Reel Life: THE 4:30 MOVIE

Filmmakers making films about loving film always show you a lot about themselves. Think of
Spielberg’s recent Fabelmans in which the young Steven character has a vision of himself filming a family argument. Here’s a boy who thinks with the camera, and who sees the world through cinema. It’ll make him a wunderkind. And it’ll make him use that skill to create joyously cinematic genre pictures that’ll, in part, interrogate family and how people make them and break them. It’s a whole career in an image—typical of the revealing nature of an auteur’s work, especially in a confident, relaxed Late Style. For Kevin Smith’s version we have The 4:30 Movie, in which the Smith stand-in is a dorky teenager in 1986 (Austin Zajur) who wants nothing more than to sneak into an R-rated movie for a first date with his crush (Siena Agudong). And so we get this: a pretty girl with a wide smile earnestly and affectionately telling a chubby nerd, “wow, you know a lot about movies and TV shows!” Smith, unlike Spielberg, has a pretty one-track mind—sex, weed, pop culture. That’s about it. The end credits of this movie include a long “Thanks” section that includes everything from Little Debbie and Little House on the Prairie to George Lucas and John Hughes. (It’s a succinct syllabus for Kevin Smith Studies.) His preoccupations made for a bit of Gen X freshness with his scrappy indie Clerks back in 1994, what with its minimum wage slackers chattering back and forth about movies or sex acts in amateur cheap-o black and white. But, aside from a few successful fluke attempts at developing a style and deepening his thematic concerns (apocalyptic Catholic fantasy comedy Dogma, sentimental single-father rom-com Jersey Girl, and grungy political horror Red State), Smith’s been stuck in a permanent adolescence ever since, both as a stylist—all flat coverage, bland lighting, and simple staging—and as a writer—all surface-level allusions and references. His previous picture, the dreary and sappy Clerks III, even indulges in recreations of scenes from the first, as its legacy sequel status has the characters in the movie making a movie about their lives, which is a kind of worse Clerks. 

As Smith became a more repetitive niche interest, he dug in deeper into his chatty nerds’ limited imaginations. (Even a couple weirder horror adjacent pitches the past decade play like shaggy podcast anecdotes.) He’s making hangout movies for himself, and his die-hard fans, and his chummy collaborators, keeping his work cheap and lowering expectations. But he enjoys himself and that's what still causes his movies to have little sparkles of idiosyncratic interest. That his latest is comfortably his best in nearly 15 years is a tribute to its breezy smallness that makes his newfound sentiment comfortably quaint. It finds our lead and his buddies hanging out all day at a three-screen movie theater in their hometown while awaiting his crush. We see clips of fake trailers—decent—and some fake movies—pretty sloppy. (There are also tons of jokes in which characters straight-faced say something like “There’ll never be more Star Wars” or “Bill Cosby will always be admired” with dopey historical irony.) Along the way is some silly banter, some stupid antics, and a few funny performers (Justin Long, Rachel Dratch, Sam Richardson, Ken Jeong, Adam Pally, Jason Lee) doing their best with some thin characters. But nothing too outrageous happens, and the lines are never more than passably amusing, and the people are all broad shtick. It’s a genial enough thing, a pleasant, undemanding sit, and sure to please, or at least intrigue, the micro-generation of like-minded nerds for whom Smith remains a figure of note. But it’s ultimately so low-stakes and lacking in narrative and emotional—let alone comedic—juice that it mostly evaporates on contact with dead air between the projector and the audience. It’s a movie for people whose greatest dream is for a pretty girl to admire them merely for their movie knowledge. Hey, we can dream.

Back on Patrol: RIDE ALONG 2

After a woefully underprepared security guard played by Kevin Hart helped his future brother-in-law cop (Ice Cube) take down a big bad guy during a routine job shadow in 2014’s surprise hit comedy Ride Along, he decided to become a police officer, too. Now it’s Ride Along 2, and the talkative, blustering little guy is a rookie cop who really wants his fiancé (Tika Sumpter) to convince her brother to let her needy man go to Miami on a case. She does. So the mismatched pair is together again, this time in a more professional capacity, hot on the trail of a hacker (Ken Jeong) and the drug dealer (Benjamin Bratt) for whom he works. Once again, bland cop mechanics and tepid buddy comedy banter is brought ever so slightly to life through the one-note disjunction between Hart and Cube’s personas. They each get to work a couple of character traits in opposition to the others’ while the plot strands them in a generic detective story that develops lazily.

Deeply uninspired and undercooked, this mediocre and unnecessary movie never makes a good case for itself. The arc of the main relationship – from loud disagreements to begrudging respect – is an exact duplicate of its predecessors, and the journey there is the same dull jumble of thinly developed action beats and repetitive rambling jokey patter. (They’re brothers-in-law, because of the impending wedding, and also they’re in law enforcement. That’s about the funniest it gets.) If the characters were more interesting or entertaining, I suppose I’d be more apt to excuse a passionless, mindless retread. But the screenplay (again by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi) leans hard on the preexisting ideas of who Hart and Cube are, since the first movie didn’t exactly make them much else worth remembering. I still wish they had switched roles way back at the start of this series, making Cube the hyperverbal overconfident guy, and Hart the strong silent type. At least it’d be something different.

But, alas, here we are, with a workmanlike and flavorless film following Hart and Cube through the streets of Miami on an easily solved, but belabored, case. They’re no Bad Boys. We get a generic foot chase (the kind that thinks it’s funny to make the participants bounce off a trampoline and run through people’s houses – stuff like that). Then later a car chase tries to get laughs by intercutting Grand Theft Auto-style video game animation. Other would-be comic action beats include a run-in with an alligator, a car bomb, and shootouts in a nightclub and at the docks. It means well. The location work is functional – sunny and clear – while the action is plain and the comedy and mystery plot are mostly predictable. Returning director Tim Story has a movie that just refuses to think through anything that’s happening, resulting in a halfhearted jumble of cliché. Will the chief (Bruce McGill) threaten to suspend the leads? Will the villain have an inside man? Will women be treated as accessories? All of the above. Duh.

Admirably diverse, so at least it has that going for it, the movie is otherwise routine and uninspired. It’ll contrive a scene for a policewoman played by Olivia Munn to show up to an active crime scene while wearing a sports bra, then not even bother explaining the skimpy reasons why. It’ll include an underdeveloped subplot about a tyrannical wedding planner (Sherri Shepherd). Whatever it takes to shove in an extra stereotype-driven attempt at holding an audience’s attention. There’s so little here. And then there’s the characters’ cavalier approach to guns – shooting at perps, threatening suspects, using the weapons to playact toughness or cover insecurities, treating their job as an extension of a video game. A better comedy could lampoon this mindset (a timely satiric idea) instead of sitting back and snoozing its way through stale cop movie habits. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely not in the mood for a movie with a comedy sequence involving a jumpy policeman shooting an unarmed person (he doesn’t die, but still…), especially in a totally frivolous and disposable mediocrity like this one.

Fly Another Day: PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR

Penguins of Madagascar successfully chucks everything stupid, boring, and routine about the Madagascar movies for a spinoff focusing on the best part: the penguins. In those earlier films about escaped zoo animals having a variety of wilderness adventures, the center stage went to dull neurotic creatures not cut out for jungle life. The fun happened in whatever a quartet of oblivious and absurdly confident penguins was getting up to. Scheming like a troop of superspies, complete with exaggerated karate poses and chopped Army Man voices, they bungled their way from one calamity to the next with an outsized sense of accomplishment and superiority. Of course, putting fun side characters in a movie all their own runs the risk of collapsing the charm with too much of a good thing. After a trial run in a cartoon series on Nick, here they’re in a movie that matches their loony goofiness and gives them room to stretch out. It’s a fast, often funny, very cute slapstick adventure.

In one of the first scenes, the four penguins literally rocket away from the end of Madagascar 3 into their own story. (“I was getting pretty tired of that song!” one shouts over the sounds of the previous series’ recurring “I Like to Move It” fading into the distance.) Leader Skipper (Tom McGrath), enthusiastic young Private (Christopher Knights), serious Kowalski (Chris Miller), and mute Rico (Conrad Vernon) just want to break into Fort Knox and steal one of the few remaining stockpiles of banned snack food Cheesy Dibbles. In the process, they’re pulled into a diabolical octopus’ evil plot to kidnap penguins from zoos around the world. The crazy cephalopod (John Malkovich, sounding a chummily megalomaniacal sort) is jealous that penguins get all the attention, distracting from the less adorable aquatic creatures. Fair enough, I suppose, but he’s overreacting in gleefully cartoony villainy.

So our hero birds race around the world trying to save penguins from certain doom. Every step of the way, they cross paths with The North Wind, an elite commando unit of snow-white arctic animals, a wolf (Benedict Cumberbatch, in one of his best performances, no joke), a seal (Ken Jeong), an owl (Annet Mahendru), and a polar bear (Peter Stormare). These critters are better equipped to fight supervillains. They have a plane, jet packs, tracking devices, tranquillizer darts, and a secret base in the center of an iceberg. It’s not hard to see why they’d be upset to find four bumbling amateur spy penguins doing about as well in the pursuit of stopping the octopus. The pros make perfect uptight foils for the weirdly effective nonsense the birds bring. Even better, there’s no way these penguins are learning a lesson or going through some pat character arcs. They remain blissfully themselves.

Stuffed with visual gags, rapid puns, and antic action, the movie has plenty of brisk, colorful cartoony pleasures. The scattershot globetrotting effectively collapses all sense of geography, going from New York to Venice to Madagascar to Shanghai and back again in no time at all. That’s part of the fun, high-energy whirlwind mock spy movie stuff done with waddling dim wits. Every stop is home to a manic action sequence involving a variety of animals and weapons deployed to mostly humorous effect. I liked when octopi swarmed a gondola driver and made him their puppet. That’s something you don’t see every day. Nor do you often watch a penguin punch an octopus in the face, or perform a slaphappy dance dressed in lederhosen. Sometimes, you just appreciate the novelty.

This is one of DreamWorks Animation’s most effective animal comedies, even though it arrives at a time when they’ve pivoted away from them towards animated adventures like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. Directors Eric Darnell (Madagascar) and Simon J. Smith (Bee Movie) make a tight and uncomplicated feature that’s over in 90 minutes and lots of fun along the way. Added strange asides include: a documentary filmmaker voiced by Werner Herzog in Encounters at the End of the World mode, a shouting man-on-the-street reporter voiced by Billy Eichner, penguins in mermaid costumes (“You mermaid my day!”), and a villain’s habit of shouting for henchmen in ways that accidentally sound like celebrity names (“Drew! Barry! More power!”). It’s an enjoyable time at the movies, quick, pleasant, energetic, funny, and modest. I’m not complaining.

Snail's Pace: TURBO

Turbo, the latest family film from Dreamworks Animation, is stale and forgettable, but brightly colored and moves along at a brisk pace. I wish those colors and that speed told a fresher story or at least were put to use for something even halfway memorable. I better write this fast before the whole thing zooms out of my mind faster than a speeding snail. That might not sound all that fast, but Turbo clocks a snail’s pace at over 200 miles per hour. How’s that possible? The NASCAR fan snail at the film’s center (Ryan Reynolds) falls onto the highway and gets knocked into a tank of nitrus in a hotrod’s engine. A neat little sequence zooms all the way into the little guy’s atoms and shows them turning neon and zipping around faster and faster. Now he’s a super snail. Too bad he couldn’t be in a super movie.

In family film tradition, the speedy snail who names himself Turbo is alienated from his herd-mentality group of normal snails. They don’t understand his ambitions and therefore ostracize him, casting the fast-paced freak out of their snail habitat in a suburban garden. The poor fellow ends up with his still-slow brother (Paul Giamatti) at a failing strip mall in the middle of Van Nuys. There they are captured by Tito, a genial, bumbling snail racer (Michael Peña). I realize all that sounds a little strained and silly, but wait until you hear that the snail racer co-owns a Mexican restaurant with his brother (Luis Guzmán), so there’s double brotherly strife here. Turbo and Tito have big dreams that their brothers just don’t understand. Will the story bring all of these brothers closer together? Will dreams be realized, no matter how often they’re in doubt? What do you think?

The plot of the film involves Tito discovering Turbo’s speed and deciding to enter him in the Indianapolis 500. How, you might ask, does one enter a snail in a car race? Pay the entrance fee, of course. Tito raises the money from the strip mall’s other entrepreneurs (Richard Jenkins, Ken Jeong, and Michelle Rodriguez). They all seem to think that the exposure will reinvigorate their little corner of the local economy. Makes sense, I guess. If you’re going to be sponsoring a snail in a big car race, why wouldn’t you put the name of your business on the shell? Someone in Van Nuys might see that sign on that snail and think to go to your strip mall next time they want a taco. You never know, I guess.

There’s plenty of silly business along the plot’s sidelines involving the plain old slowpoke snails Tito brings along for some reason. They are a diverse collection of sluggish primary colors with the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, and Ben Schwartz. They’re the kind of cartoon characters that always seem to be smirking at you. I’m not sure exactly what these characters want, what their emotional journeys are, or even who they are, really. They don’t even get the typical one-trait sidekick development. By the movie’s end, they’re Turbo’s pit crew. Makes sense, I guess. There’s also a narcissistic French racing star (Bill Hader) who might not be so happy about racing a snail. Makes sense, I guess. You put in all that work to get to the top and some stupid snail is going to just zip by you like that? This is a movie built out of so many improbable plot elements that one simply has to stop questioning and go with it. The answer to any “Why?” would be “Because otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.”

But it’s a jumble of elements you’ve seen before, too safely crafted to either satisfy or fail, utterly predictable every step of the way. This movie about a snail racing racecars around a racetrack can’t even manage to be a little odd or unexpected. Director David Soren, who co-wrote the script with Darren Lemke and Robert D. Siegel, pulled stock character arcs, booming pop songs, and silly sight gags together and assembled them in an appealing package that danced in front of my eyes without every once engaging me on any level. It was simply there. I’d call Turbo the most forgettable animated film of the summer, but I’m sure I’ve already forgotten the most forgettable animated film of the summer.

The one truly notable aspect of Turbo is not necessarily the visually pleasant animation. We’re at the point where smoothly rendered computer-generated visual detail can be so blandly proficient that it’s only worth calling out for being truly terrible or particularly stunning. It’s fine here, that’s all, although I was charmed time and again by the neon blue streak of light Turbo trailed behind him at top speed. No, the only aspect worth noting is the film’s casual diversity. It’s appealing and admirable to have a cast of characters (the humans, at least) who are different in age, gender, body type and background without making a big deal about it. I mean, I’d prefer if they were in a movie that actually created characters out of them that were more than cogs in the all-too familiar plot mechanics, but it’s a start.

Intervention: THE HANGOVER PART III

The Hangover Part III is a better movie than The Hangover Part II only because I find time spent in complete and total indifference preferable to stewing in boiling rage. The mean-spiritedness from the 2009 surprise hit comedy The Hangover was successfully, for me at least, swept up in the momentum of its mystery of three guys trying to piece together their drug-and-alcohol decimated memories of the previous night. But by the time the retread of a sequel arrived, the meanness went rancid. That film, in doubling down on the perceived selling points of its predecessor, ended up a putrid pile of hateful jokes that shoot past miscalculated and add up to nothing more than a sad waste of effort for all involved. With Part III, the benefit seems to be that no one involved bothered to write any jokes or try very hard to sell the material. So it has that going for it.

This film brings back the so-called Wolf Pack from the previous two films: stuffy dentist Stu (Ed Helms), aging bro Phil (Bradley Cooper), regular guy Doug (Justin Bartha), and weirdo Alan (Zach Galifianakis). This is a rare film in a series in which most of the lead actors appear to be as tired of it as I am. Maybe I’m just projecting. As it begins, the characters apparently finally learned their lessons from having pretty much the same exact thing happen to them twice. But of course, what kind of sequel would it be if they didn’t get into any trouble? Almost immediately, Alan accidentally decapitates his new pet giraffe, a kind of did-they-just-do-that opening sequence that follows an even earlier sequence of a slow-motion Bangkok prison riot.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well, the crazy criminal Chow (Ken Jeong), the exasperatingly annoying returning character, has escaped prison and that’s why a growling John Goodman kidnaps the guys en route to a rehab facility. (After all they’ve done, that dead giraffe was rock bottom, apparently.) Snatched up mid-intervention, they’re told to capture Chow and bring him to Goodman or Doug gets a bullet in the head. Hey, at least it’s something new. The weirdly serious turn is, animal cruelty aside, a far tamer effort than either of the two previous movies, with a plot that assumes you’re entering the theater feeling affection or something like it towards these main characters. I could barely care about them long enough to get me through the first film and the second one made me loathe them, so I suppose I was going in with a disadvantage. I just didn’t care what would happen to them, but I could have gotten over that if the film was funny.

I hesitate to knock this film for being largely laughless since most of its 100 minute runtime plays out like a sluggish thriller entirely uninterested in nothing more than a bit of comic relief here and there. Free (purposefully or not) from the toxic cloud of bad jokes that filled up the rerun that was its immediate predecessor, director Todd Phillips and co-writer Craig Mazin have inadvertently freed themselves from the comedy designation almost entirely. It’s allegedly a comedy. That’s what the studio has marketed it as. It’s the genre of the films it follows. It’s the category provided by the fine folks at the Internet Movie Database. Some of its lines come out as somewhat comic simply by the nature of Helms, Cooper, and Galifianakis and their reputations as funny guys, even though its best joke, such as it is, comes straight out of Zoolander. (I liked it far better there.) But there’s very little here that’s inherently funny.

Maybe this is a feature length demo reel for Todd Phillips hoping to be hired for an action film next time. After all, there’s a lot of technically adept filmmaking here. There’s a mildly enjoyable heist of a mansion in the hills outside Tijuana that involves creative use of dog collars to maneuver past a security system. There’s a briefly gripping tie-the-sheets-together-to-shimmy-down-the-side-of-a-building scene. The movie’s never better than when one or more of its main characters are right on the edge of potential death, but probably not for the reasons the filmmakers intended. This may be the only comedy that disappoints by leaving too many characters alive at the end. Without laughs or meaningful stakes, this makes for an awfully tired, pointless exercise.

Note: I can’t honestly say what anyone who happens to enjoy the series will make of this odd entry, but something tells me the scene in the middle of the end credits is probably where the die hard fans would’ve preferred the movie to start.

Dumbbells: PAIN & GAIN

Michael Bay is Hollywood’s preeminent vulgarian. With movies like Armageddon and Transformers, he specializes in slick imagery that turns a gleaming gaze on people and technology with the same slobbering glee, an objectification that turns everything into button-pushing jolts of spectacle, collateral damage, and queasy humor that leans on distasteful stereotypes more often than not. This sometimes leads to enjoyable movies, sometimes not, but it certainly makes him the right person to direct Pain & Gain, a based-on-a-true-story caper about some lunkheads with big small dreams who basically imagine themselves the heroes of their own Michael Bay movie. His proudly juvenile adrenaline machines in which an outsized id runs free through a glamorously ugly caricature world fits with a story so grotesque and unbelievable it simply must be true (or at least exaggerated from the truth).

The action takes place in Miami during 1994 and 1995. There at the time Bay was filming his feature debut, the cop buddy action comedy Bad Boys. So, alas, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), the main character of this movie, instead cites Rocky, Scarface and The Godfather as his cinematic motivation. He, conveniently forgetting the ultimate fate of the protagonists of those films, thinks of them as good examples of guys who made something of themselves, something to aspire to as he prepares to chase his American dream: lots of money, lots of things, and lots of pretty women. He has what he thinks is a great get-rich-quick plan, a sure-fire all-American, get-what’s-coming-to-him windfall. When questioned about his scheme he says, “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know what I’m doing.”

And what is Daniel's plot? He has happened to gain a new client, rich jerk Victor (Tony Shalhoub), who walked into Sun Gym looking for a personal trainer. He’s the kind of guy who says, “You know who invented salads? Poor people.” He’s not a nice guy. Daniel's idea is to recruit two of his co-workers, the steroidal Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and the born-again Paul (Dwayne Johnson), to help kidnap Victor, make him sign over all his assets blindfolded, and then return him to his routine unable to do anything about it. That sounds easy enough, if rather implausible and with countless details that need to be worked out. But Daniel doesn’t seem to notice those and his partners in crime don’t ask many questions. They all think they’re about to get rich beyond their wildest dreams. Here’s a group of guys smart enough to cook up a scheme, but too dumb to get away unscathed.

The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely gives us overlapping narration from all three men and their victim, giving us four perspectives on the events as they unfold. The dissonance between the confidence they constantly speak to us and each other, the pumped-up sheen of Bay’s filmmaking, and the string of dumb decisions they proceed to make provides a recipe for a savage pitch black comedy. When things start to go wrong, as you know they must, it turns into a kind of humid, sun-baked Fargo. (There’s a nasty bit of business with a pile of dismembered limbs that rivals that film’s wood chipper scene.) Bay shoots it all with a smug satisfaction, snickering at these meatheads for buying so whole-heartedly into the American dream of having it all and getting away with it that they can’t see it’s a lie with which all truly successful people learn to compromise. Early on, Wahlberg attends a lecture from a transparently phony motivational speaker (Ken Jeong) and leaves feeling nothing but starry-eyed confidence. Yes, he thinks, even he can make his dreams of obscene wealth come true. That he should go about it in a brutal, haphazard, illegal way is a source of the humor, but in the insistence that perhaps he’s a fool to try anything at all, the film is cynical, nihilistic social satire to its core.

There are no heroes here. The criminals are misguided lugs impossible to root for. Their victim is a smarmy slimeball who’s impossible to wish victory upon. Bay puts the audience in the sometimes uncomfortable position of simply watching the gears of plot turn on these awful people. The late edition of a private eye played by Ed Harris as a weary pragmatist and the only person of professional competence in the whole movie and as such seems to be subtextually shaking his head at the sad weirdness of it all, like Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, does much to help cut through the ugliness. But what sometimes beautiful ugliness! Bay’s muscular showiness is put to good use here, laying out tawdry, glittery lifestyles of the almost rich and gaudily infamous-in-their-own-minds, lives that play out sadly in gyms, strip clubs, and on Floridian beaches.

There’s huge entertainment to be had in the rapid-fire montage that keeps the pace speedy throughout the entire two-hour-plus runtime and the collision of light performances with the heavy dark violence and vulgarity. Instead of risking the audience lose track of his satirical point, Bay makes it quite clear that he’s in on the joke. As brutish satire, it makes its jabs early and finds only ways to repeat them thereafter. Luckily the performers (I haven’t even mentioned fun supporting roles filled by Rob Corddry, Bar Paly and Rebel Wilson) are agile and funny and the story itself is strange and unpredictable enough to keep things interesting. It’s a credit to the great cast, twisty plot, and Bay’s aggressively watchable, just-shy-of garishly colorful style that I didn’t grow tired. I didn’t love it or loathe it, but I think I had fun.

Loud Noises: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

At the center of these Transformers movies are the perfect metaphors for describing them, huge incompressible shape shifting junk heaps that occasionally assemble into aesthetically pleasing vehicles. Aren’t these movies essential just that, occasionally pleasing junk? Directed by Michael Bay at his what was then his most excessive, the first movie, from 2007, might be his best movie. It’s a triumph of machinery, both the creatures and the Hollywood mechanisms of their birth, the kinds of gleaming metal and kinetic action that Bay has always focused on. Here they become the goofiest, most explosive expression of his style, his canted angles and saturated colors that turn every shot into a music-video/advertisement hybrid, popping each shot with the crisp vibrancy of slick commercialism. The controlled chaos fell into disproportionate anarchy with the sequel, 2009’s Revenge of the Fallen. That film, though still capable of fleeting moments that are visually striking, was tonally incoherent and offensively stereotypical on most every level.

Here we go again, with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which splits the difference between the two approaches to the same material. This time, it’s in 3D, which at least serves to slow down Bay’s typically rapid-fire editing, if only by a few blinks per shot. The spectacle has to wait, though. For a good hour, perhaps even 90 minutes, Bay spins his wheels with crude humor, offensive stereotypes, and endless, elaborate setup.

Shia LaBeouf, having saved the world twice, is out looking for a job, jealous that his glamorous girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a former Victoria’s Secret model in her first acting job) is getting so much attention from her sleazy boss (Patrick Dempsey). The job search is a bit of a stall while the robots gather up the plot points that will lead to eventual mayhem, though it gives screen time to a self-amused John Malkovich, and a small role for Ken Jeong that is both racist and homophobic at the same time. As for the elaborate romantic setup, it never really pays off, unless you’re so inclined to count the huge close-up 3D shot of Huntington-Whiteley’s rear end walking up a flight of stairs that serves as her first appearance.

Meanwhile, the Autobots (those are the good guys) are still working with the military, led by Josh Duhamel, to sniff out Decepticons (those are the bad guys) but also blow up terrorists for some reason. The movie joylessly gives us an unintentionally hilarious description of said terrorists’ hideout as “Illegal Middle Eastern Nuclear Site.” Phew. As long as it’s illegal. That’s a sequence that wouldn’t look too out-of-place in Team America: World Police.

Taking a break from working for America, the Autobots just uncovered some top-secret stuff about the true reasons behind the U.S./Russian space race of the 60’s and the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl. I’m normally untroubled by seeing alternate history in pop sci-fi (this summer’s X-Men uses the Cuban Missile Crisis to good effect) but here it comes off sleazy and uncomfortable, especially with waxy CGI presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and even Obama) mixed in with the tweaked historical footage. Later, the movie will take visual cues from the Challenger disaster and 9/11. Ugh.

Moving on, there’s a lot to slog through. Buzz Aldrin cameos playing himself, staring up at Optimis Prime, the leader of the Autobots while admitting that, yes, there is indeed an ancient hibernating transformer (Leonard Nimoy) buried on the moon. Bill O’Reily has an interminably smug cameo needling John Turturro’s grating ex-government official. (I pause here to note that the reliably funny Alan Tudyk plays Turturro’s assistant). Frances McDormand collects a paycheck as an Intelligence chief interested in letting the ‘bots find and collect the long-dormant tech off of the moon. In a movie called Transformers: Dark of the Moon we get far too few Transformers and very little moon for all of this time. The movie is scene after scene of humans setting up what we all really want to see: stuff blowing up real good. The first film was actually a competent teen comedy that shifted effortlessly into a goofy sci-fi explosion of action, but after those giant robots have been slamming around writer Ehren Kruger has had no idea how to make just normal people interesting. To be fair he didn’t write the first movie, just the bad second two. All this human setup would be excusable in smaller, more economical doses, or if the robots’ plots made any sense whatsoever.

I won’t take this opportunity to dissect the many ways the logic of the various robot plans do not work. Instead, I will reflect on the fact that giant, largely indistinguishable robots are roaming the planet causing all kinds of ruckus and they’re still supposedly a secret. These creatures are also apparently intuitive geniuses, able to predict the plans of their enemies to an astonishingly accurate level. Take a scene wherein some rolling metal robots emerge to attack Shia on a highway, which leads to a striking 3D composition in which a car unfolds into a Transformer from around its passenger, beats back debris, then turns back into a car with the passenger returned safely to his seat. It makes not a lick of sense and I couldn’t tell you what this brief action sequence accomplishes in terms of plot or who did what to who and why, but it sure looked good for that brief moment.

For all I really disliked about the endless set-up, I was shocked to find that the pay-off almost, almost, made up for it. The action in the last hour or so moves to Chicago where Decepticons are taking over the city for some reason. Humans, after standing by powerless, and Autobots, after cowardly hiding while humans were massacred, roll into town to fight back. The resulting distended urban warfare action set piece is surprisingly effective. It’s well paced and mostly comprehensible, or at least there are clear goals that must be accomplished for the good guys to win. Chicago is thoroughly cluttered in the process. There’s a nifty Decepticon that’s like a metal Sarlacc pit on wheels. There’s good use of 3D to enhance huge drops and dips between skyscrapers. It’s dumb, loud summery sound and fury, and it works on a brute force level. One nearly great sequence with a teetering skyscraper, for example, has nice cliffhanger inventiveness. Bay may often make awkward, frighteningly tone-deaf films, but, when he’s using his eye for forcefully effective action imagery, I’d rather see a pure Michael Bay film than someone else trying to crib from his bag of tricks, like the thoroughly awful Battle: Los Angeles from earlier this year.

I didn’t end up leaving the theater completely hating Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but it’s only because the last hour distracted me from the opening 90 minutes. Upon reflection, dissatisfaction settles in along with the convoluted plot’s sheer idiocy and memory of the horrendous human plot with its endless failed attempts at humor. So, just good enough to very nearly distract from how bad it is, there’s a backhanded compliment for you.

The Hangover (2009)

The Hangover is the kind of effortlessly entertaining, explosively inappropriate, R-rated summer comedy that provides plenty of laughs and then leaves without a trace. There are no quotable lines or priceless moments that will last much past seeing the thing, but it’s plenty of fun in the moment. It doesn’t hurt that it has a fun premise. Three guys take their friend (Justin Bartha) to Vegas for his bachelor party only to wake up the next morning to find that they have no memory of the night before and have lost the groom.

It’s a great hook, sending the three guys through Vegas on a desperate search for their friend, along the way running in to all kinds of strange characters that reveal pieces of the puzzle of their night. It doesn’t hurt that the three guys are played by very funny actors embodying specific types of modern male dysfunction. There’s Bradley Cooper, handsome, fun-loving, and rebelling against middle-class married-life suburbia, a real Fight-Club type. There’s Ed Helms, a gangly, nerdy, cautious dentist, under the thumb of a suspicious, bossy girlfriend. Then there’s Zach Galifianakis, the loopiest, goofiest of the bunch. His face is hidden behind a Grizzly-Adams beard. His belly folds over his belt. His eyes are often hidden behind large sunglasses or a dazed glaze. He’s awkward and uncomfortable to watch but completely funny in the way he delivers the strangest lines (he has to be back in town for the Jonas Brothers concert and must stay 200 yards from all Chuck-E-Cheeses).

The three guys tear through town running into a baby, a tiger, a stripper, cops, doctors, gangsters and even Mike Tyson in their search for their friend and to find out what, exactly caused the mayhem they discover. Why is a mattress speared on a statue? How’d they get that car? Whose baby is that? Who ordered those custom mugs and hats? What’s that chicken doing? Dude, where's our car?

The movie has no weight – I never really cared about the characters – but there’s enough humor and hot air to float the movie to the finish line, even if it starts to deflate a bit in the third act. Even though I didn’t care about the people, they were still likeable creations, and there’s enough curiosity factor to each new development – how’ll they get out of this? – to sustain the freewheeling energy for most of the time. Director Todd Phillips has a fine cast (including support from Jeffery Tambor, Heather Graham, Rob Riggle, Mike Epps, and Ken Jeong) and uses them well. He also knows his way around the dude humor of the concept, building on his past experiences with Old School and the like. Phillips guides the movie with a steady, sure hand, knowing when to punch up the humor and knowing when to keep it low-key. This isn’t going to be an especially memorable picture – its effect is already wearing off and I’ll have mostly forgotten it within a year or two – but it’s sure to be a staple of late-night TV.