Trip Despise-Her: SNATCHED

Snatched is one of those disappointing high-concept, mid-budget, star-driven Hollywood pictures that seems to come around every so often. It has the right cast, a fun premise, and a few funny moments, but otherwise just sits there on screen collecting dust. The basic fish-out-of-water adventure comedy plotting finds a dopey daughter (Amy Schumer) and dotty mother (the great Goldie Hawn in her first role in fifteen years—sadly she should’ve waited longer) on a South American vacation. They inevitably get kidnapped and must cease their squabbling long enough to survive and maybe, just maybe, learn a little about themselves along the way. On this sturdy, predictable structure director Jonathan Levine (The Night Before) and screenwriter Kate Dippold (The Heat) pile flat, simple, one-note scenes. This is a movie that only can hold one idea, and often only one person, in a frame, plodding simply without escalation from plot point to plot point, allowing its performers just enough personality to fill out just barely more than a trailer’s worth of entertainment.

 

Cut together with journeyman boredom in every choice – a tourism brochure montage of establishing shots, a slow-mo dance sequence or two, vistas of B-roll you’d find on a hotel lobby TV – the whole endeavor could only succeed with diminished expectations. It’s too thin and grindingly workmanlike in its impersonal bare-bones competence, flatly staged and unimaginatively developed. Comedy and action work best with surprise: an unexpected swerve, a shock reveal, an eccentric resolution. Here we get a smattering of these moments. In an opening scene, Schumer’s boyfriend (Randall Park) says he’s breaking up with her and she responds, “When?” Later a grizzled jungle guide (Christopher Meloni) is asked if a piece of fruit is okay. “Yeah, sure,” he replies, then takes a beat and adds, “Oh! You mean to eat? Probably not.” Funny. So too are Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack as vacationing gal pals intensely interested in looking out for their fellow foreign ladies because you simply never can trust a foreign vacation. (There’s unexamined Ugly Americanism here, natch.) But we’re talking silly little grace notes on the edges of a leaden comedy, flat-footed and tone-deaf, in which two American women get kidnapped and flail around Latin American stereotypes for 80 minutes. 

Why take Hawn, capable of effervescently charming performances, and make her a dowdy scold? Why take Schumer who, at her best, can lampoon awkward social issues in casually biting satire, and make her a routine R-rated comedy-style stunted adult-child? They’re allowed to play against type to fit the dragging constraints of a hectic and unfunny action plot that’s so narrative heavy it rarely pauses to let its leads breathe. Their best moments allow the two of them space for banter that feels like a real testy mother-daughter relationship, one with some history and tension that could flower with room to grow. Instead they’re shoved into tumbles down muddy jungle roads and made to slog through tone-deaf humor. When they arrive at a distant village, it’s a cue for smug eye-rolling and flailing gross-out humor at the expense of the native’s customs and well-meaning doctors, culminating in a sequence involving a tapeworm that’s just flat out nasty. The movie just doesn’t have a point of view, has no idea how to maximize the inherent charms of its cast or activate any sense of tension or suspense in its premise. The emptiness just makes it seem limp and sad, so much running around and yelling and frantic flailing for naught.

Boo Who? GHOSTBUSTERS

Like the 1984 supernatural comedy Ghostbusters, the 2016 remake is a plodding effects-heavy silly spectacle strung along a rickety thin plot. The jokes aren’t particularly funny. The ghosts aren’t particularly scary. And the story isn’t compelling. The whole enterprise rests entirely on the charms of its comedian cast. In both cases, this allows for a certain eccentric personality that keeps it from being a total waste. The original had its sarcastic Bill Murray, technical Harold Ramis, eager Dan Aykroyd, and helpful Ernie Hudson banding together to start a small business as ghost catchers. Now there’s a reluctant Kristen Wiig, earnest Melissa McCarthy, loopy Kate McKinnon, and capable Leslie Jones putting together a ghost busting team. They want to prove their research isn’t bunk, and that they can do some good removing New York City’s pesky hauntings. Because the cast is likable and game, throwing themselves into the swirling effects work with some sense of commitment and chemistry, it’s not too bad.

The run up to the movie’s release was marred by sight-unseen sexist anger from guys who objected to women in the ghostbusting business, followed by an opposing contingent who felt the best way to combat that nonsensical rage was to claim seeing the movie to be a sort of feminist duty. (Hopefully all right-thinking people know women can be ghostbusters; and you don’t need to buy this particular movie ticket to prove you believe in gender equality, despite its undeniably productive symbolic value.) In retrospect, the movie itself is hardly worth the foofaraw. Watching it I was neither entertained nor annoyed. I was, in fact, the closest to no thoughts at all as possible. Technically a movie, a great deal of obvious cost and effort went into making it a shiny, amiable, blockbuster bauble. It’s not a good movie, but it’s certainly no worse than the original, sparks of inspiration duly served up in a bland container. There are good intentions and good will on the part of director Paul Feig, co-writing with his The Heat screenwriter Kate Dippold, beholden to the idea of what a Ghostbusters should be. It hits the same beats, invites in many of the same spirits, and plays it safe. There’s an overwhelming feeling of been there, done that, despite the refreshed surface details.

Tasked with reviving a long-dormant property important to Sony’s bottom line, Feig, who has steadily been accruing a good run of big screen comedy, is beholden to the dictates of big, bland studio product. He doesn’t have the freedom to be as loose and observationally character driven as his Bridesmaids or as sharply pointed a gender studies genre critique as his Spy. So it feels emptier than we know he was, at least in theory, capable of making it, like it’s a fresh take sloppily shoved into stale packaging. But at least he is allowed to give his cast enough room to make it their own. Wiig and McCarthy nicely underplay sweet old friends who reconnect over their love of the supernatural. McKinnon is a continual delight as a loose-limbed weirdo fawning over the ghostly happenings and her oddball tech. (Whether she’s dancing to DeBarge or licking her weapons, every cutaway to her is worth a smile.) And Jones makes the most out of an NYC history buff, good for pointing out a subway spirit is of one the earliest criminals to be electrocuted in the city. (“It took so much electricity they said, forget it, just shoot him.”) They wring some small laughs out of the dead air.

To the extent this Ghostbusters is a pleasure to watch it’s thanks to these four women, plus Chris Hemsworth as their incredibly dim hunky secretary so dumb he plugs his eyes when he hears a loud noise. (That’s the movie’s one smart commentary on gender roles in these kinds of movies, giving women the center stage while the token man is there to be stupid and objectified.) Otherwise the movie’s a slog through repetitive and flatly deployed hauntings at which the women show up, take care of business, and then leave deflated when the mayor’s office routinely decries them as fakes. Then there’s an endless CG climax with swirling ectoplasm and a snarling underwritten villain. It’s business as usual. Every scene is too short – no good build to the comic rhythms or scares’ staging, with the hammering editing stepping on most punchlines – and yet the whole movie is too long. There’s a push-pull between the new and old (several cameos from original cast members stop the action cold), the comedy and horror, the grinding predictable plot and the thwarted desire to turn into a loose hangout with funny people. It never resolves these tensions, leaving the movie off-balance and never wholly satisfying. The women are great. The movie is not. A more radical reimagining was in order.

THE HEAT is On

If nothing else, the new buddy cop comedy The Heat proves that some standard movie formulas can still work if done well. Just reading the phrase “buddy cop comedy” probably already has you thinking it’ll have the tough boss who puts together two dissimilar police officers. The pair will, after initial tension and hurt feelings, learn how to work together and then even to like each other, maybe. There’ll be bonding and bullets and it’ll all get wrapped up with plenty of laughs along the way. Well, you’d be right. But The Heat does it all with plenty of likable energy, reasonably involving plotting, and two terrifically appealing lead performances. And the formula works once again.

To this typically masculine subgenre, director Paul Feig, of Bridesmaids, and screenwriter Katie Dippold, a writer for the terrific sitcom Parks & Recreation, bring a welcome pair of roles for women. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy play the cops around which the story is built. They’re not only operating within the usual bounds of the good cop, bad cop positions, but are playing variations on their typical character types as well. Bullock plays one of her professional women who gradually loosen up and let others into her life without sacrificing the quality of her work. McCarthy plays one of her tornados of profanity and peculiarities, the goofball with hidden depths. These two hugely appealing actresses are good at playing these kinds of roles and here have fun chemistry with one another. They’re a natural pair. Their differences and similarities fit together nicely, operating on compatible wavelengths from which genuine warmth is formed. Bullock, tightly composed and snappily determined and McCarthy, confidently messy, make quite a pair.

Bullock’s character is an F.B.I. agent who arrives in Boston hot on the trail of a mysterious drug lord. McCarthy is the initially off-putting local detective who bristles at the thought of some outsider telling her how to do things in her town. Everything you need to know about the characters you can tell by their wardrobes. Bullock dresses exclusively in conservative pantsuits, while McCarthy wears ratty t-shirts and a well-worn vest. They couldn’t be more different, which makes their progression from initial antagonism to reluctant partners satisfying. Though there’s plenty of room around them for character actors to play cops (Demián Bichir, Marlon Wayans, Taran Killam), criminals (Spoken Reasons, Michael McDonald), and locals (Jane Curtin, Michael Rapaport, Bill Burr), it’s basically a two-woman show. Asides acknowledge the difficulty of being a woman in a typically male-driven profession, but that’s wisely kept subtextual. They’ve got a job to do, proving their capability with results.

What makes The Heat work so well is the way it looks like a cop movie, crisply barreling down an investigation that takes some satisfying twists and turns, but moves like a star-driven comedy. In scenes of interrogations, analysis of clues, and meetings over strategy, Feig’s direction and Dippold’s screenplay serve both cop and comedy sides of the film equally, ratcheting up the stakes and dumping exposition while letting their leads’ clearly-drawn personalities bounce off of each other in appealingly prickly confrontations. They throw their whole bodies into showing the other who’s the real boss of the situation, to the point of spending way too long trying to push each other out of a doorway for the small victory of being the first one to a suspect’s apartment. To compete with each other when they’re both equally driven to catch the drug lord is ridiculous and they know it, but they simply can’t help themselves. That’s what drives the comedy: irrepressible professional pride leading to surface level conflict that inevitably reveals the affection we knew all along they could find.

It all comes down to the inevitable stakeouts and shootouts the genre requires, but because it’s been such a pleasure to see these two cops snap at one another and grow close to one another while being, for the most part, good at their jobs, it’s easy to get involved in their plight. There are big splashy gross-out moments of stabbings and tense gun-wielding stalemates, but plenty of laughs as well. When Bullock and McCarthy flail about undercover in a nightclub, it’s more funny than tense, but later a scene that starts with an amusing buzzed night out and ends with the two barely escaping certain death is suddenly more dangerous than funny. (Though McCarthy gets a good laugh out of the moment as well.) The film keeps both plates spinning. It may be more or less exactly what you’d expect out of a buddy cop comedy, but we haven’t had a good one in some time. It is formula played in such a way that it doesn’t feel stale. And it’s not often that a Hollywood production is so nonchalant about telling the story of two women in the context of a formula picture, which makes it all the more refreshing.