Car Trouble: BABY DRIVER

Baby Driver is the action movie equivalent of an earworm. Wafting in on the summer breeze full of undeniable, unshakable energy, it is as bright, infectious, zippy, crowd-pleasing, sugary, and satisfying as the best pop songs. That it comes from writer-director Edgar Wright is no surprise. In his filmmaking, every cut counts, every aspect of the production – from design and cinematography to casting and staging and everything between – brilliantly orchestrated into one cohesive blast. By timing when and where to move from frame to frame down to the millisecond, his eye as unexpected as it is intuitive, he builds rhythms, forms jokes, reveals character, emphasizes key plot details, and sets the pace with the rigor and flare of a drum major. It’s show-off style of the most casual sort, reveling in the modulating momentum a rat-a-tat marriage of script and sensation movie magic allows. His latest film pushes his style the farthest yet. In his 2004 horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead one of the most memorable moments involves a jukebox blaring to life as the heroes attack a zombie with pool cues, each strike of their makeshift weapons keeping time with the Queen song suddenly on the soundtrack. Baby Driver is the feature-length version of that instinct, telling the story of an in-over-his-head getaway driver with special emphasis on the music in his earbuds.

Not just a great gimmick, the nonstop diegetic soundtrack serves the character. Baby (Ansel Elgort), orphaned in a car accident years ago which left him with constant lingering tinnitus, is a wunderkind driver under the thumb of a smarmy gangster (Kevin Spacy, oozing confident snappiness). His driving is like Gene Kelly’s dancing: muscular, fluid, graceful, dazzling. He makes it look easy to be so excellent. Forced to chauffeur the man’s bank-robbing teams at a moment’s notice – “They call, I go,” Baby says – he focuses narrowly on the task at hand. He blocks out the ringing in his ears using a cool playlist he keeps handy in one of his may iPod classics (technology already as nostalgic as the records and cassettes that are also key factors in the plot). This allows him not only to alleviate his ailment, but to help distance himself from the real criminals. Though he’s one of the team (the various robbers played with great personality by the likes of Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Bernthal, and Flea, an ensemble of scene-stealers), he views his situation as that of a frustrated goodhearted youngster. He loves driving, but hates his job. 

The boss has engaged his services through a mixture of blackmail and intimidation. Baby thinks they’ve just about completed their arrangement – the movie starts with the typical One Last Job formulation – but just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. Trying to protect his new girlfriend (Lily James) and his ailing foster father (CJ Jones) from danger, he finds he must crank up the tunes to drive or die. Scenes with his loved ones are a tender oasis against the prickly criminals he carts around and the hurtling action that erupts from them. Baby is a nice young man in over his head, and there’s a fine tension between the sense of control his driving skills affords him, and the careening lack of control in his larger situation. It helps that Wright has Elgort to surround with this high-stakes frivolity. The young Fault in our Stars actor’s face can from some angles look placid cool, and from others nothing but unformed sweetness. The soft, subtle malleability sells his intensely sympathetic character, the sublime heightened heist melodrama he’s in, and the smooth skill with which it’s all pulled off.

The rare car chase movie that’s as alive outside the action as in, it’s nothing but good fun visual flourishes and great sudden surprises from beginning to end. Wright approaches his sturdy action movie setup with the grace and skill of an expert plate-spinner. The screenplay flows with funny, syncopated patter and chatter; the plot crackles with unforced setups for payoffs that are always deeply satisfying, even (and especially) when they spin away from the expected. The characters are quickly sketched and consistently engaging, from a cast exuding not only great relish for the fun lines they get to speak, but for the tempo and style with which they swagger. For Wright has choreographed the entire film (the cuts, the words, the angles, the action, and the gestures – from a flick of a wrist to the bat of an eye) to the soundtrack. With a backbeat of only the catchiest songs – an eclectic mix of rock, R&B, hip-hop, and pop that are the sweet spot of not too obvious or too obscure – the production becomes the action film as musical. It takes the assumption both forms are story hooks on which to hang sensational set-pieces to its logical conclusion. There’s never a down moment, only crescendos and fermatas, tension and humor stretched and strung. Like the best song-and-dance, the film does the complicated – thrilling stunt driving, shootouts, and foot chases at a screwball pace – with a big darling grin on its face. It’s a great time at the movies.

Too Many Crooks: HORRIBLE BOSSES 2

To say Horrible Bosses 2 represents everything wrong with America today is a bit of an overstatement, but more for what it implies about the mercifully forgettable movie’s importance than the actual repugnant experience of watching it unspool. Sure, it is a crassly commercial calculation pointlessly extending the plot of Horrible Bosses, a box office success that tidily concluded. There was no need to revisit the three dudes (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day) who hated their bosses so much they ended up causing the death of one, jail time for another, and blackmailed the third into silence. But the mere fact that we are is only unfortunate. What’s worst is the resulting R-rated comedy sequel’s ceaselessly miscalculated edginess. It takes the underlying selfish smugness that permeated its predecessor and amps it up while dialing down the sense of effort. It’s lazy and dumb, offensive mostly for what it assumes an audience will settle for.

The plot’s a shambles, a dull repetition of similar moments stupidly drug along by flat scenes that sit on the screen without building momentum or energy. It’s flat, barely feeling like a movie at all most of the time. The main guys have invented a new product that looked to me like any old showerhead, but they call it the Shower Buddy and claim inspiration from a car wash, so what do I know? Their product catches the attention of a big shot mail order magnate (Christoph Waltz) who orders thousands of units, then refuses payment, sending their fledgling business into bankruptcy. Then he laughs, saying he’ll buy their company from the bank for pennies on the dollar.

Too stupid to learn their lesson from the last film, as per comedy sequel dictates, they decide to kidnap the rich guy’s jerk son (Chris Pine) and demand their company as ransom. Once they do, the son tries to negotiate a cut of the ransom as his dad calls a detective (Jonathan Banks) and our main characters flail about in-over-their-heads panicking. Now that I type that out, it doesn’t sound so bad. And indeed, the core is fine, a sort of Ransom of Red Chief meets heist movie plot that could’ve worked well with a tight pace, good sense of character, and funny jokes. There’s none of that here.

Director Sean Anders, coming off the funniest Adam Sandler comedy of the past decade, having apparently made a wrong turn somewhere, deploys ugly, garishly bright digital cinematography that looks cheap and smudged. It’s hard to look at, though at least it matches the general sense of slapdash carelessness that permeates the whole project. The plot features few real surprises. The closest it gets involves a character literally shouting, “What a twist!” It spends its time weakly moving through a painfully stupid series of events, limply trotting out characters from the first film (Jennifer Aniston, Jamie Foxx, Kevin Spacey) with little reason for their reappearances beyond their prior appearances. The screenplay (credited to the director and three others) heightens their original quirks to mean-spirited parodies of what were already those to begin with.

But where the script most turns wrong is its unrelenting vileness. No character can go more than three lines without becoming problematic or gratingly tone-deaf. It’s an attempt to be edgy, filthily R, through nothing more than endlessly, wearingly, willingly offensive dialogue of the cheapest, meanest, lowest variety. It starts to pile up instantly: ethnic slurs, casual objectification of women, fear and appropriation of black culture, gay panic. With the flimsiest patina of ironic distance, the sleaziest of half-hearted excuses for such bottom-feeding comedy, the movie becomes shamelessly putrid: sexist, racist, and homophobic, a gross pit of worst impulses, a comments section come to life, dripping self-regard and overflowing with horrible worldviews.

Most anything can be funny approached from the right angles, but Horrible Bosses 2 finds only wrong ones. There are tasteless punchlines about molestation, mental illness, and abuse, ill-timed gags about henpecked men and police misconduct. And every scene includes at least one attempted comic riff about sexual assault, resulting in a movie that seems to exist mostly to catalog all possible variations of rape joke. The only laughs are in the bloopers that play over the end credits, but even then they’re mostly on screen, not off. In a year that brought us largely funny, cheerily dirty, broad R-rated comedies like Neighbors and 22 Jump Street (problematic prison scene aside) managing to be somewhat progressive in their approaches to race, gender, sexuality, and class, the Horrible Bosses weltanschauung feels all the more stunted and backwards. Yuck.

A Company on the Verge of a Breakdown: MARGIN CALL

The entirety of J.C. Chandor’s debut feature Margin Call plays like the first act of a disaster movie, the moments when the experts slowly become aware that things are about to go very wrong, that the world of the film is about to explode. In this case, the disaster is all too real, has already occurred, and we’re still living in its aftermath. Set in the fall of 2008, the film takes place over 24 hours in a big financial firm as one analyst figures out just how bad things are going to get. The shocking truth he discovers is that risky bets on mortgage-backed securities and the like are about to come up for big losses. The company is over leveraged. The decisions that are made this night will mean the difference between the life and death of the company, of its workers’ and their families’ finances, and probably for the entire American economy, if not the world’s. Sound familiar?

The film starts with a fired risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) giving a flash drive to one of his youngish employees (Zachary Quinto). It contains the formulas that predict impending devastation, the keys to understanding the suddenly very real possibility of complete and total financial ruin for the firm. He passes this information along to his boss (Paul Bettany), who passes it along to his boss (Kevin Spacey), who gives it to analysts (Demi Moore and Aasif Mandvi), who give it to their boss (Simon Baker), who calls in the CEO (Jeremy Irons). It’s an all-star cast (or a close-enough approximation of all-star) ready and waiting for the disaster to strike, repetitively going over their options and weighing consequences. They can see it coming, they can try and slow its approach, but this thing is going to hit and hit hard.

Chandor fills the film with tense boardroom scenes and jargon-filled power plays, along with brief moments that play almost like asides, sketching themes too concretely. At one point, during a rooftop smoke break, one suit actually peers over the edge and says, “It’s a long way down.” What this screenplay could have used was characters who were more than just symbols and with more bluntly clever macho Mametian rat race rat-a-tat in their dialogue. (Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin are further good examples of the kind of character-driven satirical spark technical talk can sometimes have). The actors – most of them pretty great – are ready to sink their teeth into meatier roles than are provided.

This is a film that tries to create characters that are understandable, relatable even, in a film that looks to find empathy but not excuses. It gets there, but it’s all so heavy handed. I believed these actors were the kinds of serious suits who would soberly and gravely use bursts of business speak to tersely and tensely discuss risky financial deals. What I didn’t believe were the moments like the ones when Bettany gives a remorseless little monologue about how people say they want a fair world but “nobody actually wants that,” when Tucci trots out a wistful bridge-building anecdote to make the point that Wall Street produces nothing of tangible value, or when Spacey reveals he has a symbolically significant dying dog at home. The small details of the film are so convincing – the jargon, the drab gray production design, and the simple modern costumes – but the words spoken are so often flat that, try as I might, I simply couldn’t believe the big picture.

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.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

The Men Who Stare at Goats has a great title and, with George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey, a great cast. Unfortunately, it’s a comedy that’s stuck awkwardly between light and dark, soft and edgy. It spins its wheels tonally while also forgetting about narrative drive or thematic development. As a result, it’s merely 90-minutes of watching big stars goof around in a giant sandbox playing true characters, mostly (Clooney, Bridges and Spacey) psychic soldiers trained in a secret Armed Forces project known as New Earth Army. McGregor is just a tag-along journalist (inexplicably shifted from London to Ann Arbor in a pointless case of adjusting the truth) learning about the history of the group, who call themselves Jedi Warriors (cute, considering they’re talking to Obi-Wan Kenobi).

The four men provide the film some modest pleasures. Clooney is good-natured and humorous, as he usually is, here deadpanning dubiously effective combat technique and flatly describing improbable abilities including a “death tap” that killed a man (Instantly? Nope. Eighteen years later. One never knows when the curse of the death tap will strike). Bridges is basically an enlisted Lebowski who indulges in New Age hippie-culture and invents the majority of techniques on display. Spacey has a great few scenes, rolling back his eyes and talking in a funny voice for one scene in which he tries to fake paranormal powers. In another scene he will calmly pass on good wishes to a newlywed couple with the funniest two lines in the movie (Spoiler: “Congratulations. Sorry it doesn’t work out”).

Directed by first-timer, but longtime actor, producer, writer, and friend of Clooney, Grant Heslov, the movie ends up a wishy-washy mess, not as good as it should be, but not as bad as it could have been. The movie’s good-natured enough, but ultimately Heslov can’t muster up enough heft to really start the movie so that by the time it’s wrapping up I found myself thinking “is that all?” It’s a goofy, insubstantial little thing (save for a case of most unfortunate timing with a scene showing an acid-tripping soldier shooting up his base) that just never works. The last scene has McGregor’s reporter typing away, promising to tell the world what happened, then lamenting that his story received little coverage in the media. We’re supposed to sympathize with him, but I found myself agreeing with the media. This story’s a non-starter.