, expressive animation. It has a rousing score and great widescreen compositions. It’s exciting and more than a little moving. I was pleasantly surprised. The film comes from Dreamworks Animation, but the creators are Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who created Lilo and Stitch, the last genuinely great film to come out of Disney Animation. They bring with them all of the above, but also a deep sense of story and character that finds no need for pointless celebrity gimmickry or in-jokes laced with quickly dated references, the symptoms that have plagued most of Dreamworks’s prior output.

The plot feels familiar. In the past ten or fifteen years, nearly every animation studio has put out an epic adventure-comedy about an outcast young person whose unappreciated talent just might end up saving his community. That’s Disney’s Hercules, Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, Warner Brother’s Happy Feet, Sony’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and even Dreamworks’s own Kung Fu Panda. But what Sanders and DeBlois bring to this formula is energy and passion, resulting in a telling that feels so expertly realized that it becomes the kind of filmmaking that follows formula without ever once feeling stale.

Besides, the world the filmmakers create is interesting and fun all on its own. It’s hundreds and hundreds of years ago in an unspecified place and time in a Viking village that has a problem with big pests that carry off sheep and burn down buildings in the middle of the night. Those pests just happen to be dragons. The whole village trains to fight the beasts which flap their way out of the darkness on still and quiet nights. This feels like a fully realized fantasy setting, not just something slapped together out of spare parts.

The leader of the village is the most fearsome dragon-killer (Gerard Butler), but is ashamed of his wimpy son (Jay Baruchel), a weak Viking who is constantly building contraptions. The son is sent to dragon training with the other young people, including the cutie (America Ferrera) he has a crush on. The group of youngsters is led through training by a tough old dragon-fighter (Craig Ferguson) who has a peg-leg and hook-hand to show for his many years of experience. But the son has a secret. One night, he shot down a rare breed of dragon and has been visiting the creature in the forest. It has broken its tail so it can’t fly away. The two of them form a bond, with the son helping the dragon back into the air, and the dragon helping the son learn about dragons. The animation with the dragon is expertly handled. There is no dialogue; the creature remains an animal. All emotion and expression comes through with body language and the eyes. When the dragon finally takes flight, there are several scenes of stunning flight so perfectly realized that I felt like I was flying right along with them. This is a tender and well-told story of emotional interaction between man and beast.

The film leads, as it must, to an epic confrontation with revealed secrets, strong declarations, abrupt changes-of-heart, and fulfillment of romantic subplots all leading up to a huge battle against the true villain. But to say it in that way is to make it sound boring or unexciting. That’s just not the case here. The action is lots of fun; it’s incredibly energetic and well-staged with a great sense of space and energy. The gorgeous animation puts stunning images on screen, not just in terms of detail, but in composition and framing as well. I wasn’t even bothered by the 3D. It seems to work well, and I write that as someone who is still a firm septic when it comes to the longevity or usefulness of the gimmick. The 3D here shames even the much-hyped technique in Avatar in effortlessness and usefulness. It never once pulled me out of the experience.

This extends to the rest of the film as well. It’s an exciting, fast-paced and absorbing story. The voice acting is superb across the board. The actors give soulful, heartfelt performances that are matched by the performances the animators give in bringing them to life. The movie doesn’t quite generate the same emotional wallop that Pixar has become so good at, nor do all the supporting characters add up to much more than scenery. But this is still a very strong effort, high quality all the way. The film is a total delight from beginning to end.

The Ugly Truth (2009)

The latest example of mind-bogglingly retrograde stereotypes mixed in with mind-numbingly lame comedy is The Ugly Truth, a raunchy romantic comedy with no wit, no style, and no substance. It features Katherine Heigl as a high-strung control-freak career woman harpy with an inability to relate to another human being in a non-business setting. Her foil, and ultimate dispenser of romantic advice, is the crass big-mouthed lout played by Gerard Butler who is hired as a commentator on male-female relationships by the TV station at which she works. They hate each other, but deep down they love each other. Surprised? At least the movie is utterly forgettable, however unbearable. It’s already slipping away from my memory as I type. It's a movie so forgettable, it has been out nearly a month and I kept forgetting it was released.

Indifferently shot by dullard director Robert Luketic, The Ugly Truth is all ugly, no truth. It’s a grim, joyless experience, a grueling death-march of a rom-com. The movie plods from one stupid scene to the next, giving me ample time to build my hatred towards it. It offers no real insight into relationships, instead bludgeoning audiences with banalities and filth substituting for substance. Any laughter generated must be purely Pavlovian: “This is a comedy; therefore we must laugh when an actor gives a winking spin to a line.” The movie plays out like a lame PG-13 movie made even lamer by interjecting R-level profanities in an attempt to make the material edgier or more truthful. It's sad and lifeless to watch normally charming actors get dragged through a story like this.

Not only is it unknowledgeable about human interactions, but it knows less about the TV business. The movie imagines TV-news as a land with cameras magically ready to capture all kinds of crazy situations and endless airtime on which to run them. Apparently, a technically flawless broadcast can be pulled off with almost no planning and with monologues, comedic diversions, and heartfelt emotional confessions meandering throughout the broadcast. There’s little comprehension of the real mechanics of a live television production, giving the TV-business aspect of the movie slightly less credibility than the shoddy relationships developing between the broadcasts. It’s like Broadcast News with all of its strengths removed. The Ugly Truth is nothing more than the sort of dumb "men are like this; women are like that" shtick that's the stock-in-trade of hack comedians everywhere.