False Flag: AMERICA: THE MOTION PICTURE and THE FOREVER PURGE

One of the worst movies of this, or any, year is America: The Motion Picture. It’s an ugly, loud, obnoxious, endlessly puerile, painfully unfunny, repugnantly self-amused experience. The animated picture — stiffly composed in a style that appears copy-pasted from some unholy dated amalgamation of faux-anime and semi-Flash cheapness — is a broad goof on American know-nothing historical ignorance. It turns the revolution into a pastiche of half-remembered names and excessive comic book violence with bold-faced names turned into action figures smashed haphazardly together. Beginning with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Will Forte) by werewolf Benedict Arnold (Andy Samberg), the colonies’ revolution against the British is assembled Avengers style by dumb bro braggart George Washington (Channing Tatum). He wanders the land getting everyone from Samuel Adams (Jason Mantzoukas) and Thomas Edison (Olivia Munn) to to join the cause. Eventually Geronimo and Paul Bunyan show up, too. (The tone is set early when a group shot of founders at Lincoln’s funeral includes MLK and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Okay, that last one made me almost smirk.) This slipshod burlesque is an idiot’s tale told with facile fury and scattershot politics. It’s a queasy mix of lazy liberal bromides (a pile of AK-47s are wheelbarrowed in from Y’all Mart) and conservative bloodlust. At times it’s parodying blind American exceptionalism; other times it just is that. Sometimes it puppets its figures for left-wing critique; other times it’s the worst ahistorical points scoring. But I suppose some of this might go down easier if it landed even one good joke. Most of the time I sat there stupefied that anyone, let alone the marquee names attached, actually spoke the flat, nasty nincompoopery that passed for dialogue in its thinly sketched goofs.

To make matters worse, the movie lacks not only a sense of wit or perspective, but also anything approaching a good or even watchable aesthetic choice. The whole project from Archer alum Matt Thompson and Mortal Kombat screenwriter Dan Callaham has South Park flatness and JibJab movement. Its images are eye-meltingly unpleasant, down to the frequent face-exploding, blood-spurting gore, and the sound is a constant screech of noise and vulgarity. The politics in these awful drawings are roughly similar, a wild mess that’s neither here nor there. This is an unsteady, deeply irritating feature length mix of Adult Swim loopy edginess randomness and sub-Family Guy vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake choked in self-impressed referentiality. (Though, to call the movie sub-Family Guy is like calling a Porta Potty sub-outhouse. And that’s still too flattering.) The movie is as fruitlessly deranged as it is pointlessly exhausting, and as boring as it is convinced its excesses will be entertaining. Instead it’s a movie for anyone who thought the boisterously prejudiced Team America: World Police was too subtle and polite. Of all the problems we have as a country, a lack of vulgar folks willing to treat our history as a choose-your-own-adventure is not one of them.

Far better the dystopia of The Purge to, ahem, attempt a purge of our nation’s ills. In that world, you’ll recall, the New Founding Fathers decreed a yearly holiday where all crime (including murder, the warnings always helpfully remind) is legal. The movies have, at best, been a vibrant stew of high-minded allegorical social commentary smuggled and shouted through low-down exploitation thrills—even if it’s never quite as high or low as it could be. At least they have spirit. They have a keen understanding of the societal breakdown they display, how a free-crime night indulges the worst impulses of the worst among us, and inflicting the most pain on the most vulnerable. The prequel, The First Purge, showed us how the whole thing was manipulated by wealthy conservatives as a way to let the rabid white supremacists and assorted right-wing extremists in their base attack women, the poor, and people of color. Now, with The Forever Purge, the series takes us past the end of The Purge to find die-hard Purgers, calling themselves Real Americans and True Patriots as they mount flags on their trucks and load their machine guns, getting fed up with their limited hours of impunity and just keep the chaos rolling. One neo-Nazi grins at the sound of gunfire; that’s American music, he says. It’s a smart escalation of the stakes, since sunrise is no longer the safety it was in entries past. Now the danger goes and goes, and grows and grows. When will it end? (Maybe the Purgers will storm the capital.) This isn’t only a movie about survival, but about escape from the worst of us.

The movie shifts the setting out of the big cities and into a small rural Texas town full of rich white ranchers (Will Patton, Josh Lucas) and Mexican laborers (Ana de la Reguera, Tenoch Huerta). Eventually, as the rioters start hijacking the city, we follow a sympathetic group of innocents as they try to flee with their lives. There’s horror inherent in the premise, fitting the place the series started, though as it’s aged the scariest aspect is how plausible they’ve started to play, how thin the line between the rhetoric of the Purgers and our actual right-wing rioters and their enablers. There’s even an overt line late in the picture about the pro-Purge party watching the monster of their own creation and indulgence rampage out of their control. Scarily familiar. But Forever tilts more toward action sequences, away from the horror of jump scares and even dialing back on (some) of the gore. Instead the picture favors chases and standoffs and shootouts — the better to match the west of its setting. Screenwriter James DeMonaco, the voice behind every one of these movies, continues to modulate its ideas, build its world, and find new avenues to have it reflect urgent topical concerns while putting its stock characters, and our country, through the wringer. 

Director Everardo Gout dutifully stages the looming menace of the moment — motorcycles roaring up on a dark highway; a theater basement full of staked vampire cosplayers; a border wall as towering trap lit up by break lights — and keeps the proceedings fast-paced and frantic. By the end, Americans are trying to flee violence at home by crossing borders. Cities burn at the hands of folks fed a big lie that killing those who upset them will restore their old sense of hegemonic power. And in the middle a prejudiced rancher grows to respect the Mexicans as they help each other survive. (In action, that’s not quite as pat as that sounds.) Here’s a movie to match our precarious moment (all the more prescient considering its original release date was last summer). It somehow nurtures a small kindling of hope even as it finds increasingly dire reasons to despair. This is a series that makes its political points with shotgun satire and sledgehammer slogans. But, given the tenor of the times, that feels just about right.

Bet Your Life: THE HOUSE

We are at what one can only hope is the straggling tail end of the R-rated bad behavior comedy. The subgenre with such depressingly monotonous recent entries as Office Christmas Party, Fist Fight, and Snatched has become so predictable – shaggy improv roundabouts punctuated by truly nasty sight gags and corrosive worldviews wedded to extremely cynical sentimental self-actualization character arcs – that each new entry makes the days of Superbad or even Sisters seem so very far away. How often must we sit through the montages of consequence-free partying and destruction? This context might lead many to see what screenwriter Andrew Jay Cohen (of the more palatable Neighbors and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates) is up to with The House, his directorial debut, as just another version of the same. But this brisk comedy about an in-over-their-heads middle-aged middle-class couple running an illegal small-town underground casino is doing something different, giving its raunchy ridiculousness a chance to escalate in concert with performers interested in doing more than cranking it up to eleven at the first chance. Sure, the movie has four-letter words, scenes of crowds drinking and fighting, and the requisite gross-out gags, but there’s a desperation to the characters’ energy, and a sharp societal commentary running through it. 

The trouble starts when a sweet married couple (Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler) faces down their impending empty nest with creeping terror. They don’t have enough money. Their daughter (Ryan Simpkins) is off to college, but, unknown to her, the scholarship they were counting on has fallen through. The folks vow to send her off right, and not break the bank on their shaky mortgage, despite weak-kneed moments. We’ve done everything right, Ferrell wails, confronted with his retirement account nonetheless turning up lighter than he’d thought (his 401k, for example, is several hundred thousand less than his assumption that it was an account with $401k in it) and the first bills for tuition rolling in. Enter their lovably sleazy friend (Jason Mantzoukas, stepping up to co-lead status after years of choice bit parts), a desperate divorced mope in need of financial pick-me-up himself, who proposes the off-the-books, under-the-table casino concept. Make four years of tuition in just a month off the backs of their craven neighbors’ gambling urges! It seems so simple at the start, but the movie smartly allows it to spiral out of control in logically wild ways, tying its economic anxiety and middle-class collapse to their tunnel-vision greed. Its thesis very well might be “capitalism: the cause of and solution to your problems.” By the time the couple have become kingpins of the backyard bacchanalia, equal parts pleasure and guilt, it’s clear that money may be a necessary evil. They lose track of their original goal as they plunge deeper into selfishness (a trait mirrored by the town’s equally crooked council members). 

I’m afraid that might make the movie sound like a screed, or a grating political commentary. No, what’s some sort of genius is the way this all follows from a blast of a comedy, springing up naturally from heightened absurdity rooted in character and situation. It’s hilarious moment to moment, its underlying thematic preoccupations carried off with the lightest of touches because it’s too busy with bouncy quips, brisk sight gags, unexpected line-readings, and a convincingly centered escalation. Ferrell and Poehler play the rare comedy married couple who are given equal billing and equal footing in the shenanigans. Driven by the desire to do right by their daughter and continue the illusion of financial security for their family, they are in complete lockstep, a perfect team. No time for phony divisions or false relationship crises. They’re too busy slowly but surely turning into slick suburban mobsters, self-styled untouchable underground small business owners. All the while they remain adorably committed to each other and to their plan, building each other up and egging each other on. Ferrell and Poehler have the relaxed manic energy of an old relationship enlivened by an exciting new project, a chemistry that feels real and true and sells the insanity to come.

What starts as neighbors around a poker table balloons into fight night, bars, DJs, pool service and more as an honest-to-goodness casino-in-miniature opens up like a dazzling Hellmouth under their cul-de-sac. Surrounded by a stellar supporting cast (a veritable who’s-who of comic character actors, including Nick Kroll, Rob Huebel, Lennon Parham, Cedric Yarbrough, Michaela Watkins, and more) who sell the good-natured raunch and escalating panic-inducing comic gross-outs. By the time sweet Ferrell has accidentally axed a low-level mobster’s finger off (and used a Croc in a flailing, futile attempt to stop the bleeding) and Poehler has fashioned a makeshift flamethrower to protect their investment, they’re not simply uproariously wild R-rated shocks, but a totally logical extension of the story’s good-natured cynicism. The lead characters are so sweet and loveable it’s worth a wild and wacky dive into the dark side to see them come face to face with their own greedy failings and rediscover what truly matters. 

It could have simply been pat family-first moralizing dressed up in goofy Breaking Bad-as-a-sitcom clothes, but the total commitment of its makers and leads elevate this into something special. The movie’s finale brings the strands together – family values colliding with small-town corruption in a mad-dash scramble to set things right. But it’s clear that just because this loveable family might be able to save themselves in the end, there remains something tenuous about the whole financial underpinnings of their world. It’s funny watching them flail – it’s the sort of comedy where it’s funny both cumulatively as obstacles pile up, and on a scene-by-scene basis as every glance, aside, and posture contributes to the pleasure – but there’s also a nervous laugh about how deeply messed up our culture’s financial priorities are. Turns out a casino economy is enough to drive a person crazy. The movie is an appealingly outlandish nervous tap-dance over the yawning chasm of distress that is modern America, an escalating desperation in the face of financial despair.

Cop Out: RIDE ALONG

Ride Along is a fish-out-of-water buddy cop comedy with the theoretically funny twist of one of the bickering cops not being a cop. It’s not exactly a new twist on the formula. We’ve seen that dynamic before, played for laughs in films of all kinds, including Die Hard with a Vengeance. In Ride Along, a wimpy security guard (Kevin Hart) agrees to go on patrol with a tough, no-nonsense, breaking-all-the-rules-because-he-knows-best cop (Ice Cube) because he’s dating the man’s sister (Tika Sumpter) and wants to be seen as worthy. The script, which has been cobbled together by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (they of R.I.P.D.) with Greg Coolidge and Jason Mantzoukas, runs through the typical buddy comedy clichés, starting with a scene like something from 2010’s The Other Guys and coasting into an investigation that’s reminiscent of last summer’s The Heat. Every step of the way, the movie coasts on the energy of putting two actors playing opposites bouncing off of each other, getting under each other’s skin, and eventually learning to like each other and work well as a team because, come on, it’s what this kind of movie is.

Cube scowls and Hart shrieks as they work their way through a series of comic sequences. It’s everything their screen presences would have you expect. Think for a second about what the movie might’ve been if they switched parts, with the bulky, glowering Cube as the shivering civilian and the diminutive Hart the blustering seen-it-all confident cop. I’m not saying it’d be a better movie – it’d almost certainly be dismissed as miscast – but at least it’d throw a curveball into its stiffly forced wackiness. It limps around on generic plotting while the actors are only as funny as the off-the-shelf parts of the screenplay allow them to be. Hart stammers and hyperventilates and flings himself into physical bits while Cube growls and gets down to business as he tries to get actual work done. As they encounter typical police work – illegally parked vehicles, drunk and disorderly conduct – Cube keeps Hart distracted and humiliated at every turn.

This thin material certainly isn’t helped by how unhelpful Tim Story’s direction is. It’s just not funny – flat, inexpressive and doing absolutely nothing to help punch up the performer’s timing or augment tepidly humorous scenarios with little bits of visual teasing. For a guy who has spent his career shooting comedies (Barbershop and Think Like a Man), action comedies (Taxi), and light action (two almost-instantly forgotten Fantastic Four movies), he has very little action or comedy in his sense of framing. His is a visual sense that’s clean, professional, and wholly impersonal. It’s sturdy I suppose, but when put to use on a script so thuddingly obvious and jokes that are more miss than hit, it’s not enough. A joke in which Hart mistakenly identifies a woman biker as a man could be a funny joke on him, but the way it’s cut together makes it seem all too ugly a joke on her.

Speaking of ugly, Ride Along seems to find gun violence a whole lot funnier than I do. It’s so light and middling a comedy that skirting around its bleaker comedic impulses makes it seem a little on the icky side. Take these two punchlines. One comes after Hart has, in the process of threatening a suspect with a gun, shot a man in the shoulder. He says, “I thought the safety was on!” I’m sorry if an innocent man accidentally shot (even in what is clearly meant to be played off as nonlethal) doesn’t start me laughing. Then there’s a scene in a gun range when Hart shoots a high-powered shotgun and the kick launches him violently backwards into a wall. “Those should be banned!” he wails, the joke seemingly that he’s not tough enough to handle it, what with his knowledge of firearms limited to violent video games. It seems to me the real joke is that, what with our nation’s dysfunctional relationship to firepower, use of such weapons probably should be constrained, and yet that’ll never happen.

For the most part, though, Ride Along is on cruise control, too light and forgettably formulaic to get riled up over one way or the other. It’s not just the tough cop, outmatched wannabe cop, and the sweet, patient, sure to be third-act-threatened girlfriend. There are standard cop movie characters everywhere, like a gruff lieutenant (Bruce McGill), who doesn’t have the turn-over-your-gun-and-badge scene, but might as well have, and two wisecracking partners (John Leguizamo and Bryan Callen) who push along the investigation while Cube’s preoccupied with his prospective brother-in-law’s failings. There’s not a single unpredictable moment in its entirety, up to and including a terrific cameo appearance in the final stretch that’s been spoiled 80 minutes earlier by listing the actor in question in the opening credits. I suppose it would’ve been too much to ask for this autopilot work of formula picture to have even one welcome surprise.

Coming to America: THE DICTATOR

In The Dictator, co-writer and star Sacha Baron Cohen gives himself a massive satirical target. How easy is it to make fun of the excesses and egregious views of a megalomaniacal tyrant? His dictator character is General Aladeen, the oppressive ruler of the fictional country of Wadiya. He’s presented as a wealthy, fatuous, violent, misogynistic racist. But, you know, the funny kind. The funniest thing about the movie is how it manages to slip around the target and just about miss it completely simply through the nature of the way the movie is structured. For this conceit to work, Cohen needs to have us either rooting for the downfall of Aladeen or hoping he learns the error of his ways. That’s not exactly what Cohen, collaborating for the third time with director Larry Charles, has in mind here. They want to use the fictional horrible dictator to critique our own society. And they get there, eventually, for one pretty good scene, but they sacrifice the potential for a more successful comedy in the process.

The plot of the movie concerns the dictator’s trip to America to address the United Nations. Once there, right-hand-man Tamir (Ben Kingsley) hires a racist private security guard (John C. Reilly, whose small role is presented almost in full in the trailer) to take the dictator out. Once out of the way, he can be replaced with a stupid lookalike (also Cohen) who will sign an agreement to democratize Wadiya and hand over its oilfields to multinational oil corporations. That’s a funny premise, but instead of running with that, following the innocent doppelganger (a la Chaplin’s great, gutsy 1940 send-up The Great Dictator) and the shadowy backroom deals Kingsley makes with American companies – he essentially sells the country away from one uncaring overlord to another – the film thinks it’s far funnier to follow General Aladeen. He escapes assassination, but ends up beardless and thus (apparently) unrecognizable on the streets of New York.

Cohen gives the character a lot of corrosive satiric energy, but he’s used in a series of broad jokes and sequences that crisscross the line between merely tasteless and out-and-out offensive with staggering frequency. Aladeen is constantly making awful comments about women and minorities, casually referencing rape (not funny at all) and terrorism (sometimes funny), and generally behaving entitled and rude to everyone he meets. This can be a good source of humor. Indeed it is in a very funny scene on a helicopter tour in which he’s talking in the Wadiyan language about his new 2012 model Porsche 911 and scares a couple of tourists. But the entire thrust of the plot is to see him back in power. It’s built into the very core of it all; that’s his entire goal in the film. He schemes with an expatriate Wadiyan nuclear scientist (Jason Mantzoukas) to interrupt Ben Kingsley’s scheme and return his homeland to its proper oppression under his rule.

Aladeen doesn’t learn any lessons along the way, unless you count the love, or something like it, he grows to feel for the earnest fair-trade grocer played by a strangely muted Anna Faris in an unconvincing and distracting subplot. He remains an unrepentantly nasty guy, up to his old tricks of intimidation and casual cruelty, which would be fine if the film weren’t intent on softening him (like with that pesky would-be romance) and losing focus with bizarre digressions of the kind you’d think a savage 83-minute satire wouldn’t need. One surreal gag starts with a grocery-shopper giving birth in the store when the owner asks Aladeen to help. He tries to text his Wadiyan co-conspirator during the birthing and ends up with his cell phone up inside the poor woman. This is just mind-bogglingly unfunny and way off topic. It’s this and moments like this that causes the movie to go minutes on end without a single laugh in sight. And when a movie is so short, these laughless stretches really add up quickly.

It’s just that Aladeen is hard to care about, unlike the endearing qualities that balance out the tone in his previous starring roles. In Cohen’s early film efforts in gonzo comedies Borat and Bruno (also directed by Larry Charles) he fearlessly inhabited deliberately irritating characters from his Ali G HBO series, one a brusque, exaggeratedly prejudiced reporter from Kazakhstan and the other a clueless, vain, gay, Austrian, would-be celebrity fashionista. In each case, he set out across America, causing immediate culture-clash friction by sending out these outlandish characters to interact with real people. Those films contain healthy doses of potent cultural satire, and have plenty of moments that just feel miscalculated, but on some fundamental level, seeing people react so oddly or so blatantly discriminatory towards these characters puts us on their side. The Dictator is almost entirely miscalculation. I just couldn’t care about Aladeen getting his throne back, even at a grating satiric level, and if the film’s plotting is to work, it hinges to some extent on just such investment on the audience’s part. (What about that poor lookalike? He’s pretty funny, but glimpsed in only two or three scenes.)

Where the film’s satire really lands is in a climactic speech in which General Aladeen extols the virtues of a dictatorship. He says that under that form of government all wealth can be concentrated in the top 1%, you can give your buddies tax breaks, the media can appear free but really be controlled by a few powerful men and their families, you can fill your jails with predominantly one race and no one even cares, and etcetera. It’s a powerful left-hook of a political statement, very strong, very funny, and very cynical. But it’s a sharpness that comes too little too late in a movie that has spent a considerable portion of its run time messing around with gross-out gags and purposefully offensive material that just doesn’t add up. It keeps all its most interesting material on the sidelines where it’s least useful to making this an enjoyable experience. It’s a blown opportunity, a satire that aims for such a big target it’s not just disappointing, it’s downright depressing that Cohen largely missed.