Nope: THE DO-OVER

Has a movie star ever done less on screen than Sandler in any of his recent lackadaisical performances where he’s little more than a black hole of energy and appeal? Maybe, even after years of scraping near the bottom of the barrel with the dire likes of Grown Ups 2 and Blended, it was combined impact of the relative box office disappointment of his hard-R, but twisted funny, That’s My Boy in 2012 and the bad luck to stretch dramatic chops in two total flops, 2014’s Men Women & Children and 2015’s The Cobbler, that pushed him to do less than the bare minimum. Since then he’s slept through an action comedy (Pixels) and a western parody (The Ridiculous 6), each worse than the last. And each time around he fades under the spotlight, committing less and less to silly voices or high-concept goofiness. He lets the supporting players and desperate flop-sweat gross out gags do the heavy lifting while he appears to look forward to the next time the director calls cut so he can get on with his life.

I dutifully fired up Netflix to sample The Do-Over, the streaming service’s second film from a four-picture deal with Sandler. (Creatively it’s their worst original programming move, but since they keep the numbers secret there’s no telling if it pays off financially.) I quickly found that any attempt to write about it would be putting more thought and effort into it than anyone involved did. The story concerns two unlucky dopes (Sandler, sleepwalking, and David Spade, playing against type as a timid dummy instead of a sarcastic dummy) who fake their deaths to escape their miserable lives only to discover the plan goes awry when they end up in a conspiracy involving cancer drugs. If you think it sounds a bit more complicated than the typical Sandler material, you’d be mistaken. It’s a collection of dumb complications, sloppily plotted, lazily performed, and shot with all the flat visual interest of a stock photo with the watermark still attached. What would be worse: if Sandler has stopped trying, or if this is really the best he can do?

Why does it exist? Is it for the product placement, logos for cell phones and beers and others in a parade of brands prominently displayed? Is it to get attractive women, extras and featured performers (like Paula Patton) alike, in tight dresses, low-cut shirts, and bikinis? Is it to get Netflix to bankroll a trip? Long scenes take place on a tropical island, or in swimming pools, so it’s also another of his paid vacations with a little bit of a film shoot on the side. He’s brought along a host of his usual pals in front of the camera (Spade, Nick Swardson) and behind the scenes (director Steven Brill, veteran of Little Nicky and Mr. Deeds, lackluster comedies that seem better in retrospect compared to this).  It’s such a flaccid, baggy, boring movie, working in cameos for all sorts of people I just felt sorry for, like Kathryn Hahn, Sean Astin, Michael Chiklis, and Matt Walsh. I felt worst for the great character actor Luis Guzmán, who has an embarrassing scene involving sweaty testicles, one of many desperate R-rated jokes fruitlessly attempting to yank some life into this dud.

And then if you happen to take the story seriously for even one second, the whole thing is even worse than the lack of laughs and narrative or visual interest. It’s wrapped in toxic masculinity’s misogynistic expression, blaming the characters’ misfortunes entirely on women who exclusively wish to torment, tease, trick, and otherwise torture the men in their lives. It ends with Spade repeatedly punching a woman in the stomach while shouting, “I’m sick of women lying to me!” The whole thing’s nothing you couldn’t get if you asked a dozen of the worst commenters on a shady website to write a screenplay about how much they feel wronged by women. If out of perverse curiosity you end up watching this movie you have my condolences. To review Sandler films is too often an exercise in finding rock bottom move ever lower.

Not-So-Perfect Getaway: IN THE BLOOD

I’m rooting for Gina Carano. As an action star, she has plenty of promise. She’s a former mixed martial arts fighter who carries that physicality with great calm and capable choreography into a screen presence that’s compelling and intriguing. Her weird blend of unruffled expression and tight body language gives her a real ease that draws me in, even in the center of the terrible cheapo actioner that is In the Blood, her latest film. After her first lead role in Steven Soderbergh’s sleek Haywire and a choice supporting turn as The Rock’s right-hand woman in Fast & Furious 6, she deserves better than the woefully generic, bungled B-movie she’s headlining here. It’s the kind of movie that should have a simple hook, but takes its nugget of pulpy interest and muddles it up with belabored backstory and dropped subplots that add up to nothing much, stuck somewhere frustrating between trying too hard and not trying hard enough.

Director John Stockwell has made that his trademark as of late, with slight B-movies like Cat Run and Dark Tide that are too lazy to be effective and too clumsily plotted to fully activate what small simple pleasures they could generate. It’s no wonder that his best film of this kind (leaving out his actual best film, the nicely observed 2001 teen drama Crazy/Beautiful) is his simplest. That’d be 2005’s diving-for-treasure thriller Into the Blue which used a nicely photographed beach-side setting as an excuse to stage sequences of moderate suspense when it’s not ogling stars Jessica Alba and the late Paul Walker, hired to look good in swimwear and filling their roles splendidly. Still, it’s nothing more than a barely passable matinee diversion on a lethargic day.

In the Blood also takes place by the beach, looking at times like a nice paid vacation for all involved. But the movie spends little time in bikinis and almost as little time taking in the scenery. Just as well, since the movie is shot on some of the cheapest, ugliest digital video I’ve ever seen professionally projected in a movie theater. Sometimes, Stockwell cuts to pixilated cell phone video (shot on what appears to be circa 2003 technology), smeary surveillance feeds, and chunky GoPro footage, the better to make us grateful for what subpar cinematography we get, I suppose. The story follows Carano as a newlywed honeymooning on a small Caribbean island with husband Cam Gigandet. He goes missing in the aftermath of a suspicious zipline accident. She sets out to find him and get to the bottom of the apparent conspiracy to keep her from the truth about why he was taken.

As if that’s not enough, we also get flashbacks to Carano’s character as a teenager. She’s toughened up and taught to fight by her father (Stephen Lang) who tells her “scars are tattoos with better stories.” She has killed multiple people in self-defense on separate occasions. We hear she met her husband at Narcotics Anonymous. So she’s had a hard life. Why all this overly tragic backstory is loaded on top of this relatively simple story is beyond me. If a movie’s going to traffic in stereotypical character types as thoroughly as this one, why bother explaining? Maybe screenwriters James Robert Johnston and Bennett Yellin thought we would want to know why Carano is such a good fighter. Thanks, but no thanks. No Gene Kelly movie ever felt the need to take the time to painstakingly let us know how his characters became great dancers.

Into the Blood is lazily plotted, with little energy to the mystery. Methinks a problem might be the movie’s assumption that we’ll miss Cam Gigandet. He’s so painfully unconvincing in the opening scenes I was all too happy writing him off as an unseen MacGuffin character for most of the movie. (The reveal of the details of his fate is a big let down, too.) As Carano goes looking for him, scene after scene is shaggily, sloppily assembled. The action is sporadic, in murkily shaking shots, and torturous without impact. When not brawling, scenes are brightly overlit. You can see the actors sweating and squirming in front of the camera, trying and failing to make the tortured twists and clunky dialogue work.

The ensemble includes Ismael Cruz Cordova, Amaury Nolasco, and the always-welcome Danny Trejo as locals who spend their time helping and hindering the search. They’re fine, I suppose, but utterly indistinct. Most everyone is just there to move things along and not pull focus from the star. She’s great, but so underserved by the material that she fails to live down to it. If the story was sharper or the ensemble more vividly sketched, maybe she’d have something to work off of. The best part ends up being the wonderful Luis Guzmán as a laid-back local cop who has exactly zero interest in the situation in which Carano’s found herself. I liked that about him. I could relate.

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.

Local Hero: THE LAST STAND

I was surprised how welcome it is to see Arnold Schwarzenegger back on the big screen in a starring role. It’s at least as good as it is to see South Korean horror/action/comedy hybrid genre filmmaker Kim Jee-woon's new feature opening wide all across America, come to think of it. That the former’s return and the latter’s Hollywood debut is one and the same is a nice bonus. If only the movie they made together was better. It's the kind of pared down actioner featuring a small setting and big stakes that should make for some nice lean excitement. And sometimes it does. This is a movie of fleeting diversions, but mostly it plays as witlessly flip, excessively violent, and creakily predictable.

The slight plot features a fugitive drug cartel leader (Eduardo Noriega) fleeing capture, leaving a frustrated F.B.I. agent (Forest Whitaker) in Las Vegas. He stays a step ahead of the feds, racing a super fast sports car towards the Mexican border. To get there, he has to go through a sleepy one-stoplight Arizona town where the aging sheriff (Schwarzenegger) and his green deputies (Luis Guzmán, Jaimie Alexander, and Zach Gilford) are dealing with a shady trucker (Peter Stormare) and a missing milk farmer (Harry Dean Stanton). They’re a bunch of stock characters – complete with stereotypically twangy Americana scoring in the background – waiting around for the shooting to start. The film works along parallel paths as a car chase zooms towards a slow small town mystery, cutting between the two, biding its time before the two halves will eventually collide in a whole climax in which every character gets to play a part.

If you don’t think a crazy weapons-museum proprietor (Johnny Knoxville) and a jailed-for-the-weekend drunk and disorderly Iraq war veteran (Rodrigo Santoro) will become important in the lengthy climactic firefight, then you’ve not seen an action movie before. But who would go to this movie without having seen an action movie before? The script cobbled together by Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff and George Nolfi leaves no room for memorable characters beyond the typecast personas. It’s an uncomplicated movie of dusty setups for obvious payoffs that take their sweet time showing up. In the opening scene, Schwarzenegger is thrown the keys to a shiny new car, its owner telling him “Don't let anything happen to it.” It’s overwhelmingly obvious what condition that car will be in by the movie’s end. There’s a lot of bloodshed coming as well and when the sheriff growls that he “knows what’s coming,” I believed him, because I did too.

Cartoonish and hollow, it is, in tone and genre positioning, a pale American echo of Kim's slapstick spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, the Weird. That’s not a great film, but it’s a similarly convoluted and empty expression of well-staged style. The Last Stand has an admirable looseness about it, a jokiness that sometimes comes across as genuine. I especially liked when Schwarzenegger has a line about one of the villains “making us immigrants look bad.” It’s not often that one of his pictures feels the desire to explain, even in a throwaway line, why a thick Austrian accent is rumbling out of the mouth of an American character. But the ease with which Arnold can command the screen is thrown away by the ways in which Kim’s pacing is off. Jokes misfire through bad timing. The humor is strained, especially when Knoxville gets involved, and the setpieces, though clever enough at times, like when a car disappears into the night by turning off the headlights, or when two men chase blindly through a cornfield, never really becomes more than repetitive. Action beats arrive too slowly, last too long, or end too soon. Plot twists are fumbled. I felt myself straining to have a good time while my affection slowly drained away.

Adventure Time: JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND

There was no good reason to get excited about Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. It’s a late arriving sequel to the little-loved 2008 family movie Journey to the Center of the Earth, a loose adaptation of the Jules Verne classic. It was a cheesy, erratic, CGI monstrosity that took full, sloppy, insufferable advantage of the then-novelty of a 3D resurgence. Of that movie I can only recall a mugging Brendan Fraser and a moment in which Seth Meyers smirks as he thrusts a tape measure out of the screen. Having seen this new movie, I must admit that my reticence was unfounded. Journey 2 is a fun time at the movies, a gee-whiz spectacle made with great energy and an authentic, pleasing sense of adventure.

Ditching just about everything that made up its predecessor up to and including the writers, the director, and most of the cast, Journey 2 makes it nice and easy to recommend ignoring its sequel status and jumping right in. It doesn’t take much time at all for the script by Brian and Mark Gunn to get the plot off and running. A teenage boy who considers himself an explorer (Josh Hutcherson) convinces his stepfather (Dwayne Johnson) to help him try to find The Mysterious Island. You know, the one that Jules Verne wrote about.

This island has to be real since the boy has picked up a coded message transmitted from the middle of nowhere that has to be, just has to be, from his missing grandfather (Michael Caine). Proving the existence of this island was the old man’s life’s work. I like how the kid figures out where the secret message originates by casting aside his iPad and paging through dusty volumes of fantasy literature and comparing the map inside The Mysterious Island with the ones inside Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island. You see, these maps all have clues as to finding the actual Mysterious Island, because, why not?

Sensing an opportunity to bond with his stepson, the trip is planned. Stepfather and stepson hitch a ride on a rickety helicopter with the owner (Luis Guzman) and his plucky teenaged daughter (Vanessa Hudgens). They all get sucked into a swirling storm cloud that deposits them onto the unknown shores of Mysterious Island. There they find grandpa of course, as well as gigantic bugs, gargantuan lizards, and miniature elephants. It’s a veritable phantasmagoric jungle menagerie of identifiable beasts in unexpected sizes. The movie is little more than these broadly sketched and immensely likable characters hiking through the jungle and encountering these strange sights. “You should have expected mysterious things,” the stepson tells his stepfather. “It’s in the title.”

This group is made up of easily identifiable types played with earnest, affable verve. The boy adventurer, the strong-but-kind muscle man, the white-haired veteran explorer, the pretty girl, and the comic relief are imbued with characteristics that bounce off each other in ways that are the right mix of predictable and comfortable. With someone as charismatic and charming as Dwayne Johnson, the other actors are left scrambling to win audiences’ affection. The effort pays off. I found I liked spending time with them as they spend their screen time marveling at strange sights and running away from them when things get dangerous, all the while trying to find a way off this island without getting stomped on, eaten up, or submerged under water.

The movie is a particularly enjoyable version of this particular kind of movie, the kind of movie that gets a kick out of giants beasts lumbering about and flying around in classic Ray Harryhausen style, albeit in a just-convincing-enough modern CGI fashion instead of that special effects master’s use of stop-motion animation. (In fact, Harryhausen did the effects for a 1961 adaptation of The Mysterious Island, a film I absolutely need to see). Director Brad Peyton (who made his directorial debut in 2010 with Cats & Dogs 2, which is best forgotten) handles the large-scale effects and the swift script with a nice, unhurried style. It’s just plain sturdy adventure filmmaking. It’s bright, colorful, and energetic with big monsters, beautiful scenery, and an exuberant and agreeable use of 3D effects. (Objects noticeably pop out and extend backwards without being too distracting).  It’s a B-movie matinee right out of the 1950s when it would have been called something like a boy’s adventure story and played to theaters of happy children on a Saturday afternoon.

The fact of the matter is, that I saw this movie in a theater filled with happy children just last Saturday afternoon. They howled and giggled and exclaimed right on cue. Reader, I could totally see where they were coming from. The fact of the matter is, the movie just plain works. This is not an especially ambitious movie, but it’s a satisfying one for what it is. It’s good-natured and sweet, with a relaxed sense of humor that’s only sometimes too easy or corny. It’s silly and it knows it. The movie comes with a nice family-friendly moral without becoming moralizing, with zippy action sequences that are exciting without becoming frightening. What can I say? It put a big goofy grin on my face.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)

In 1974, journeyman director Joseph Sargent pumped out the lean, gritty, hijacked-subway B-movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, with a sardonic, sarcastic Walter Matthau going up against the crisp and creepy Robert Shaw in a battle of the wills fleshed out with eccentric supporting characters and local color with the grimy and goofy New York City (back when crime and bohemianism were high, civic pride and public services were low) a character in its own right. But that was thirty-five years ago. Now director Tony Scott has updated without besting the original concept – bringing to it his trademark restless but uncurious camera – and without finding a way to make the story relevant to how the city is today. Rather, Scott has created a movie that feels disconnected from our time and drums through its plot mechanics with a grim, unsatisfying sense of déjà vu. It’s more than the fact that it’s a remake that makes the movie feel generic. The bleary, numbing cinematography works in concert with the blandly clunking score to create a sense of tiring excitement where I felt commanded to be entertained.

Denzel Washington replaces Matthau and does a fine job with a role that, as written, is less than taxing. Anyone with sufficient screen presence could have pulled it off. This is no slight against Washington, a great actor, but rather against the script by Brian Helgeland (who’s done fine work in the past). This isn’t a distinctively written character. Like most of the characters, he’s given nothing distinct or interesting to say beyond tired thriller lines that have slid out of the thriller factory like clockwork for decades. Maybe he should be grateful, for when Helgeland attempts to write something different and distinct, it ends up sounding stupid like poor John Travolta (loudly hamming it up in the Shaw role) who is forced to punctuate nearly every sentence with an ill-fitting profanity. Treated even worse are the great character actors, like Luis Guzman and John Turturro, who are given next to nothing to do, or James Gandolfini who does so well with what he’s given (the one stab at current reflection that sticks) you wish he had more, and better, things to do.

Any suspense that does arise comes from the plot itself, but the inherent suspense in the story goes unexploited. The subway car is stuck underground. How will the hijackers escape? The plot’s central thrill comes from the lack of motion. The subway is gumming up the works and Matthau/Washington main goal is not saving the day, but getting things running again. But Scott doesn’t trust stillness to raise tension, nor is he interested in exploring the mundane goal of getting the subway system running. His camera zooms and spins in a desperate attempt to whip up extra tension but instead spins further and further away from tension.

The movie works on a superficial level. It’s an involving story and exceedingly watchable performers. I was even tricked into a mildly positive response upon exiting. I wasn’t blown away but could have been heard proclaiming it “alright” and “reasonably diverting” if “not as good as the original.” Now, having settled in my mind, the memory has curdled. It has sunk in my estimation, but not by much. This is a cold, mechanical movie, heartlessly calculated, loudly screaming “aren’t you thrilled?” 

Fighting (2009)

As quick, blunt, and economical as its title, Fighting goes through the motions with skill but little passion, in contrast to director Dito Montiel’s first film. That film is A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a roughly assembled semi-autobiographical film that jumped about and occasionally missed the emotional mark, but was shot through with such vibrant passion that energized every edit and jolted the interactions into a state resembling a half-remembered fever dream of repulsively attractive nostalgia. That was a good movie. Fighting, on the other hand, is just a junk movie: reasonably well-made but unexciting. It just sat up there on the screen while I was profoundly indifferent.

It’s the story of a young man who gets sucked into a world of underground fighting in New York. That young man is played by Channing Tatum in yet another of his tough guys with wounded souls. He does it well again here – there’s something about his smooth rectangular face, with his eyes lost in the mass of flesh, that can project a wounded warrior – and has some nice moments with Terrence Howard who’s playing a self-described two-bit hustler. They rarely raise their voices, softly mumbling their way through the movie. There’s also a romantic interest provided by the pretty Zulay Henao, but the most interesting characters, such as they are, lurk around the edges. There’s Luis Guzman and Roger Guenveur Smith (a quintessential what's-his-name) as sleazy peers of Howard’s and an entertaining Altragracia Guzman as Henao’s grandmother; they do the best they can with the material given, but they remain only half-formed characters.

There’s no sizzle to the movie. It’s bland and formless, thoroughly uninteresting and unexciting in form and execution. As it played out, I found that I really only had one major complaint about the film: I simply didn’t care. It was competently shot, but the movie failed to make me care about the stakes. I had no interest in discovering what happened next. It became a dead piece of cinema to me, nothing more than a series of images and sounds. I didn’t hate it - it’s totally watchable - I just didn’t care.