I Do, But I Don't: MARRY ME

I don’t think Marry Me will single-handedly revive the romantic comedy as a going concern, but it sure is a nice reminder why we miss them. It certainly helps that it stars two hugely likable performers whose careers might’ve been filled with more of these if the bottom hadn’t fallen out of the genre’s theatrical prospects. Jennifer Lopez plays a Jennifer Lopez type: a global pop star whose every move is hounded by gossip and paparazzi. (The one difference is age; it’s fun to hear the 52-year-old’s character described as “north of 35.”) Owen Wilson plays an Owen Wilson type, if he was a divorced middle-aged middle school math teacher. His friend (Sarah Silverman) invites him to bring his daughter (Chloe Coleman) to the pop star’s concert. The singer plans to marry her pop star boyfriend (played by actual pop star Maluma) at this sold-out show. But just before taking the stage for their vows, Page Six reports on his infidelity. Dazed and heartbroken, she points out at the crowd where Wilson happens to be holding his friend’s “Marry Me” sign. “Sure,” the singer says. “Why not?” Thus begins a whirlwind romance that starts as a stunt, stays surface weird for a tentative spell, and then slowly but surely becomes the real thing. You know the drill.

Lopez and Wilson make for a good pairing, believable both in the from-separate-worlds unlikely pairing and in the sweet, surprisingly simpatico, flirtatious first blushes of affection. Lopez has the hard outer shell of glamor and style, with the soft underbelly of an underdog. Wilson has a slightly spaced affect, warm earnestness, and shaggy melancholy. It’s fun to see these line deliveries and personalities mingle on screen, even as the picture around them sometimes strains for even a baseline believability. To say the things these characters take in stride, or shrug off, stretch credulity is an understatement. There’s not a single moment where the world they inhabit feels real—it’s all fizzy and fuzzy fantasy visions of both their professions. And the screenplay is loaded up with assistants and gay best friends and cute kids, each doing their turn in the margins to prop up the agreeable, sometimes charming, but never quite as funny as it could be scenes. But because the leads are so winning, and the movie stays so brightly keyed into their charms as performers, it stays just barely aloft as the cliches pile up.

It leaves no opportunity for a romantic gesture untaken—a school dance, a concert, a mathlete competition. You better believe there are songs sung, dances taught, signs held up, arrivals made last-minute, and announcements given dramatically in front of audiences. Some of these happen two or three times, even. It feels like watching Hollywood start up a long-dormant trope machine as the movie creaks and groans as it tries to find its way back to what used to be effortless. Director Kat Coiro and screenwriters John Rogers, Tami Sagher, and Harper Dill come from the world of sitcoms, and though the movie’s anamorphic style is suitably big-screen, the movie is often at its best in smaller, snappier, sweeter character moments than when it tries to explain its conceit’s ramifications in any concrete detail. And yet, the bigger cheery artifice of it all still manages to prove that rom-com tropes still work if done with even a minimal commitment. Even one just north of the Hallmark Channel movies’ quality can pluck the heart strings when the actors’ eyes twinkle with love as their faces draw near, the lighting gets soft, the music swells, and for a brief moment we might really believe a pop star and a middle school teacher can build a life together. (Speaking of: if any pop stars are reading this, my DMs are open.) This is the kind of harmless fantasy I wish we could add back into our regular multiplex diets.

Shake Your Boov Thing: HOME

Home is the sweetest, sunniest alien invasion movie you’ll ever see. It starts when the Boov come to Earth looking for refuge, having fled across the galaxy pursued by the Gorg. Following the Boov motto, “Run away,” they just need a place to hide their little purple squishy square bodies, a respite for their mood-ring skin, rest after so much scurrying around on floppy tentacles. They’re cute, awkward, and pushy, relocating all the humans to a pop-up internment village in Australia. They stretch out across the rest of the globe, content to stay hidden forever from the Gorg – a planet-busting warrior starfish in a big mechanical triangle. That doesn’t sound so sweet or sunny, but the Boov mean well, and they don’t do anything that can’t be undone.

The story concerns a human girl, Tip (Rihanna), who has been stranded in New York, separated from her loving, worried mother (Jennifer Lopez). Hiding from the Boov, Tip stumbles across Oh (Jim Parsons), a loveable oddball alien who just made a big mistake that’ll lead the Gorg right to Earth and is thus on the run from his fellow people. They’re both outsiders. She’s an immigrant from Barbados. He’s disliked by every Boov. “I don’t fit in. I fit out,” he sadly reports in his Boov-ian broken English. And so they reluctantly realize they can help each other, and maybe even set the topsy-turvy world right side up again. What follows is a chipper and pleasant sci-fi road trip about cross-species understanding.

Now in its second decade, DreamWorks Animation has moved away from gimmicky pop culture comedies and become a reliable source of charming animated adventures. Home, directed by Tim Johnson (Over the Hedge) from a screenplay by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (Epic) based on a kid’s book by Adam Rex, hits all the expected beats of such a project. It’s a cute adventure that’s a standard family film message machine. Be yourself. Be kind. Do the right thing. But it manages to be energetic and enjoyable without stooping to snark or collateral damage. It comes by its entertainment earnestly.

Especially lovable is its design, a soft world of round edges and a vibrant color palate. It looks comfortable, from floating futuristic orbs manipulating gravity to a fuzzy cat who spends most of the movie purring. The alien invasion conceit is both a fine hook treated with some degree of seriousness, and also a great joke. The Boov are never threatening, with a bumbling leader voiced by Steve Martin leading them towards misunderstandings of Earth ways. He rides a vacuum – at one point motoring into a meeting yelling, “I vacuumed here as fast as I could!” – wears oranges as shoes, and eats footballs like fruit. With this culture clash, they come from a believably goofy place, with bubble-hovercraft and PlaySkool-adjacent gadgets delightfully rendered in cutesy alien styles.

Even better is the film’s matter-of-factly diverse cast of human characters. It’s easy to imagine a weaker movie falling into Hollywood reluctance, defaulting the story to a typical white father-son journey. It didn’t have to be about women of color. And yet it is about a girl from a particular background with all the specificity she brings, a welcome sight. What a powerful statement, saying animated adventures can be about anyone, a message all the more powerful for its off-hand acceptance. It simply is part of the fabric of a story about finding value in everyone, no matter how different you might think they are at first glance.

At its heart is the odd couple of Tip and Oh, loveable, expressive, heartfelt characters. That the girl and the alien become good buddies is no surprise. The film’s not exactly breaking new narrative ground. But it’s a movie of warm, kindhearted vibes, with likable visual humor and cozy voice performances. Rihanna and J.Lo are a convincing, connected mother-daughter pair. Parsons has an open silly wonderment to his blundering alien voice. And Martin’s antagonist is a perfect blatantly ridiculous hot-air machine ready to be punctured. The story is gentle, never mean-spirited. It’s an appealing, good-looking, well-intentioned entertainment that’s full of cheerful imagination and all the right messages handled with a light touch.

Fatal Attraction: THE BOY NEXT DOOR

A short, silly psycho stalker movie, The Boy Next Door offers serviceable low-rent pleasures. These sorts of films tap into anxieties about sex and secrecy, worrying that one wrong private decision can have horrible public consequences. Here a high school teacher (Jennifer Lopez) finds her eye wandering to the neighbor’s housesitter, his 19-year-old dropout nephew (Ryan Guzman). He’s a fit young handy man, introducing himself by offering to make her garage door go up again. Later, after flirting corny come-ons and discovering they share a favorite book (The Iliad, of all things), he seduces her. It’s a one-night-stand she immediately regrets. She may be estranged from her cheating husband (John Corbett), but she hasn’t given up on her marriage. She’d hate for a fling to ruin chances of fixing her life, a very real possibility as the boy next door refuses to take “never again” for an answer. What follows is a faithfully formulaic escalation that moves too fast to let a little silliness slow it down.

We go to the movies for all sorts of reasons. This isn’t a movie to satisfy most of them. Its dialogue is preposterous. Its twists can be seen coming. Its characters are paper thin, with motivations prone to switch for whatever the plot needs next. It’s silly and more than its fair share of stupid. It does little that wasn’t done before, and better, in 1996’s Mark Wahlberg/Reese Witherspoon teen thriller Fear. I could sit here and pick it apart for hours. And yet! And yet I didn’t mind it so much. It’s ridiculous and dumb, but so what? It has J.Lo looking fabulous, wielding considerable sex appeal in a part that transforms what could be a simpering woman-in-danger role into something sturdy through her presence. It has director Rob Cohen staging sensual scenes of desire, decent jump scares, effective growing paranoia and eventual violence. It’s not a good movie, but it sure is fun enough in the moment.

J.Lo makes a convincing cougar next door, staring out the window at the boy, his muscles rippling, sweat dripping, billowing curtains barely blocking her view. Later, she’s at her wit’s end trying to act like nothing’s wrong, especially as the boy lingers, menacingly hanging around her family, making instantly close friends with her son (Ian Nelson), inviting himself over for dinner, and dripping hardly-hidden innuendoes into conversation. “I love your mom’s…cookies,” is just one of many lines that straddle a line between threatening and goofy. Once it becomes clear she’s not interested, he gets even worse. He registers to finish his degree and hacks into the school email to get in her class. He turns her son against her. He threatens to blackmail her. He cuts the breaks on her husband’s car. He threatens a potentially sympathetic vice principal (Kristin Chenoweth). There’s something not right about him. Guzman gives a creepily dead-eyed performance that reads as generic model hunk in the opening act, but then turns instantly into stone-cold insanity.

By the time she sees his stalker-wall-of-photos and hears his smarmy self-righteous entitlement, it’s clear he’s not unlike a particular brand of Internet troll, raining sexist abuse upon her and yet hypocritically claiming he’s the victim in all this. More than once he howls at her something along the lines of, “How can you do this to me?” As if her turning him down is the real injustice. Given that, it’s easy to root for J.Lo to teach him a lesson, reclaim her life and, you know, kick him in the boing-loings at the very least. There’s enough believable chemistry between the leads in the first several minutes, and menace in the stalking and threatening that takes up the rest of the runtime, that the simple story works. It’s exactly what the movie needs to operate and not a bit more. Though, what with J.Lo’s Fly Girl start and Guzman’s two appearances in fun Step Up films, I kind of wished they had a big dance number. It wouldn't have made a goofy little movie loaded up with Freudian undercurrents, Oedipal references, and an actual cat scare any more ridiculous.

That missed opportunity aside, Cohen shoots Barbara Curry’s clunky script with energy. He and she are committed to the unapologetic trashiness, bringing the film a bit beyond what could’ve been routine Lifetime-style hot button insinuations by providing carefully framed, suggestively lit steamy sex and just-brutal-enough violence. Sometimes, there’s even a nice solid bit of blocking, like a scene in which the boy confronts J.Lo in the kitchen. Father and son are in the next room, out of focus in the background left of frame, while the boy backs her into a counter at the far right, forcing himself between her and what she hopes to maintain. That’s just good filmmaking, expressing in images what the script rather simply spells out. Take sturdy construction like that, add some star power, some goofy chills (of the sexy and scary varieties), and some good laughs (with and at the movie), you end up with half-decent cheesy sleaze.

Point Blank Payback: PARKER

On the whole, Parker is too clumsily handled to really sing like it should, which is too bad, considering that this adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s crime novel character has nearly enough pulpy energy from which to work. The surplus of it nearly balances out the deficiencies elsewhere. A great deal of the charm comes from the considerable charisma of Jason Statham in the title role as Richard Parker, a cold, clever criminal who is seemingly unstoppable and, when wronged, will charge after those who did him in with ruthless efficiency. Westlake’s template has been put to use with lead actors in films as diverse as Lee Marvin in 1967’s Point Blank, Robert Duvall in 1973’s The Outfit, and Mel Gibson in 1999’s Payback. Clearly a showcase for charismatic actors of various and diverse kinds, Statham plays this character as a force of nature, muscling through this sharp-edged yet lethargic thriller with a steely focus and impeccable timing.

It all starts with a heist at the Ohio State Fair. Parker and his accomplices (Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, and Clifton Collins, Jr.) lift a couple million dollars and get away with it too. It’s during the getaway that things go south. Parker refuses to reinvest his share of the stolen money in a secondary heist opportunity, which leaves the others no choice but to shoot him and leave him for dead on the side of the road. But, as you might imagine, he’s not dead. He’s alive and kicking, leaving a trail of stolen cars on his way to get the money he’s owed and teach those backstabbers a lesson by out-planning them and heisting their next heist out from under them. To do so, he drives right into a tangle of fun character actors. The likes of Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez, Bobby Cannavale, and Patti LuPone do the kind of supporting work that zips in for a scene or two (or a dozen) and relieves Statham of only some of the pressure of holding up the film single-handedly.

With a plot that twists around quite nicely, it finds an uncomplicated nastiness and suspense that settles into the right groove from time to time. There are all kinds of theoretically enjoyable turns of violence and strategy, from double and triple crosses and elaborate ruses to simple improvisatory kills, like when one character stabs his attacker in the neck with a piece of a gun. I especially liked when one character breaks into a building, hides a couple of guns, and then waits for the narrative to eventually deposit all of the characters back in the building for a final confrontation. I’m being purposely vague here, since the bulk of the enjoyment in this movie comes from the who, what, and when of the heavy plotting. In John J. McLaughlin’s script, the dialogue is purely functional and the characters only types. What fun is here comes from the simple pulp pleasures.

That’s all well and good, but the film never really came together all the way for me. I had the distinct feeling that it was a movie that knew all the right notes, but had no idea how to get the tune to come out right. Directed by Taylor Hackford, a man capable of framing a serviceable shot, but who is otherwise held hostage by the quality of the scripts he’s given, the film plays out in smeary digital photography peppered with more than a handful of unacceptably poor quality establishing shots that look like they were shot with consumer grade camcorders in 2003. The simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get framing bobbles the tone and stretches the pacing until I felt like I had to slow down and let the movie catch up. This is the kind of B-movie that needed just a bit more of a push – maybe a rewrite or two? – in order to be as tight and nasty as it was so obviously aiming to be.

Unevolved: ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Scrat is a bushy-tailed prehistoric squirrel who desperately desires an acorn that’s forever out of his reach. He’s a wordless, frustrated figure of bumbling slapstick with a Looney Tunes style of elegance to the purity and consistency of his motivations and adventures. Like Wile E. Coyote, Scrat’s his own worst enemy. It’s his insatiable desire for the unattainable that drives his worst impulses past self-preservation, his every inconvenience made all the more frustrating since, unlike the Road Runner, an acorn can’t even knowingly outwit him. But as much as I love Scrat, he’s simply not a good enough excuse for Blue Sky, the animation studio owned by 20th Century Fox, to keep churning out the Ice Age movies which contain within them his antics, presenting them as half-connected scenes that run parallel to the main story.

Once again we’re back with Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo), Manny the mammoth (Ray Ramano), and Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary), who first became an unlikely herd all the way back in 2002 in the good-enough film that started this whole thing. This time around, as ever, the trio finds that the world is experiencing a rapidly changing climate. Ice Age was about the coming Ice Age. Its sequel, 2006’s The Meltdown, was about a big thaw. In 2009, the third sequel left all real geologic history in its dust with Dawn of the Dinosaurs. At least in this new one, Ice Age: Continental Drift, Sid lets us know how ridiculous that was, saying, “It didn’t make any sense, but it sure was exciting!” And it was, I guess, at first, although by the time the dinosaurs were gnashing their teeth and chasing the characters to and fro I had already gotten tired of it all. I was tired of the series sometime after my second or third viewing of Ice Age, or maybe it was during my first and only time through the waterlogged Ice Age 2. The series sure has a way of making massive climate change seem like no big deal. Then again, that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as the oil companies have been doing just that for years.

So maybe I’m not the ideal audience for Continental Drift, but then again, maybe it will mean all the more when I say that it’s adequate. It, like Dinosaurs before it, comes the closest to capturing the very low charms of the first picture. I sat there while the sound and color danced around the screen and though I wasn’t exactly involved in the antics, I didn’t hate it either. Though I thought for sure the movie was ending at it was only the halfway point, I still ended up getting a modest jolt of entertainment during the actual hectic climax. So there’s that. The animators, under the direction of Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier, are certainly talented and they have this particular cartoon universe down pat. I like the color and personality of it all, with exaggerated movements and nonplussed anachronisms. (And need I reiterate just how much I enjoy our fleeting moments with the strong, wordless frustration of Scrat?) I just wish that someone involved (maybe Michael Berg and Jason Fuchs, the credited writers?) could have thought up something more than halfway diverting to happen with it all.

In this installment, the continents are rapidly shifting and Manny is separated from his wife (Queen Latifah) and teenage daughter (Keke Palmer). Adrift on a chunk of ice with Diego, Sid, and Sid’s cranky, senile granny (Wanda Sykes), the group is accosted by furry pirates – a monkey captain (Peter Dinklage) and a crew containing a saber-toothed tiger (Jennifer Lopez), a rabbit (Aziz Ansari), a seal (Nick Frost), and a kangaroo (Rebel Wilson) – who are a big danger despite and because of their knowledge of the way back home. Speaking of back home, Manny’s wife and daughter are leading to safer ground a group that includes a hedgehog (Jake Gad) who has a crush on the younger mammoth (how’s that work?) and a group of cool teen mammoths (where are their parents?) with the voices of Drake and Nicki Minaj.

This is all pretty standard family film plotting with little to these new characters’ personalities beyond sight gags and standard-issue villainy and little added to the old characters beyond the new situations. There are typical father-daughter disagreement-healing, self-esteem-crisis-solving, stereotype-refuting, family-togetherness-affirming plot threads running every which way through the movie in ways that hit every point on the moral checklist in uncomplicated family film fashion. There’s no imagination here, no chance to let the story build or develop in any interesting way whatsoever. It just clunks from plot point to plot point, hitting all of its rote emotional beats while that nutty squirrel blasts through every once in a while to keep things entertaining, even if only for a minute or two at a time. Otherwise, it all feels so lifeless, written and performed (with the exception of Sykes and Dinklage who are new to the series and so aren’t bored with it all yet) as if an enormous machine had spit out what it guessed humans like best about these kind of movies.

Playing right now at a theater near you, there are good to great movie choices for nearly every demographic. But say you’ve already seen all of those, or maybe your power went out and you need a cool place to sit for a couple of hours. You could certainly do worse than Ice Age: Continental Drift, an adequate movie that gets exactly where you think it’s going without anything too especially surprising or enjoyable (other than Scrat) along the way, but there’s nothing to out-and-out dislike either. It’s blandly harmless. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll get quoted in an ad with that.

Quick Look: THE BACK-UP PLAN

I find Jennifer Lopez to be an appealing screen presence, but she makes it hard to defend her work when she appears in so many horrible movies. For every excellent movie like Out of Sight, she turns up in a half-dozen Monster-in-Laws. Her latest terrible effort is The Back-Up Plan in which she is a woman who gets artificially inseminated because she’s worrying about the ticking of her biological clock and her lack of a good man. In a wacky coincidence, on her way out of the doctor’s office, she meets The One (Alex O’Loughlin). This comedy-in-name-only tested my patience by consisting of nothing more than a pile-up of many bad, bland comedy clichés that I detest. There’s an overcomplicated, overreaching high concept. There’s unconvincing, unbelievable characters. There are reaction shots from animals as laugh cues, poorly executed pratfalls, lame sub-sitcom one-liners, and the belief that references to bodily functions are inherently funny. There’s even that all-too-common pregnancy test scene in which the character seems to forget that it is covered with urine. (Later, a secondary character has a birthing scene that is shockingly, aggressively, awful). Director Alan Poul and writer Kate Angelo take every opportunity to turn each scene into an endurance test. The whole movie is nothing more than one long, painfully obvious pregnancy joke lazily, boringly told.