The Old Men and the Guns: EXPEND4BLES

Expend4bles is running into all the usual problems that can dog an aging franchise limping back into theaters—diminished energy, effort, and interest. The title of the latest is its creative peak. This action series started as an aging action star ensemble picture. Not a bad idea to put a black-ops squad of oldsters together, a Grumpy Old Men with guns and gore. Sylvester Stallone lead the charge and, across three movies, supporting roles went to the likes of Dolph Lundgren and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis and Wesley Snipes and Jean-Claude Van Damme and Jet Li and Harrison Ford and Chuck Norris and Mel Gibson and dozens more. The token young guy was Jason Statham, then only a decade removed from his first breakout in the Transporter movies. Now, though, he’s less than a decade removed from Stallone’s age in the first Expendables. When Stallone was Statham’s current age, 56, he was already gearing up to play Rocky and Rambo in their elder years (for the first time). Statham isn’t wearing his age like that. He’s still in fighting form as the youngest regular guy on the squad, able to jump and leap and stab and parry and even sell a perfectly aimed gunshot from a moving motorcycle as it spins midair. He’s still got it. No matter how many junk pictures he pops up in, I’m never tired of him. This movie, however, is tired. This belated fourth Expendables entry has no good young blood to offer to bolster Statham’s spot. And it doesn’t have the deep bench of older actors willing to return with them. So it’s still the same guys, but with fewer older stars willing to return to joke around in a subpar spectacle that relies almost entirely on the throwback appeal of said stars. It’s an aging varsity team with most of the roster unavailable and no one on the JV squad to call up. The result is so low-key and lethargic I spent even the action scenes wondering when it’d pick up the pace.

The director this time is Scott Waugh, an action expert whose films are sometimes solid. His video-game-adaptation Need for Speed is a fun car chase flick, though his Act of Valor is torpid US military propaganda, while his most recent prior film, the long delayed Hidden Strike, is torpid Chinese military propaganda. He’s not the sort of director who can overpower another’s priorities, in other words. Here he’s dutifully serving star demands and franchise image, but with much more of the former and less of the latter. Some of his frames here have a plasticine energy that tries hard to whip up a sense of fun. But that’s undone by characterizations that are one-note stereotypes. Even in a movie as broad and slight as a dumb throwback actioner, there’s just nothing to hold onto. It’s bad enough returning characters are simple and repetitive. Statham is a confident rule-bender always serving Stallone, the unquestioned macho leader adored by his team. It’s what he wants to project as a Movie Star in his twilight. I don’t think that’s changed much since the first. It comes with the territory. But such thinness is worse when the characters are new and quickly reduced to nothing. Newcomer 50 Cent spends the movie vaguely grumpy and gets no cool action. Megan Fox careens between nagging girlfriend and pin-up-poster glamor commando. Then these nobody characters enlivened only by the spark of celebrity in their casting are sent into a tediously simple storyline involving just a handful of locations, some pro forma deck-shuffling conspiracy blather, a layer of macho posturing and military jargon, and some CG blood splatter. It doesn’t even do right by its ensemble, leaving most of the fighting to Statham alone. (I mean, I would, too, but I’m also not going to try out for the Expendables team anytime soon.) I almost wish this movie was enjoyably bad instead of just dull.

Secret of the Snooze: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

If you buy a ticket for a movie called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows you get what you paid for. It follows the stereotypical sequel strategy of “same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.” Like its predecessor, the 2014 reboot of the 90’s big-screen live-action adaptations of the animated TV interpretations of the comic books – it’s a nesting doll of cultural recycling – it follows the continuing adventures of a quartet of teenage turtles who are mutant ninjas. Or are they teenage mutants who are turtle ninjas? Or would it be more accurate to call them mutant turtles who are teenage ninjas? However you arrange the adjectives, they’re a mostly indistinguishable group. You can tell them apart by their headbands’ colors, and the small particulars, like the nerd’s goggles and the brawn’s gruffness, and the dweeb’s annoying wisecracks. Anyway, there’s yet another threat to New York City and the turtles have to jump into action and save the day. Cowabunga and whatnot.

Out of the Shadows is a glossy live-action cartoon, with hulking steroidal turtles, buff beasts with hard shells and harder abs, bouncing through energetic adventure sequences. The plot, again by screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, is pitched at the lower end of the Saturday morning cartoon level, with thin motivations and broad conflict broken up into episodic chunks and strung along by clunky exposition and juvenile humor. But the action is often enjoyable as big, dumb, colorful excitement involving: a tricked-out garbage truck in attack mode; a mad scientist; evil ninjas; two felons mutated into vaguely humanoid large jungle animals by purple ooze; a tank; a waterfall; a hockey stick; three glowing MacGuffins; a portal in the sky spitting out a gigantic war machine piece by piece; and an interdimensional slimy tentacle-waggling brain stuffed inside a robot.

Director Dave Green – of the amiably passable kid-friendly found-footage E.T. knockoff Earth to Echo – knows his way around slick, silly movement, shooting it all in an energetic and propulsive style. It’s bouncy and convincing enough, even when a giant rhino man is chasing a dude who has slapped together makeshift rollerblades. Matching the first movie’s standout setpiece of a semi sliding down a mountain, this one features a sequence in which the turtles jump out of one plane onto another, fight inside that plane’s cargo hold, then crash it into a rainforest river that takes them down rapids while fleeing a tank. It’s a neat feat of totally nutty adventure. That’s fun. The rest of the movie can be a bit of a slog, trudging through flat human story beats, with returning reporter April (Megan Fox, used mostly for sex appeal in a movie ostensibly aimed at 9-year-olds) as a turtle ally. Meanwhile, her cameraman (Will Arnett) is taking public credit for the turtle’s heroism from the last time.

We’re introduced to new people who only exist to push along the plot. There’s Stephen Amell as a police officer determined to find the now-fugitive Shredder (Brian Tee) after seeing him escape on his watch. There’s Tyler Perry as the aforementioned mad scientist, amusingly playing him like a slightly goofier Neil deGrasse Tyson. There’s Laura Linney as a no-nonsense detective, totally straight-faced while talking to CGI teenage mutant ninja turtles like they’re real people. None of these people are characters; they're barely even story. Eventually the gooey brain (with the voice of Brad Garrett) is threatening to emerge and, I don’t know, smash up New York a bit. The whole thing is conventional summer blockbuster stuff, with the bad guys snatching up MacGuffins and the good guys trying to stop a disaster movie from breaking out.

Sure, the PG-13 cartoon roughhousing is sometimes diverting enough, but without a reason to care it’s hard to get invested beyond the surface spectacle. I suppose it comes down to me not liking the turtles, and not even being able to tell them apart most of the time even though they introduce themselves at least three times over the course of this movie. They’re not as poorly characterized as the humans, but they’re still hard to know beyond the token “likes pizza” and “good at ninja things” details. They don’t even have much conflict, idly wondering if people would ever accept them out of the sewers before re-embracing their secrecy. They learn to work together and share their feelings. It’s rote kids’ movie moralizing, just another unsuccessful way to make it seem like this silly distraction amounts to something worthwhile beyond its all too fleeting goofy flashes of excitement.

Give 'Em Shell: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

I must admit the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have never really worked for me. There’s something about their characters that holds me at a distance. Maybe it’s because they’re so similar in look – big humanoid turtle things differentiated only by the color headbands their wear – and personality. They have the names of Italian Renaissance artists: Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Donatello. They all love pizza, do martial arts, shout “cowabunga,” and live with their adopted mutant rat father in the sewers below New York City. It’s a collection of silly details that never quite grabbed me in any form be it comics, animated series, video games, or feature films.

I still felt that distance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a reboot of the live action big screen turtle movies. But somehow this transparently silly goof of an adventure movie kept me distracted, if not quite entertained. It’s not a good movie, but it’s competent as it runs through a standard superhero plot with a big bad threatening a city and the heroes who save the day. That its climax only puts about 10 city blocks in immediate danger is a nice change of pace. Is it progress that this summer spectacle is a retread of blockbuster beats from a decade or two ago instead of staking a claim in the apocalyptic stakes race we’ve been living through the last few years?

The movie follows an intrepid reporter (Megan Fox), the sort of ambitious young newsperson who is sick and tired of fluff pieces and wants to do serious journalism. One night she spots a group of mysterious vigilantes breaking up the evil Foot Clan’s nefarious deeds on the docks and comes face to face with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Some fun is had with their improbable details as Fox tries to explain to her newsroom colleagues (Will Arnett and Whoopi Goldberg) what she has discovered. She sounds crazy. Meanwhile, desperate to keep their existence secret, the turtles and their rat father set out to find and befriend her.

The human characters are stock flat types that don’t make much of an impact beyond whatever charms the actors bring. But there’s a CGI realism to the textures of the turtles’ and rat’s skin that makes them marginally more convincing as living beings. It also makes them far creepier than the phony rubbery costumes of their previous early-90’s live action appearances. Now they’re uncannily real and utterly fake in the same instance. We’re not talking the apes from Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes here. The Ninja Turtles speak with energetic voices (provided by Johnny Knoxville, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, and Jeremy Howard) as their faces light up with giggly banter and gain flashes of gravitas. Their rat guardian Splinter (Tony Shalhoub) has damp and furry features of uncomfortably verminous countenance as his dojo voice intones ponderously.

Eventually, as a nefarious C.E.O. (William Fichtner) and Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), the head of the Foot Clan, team up to spray poison from the top of a skyscraper and make billions off the cure, the turtles and their new human ally get drawn into saving the day. It’s a small, thin plot. You’ve seen the basic beats before and here they’re replayed dutifully. Even the surprises aren’t surprising, you know?  At least it has a small, thin sense of humor about itself.

Arnett becomes Fox’s sidekick, providing sarcastic asides, while Goldberg gets the most charm out of far too little screen time. (I could’ve used at the very least one more scene with her wisecracking editor.) The screenplay by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, and Evan Daugherty is peppered with corny wisecracks and laughs that may not be entirely intentional, but still fit the silly mood. It's not much of a plot, and I certainly couldn’t tell you which turtle was which at any given time, but at least there’s room for a villain preparing to get inside a robotic samurai suit to say, “Tonight, I shall dine on turtle soup.” That’s the kind of straight-faced laugh line that makes me smile.

Speaking of straight-faced, director Jonathan Liebesman, behind spectacles both bad (Battle: Los Angeles) and okay (Wrath of the Titans), directs with a heavier hand than the material requires. It’s kid’s movie bounciness – the turtles are goofballs – smashed up against PG-13 roughness – a bad guy is dissolved from the inside out in somewhat graphic fashion. Lulu Carvalho’s beams-of-light-soaked cinematography is presented with a glossy seriousness, cut together in a standard amped-up chaos cinema style. I suppose when you’re dealing with material this flimsy, and so half-aware of its own inanity, grounding it in a sense of thriller weight makes the utterly weightless bounding of its inhabitants slightly less likely to float away into nothingness.

The overly familiar plotting is done and over with quickly and not as painfully as the who-is-this-for? tone or the tediously expositional rat would lead you to believe. The movie is completely empty-headed, a bland and mostly undistinguished effort that spends more time acting like it’s fun than actually being fun. It mostly goes through the motions, but at least it’s not a total waste. In the movie’s action centerpiece, a semi slaloms down a snowy mountainside as bad guys give chase and characters fall in, out, and around. It has a zip and novelty that makes it one of this summer’s better spectacle sequences, provided you can forget that there’s no towering mountain a mere 19 minutes out of Manhattan. But by that point you’ve already accepted that there are man-sized mutant turtle teenagers with ninja skills. What’s a little geographic confusion on top of that?

Scenes from a Marriage: THIS IS 40

Audiences first met Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann) in Judd Apatow’s hit 2007 comedy Knocked Up. They were the harried couple in their mid-30s with two young kids, a family that was both a source of hope and a cautionary tale to the film’s leads, expectant parents played by Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl. Pete and Debbie were in some ways the best parts of that movie, memorable and with some exaggerated truth about them. You might remember Pete warning, “Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond. Only it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.” Now Apatow has plucked these characters from his earlier hit to create a spin-off with This is 40, a movie that proves Pete’s line about marriage correct. This is a sort of epic, R-rated sitcom episode, right down to the sunny bland visual sense, unfunny in large patches and lasting seemingly forever. It’s a shaggy, uneven film with some small, incidental pleasures that from time to time nearly make up for the production’s overarching solipsism.

The film takes place in the days before Pete and Debbie’s fortieth birthdays, a fine hook on which to hang a plot of personal reflection perched on the precipice of potential midlife crises exacerbated by pressures from outside the marriage. In true sitcom fashion, each half of this couple is hiding or minimizing important information from the other. Pete, when he’s not secretly scarfing cupcakes, has been giving money to his freeloading dad (Albert Brooks), which couldn’t be more inconvenient since his indie record label is on the brink of collapse and he’s missed a few mortgage payments. Debbie is also having trouble with her dad, an aloof, awkward, distant parent (John Lithgow), and money problems that need her to find out which one of her employees (either Megan Fox or Charlene Yi) is stealing from her boutique clothing store.

These are the main threads of anxiety that run through the picture, which are certainly fine impetuses for stress. It’s a shame that the film follows its characters right down a tunnel of self-absorption, with two characters locked in marital conflict in petty, grating ways. They bicker about diets, sex, childrearing, habits, money, vacations, and schedules. Over the course of 134 minutes, the film has plot elements that dead-end or take a cul-de-sac in a loose, rambling structure that allows foibles and miscommunications to escalate, pile up, fade away, come roaring back, shift priorities, and resolve, or not, in sometimes enjoyable fashion. Rudd and Mann are very good performers and are here, but the film is ultimately so repetitive an irritant, circling around the same emotional problems, relationship conflicts, and thematic concerns with increasingly less to say, that in the end I cared about the side characters far more than the couple at the center of it all.

Take, for example, the great Melissa McCarthy, an Oscar nominee last year for her work in the very good comedy Bridesmaids, who here plays a mom of one of Pete and Debbie’s daughter’s classmates. Following a terrible scene in which Debbie, thinking she’s sticking up for her daughter, cruelly berates the poor kid, the parents are called into the principal’s office. In a painfully uncomfortable scene, Debbie simply denies the encounter, which leads to McCarthy getting increasingly agitated. In the end, she’s the one who gets in trouble with the principal, coming across as a crazy person simply because Pete and Debbie present such a united front of deceit. (Well, McCarthy's character's a little crazy too, but still.) Beats me why we’re supposed to like this sort of thing. All this really did was cut off any lingering affection I had for the main characters.

Besides, all the stuff even approaching funny is happening with characters sitting on the sidelines with undernourished subplots, a fact that’s some sort of astonishing in a film this indulgent. For starters, there are Apatow’s daughters, Maude and Iris, playing Pete and Debbie’s daughters through convincing and cute character traits, the older newly adolescent and moody, the younger awfully precocious in a good way. I liked their relationship with each other as well, which leads to the film’s best off-handedly sweet moments. Brooks and Lithgow, as the flailing grandfathers, are fun as well, but never more than when they get a chance to play a scene opposite each other. Fox and Yi are amusing as two diametrically opposite employees, each quick to accuse the other of being the thief. Then there’s the terrific supporting cast filled with people like Chris O’Dowd, Jason Segel, and Lena Dunham, who have a handful of mildly funny lines, if that, each.

The determined self-centered absorption at the film’s center ends up dragging down all of its more admirable qualities, which are scattered about the film with no real central drive or organization. If we are to care about the couple at the middle of it all, it’s made all the more difficult by their selfishness wherein a great deal of their problems would disappear by simply speaking to one another honestly or thinking about the feelings and motivations of others. If we are not suppose to care about this couple, than the least the movie could do is offer up sharper character studies instead of unconvincing types stuck crosswise in three or four Idiot Plots at once. Perhaps Apatow really does believe that marriage is a tense, unfunny, formless, endless sitcom episode, but he didn’t have to go and make one, did he?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Despite being based on a line of action figures and a terrible 80s animated series, Transformers was a fast, fun summer movie with satisfying human comedy, a good grasp on its goofy tone, and cool special effects, even if the last twenty minutes devolved into a mess of incomprehensibility. With Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Michael Bay has created a film that expands every aspect of his first film, a move that destroys the precarious balance of the comedy, loses sight of the inherent goofiness of the concept, and uses its special effects so often that they become numbing. Not even an intense booming explosion that resonates with a deep bass kick in the climax of the movie could shake me out of my bludgeoned state. I guess the creators thought audiences liked the incomprehensibility the best. The experience of watching the movie is not unlike untangling blinking Christmas lights while listening to all of your dishes fall out of the cupboards.

Once again there are human actors stranded amidst the vehicles that turn into giant robots, but this time they can’t hold their own against the mostly-indistinguishable clanging CGI monstrosities. Where’s someone like Jon Voight or Anthony Anderson from the first movie? They both played the material with just the right amount of winking but are missing here. Why do other similarly lighthearted performers from before – John Turturro, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese Gibson – get swallowed up by bad writing and self-importance? (Don’t even get me started on Julie White and Kevin Dunn, for whom I’m just embarrassed). Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox are also in the movie but make so little impact – neither is given any great distinct moments – that they are hardly worth mentioning despite being the ostensible stars of the thing.

The plot involves giant bad robot people who want to find this other big machine to kill humans and the giant good robot people that try to stop them, but even that, believe it or not, takes a back seat to the mindless action that’s little more than militaristic fetishism and rampant misogyny, ethnocentricity, and racism. The only thing Bay’s camera lingers on more than cleavage and explosions are the gleaming weaponry of robot and man alike. All women are either excessively emotional or cold-hearted man-killers (or maybe even robots in disguise). All scenes that take place in foreign countries showcase a startling condescension, using natives for comedic effect or background props and using the basest shorthand for displaying foreign cultures. And then there’s the matter of the two shuffling, illiterate, exaggeratedly incompetent and idiotic, jive-talking Transformers who are practically blackface robots. Need I say more?

I could barely tell the robots apart, could barely understand what most of them were saying, and barely cared about the exposition that both they and the humans were force to spell out. There’s no scene to match the first film’s great comedy of the exposition that reveals the true nature of the Hoover Dam. To say that the script was written with a tin-ear would insult all the great hacks out there who use their tin-ears to competent effect. What went wrong with this script? Two of the writers are Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who have written fine popcorn flicks like the first Transformers and the great recent Star Trek. I hesitate to lay the blame with them since their record has been so spotless. What about the third credited writer, Ehren Kruger? He’s mostly written horror movies (some of them bad) but I think his influence is felt mostly in the creepy scenes of mechanical intrusions, like when LeBeouf finds himself with an itty-bitty robot crawling up his nostrils. Is the blame then to lie with Michael Bay, who supposedly did some work during the Writers’ strike? It’s possible. Or maybe the script is a result of clashing styles and tones and a rushed schedule which resulted in no ideas being thrown out? It certainly feels at times like a filmed brainstorming session. It’s a total mess.

There are two kinds of Michael Bay movies: dumb fun and just dumb. Can you guess which one this is by now? The movie is everything that is wrong with big-budget sequels. It’s long, formless, and indigestible. It’s scenes of endless noisy nonsense punctuated only by more scenes of endless noisy nonsense, and then it goes on for over two-and-a-half hours. I left with nothing more than a headache.