Un-Bear-Able: TED 2

Less a film, more a long string of failed scenes limply strung along by an offensively puny wisp of story, Ted 2 is the sort of movie you’d never want impressionable youngsters to see. Not simply because it’s relentlessly vulgar and casually mean-spirited, but because they might get the wrong idea about what constitutes a joke. Nothing but bad vibes and cheap jabs, jokes here are lazy swipes at stale targets, insults, cultural references, and mind-in-the-gutter gags spat out in a painful patter with no sense of pacing or timing. It’s stiffly assembled and flatly delivered, a long, punishing excursion filled with lifeless shots and awkward pauses. Lacking even the sliver of imagination and energy that made the first Ted, our middling introduction to the eponymous R-rated sentient teddy bear, this sequel begins with no reason to exist and makes no case for itself.

Ted 2 has desperate desire to offend, nakedly condescending. It shouts out names of recent tragedies (in obvious ADR), insults oppressed minorities at every opportunity, and is wallpapered in casual racism, homophobia, and sexism. An equal opportunity offender only lazily upholds the status quo, without a perspective to make any real points. It’s boring to watching such flailing irreverence, chasing empty shocks towards irrelevance. Writer-director Seth MacFarlane’s comic stylings are recognizable from his rancid Family Guy and flop western spoof A Million Ways to Die in the West. He thinks standing back from his material spouting off random garbage is equivalent to wit, but it’s a bullying approach, smirking and slapping at an audience while talking down to his own characters. And then he asks us to care about their plights.

Unlike its predecessor, which fell back on a predictable man-child comedy structure asking its characters to grow up, this new Ted asks us to love them even though, and often because, they’re unrepentant jerks. Mark Wahlberg returns as the man whose childhood toy became Ted (voiced by MacFarlane), and they proceed to rampage through a movie that has them make fun of black men and gay people, destroy a barn, steal weed, molest Tom Brady, start a fight at New York Comic-Con, and knock over a shelf of samples in a sperm bank without consequences. (No good movie has ever featured sperm bank shenanigans.) All that happens because Ted and his wife (Jessica Barth) want to adopt a baby, but are told they can’t since the bear isn’t legally a person. Makes sense to me, but MacFarlane wants us to be outraged enough to care about a protracted court battle as the uncouth bear decides to fight for his nonexistent civil rights.

Between unfunny tomfoolery and insult comedy, long scenes play out mostly straight as characters earnestly discuss Ted’s consciousness, determined to prove his personhood to a jury. How am I to care about this bear when the movie’s so fundamentally unserious, and he’s totally, irredeemably, purposelessly unlikable? We’re supposed to feel suspense waiting for the verdict, after a plucky young lawyer (Amanda Seyfried) delivers sincere speeches and Ted compares his trials to the plight of slaves (he watches Roots and references Dred Scott) and gays (or, as he tells the court, denying his equal rights “is just like what you’re doing to the fags! I’m sorry—homos”). The joke is that Ted uses a slur and then corrects himself to a different impolite term. The effect is an insult – hurtful words so dismissively tossed off – wrapped in a bigger insult – that anyone expected a laugh out of it. It takes a particular kind of social blindness to make a movie that’s both a metaphor for civil rights battles and an insult to anyone who’s fought for them.

It’s lazy and hateful, with sincerity cut only by stale attempted humor the very definition of “punching down.” By the end, two bullies have dressed up in costume to menace nerds at a convention, a wise old civil rights attorney (Morgan Freeman) tells the jury to remember the Emancipation Proclamation and vote pro Ted, and Jay Leno has appeared as himself pretending to be “gay” in the most awkwardly silent thirty seconds I’ve spent in a theater this year. And I saw Paul Blart 2. MacFarlane shows no desire to shape a scene or whip up momentum. With the deadliest pacing, every gag is dead on arrival. There’s no inner drive, nearly two hours spent just clunking along from one patch of dead air to the next. He takes lazy jabs at Bieber and Kardashians (hardly the freshest, or most deserving, of targets), stops scenes cold for fumbled cameos (poor Liam Neeson), and displays a preoccupation with male virility as if it’s an inherently funny topic.

This movie is superfluously backwards and overwhelmingly dull, too slapdash in its story and comfortable in its hypocritical and unchecked assumptions about what’s funny, as if anyone that’s not a straight white bro is worth pointing out and picking at. But, yes, by all means, let’s respect a stupid teddy bear. Yeesh. It’s agonizingly clear how grating and deadening MacFarlane’s hodgepodge approach is. I think he loves movies – he stages a straight-faced joke-free Busby Berkeley-ish musical number as his opening credits – and maybe genuinely wants to make a case for equality. But he’s too tone deaf to be funny while doing so, or control the real messages his Ted oozes.

LUCY in the Sky with Superpowers

I’m tempted to say Luc Besson’s Lucy goes enjoyably off the rails, but it’d be more accurate to say it operates blissfully without knowledge of any tracks whatsoever. It’s a sci-fi thriller that evolves as it goes along, sliding exuberantly into a metaphysical tangle. By the end it is tugging apart the very fabric of existence. So many movies go down familiar tracks it’s a delight to see one that heads off in its own direction. Soon we’re following wild unexpectedness with a protagonist who finds herself increasingly unable to connect with the world in the way the rest of us perceive it. She goes above and beyond quite literally and suddenly, throwing standard thriller plotting into grand, silly loops. It’s a trip.

It all starts familiarly enough. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American in Taipei who gets kidnapped by a drug lord (Choi Min-Sik). His organization knocks her out, cuts her open, and sticks a bag of experimental synthetic drugs just underneath her stomach. She’s told to smuggle the substance into Europe or else. What no one expected was to have the bag burst, flooding her system with a massive overdose. One of those swoopy CGI fantastic voyage sequences reveals little blue jolts pinballing around her cells, crackling her neurons, and jumpstarting rapid changes. Here’s where the sturdy, if standard, thriller premise bursts open as well, flooding the film with a sci-fi conceit that explodes in unexpected and continually evolving ways.

Because this early overdose sequence is intercut with a professor (Morgan Freeman) lecturing on the untapped capacity of the human brain, a lecture intercut with wildlife stock footage, it’s clear where this is going. Lucy twitches, levitates, and yelps as her eyes turn neon blue, before an eerie calm washes over her. “10%,” says an alert that fills the screen. That number will grow throughout the film as Lucy sets out to stop the drug ring, save herself, and discover what happens when she reaches 100%. The old we-only-use-10%-of-our-brains is a fake fact that circulates now and then, but this movie isn’t interested in the falseness. It takes the idea and runs with it, taking it to a gleeful extreme, exploiting its stoned dorm-room concept for all it’s worth.

The drugs coursing through Lucy’s system give her extraordinary cognitive abilities. She panics until her brain speeds up to accommodate all the new processes it’s running. She’s high, spitting out deep thoughts and staring into space as the substance works through her, preoccupied by her new ability to see matter and energy, visualized as streams of Matrix data and writhing info blasts. She can see to the very foundations of the universe as her brain expands. She’d be a superhero if her power didn’t put her so far above petty human concerns. We can’t see what she sees, though Besson throws her subjective experience on the screen when he’s not holding back to surprise us with a power later. It’s appealingly off-kilter. Still, enough of her humanity fights through to allow her to multitask, trying to unravel the mysteries she’s unlocking and fight her way to the drug lord and bring him to justice.

This being an action film, and a refreshingly fast and economical 90-minute one at that, there are shootouts and car chases. They’re bright and clear, presented with a dash of humor and playfulness. Lucy’s powers allow her to manipulate the world around her. She can stop an assailant in his tracks or anticipate the movements of the cars around her so that she can weave in and out, leaving pursuers crashing and grinding gears blocks away. Besson – a Frenchman who loves American genre filmmaking – has always been interested in films about forceful women who go through changes. There’s little Natalie Portman’s bloodily orphaned girl in The Professional and Milla Jovovich’s reconstructed person in The Fifth Element. But with Lucy, Besson has written and directed a film that becomes engrossingly, excitingly one with its lead.

This is the third film in the last year that plays on Scarlett Johansson’s bombshell qualities and manipulates them to eerie and provocative effect. She’s doing great work maneuvering her screen image, turning it around and inside out for memorable roles. Her Lucy starts as a woman with personality, but her overactive brain threatens to pull her into a mix between Johansson’s disembodied operating system from Her and her icy, inquisitive alien in Under the Skin. She grows more confident, colder and more cerebral as her brain enhances unceasingly. She has to fight for every bit of humanity she manages to express. There’s a scene in which she gets impromptu surgery without anesthesia and makes a phone call at the same time. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie. But she plays it so naturally, a conversation so delicately played, a balance of half-baked philosophizing and heart-rending nostalgia as waves of long forgotten memories are reactivated in her. A single tear rolls down her cheek. It’s pulpy, but moving, too.

This is Besson’s best, most imaginative and entertaining film in quite some time. It’s silly, but everyone commits intensely and the movie willingly builds and shifts into surprising deep visual and cheap philosophical territory, it’s thrilling. The film views Lucy not as threat or even hero, despite retaining rooting interest throughout. She’s a source of curiosity and awe. The movie matches her pace, blasting her percentage points on screen to let us track her evolution. The story frays and shifts as it keeps up with her, as conventional cops and smugglers plotting resolves itself parallel to the thought experiment that’s followed to dazzling heights of strangeness and surprise.

Flesh is Weak: TRANSCENDENCE

In Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays a brilliant computer scientist who, given only weeks to live, agrees to try to upload his consciousness into his artificial intelligence experiment, thus creating the world’s first truly self-aware computer. The primary side effect – immortality – is just a nice bonus. The movie uses that hook as a reason to grapple with fascinating thematic questions of the kind Ray Kurzweil might enjoy. If a person’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and cognitive abilities can be copied into a bank of hard drives, is that person still alive? The scientist’s wife (Rebecca Hall) would like to think so. An accomplished tech theorist in her own right, she was the one who came up with the designs to upload him in the first place. Their colleagues (Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman) are a little more skeptical.

When the man is gone, all that’s left are the lines of code bleeping across monitors, digitally reconstructing the voice of the dead man. Give me more power, it pleads. Connect me to the Internet. Does that sound like something a person wants? What does it mean to be whatever that thing is? How integrated with tech can you be and still be yourself? If HAL 9000 had all the memories of and sounded like the love of your life, would you believe him? The film is best when it’s asking these questions, but it’s woefully unprepared to engage with them in any meaningful way. It’s primed for pulpy eggheaded pleasures and turns up only shrugs.

What is at times fun about Transcendence is watching the slow creation of an accidental supervillain. If you ever wondered how one of those cavernous lairs full of whirring computers and mindless worker bees gets started, look no further. Hall, full of mostly good intentions and racing to beat an anti-tech terrorist organization led by a bleach-blonde Kate Mara, connects the digital Depp to the Internet. Off he zooms – a goofily nifty visual zips through a literal web of information and screenshots – building in power and intelligence until he has his wife constructing a giant data center in the middle of the desert, the better to house his massive potential for good. Of course, if you’ve seen any movie about a supercomputer from Demon Seed to Smart House, you know he has a massive potential for evil and destruction as well. You can probably guess where it goes from there.

The movie is at once smarter than that sounds and dumber than it looks. It’s the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer behind such beautiful-looking filmic efforts as Inception, Moneyball, and The Dark Knight. He and Jess Hall, his director of photography, create handsome compositions that use stillness and simplicity to great effect. Clean, empty corridors seem so ominous. Shots of wide open spaces seem gorgeously, creepily vast. The spaces in which the technophobia parable plays out echo with dread and possibility. There’s a throwback appeal to the imagery, reminiscent of early Spielberg in its insistent energy, yet locked-down patience that represents a willingness to let the situation unfold crisply and inevitably. It’s a visual confidence that carries the picture far.

What’s less satisfying by far is the way the film drops the thematic juggling act by letting the characters remain fuzzy, defined only by the dictates of the plot. That’s not necessarily a problem, but when the climactic resolution hinges on our investment in the characters it’d be nice to know them a little better. We don’t, and the plot isn’t cold or tight enough to work without them. There are terrific actors in every role – like Cillian Murphy, who does what he can with a one-note FBI agent – but no one ever rings true. Hall is the stand out, doing solid work playing a woman who is mourning her husband by obeying his simulacrum. It’s like an amped-up gender-swapped thriller version of Spike Jonze’s Her, steering forcefully into the creep factor. But her character is made to bend so fully to the will of the plotting that she hardly registers as a person let alone a genre archetype. The idea she inhabits is provocative, but her character is a shambles, able to shift from totally devoted to skeptical and back again in the span of a scene.

Jack Paglen’s screenplay feels like a Michael Crichton novel, full of jargon that sounds half-plausible to an amateur ear and futurist paranoia convinced tech evolutions will inevitably end disastrously for humanity. Pfister directs it capably, finding the thrills where it counts and finding some nice shots – like a sun-dappled window in which hangs a circuit chip in the center of a dreamcatcher – to cut into the flow of mood and contemplation. It’s a sci-fi thriller that’s moseying around, overtly turning over ideas with great care and wonder without getting much below the surface of it all. Transcendence transcends nothing. Without humor or personality to speak of, it feels inert and underdeveloped, content to throw out provocative questions and let them dissipate before resolving, let alone following, those lines of inquiry.

Playtime: THE LEGO MOVIE

You’d think by now I’d have more trust in writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Instead, I’ve gone into each and every one of their films suspicious of the entire project and left feeling pleasantly surprised, won over by their manic energy and thoughtful thematic playfulness. Who would’ve guessed their Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a feature-length expansion of a slight, whimsical picture book, would be one of the funniest movies of any kind in recent years? Or that their reboot of musty old TV series 21 Jump Street would be a jocular undercover-cop comedy perceptive about shifting teen mores and feature one of the best cameos I’ve ever seen?  Now they’ve tackled The Lego Movie. That’s right. It’s a movie based on the tiny bricks with instructions on how to build them into vehicles and buildings that come with square, stiff yellow people to put inside. I don’t see the story in it, although Lego has tried some original fantasy brands and media-tie-in parodies for TV on occasion to move product. Thankfully Lord and Miller found a way to make more than an advertisement. Under their direction, The Lego Movie is a freewheeling and clever family film.

Making terrific use out of the mix-and-match ability of Lego, the filmmakers have thrown out the instruction book. Actually, that’s the crux of the film, a conflict between the two basic ways one can use the product. Computer animation that looks like the expensive Hollywood version of what you’d get making stop-motion Lego movies on your bedroom floor (a quick YouTube search reveals this a popular subgenre of amateur filmmaking) builds a world built entirely out of these multicolor bricks. It’s a generic metropolis filled with generic Lego people: construction workers, police, cat ladies, surfers, coffee shop patrons. They all follow the rules, the same homogenous lifestyle that uses each and every brick in exactly the way the manufacture intended. Disruption comes when an average Lego man (Chris Pratt) finds a legendary brick and falls in with a motley group of assorted outcast Lego people, Master Builders who insist that the bricks can be used to make anything you could dream up. Ostentatiously evil President Business (Will Ferrell) wants to keep the masses oppressed and in line, but our hero teams up with the Master Builders in a last-ditch effort to save their Lego-world by opening it up to be played with however they want.

The film moves at a breakneck pace through colorful madness that spoofs the usual three-act structure of big sci-fi fantasy spectacle. There’s our naive Chosen One who finds the piece and is told by a wise old bearded Master Builder (Morgan Freeman) that he’s the fulfillment of prophecy and the savior Lego-world needs. That this is obviously phony makes for a fun, adaptable running joke. Their allies include a funny mix of characters from various Lego product lines – a punk woman (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), a pirate (Nick Offerman), a unicorn kitten (Alison Brie), and an astronaut (Charlie Day). Their goals are typical stuff – find this crucial object and use it to shut down a superweapon – but it’s treated with a wink and a sly sense of humor. At one point, a character explains backstory most movies of this kind would take very seriously indeed, but here it literally devolves into “blah, blah, blah.” All we need to know is that our heroes are being pursued by President Business’s henchman Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) and his robots in elaborate, endlessly clever action sequences that hop through a variety of Lego worlds like a wild west set, a pseudo-medieval land, and a hodgepodge oasis of secret imagination.

The Lego nature of everything from the clouds in the sky to the water in the oceans, down to even the explosions and dust plumes, is put to good use. Good guys frantically rebuild the necessary equipment on the fly, while the baddies march forward mercilessly rule-bound. Cameos from all sorts of Lego types litter this high energy romp through relentless action and invention, from Shakespeare and Shaq to Wonder Woman and C-3PO, all cracking a joke or two before falling back into the big picture. It’s all such an exuberant sense of childlike play, the characters and setting deconstructing themselves and building new fanciful wonders before our eyes with delightful speed and complexity in the rapid-fire action slapstick. Imagine those charming moments in Toy Story when we watch Andy act out scenarios with his toys stretched to fill 90 minutes and you’ll get a sense of the tone here. This exceptionally, endlessly cute and quick film isn’t afraid to go very silly and step out of its narrative. The villain hoards mystical objects, like a massive used Band-Aid he calls the Shroud of Bahnd-Aieed. In the climax, his giant evil machine sounds exactly like a little kid making a growling engine noise.

For the longest time, I was simply charmed by what was an awesomely high-functioning technical exercise. But in its final moments, Lord and Miller take the film a step towards brilliance, pulling back the focus and revealing new information that moves away from thin genre play and towards something deeper, but no less hilarious. I won’t spoil it for you, but it says something almost profound about the way the act of creativity can bring people together. There’s also something in there about free will and a higher power. One character we meet late in the game is literally named The Man Upstairs. But it’s all folded into a sugary blast of entertainment. It’s amazing how a movie so light on the surface opens up bigger questions effortlessly. Just as amazing is that this multi-million dollar corporate advertisement doubles as an anti-corporate call to individuality in the face of crushing conformity, that this blockbuster movie doubles as a commentary on how blockbuster plots are built out of material as generic and interchangeable as Lego blocks. Lord and Miller are masters of having it both ways and getting away with it too.

Bucket List Hangover: LAST VEGAS

Far and away the funniest thing about Last Vegas, a comedy about a bunch of old guys reuniting for a weekend in Las Vegas, is something that’s not intended to be a joke. It’s a movie about guys trying to recapture their better days that hopes the audience remembers its cast’s. Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert DeNiro, and Kevin Kline have been on the big screen since before I was born and in their many decades of work have been in some of the best movies of all time. Last Vegas is not among their better efforts, but at least it’s not a total embarrassment. It’s certainly not any more than not an embarrassment, but that’s not nothing. The movie is built only to capitalize on their likability derived from all their time spent building up loads of audience affection. It’s counting on it, in fact, to fill in generic jokes and slight plotting. The movie is pleasant, undemanding, and flimsy.

It’s an old person hangout movie in which likable and wrinkly familiar faces sit around and enjoy each other’s company while working through some old tensions that are saddled upon their characters in a mostly doomed attempt to differentiate them from the actors’ personas. The story starts when the guy played by Michael Douglas calls his old pals and tells them he’s getting married in Vegas that weekend. They, being retired and not particularly busy, make the appropriate travel arrangements and head off for a septuagenarian bachelor party. It’s The Bucket List by way of The Hangover, but not nearly as schmaltzy or raunchy as that comparison suggests. There’s all the gentle geriatric humor you’d suspect such a premise would invite.

Talk of surgery, pills, and doctors’ orders mixes freely with misunderstanding slang, fumbling around gadgets, shouting over pounding nightclub music, and talking to the much younger partiers around them. One young lady tells Kline he reminders her of “Grandpa Lou.” The concierge tells them their suite was previously booked by 50 Cent. “Fifty people in here?” Freeman marvels. A nice lounge singer played by Mary Steenburgen shows up from time to time, and she’s a nice break from the borderline sleazy montages of poolside bikinis and showgirls. It’s nice to give the guys someone closer to their own age to interact with.

Director Jon Turteltaub, who as of late has been making tame action movies like National Treasure for Disney, and screenwriter Dan Fogelman, of Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Guilt Trip, keep the proceedings loose and mellow. They don’t spend too much time insisting on their movie’s funniness, which makes it easier to take the fact that it isn’t all that funny. It goes down smoothly since it’s not spending its time being obviously unfunny. It’s just watchable and friendly. Even the prerequisite mistaken identity crossdresser gag is relatively kind and free of shame or awkwardness, as a more casually hateful comedy would stoop to. No, here all are welcome to relax with the old guys, have a few drinks, reminisce, play some blackjack, and party till it’s time to take more Lipitor. It’s too somnambulant to work up the energy for more than a handful of moments that even threaten to be in bad taste.

Without being in a hurry to get much of anywhere, Last Vegas simply shuffles along through rote comic beats and unrushed sightseeing. Someone’s going to fall into the pool. Someone’s going to either win or lose a great deal of his pension on the casino floor. Someone’s going to try to use that little blue pill before the weekend is over. It’s a film that lazily lollops its way to pretty much exactly where you think it’ll go. There’s not much inherently funny about any of this – no, not when Kline puts on his reading glasses to ogle a pretty girl, or when Freeman busts a disco move, or when DeNiro is grinded upon by LMFAO’s Redfoo. It’s barely even worth a chuckle when 50 Cent turns up as himself, asking the guys to keep the noise down because he’s trying to sleep. It’s supposed to be funny because he’s 50 Cent, much like the rest of the lame jokes are supposed to be funny because of the cast of legendary actors who also happen to be old. It’s a bland, vacant experience. I’d rather see a movie about what these guys did between takes. Over the credits they could roll footage of whatever they’ve bought with their paychecks. 

Vanished: NOW YOU SEE ME

If you had stopped the heisting magician thriller Now You See Me halfway through, I’d have been just as happy with the movie’s conclusion. Actually, I’d have been a smidge happier, since that would mean I got to leave the theater an hour earlier. Everything about the movie feels arbitrary to its core. If, at the midway point, you’d asked me to explain who the characters are, I’d have been at a loss. They’re given absolutely no characterization outside of what the plot demands of them, which is very little and up to change with the whims of the twists. If you’d asked me to describe the plot, I would’ve vaguely muttered something about stolen money and investigating cops. What happens makes little to no sense in the moment and less when you stop to think about it. By the movie’s conclusion, it’s easy to tell that Important Things are cohering, but awfully hard to figure out why or why we should care.

Within the first few scenes, it’s clear the movie has already failed Siskel’s lunch test: Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? When you see the names in the cast, it’s easy to think a filmmaker can start with this much talent at his disposal and end up with at least a mildly diverting film. (You’d be wrong, by the way.) Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco play magicians who are given the blueprints for an amazing trick under mysterious circumstances. Michael Caine plays their bankroller (and a reminder that The Prestige is a much better magic thriller). Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent are detectives who enter the picture when the magicians appear to heist millions of Euros out of a Parisian bank during their Vegas act. Finally, there’s Morgan Freeman as a magician debunker who exists herein as Mr. Explanation. I knew something had gone horribly wrong when I actually forgot he was in the movie when he wasn’t in a scene.

The arrogantly nonsensical plotting from screenwriters Ed Solomon, Edward Ricourt, and Boaz Yakin does nothing to explain why these magicians are suddenly famous. Their act looks lousy with terrible patter and a sparse collection of cheap tricks, the worst of which are clearly aided by CGI. But, they’re famous nonetheless and though we never get a good sense of their personalities or how they relate to each other beyond what we surmise about the actors themselves from other roles and public personas, they’re supposed to be, well, I don’t know. Are the magicians our protagonists? Maybe. Their stunt ends with the possibly stolen money rained down on the audience. How very Robin Hood of them. But then there’s the dogged detectives, who have a slight edge in the sensible, stable characterization department. I liked them more, but couldn’t make heads or tails of what the movie was trying to do with them.

I’d have actually gone along with it if it gave the actors more memorable reasons for doing what they do. Maybe the problem isn’t that it’s nuts, but that it’s not nearly nuts enough. Either way, I sat dumbfounded by how little I cared. Director Louis Leterrier, who started his career with promising actioners like The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk before hitting Hollywood junk like Clash of the Titans, films Now You See Me in a blur of fast-moving images that can’t move fast enough to outrun the looming sense of unsatisfyingly unstable plotting. Scattershot plot points, aggressively explained shrugs of twists, and nothing characters all contribute to a singularly mindless two-hour sit in a theater. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to me; it’s that the movie can’t even be bothered to come up with parameters for itself with which it could make sense. At least this movie about magic manages to pull two good vanishing acts. The first was when my money disappeared from my wallet. The second was when the movie’s specifics left my mind almost entirely even a mere 12 hours after leaving the theater. 

Pretty/Boring: OBLIVION

There’s a certain baseline amount of pleasure that can be found in watching a film from a director with the imagination to design striking shots and the knowledge of how to move the camera in interesting ways. Director Joseph Kosinski is just such a director. He doesn’t just think in shots; he thinks in sequences. There’s an architectural sleekness to the way he devises cinematic imagery. This is especially true of his debut film, 2010’s Tron: Legacy, a film that in some hands might’ve played as hopelessly retro fan service, but was instead enlivened by a sense of popcorn poetry in the pounding Daft Punk score and the crisp electric neon cool of each and every frame. It’s perhaps the most underappreciated directorial debut in recent memory, simply for the way he smuggled artistry into a big budget behemoth of a film. I wish I could say the same for his follow up effort, Oblivion. It’s also a sci-fi film with lots of surface cool, but, unlike the Tron sequel, that’s where it stops. This is a film that can’t quite coast on surface charms alone. There’s just not enough there there.

It starts promisingly enough with a tantalizing set up. Many decades into the future, many years after an alien race blew up the moon and invaded Earth before getting nuked by humans in return, two humans (Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough) patrol the decimated planet. They’re waiting for their mission’s expiration date, at which point they can leave the irradiated wasteland behind and join the human colony that’s been forming on a moon elsewhere in the solar system. The two workers sit in a glass apartment in the sky, the woman overseeing day-to-day operations, the man flying a transparent bubble on wings out into the field to repair heavily armed drones. Their commander (Melissa Leo) checks in with them each morning, beaming her image onto their computer screens from her station in a massive triangular satellite high above them, orbiting outside the atmosphere. This is all slick stuff imbued with great mystery, but it soon becomes clear that the more that is found out, the less there’s reason to care.

Kosinski’s too good to make a movie that looks bad. Appropriately, Oblivion has gleaming technology and effects situated effortlessly in gorgeous shots of craggy windswept landscapes dotted with buried landmarks of humans past. But pretty sights can’t cover up a plot that starts moderately intriguing and then quickly grows inert before twisting itself around to routine genre muddling. It’s a film of portentous signifiers without anything signified, empty symbols chasing narrative cliché. You’d think in this day and age a movie about humans repairing largely autonomous drones without a clear memory of why they’re doing it could get more resonance that this film manages.

The script by Kosinski with Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt is a thin, familiar sci-fi narrative in which Things Are Not As They Seem. Cruise, for this is nothing if not a Tom Cruise picture, is the one who slowly solves the mystery. He dreams of a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko) and is wary of scavengers that catch and pick apart the drones. Eventually, he’ll meet a few of them, leading to Morgan Freeman having a great entrance, intoning poetry from the shadows before lighting a match that illuminates his face. But instead of deepening the mystery, it is simply prolonged. Each new character and each new bit of information in this would-be mindbender reveals how little is actually on the film’s mind. At one point Riseborough, responding to Cruise’s increasingly questioning demeanor, says, “We’re not supposed to remember, remember?”

Ah, but Cruise wants to remember. Like WALL-E, he’s collecting scraps of junk and little treasures, fascinated by the life humans left behind. It’s this hoarding curiosity that leads him to gather scraps of clues and divine their true purpose. Similarly, an audience with any knowledge of sci-fi films, both junk and treasures, of years past will be able to figure out the film’s every move. Maybe you’ve seen WALL-E, Silent Running or Planet of the Apes and maybe even its first sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Maybe you’ve watched the massive classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and the recent indie Moon. Drawing bits and pieces from these films and many more, Kosinski and his collaborators make a beautiful emptiness that combines old themes in new ways that ring hollow, leaving so little to grab onto that it grows boring well before the credits roll, each new development registering with me with a thud and a shrug instead of the intended jolt and surprise. 

Team America: OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

There’s a lot of literal flag-waving going on in Olympus Has Fallen, an oppressively rah-rah, militaristic, xenophobic slab of red meat filmmaking. Its basic structure is that of a mid-90’s Die Hard rip-off with the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart) and a few other high-ranking officials (including the Vice President) trapped in a bunker below the White House when it’s taken over by North Korean terrorists hell-bent on forcing American troops out of South Korea. Seems like they could have come up with a less complicated plan to get that point across, but a villain’s showmanship is everything in a movie like this, I suppose. The John McClane of it all is a former Secret Service agent played by Gerard Butler. He’s working a desk job down the street when 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is attacked and overrun. Never one to flee from danger, he finagles his way into the burning building and starts picking off the bad guys one by one while trying to rescue the hostages.

Strategy is not all that applicable to anyone’s actions here. It’s like a slasher movie with the slasher as the good guy and it grows tedious awfully quick. Butler lurks around shooting down enemies, getting into bruising fistfights and torturing captives for information about their overarching plans and the identity of their leader (Rick Yune, who, after facing off with Brosnan’s Bond in 2002’s Die Another Day, seems to have suffered a diminution in the complexity of his plotting). As in McClane’s case, there’s convenient radio communication that allows taunts to flow both ways. There’s also a command center of mostly unhelpful suits down the street where Angela Bassett and Robert Forster wring their hands and hope that the nuclear launch codes are not divulged. Morgan Freeman’s there, too. As Speaker of the House, he’s the acting president and gets the biggest (unintentional) laugh of the movie when he gives a speech reassuring the public that the government remains 100 percent operational. Is that like the old joke where the guy asks the doctor if he’ll be able to play piano after the operation and is happy to hear an affirmative, since he’s never played piano before?

With films like Training Day, King Arthur, and Shooter, Antoine Fuqua has proven that he knows his way around suspense or action setpieces. Here, directing from a script by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, he manages a couple, but they both come very early in the runtime are a mixed bag anyways. The first, a quick bit of business involving a limo accident, is a tight and surprising opening. The second, an extended bit of disaster moviemaking, is a jarring and upsetting sequence of collateral damage. It involves the terrorists flying a large military plane right down the National Mall, firing heavy machine guns, casually picking off pedestrians before crash-landing near the White House and serving as a signal to the enemy combatants hidden in the crowd to start the siege. (The plane also takes out a big chunk of the Washington Monument on the way down; I’ll leave you to parse the nationalist Freudian significance of that image.) While this is undeniably effective, it’s also excessive: a bombastic misappropriation of 9/11 imagery to form a jingoistic call to arms with overwrought patriotic bloodlust not too far behind.

Fuqua certainly shoots the whole sorry thing with total commitment to an increasingly ugly premise. But as it drones from one smoldering, darkly lit corridor to the next with the occasional bloody death or two, I lost any interest I may once have had. It’s not often you can say that a movie about terrorists holding the president hostage in order to detonate nuclear weapons within American borders feels like it has nothing at stake, but that’s the case here. As the bad guys’ numbers drop with regularity and Butler barely sustains a scratch and is always correct in his decisions, any sense of danger in the plot is gone. It’s all so over-the-top that it falls entirely apart into generic noise typical of the genre: terse, unfunny quips, fake news clips with carefully non-specific logos, and loud booms now and then to make sure the audience hasn’t fallen completely asleep.

Knightfall: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

After Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight concluded with Batman (Christian Bale) fleeing into the night, taking the fall for a series of crimes so that Gotham City may still have hope, or something like that, it makes a certain amount of sense that The Dark Knight Rises would position the caped crusader as a public figure who has slunk away from the spotlight and is poised to earn back the city’s trust. There’s no such trust problem for this big-screen iteration of the famed comic book hero. If anything, Nolan has earned, rightfully or not, an astounding surplus of fan trust, a rabid kind of fervor that had a great many convinced of the movie’s perfection sight unseen. It’s to Nolan’s credit that the film doesn’t coast on franchise loyalty and therefore manages to avoid the major problems that typically befall the third entry in these sorts of series. It’s a movie of high-quality craftsmanship from all involved, nicely shot and terrifically staged. It's a startlingly big movie, containing sweeping establishing shots and grand gestures of spectacle (the better to maximize the added value of your IMAX tickets), a rapidly expanding ensemble of characters, and the most apocalyptic villainous plot yet. The film can’t live up to its own best moments, but it’s still a solid entertainment that builds to a tremendous finale.

In the murky rising action of this spectacle, a cult of angry anarchists led by a fearsome mask-wearing savage called Bane (Tom Hardy) are gathering strength and numbers, planning nothing less than a terrifying full-scale takeover of Gotham city, propping up faux-populist sentiments to mask their violent lawlessness, to use the leverage of a scared, powerless populace to get what’s best for a few reckless ideologues, all under the threat of mutually assured destruction. And where is the Batman while all this is going on right underneath the unsuspecting city? He’s slowly but surely getting coaxed back into his cowl, after living a Howard Hughes existence as his true self, Bruce Wayne, holed up in his mansion with only Alfred the butler (Michael Caine) to keep him company. And what’s the inciting incident that causes the Batman to climb out of his cave? Why, it’s nothing less than a daring robbery from cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). It might not take lifelong Batman fandom to figure out that she’s Catwoman, even though she goes without that moniker here.

That’s about as much plot as I’ll get into here, seeing as this happens to be a film that people seem particularly averse to having spoiled. It’s just as well, for the movie is indeed a large twisting narrative filled with lots of little surprises coiled around scenes of spectacular effects and effective tension. Let me just suggest that a great deal of the film’s pleasure comes from the new members of the cast. Of course Bale and Caine are solid as always, as are Morgan Freeman as Wayne’s resident technical expert and Gary Oldman as good old Commissioner Gordon. Of the new additions, Hardy’s Bane is fearsome, even though the design of the mask means his performance is mostly communicated through forceful eye acting and a muffled voice over in a stylized accent. Just turning towards the camera is enough for his intensity to crumple the surroundings in anxiety.

But best of the new here is Hathaway, who plays Catwoman as a sort of slinky Robin Hood by way of Han Solo, a mercenary thief and black market operative who is both a help and a hindrance. Runner up is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing an especially determined and skilled cop. Hathway’s take on her iconic character is that of a satisfyingly sleek, glamorous anti-hero. (I was ready to follow her Catwoman into a different movie where she could stretch out in a starring role). Gordon-Levitt’s part calls for steely professionalism and sympathetic humanity, both of which he provides quite nicely. And I quite liked the little twist given to his character in the final moments that caused me to strike a brewing quip about his role from my mental rough draft. The two of them add immeasurably to this world, bringing real vitality to what, let’s face it, would otherwise become insufferably dower.

At its best, this is a film of terrific blockbuster entertainment with charming asides and great flourishes of action, but for long stretches of this 164-minute movie, Nolan is grabbing hold of more ambition than he can wrangle as he gets bogged down in slow scenes of uncertain stakes and confused tension. In Bane’s evil plot grows a scattershot Rorschach test of tangled political messages that coast off of current unease and generate tension in odd ways that are at once potent and dispiriting. It’s hard to make out whether the film is a relentless fascist machine or just rotting cynicism underneath which lies nothing but nihilism. Either way, this is an extremely bleak film, through which the fun (the kind of sugary, lighthearted, propulsive excitement of The Avengers) pokes through like a small circle of light glimpsed from the bottom of a deep dark pit. Such a pit – a hardly-believable quasi-Middle-Eastern prison that works more as metaphor than literal location – makes a pivotal appearance in the lengthy middle section of the film that finds Gotham closer to ruin than ever before. Although Tom Hardy’s Bane certainly doesn’t make for as memorable a villain as Heath Ledger’s Joker – the script and character design simply don't allow it – his scheme, once it explodes into action, ups the all-consuming anxiety of Dark Knight until the only thing rising in this film is the sense of despair.

Perhaps it’s precisely because of the ways in which Nolan, no longer content to just use the series as a way to mix around with the iconography of Batman, scrambles ideology so thoroughly that the movie is so difficult to parse, so deeply unsettling. Here when a revolutionary rhetoric is twisted with evil intentions until chaos and anarchy in turn provokes a scrappy cop counter-coup, the resonances, as dissonant and confused as they are, become Triumph of the Will versus Battleship Potemkin, propaganda without a cause. Maybe Nolan knew that there was simply no way of satisfying the typical requirements of sequel escalation and superhero bloat and decided to steer his massive blockbuster right into the skid.

The film is, for quite a while, nothing less than a series of exceptionally well-executed extraneous noise and action. A prisoner’s mid-air escape from a plane, a couple of Catwoman heists, and the inevitable triumphant return from retirement for Batman are all early, satisfying, summer movie moments, but upon reflection they’re actually tangential to the plot. It’s not until a brutal mid-movie one-on-one fight scene, shockingly bone crunching and hard to watch, that I felt honest dread wash over me. But soon, the massiveness of the plotting sidelines one major character or another (in a hospital bed, in prison, or both at once) for what feels like ages. The film grows as fuzzy and slow as it is dark. But from there, Nolan nonetheless manages to pull out a startling and effective escalation of tension that becomes a series of exciting climactic action sequences. The film grows horrifyingly high stakes, blowing out destruction more vividly shot and more destabilizing in its implications than I could possibly have expected.

It’s difficult to think of The Dark Knight Rises in terms of the superhero genre. It hits all the right story beats, but it’s so oppressively grim, with only the faintest glimmers of fun, and far less Batman, at least before the massive and intense climax, than many will be expecting. What it represents is a filmmaker given total control to make whatever crazy ambitious blockbuster spectacle he felt like making and an assertion that he was the one who brought this big-screen Batman into this world and only he can bring this particular version to a close. (That said, there’s plenty of room left for a sequel.) He makes a Batman movie that brings the Batman legend, the tortured nature of the hero, the intense, incomprehensible insanity of the villains, and all those corruptible, flawed characters in between, to a depressingly, almost totally hopeless endpoint, into a climactic conflagration that’s unlikely to be easily matched. I’m not sure I’d want anyone to try.

The sparkle of hope that rises from Gotham’s rubble in the film’s final minutes is barely enough to wipe out the preceding barrage of paranoia and despair. The movie is too confused about its underlying themes, its plot too eager to make leaps of logic despite its otherwise dense build-up, to make use of its potent moods beyond that pure sensation of it all. It’s an impressive film, technically accomplished and overwhelming in many ways. But it’s so unrelentingly without thematic coherence that, for all the sensational spectacle, in the end it feels somewhat underwhelming. And that’s difficult to reconcile. Here is a film that at once thinks big and thinks small, mechanically creating grim spectacle for entirely surface reasons. Its best moments land with such confident grandiosity that, despite some shaky elements and disappointing moments, it’s still a film with an undeniable impact. At least this trilogy of Batman films doesn’t fade away in disgrace. It goes out with a big and mostly satisfying finale.

Quick Look: RED

Red is a bludgeoning action comedy that, despite some small pleasure to be found in its fluid comic-book style, is most notable for its collection of slumming thespians that deserves much better. Bruce Willis is the most at home in this movie, starring as a recently retired CIA agent who is now marked for death by the very same organization. He figures out that it has something to do with an old mission, so he, and his mild-mannered kidnapping victim/girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker) set off to find the other agents who were with him at the time. This involves crossing the country to pay visits to other retirees from Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich to Helen Mirren and Brian Cox. It also has something to do with a scowling Karl Urban, a devious Richard Dreyfuss, and two scenes with Ernest Borgnine. Director Robert Schwentke brings some pizzazz to the early action sequences, but even that wears out its welcome before the movie is even half over. The fun of seeing senior citizens in action sequences only takes the film so far and the filmmakers have nothing else to contribute. This is just sound and fury signifying nothing. If you’re going to let a collection of capital-A actors wallow in this kind of junky action-comedy, at least have the decency to make it good junk. I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed. Red is entirely uninvolving, but at least it’s not flat out irritating.

Quick Look: Invictus (2009)

At this point, can we expect anything less from a film directed by Clint Eastwood than a good-looking film? Even when they’re not good – I didn’t care for Flags of Our Fathers or Gran Torino – they still look just fine, with a classic sheen that comes from dependable Hollywood craftsmanship. Certainly, Invictus does nothing to reverse this trend, but the film comes up short in a few other areas, mainly in the arenas of character and passion. Eastwood, in telling the story of Nelson Mandela’s first months as president of South Africa, has chosen to focus on Mandela’s interest in uniting the country through its rugby team. It’s an interesting story, but one that I’d have rather seen as a subplot in a Mandela biopic. Even so, I have to judge the movie in front of me and not the movie I wanted to see. Eastwood had the good sense to have Morgan Freeman play Mandela. It’s a performance that borders on mere imitation but Freeman has a quiet dignity that suits the role. The presentation of Mandela feels a little superficial, but Freeman carries the part, giving it the feeling of greater depth than what must have been on the page. As the rugby captain is Matt Damon doing a capable job in a role that requires him to mostly just shout “let’s go, guys!” The movie seems aimless for a while, even if it’s enjoyably so. I liked every scene with Mandela; he gives excellently performed monologues and dialogues and I got great enjoyment out of the scenes that simply observed his political process. I also enjoyed a subplot that runs through the film which follows the black and white members of Mandela’s security team learning to work together. Once the all-rugby finale kicks in, the movie finds a drive that it had been missing, but it pushes Freeman to the side in the process. He’s the emotion, but not the thrill, I guess. At moments, Invictus is genuinely soul-stirring but I left the theater wishing my soul could have been stirred up just a bit more.