Game Night:DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES and THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE

I never played Dungeons & Dragons. I am, however, familiar with the stereotype of the endless roleplaying game’s sessions with nerds huddled around convoluted backstories and their Dungeon Master’s maps and outlines while eagerly hanging on the results of each dice roll’s permission to activate their next move. I suppose that mental image of mine has to be somewhat true, since the new feature film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is true to that idea. It’s loose and rambling, packed with casually tossed off jargon and hyperventilated backstory. Flashbacks and narration nestle each new origin story into the main storyline when a character appears for the first time, like the actor pulled up to the table with their stats sheet ready to share. It gathers up a team of rascals in this way, each with a consequential backstory and a handy list of special skills that help the group assemble new plans to tackle each new fantasy obstacle in their episodic way. The overarching story finds a down-on-his-luck single dad (Chris Pine) and his best friend (Michelle Rodriguez) hoping to save his daughter (Chloe Coleman) from an evil wizard (I shan’t spoil his actor’s identity, nor the obvious reveal of who’s in charge of him). The path there is a daisy-chain of fetch quests, with shape-shifters, and self-serious knights, and enchanted objects, and magic spells, and creatures, and labyrinths, and lore, and portals, and undead warriors, and insecure wizards, and overweight dragons, and a gelatinous cube, and, and, and.

It’s all piled up vaguely amusingly and decently snappily, its bright frames and tone bending in the easy-going direction of The Princess Bride with some stretches of cleverness bending even closer to Monty Python circular silliness, albeit without either’s overtly meta edges. Is this fun? To a point. The personalities are fine, the effects suitably outsized, and the direction by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley hews closer to their plate-spinning ensemble Game Night than their rancid Vacation reboot. It’s bright, light on its feet, and finds reasonably clever fantasy flourishes throughout. I bet I would’ve liked it even more if I was 12 years old, or cared about its source material. The younger me who had affection for all the off-brand fantasy movies of the 80s and 90s—your Willows and Krulls and Dragonhearts—was pleased.

So often the movies today, at least at their biggest box office levels, are merely drafting off affection for stuff you liked before with little else to offer. On that level, The Super Mario Bros. Movie may be the most effective of its kind. Here’s Minion-maker Illumination’s computer animated recreation of the sights, sounds, and actions of Nintendo’s most famous video game creation. To watch it is to feel like you’re watching the game on autopilot, swaddled in the childhood sensations with the pressure off and the fond memories on. An early scene is even a bit of side-scrolling hopping and bopping. Ah, that’s the stuff. Here’s the plucky plumber Mario and his brother Luigi as they get yanked through a magic pipe and end up in a fantasyland where a giant turtle dinosaur is about to attack a peaceful mushroom kingdom. Luigi ends up in the villain’s dungeon, and Mario must ally with the powerful Princess Peach to save his brother, and her kingdom, and maybe the whole world. There are bright primary colors, briskly paced adventure sequences, with nonstop bouncy action, and bubbly voice work. (The all-star cast—including Chris Pratt and Charlie Day and Jack Black and Anya Taylor-Joy and more—downplay the broad cartoony voices of the games by about 15%.) The extremely simple story and tissue-thin characters are all about iconic poses and simple lessons as they bounce through a variety of recognizable lands—the spacious castle grounds, the Donkey Kong jungle kingdom, a winding race down Rainbow Road. You get the picture.

It worked on me, though I haven’t played a video game with any regularity in a couple decades now. I’m dispositionally closer to the infamous Adrian Childs’ column headlined “Video games are good for your mental health? Not if you play like me.” But I do consider Super Mario 64 the height of the form, so to see its aesthetics, along with Mario Kart’s and other recognizable Mario looks’, so faithfully recreated, down to the sound effects of each bop and kick and the synth chords on the score, was a Proustian reverie. Maybe that’s a little sad, but so is nostalgia. The movie’s a total delight on that score, even if it does nothing but recreate the fun of the games with blessedly little asked of you. At least it’s not cliches pretending to be depth like the dreary The Last of Us or hedging with new human characters like the agreeable Sonic the Hedgehogs. This movie promises only Mario and his world on the big screen and, by golly, here it is.

Games People Play: GAME NIGHT

Game Night is comedy played fast and tight, an action thriller paced like a farce and overflowing with choice one-liners and witty banter. It’s a hoot. My favorite running joke involves various characters over the course of one-crazy-night falling into surprisingly sturdy glass tables. There’s such a satisfyingly goofy thunk as a body goes bouncing off where every other movie would give us a pleasing shattering smash. The action around this funny thread – just one of many, and besides the movie is so fast-paced all the jokes could count as running jokes – involves a group of friends whose weekly get-together goes very, very wrong. A competitive husband and wife (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams) find their game night (pals played by Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Lamorne Morris, and Kylie Bunbury) invited to a murder mystery night by his rich, arrogant brother (Kyle Chandler). But, on the night in question, before the man can even explain all the rules past the ominous “it will look real,” actual criminals barge in, beat him up, and kidnap him. Now the group jets off on what they think is a scavenger hunt to find where a group of actors have taken him, but are instead pulled deeper and deeper into a black market conspiracy where the guns, blood, cops, criminals, car chases, and stolen goods are all-too real. 

Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (helming a superior project to their Vacation) take seriously the goofy script by Mark Perez (The Country Bears, improbably enough). Watch with the sound off and you might convince yourself you’re watching a Fincher knockoff. The shots are crisp, the violence bruises, and the lighting is dramatic shadows and rain-slick streets. But then there is the rapid-fire patter of bickering friends, treating it with all the tension and drama that’d be a little exaggerated were it a game of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit, but is dramatically underplayed given the life-and-death situation of which they’re barely aware. Gradually, as they realize how in-over-their-heads they really are, the comedy is in the sudden scared flailing they have to keep in check in order to survive the night. That they’re also still so competitive that they can’t help but continue sniping little digs at one another is a fine touch. Beyond the high-energy excitement and the high-spirited joke-a-minute dialogue shot through with visual wit and whimsy – game board tilt-shift establishing shots; composited one-take mad-dash chases – the movie finds itself smartly rooted in the genuine affection of its participants. No matter how harried and dangerous the proceedings become, Bateman and McAdams are allowed to keep the suspense entirely out of their relationship. They’re a close-knit pair, clearly in love, adorably competitive with one another in a way that shows them to be enjoying playing the games because they actually like each other. The same extends to the friend group itself, which might get at each other’s throats, but never more than any gathering around the Sorry board. Even when a thug gets bloodily killed, there’s a nod to the stakes without skipping a laugh. This is big, broad, studio comedy-making operating at a consistently entertaining high.

Slight of Bland: THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE

What a difference ten years makes. In 2003, Jim Carrey starred in the comedy Bruce Almighty as an average guy given the chance to borrow God-like powers, but the real scene-stealer, indeed the only person whose contribution I can remember to this day, was Steve Carell in a supporting role. Now here we are in 2013 with the comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. It stars Carell in the title role while the more memorable moments appear courtesy of Carrey in a supporting role. It’s amazing what can happen to a showbiz career in only a decade, an observation worth noting in connection with Wonderstone since it happens to be a point on which the plot hinges. Carell plays a cheesy, theatrical, old school magician who, with his partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), has headlined at a Las Vegas hotel performing the same magic act for ten years. They were wildly popular and wealthy, but the act’s gone stale and ticket sales are plummeting. Their hotelier boss (James Gandolfini) says he’ll fire them and hire a flashy new magician (Jim Carrey), a decision that spurs Wonderstone to put together a new show that’ll wow the crowds all over again.

What follows is a movie that’s big, broad and bland. It’s predictable in every beat right up to the rather mean-spirited finale that’s nonetheless played as triumphant victory. Carell’s Wonderstone is nothing more than a pompous and out-of-touch cheeseball, a sort of softer, off-brand Zoolander. In the movie he follows the predictable arc that starts from top of the world before getting knocked down to low lows until he finds it within himself, through the help of the characters around him, to know better how to find his way back to the top. What little that’s interesting here relates to the tension between the older style of magic making, typified by a mail order magic kit hawked by a slick showman (Alan Arkin) that holds a special place in the lives of Carell and Buscemi, and the newer more aggressive and ugly magic as practiced by the flashy, gross magician played by Carrey. Where our protagonists are average guys all dressed up with pompadours and in velvet making a dancing entrance to Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra," he’s wiry, with long stringy hair, black clothing and pounding heavy metal. He’s obnoxious, at one point cutting open his cheek to pull out a bloody, folded up playing card. “Is this your card?” he asks. It is. (His final trick is super gross, too. I shall not spoil it, except to say it’s horrifying, cringe-worthy, and a little funny.)

The tension between types of magic, though, is ground under by the homogenized mediocrity of it all in a film eager to use that central conflict as set dressing rather than utilizing it as the intriguing idea that it is. Director Don Scardino (a sitcom staple) finds little of visual interest, preferring instead to keep the in medium shots and let the lines land. It’s too bad the lines in the script by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (they of Horrible Bosses) are largely inoffensive clunkers that go down easily and without impact. It’s a comedy that fails on both on a plot level and on a scene-by-scene basis, gathering up few laughs and even less of a reason to care. Why, then, did I not out-and-out hate this movie? It’s the cast and the cast alone. Carell and Buscemi have a funny sort of buddy chemistry that occasionally wrings some laughter out of the neglected premise. A few of Gandolfini’s line readings are just unexpected enough to bring a sort of backwards gravitas to some very silly moments. And Carrey, flailing about with little to do, nonetheless makes a big impact by bringing total commitment to a nutty part that a lesser comic actor would’ve no doubt undersold.  

I haven’t even mentioned Olivia Wilde yet and that’s a shame. She’s playing a nothing character, a token female presence that is only around to provide an anemic romantic subplot. You could take Wilde out of Wonderstone entirely and the movie would lose exactly nothing in terms of coherence and impact. That’s unfortunate, but the movie is a big nothing all around. It has so many promising elements mixed in with a game cast and yet proceeds to make use of none of them. It’s blandly uninvolving and perplexingly dull, aside from the once or twice I snickered or half-smiled at the best efforts of everyone involved. The whole thing was leaving my head even as I walked out of the theater. I barely remember it as I type these words a day after I saw it, so I doubt I’ll remember anything about it in ten years.

Dead or Alive: HORRIBLE BOSSES

As directed by Seth Gordon, Horrible Bosses is a dark mainstream studio comedy, or rather, as dark as a mainstream, broadly appealing R-rated comedy can get. It’s a movie that has three friends, each with a particularly monstrous boss, deciding almost on a whim and with a Hitchcock reference, that the best way to make their lives easier is through the deaths of their bosses. The most twisted aspect of the film is the way it not only had me rooting for three would-be murderers, I also was hoping they’d go through with it.

The most surprising aspect of the film is how completely untwisted the premise plays out. The characters here are so very thinly sketched, so nonexistent outside the narrow parameters of the movie’s action that the stakes of the plot never register. Going into the movie, my mind conjured up thoughts of 9 to 5 remade in the style of the Coen brothers’ bloody good Burn After Reading. This isn’t quite that movie I was anticipating, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a moderately good time with what it is.

The film spends quite a bit of effort setting up the horribleness of the bosses, so much so that it begins to feel like “horrible” is perhaps an understatement. Monstrous Bosses, perhaps? I suppose the script by Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein needed to find a way to excuse the central premise, to make us realize that murder would be a perfectly viable option, but surely in extreme cases such as these, merely gathering evidence and then going to the authorities would be a much safer option. No matter, these are some extremely bad work environments and these aren’t the brightest characters to begin with.

Kevin Spacey plays the president of an office where he takes particular delight in torturing an ambitious office drone played by Jason Bateman, all but promising him a promotion, forcing him to work late, work on the weekends, and even working instead of saying goodbye to a dying loved one. Then, to top it all off, there is no promotion. Jennifer Aniston plays a dentist who sexually harasses her favorite dental hygienist, the befuddled and uncomfortable Charlie Day. She goes way too far when she reveals that she misuses the anesthesia in order to have her desires. Meanwhile, the factory manager Jason Sudeikis doesn’t mind his boss played by Donald Sutherland. The problem is the boss’s son (Colin Farrell, giving a great but criminally shortchanged comedic performance), a cokehead and an idiot who invites, in his dad’s absence, a collection of prostitutes into the office to help him sniff up his stash.

The three employees are played rather charmingly and the bosses, two of the three playing deliciously against type, are quite scary. The six of them (seven when you include Jamie Foxx’s “murder consultant”) seem to elbow each other off the screen for their brief moments in the spotlight – this is a superfast 100 minute comedy that seems to end soon after it’s really started – but they all improve on a screenplay that often feels like nothing more than a somewhat inspired screenwriting exercise. Take three characters and find a way to get them into and out of a murder plot in as few steps as possible.

Watching the movie, I found myself laughing and smirking and leaving the theater reasonably diverted. I was, however, almost immediately wishing that the film had pushed just a bit farther. There’s a feeling that the filmmakers set the bar fairly low and, though I suppose they cleared it, is that enough? The movie exists on one level – a broad, crude, slightly misogynistic, slightly cheap level – and although it succeeds on its own terms, I can’t help but wonder just how good the movie could have been if it had set better terms for itself. This could have been a great, dark, timely stab into current American fretfulness over the job market. After all, director Seth Gordon’s first film was the hilarious King of Kong, a documentary about arcade game high scores that showed a much keener eye for the strands of competition and hierarchy that exist in even the most frivolous of societies. As it is, the film’s just a light, forgettable shot of artificial catharsis masquerading as the real thing.