Tied Together with a SMILE 2

A confident directorial debut, Parker Finn’s Smile was one of the better uses for the recent trend in horror movies to find its fear in metaphors for trauma. It took as its symbolism a supernatural infection—an evil spirit that follows those who’ve witness a violent death, haunting them until they become the next violent death from which a witness will be followed. The link in the chain is visions of the smiling corpse, then smiling apparitions, then, finally, the victim smiling as they’re consumed by a compulsion to die. It’s creepy stuff, full of droning bass noises on the soundtrack, gliding upside-down establishing shots, and dark hallways and long silences—the better to punctuate with jump scares. But these trauma plots now border on cliche, so Finn wisely pivots his Smile 2. It’s not just about tragic backstory, but adds to its intimations of depression and suicidal ideation another form of modern mental anguish: fandom. His victim this time around is a star singer-songwriter (Naomi Scott) on the verge of launching her new world tour, giving this movie lots of sparkly outfits and speaker-rattling original (and pretty good!) pop music. (This makes it the second Eras Tour inspired chiller of the year; a double bill with Trap would be fun.) As the grueling prep to get back on the stage reaches its peak of costume fittings, dance rehearsals, meet and greets, and talk show interviews, she witness the sudden bloody death of her creepily grinning drug dealer (Lukas Gage, channeling Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights). There’s solid dread in knowing the shape of what she’s about to experience.

Her subsequent descent into dangerous madness is familiar to anyone who knows the pattern of the first film, but the trajectory’s images are given a new shivering valence as the normal screams and flashbulbs of a star’s life contrast with the total isolation of her downtime, and add eerie echoes of uncertainty. Then there are the outsized pressures of a manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) and zealous fans and record executives and choreographers and so on. They all expect so much from her, so she’s pushing herself to the limit mentally and physically even before the supernatural takes her over the edge. The rarified atmosphere of stardom is a good fit for Finn’s high-gloss imagery, and the slightly wider scope is part of the movie’s general one-upping of its predecessor. It’s just as committed to its lead character’s fraying psyche, keeping a close eye on her teeth-gnashing, wide-eyed bewilderment. But it’s also a longer, louder, gorier movie, more concussive in its jolts and dizzying in its hallucinations inside hallucinations. The ending keeps twisting until it gets somewhere both predictable and surprisingly satisfying in its grim logic and linger implications. It totally delivers on its premise.

Song and Dance, Man: LA LA LAND

I saw La La Land a few weeks ago and, though fun, the more I’ve thought about it the less I’ve thought of it. There’s much to admire about its shaggy fastidiousness bringing the movie musical to an aw-shucks shuffle and mumble aesthetic bursting with glitter at the margins. Writer-director Damien Chazelle glides the Steadicam with dancers great and small, dialing up the colors in the smooth cinematography to just shy of Technicolor vibrancy. The songs don’t exactly burst forth in memorable wit or hummable melody, but noodle around with a passive aggressive earworm tendency to quietly wrap a measure or two around the back of the brain. There’s something appealing about sitting in the theater watching it unspool, but little to stick with you beyond the feeling of having seen something largely pleasant, a mostly empty exercise in style and self-satisfaction. But that's not so bad, considering.

It begins with one of the most exuberant curtain raisers in recent memory, pure joy as a traffic jam erupts in dance, buoyant and colorful gestures totally swept up in moving to the beat. The movie ends with an even better sequence: one of the loveliest sustained passages in any movie I’ve seen lately. I held my breath as the film steps into a poignant, melancholy, graceful dream ballet about fleeting moments, about love and loss and the fantasy of what might have been. In between the film isn’t quite as enchanting and transporting, but it’s really trying, you know? Chazelle has traded in cachet gained from the gruff, buzzy, and percussive Oscar-winning drama Whiplash for the chance to make an original movie musical. We don’t get too many of those anymore, let alone evocations of a Jacques Demy style peppered with allusions to MGM’s Freed unit fare all nestled in a quipping romantic comedy (another genre that’s fallen fallow of late).

Like his earlier film it’s an exploration of artists pushing their talents to the limit, unsure whether their passion is enough to get them to the level of success necessary to make a living, let alone becoming a Great. But instead of that film’s dark central relationship – a jockeying for power between a domineering professor and an aggressively ambitious student – this film is a fuzzy and light romance, as charming as can be while still maintaining a simmering striving sadness underneath. This film’s central couple is a pair of dreamers trotting through a fantasy Los Angeles. She wants to be an actress like her studio-era idols. A huge Golden Age Hollywood poster covers one wall of her tiny bedroom in a cramped apartment shared with three other girls, a place to crash between auditions and barista shifts at the Warner Bros. lot. He wants to run a jazz club. In the meantime he’s obsessively hording artifacts from when jazz was king and piecing together savings from small time gigs playing background noise piano in restaurants or New Wave cover bands at shallow parties.

She is Emma Stone. He is Ryan Gosling. They turn up the movie star charm and crackling chemistry as they perform the expected rom-com moves, starting out prickly, jabbing at each other with glowing conversational daggers. They don’t like each other, each quick with an insult. But they dance so swimmingly in sync, a soft shuffle of steps, a sudden graceful motion, a swooping flourish. In true Astaire and Rogers fashion (in spirit, but definitely not in skill) feet tell the real story of feelings. We know they’re meant to be, and soon they’re giving it a go. Their only problem is being young in 2016, a time in which it’s awfully hard to make jazz pianist or glamorous star a career goal. (Not that it was ever easy to succeed in those professions, but it sure was a lot smoother when there was popular demand.) This makes La La Land, a self-consciously colorful and charmingly artificial romantic musical, a bittersweet tale of people who just weren’t made for these times. They bond over artistic passions – he explaining jazz, she taking a backlot tour – and fall in love, before the demands of selling-out start them on separate paths.

Chazelle makes use of his leads’ appealing banter and expressive moves, turning this into a slight two-hander. No time to flesh out others, it is a duet for young talent with enough experience to shoulder the demands of the roles and smooth-enough faces to play striving ingénues and ambitious self-starters. They are figures conjured for genre play, the types we’d expect to find in a movie like this, their movements and behavior dictated by the way a dress should ruffle, the way glitter should float on a puff of breeze, the way a hop-skip-slide should gleam under a lamppost at night. It’s all rather sweet, but narrow. Their pursuit of success (and each other) is the movie’s exclusive interest, crowding an ace supporting cast (fleeting glimpses of Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K Simmons, Finn Wittrock, and others) out of the chance to strut their stuff. And in the end, even their relationship is lopsided – far more interested in his jazz than her acting – and remains vague on their actual progress to career destinations.

The central question for the characters is whether or not they’ll be true to their artistic ambitions – he likes real jazz; she prefers serious roles – or give in to temptation. And maybe choosing one means losing the other, or each other. That their potential sell-out moves – a gig playing fun popular music with a John Legend type (played by the man himself); a role on a series described as Dangerous Minds meets The OC – sound at least as, if not more, fun than their dream art maybe muddies the movie’s point. Gorgeous widescreen colors stretch across the screen, and the film’s protagonists’ swooning, naïve worship of modes of artistic expression fallen from peak popularity (clinging to an ideal that keeps their prospects slim and dusty instead of embracing the actual mess of creating art) is mirrored in the fussy (and sometimes fusty) evocation of genre gone by. I was frustrated by all this inconsistency, but then there’s that final dreamy conclusion that practically lifted me out of my seat. And, hey, it was worth hanging in there after all. Any movie with two great scenes bookending a technically accomplished (if hollow) middle can’t be all bad.

They're Here. Again. POLTERGEIST

A marvelous horror movie, 1982’s Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg Poltergeist is a terrific entertainment, and one of my favorites of its kind. It’s a sustained piece of slowly mounting haunted house tension, with warm family dynamics and small creepy details eventually erupting in a spectacular crescendo of special effects-driven freak outs. A quintessential portrait of early-80’s suburbia wrapped up in skillful metaphor about expanding without regard for unintended consequences (or evil sprits) unchecked sprawl might kick up, it’s one of those films that has a time capsule quality, but has enough evergreen genre elements to make it timeless. When it came time to remake Poltergeist, building an entirely new film on the bones of the old was out of the question. Most of Gil Kenan’s remake is a bland updating, content to riff on the original’s most famous moments, finding new and slightly worse ways of doing everything.

The result is a contemporary Poltergeist of high competence, but little interest. It only works because its inspiration is still a good movie, and following it closely is a good way to make an effective little horror picture. This one plays like a passable tween-friendly summer diversion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can almost imagine heading home for s’mores and giggles around the campfire afterwards. Kenan’s film is brighter and lighter, with 3D and CGI taking the place of practical effects, and rounder edges on the frights. It runs nearly 30 minutes shorter, adds an awfully conventional arc for a young boy from coward to hero, and by and large keeps threats and moments of wit in a lower key. It’s both a little more and a lot less than what you’d expect. Unfortunately a bunch of clown dolls isn’t significantly creepier than one. Grown-ups sneaking a sip of liquor isn’t as interesting as sharing a joint. Nor is ditching a realtor as funny as pushing a TV for a concluding punchline.

But there’s entertainment value here, and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (of Rabbit Hole) does some smart updating. Now the neighborhood isn’t new. It’s hollowed out with foreclosures. The family moves into the house because of layoffs constraining their finances. There’s a recessionary sadness hanging over the opening. How were they to know their house was built on a cemetery? Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt play the parents, in a likable pair of performances. Their kids, sullen teen (Saxon Sharbino), nervous boy (Kyle Catlett), and little girl (Kennedi Clements), are the first to discover the haunting in their house, like electric disruptions and strangely menacing trees and clown dolls. Then the threat becomes very real when the youngest daughter is snatched by malevolent spirits and held hostage in their ghostly realm.

Who they gonna call? A paranormal researcher (Jane Adams) and a TV host (Jared Harris), of course. It all builds to flashes of nightmare hallucinations, a portal to the spiritual plane opening up in a closet (and looking a lot like Insidious on the other side), and a suburban home barfing up its supernatural secrets. It’s predictable button pushing, with fluid camerawork tracing digital intrusions through an eerily normal house pulsing with malevolent creepiness. Never particularly scary, it at least isn’t a desecration. It’s just barely enjoyable enough, I suppose. Kenan manages a brisk trot through some shivery concepts, efficiently deploying fine effects while finding a good deal of charm in the actors. The kids are sufficiently freaked out, and the adults get some dry one-liners to cut the tension. It’s not a bad time at the movies, with some moderate chills over before you know it.

As a fine example of what it is, I suppose you can shake off the déjà vu and find comfort in familiar rhythms. But why settle for a competent, but lesser, vision unless you absolutely have to? It’s hard not to wish the exact same cast and crew had been put to use on a wholly original movie. Not only has this been done better before, but Kenan’s even done a better family-friendly 80’s horror throwback before, his 2006 animated debut feature Monster House, a fast, funny, creepy good time. (Rent it and the original Poltergeist and have yourself a good double feature.) Here’s hoping this big budget remake allows the filmmakers opportunity to do more interesting original work in the future.

Tech-ed Off: MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

It’s easy to see Jason Reitman’s ambition for Men, Women & Children to be a big statement about How We Live Now. The film is a Very Serious ensemble drama about a cross-section of characters living intertwined melodramas a la Crash or Babel. In this case they’re a bunch of high schoolers and their parents in suburban Texas – though really a vague Modern Anytown, USA – who live disconnected from their feelings and each other. We see lives of quiet desperation mediated by screens showing digital spaces that alternately soothe and exacerbate their problems. Fair enough, but despite fitfully operating as effective drama, it’s clearly a movie built thesis statement backwards into character and incident, frozen by its own sense of importance. Worse, there’s not much to its thesis, which is as muddled as it is trite, developing its emptiness with a heavy hand.

I suppose muddled moralizing speaks, even accidentally, to our societal ambivalence towards technology. It’d be an interesting idea around which to build a drama, but Reitman, adapting with Erin Cressida Wilson a novel by Chad Kultgen, creates a series of events that reflect bland reprimand, concerned handwringing, or vacuous same-as-it-ever-was resignation, sometimes all at once. Caught halfway between scolding and shrugging, it has a view of the Internet that feels so outdated and incomplete I almost expected to hear a modem dial up on the soundtrack. Plot threads involve infidelities, romances, repression, self-harm, painful yearning, and a variety of questionable decisions. Each is filtered through and aided by the Internet. That’s what gives it a patina of timeliness around which it spins rather empty, cliché stories saved only fitfully by strong acting across the board.

The best plotline, perhaps because it draws best on the small character work Reitman did well in better movies like Juno and Young Adult, involves two high school kids dealing with emotional issues. She (Kaitlyn Dever, of Short Term 12 and ABC’s Last Man Standing) is a loner, bookish, sweet, and under the surveillance of a technophobe mother (Jennifer Garner). He (Ansel Elgort, of The Fault in Our Stars) is a football player who quit the team when his mom left the family, leaving his dad (Dean Norris) inattentive to his son’s depression. The kids forge a connection that feels genuine, and twists around the tech in a reasonably convincing way. Other stories aren’t as successful. A bored married couple (Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler) each secretly turn to the web to find affairs, a plotline that’s a weird blend of shame and forgiveness and, unfortunately, does not turn into a “Piña Colada Song” situation. Their son (Travis Tope) is addicted to porn. His real-life crush is a fame-hungry cheerleader (Olivia Crocicchia) whose mother (Judy Greer) lets her start a modeling website. Meanwhile, a fellow cheerleader (Elena Kampouris) suffers from body image problems brought about by bullying and egged on by online friends.

With a sprawling Message Movie format, there is unevenness built into the structure. Individual stories or scenes work well, but the big picture is a muddle of good intentions, flawed observations, and bad decisions. It’s all tied together with arch narration (by Emma Thompson, speaking in a voice not too far from her Stranger Than Fiction storyteller) that prattles on against the backdrop of space, speaking about Carl Sagan as NASA hardware floats by. Then she’ll dip down with an edit into quotidian explanations about character thoughts and actions, drolly telling us details we can plainly see before us. Reitman’s repetitive screenplay includes heavy-handed, awkwardly inserted, digressions reflecting on 9/11 and “my, how much the world has changed.” Yes. And? It’s a dash of self-serious muttering.

The film’s worst tendencies are reflected in Garner’s character, who has a keystroke logger on her daughter’s devices and hosts fearmongering info sessions for fellow parents. She starts as a humorless paranoid scold who means well. Over the course of her storyline, she goes from spying on everything her daughter does to stopping cold turkey. In the world of this movie, it’s all or nothing, ignoring both the very real benefits of parental oversight and the virtues of trust and flexibility. It’s too uncomfortable lingering in grey areas, too eager to wrap up conflicts. So much so that for all its overt exploring of the screen-saturated culture’s impact on individuals – I liked a recurring image of crowds, everyone looking at screens, their apps hovering translucently above them like a cloud of distraction – the worst events any characters go through happen entirely (or almost entirely) offline.

The movie seems to want a Big Statement, but isn’t sure what to say. In some ways it’s progressive, acknowledging that sometimes lonely, socially isolated people can find solace online that can improve their real world well being. And it’s certainly true that one can get lost in the muck of the web’s worst tendencies. Our world is complex. But every story in this movie that resolves wraps up neatly with a pat Internet-good-for-this, Internet-bad-for-that judgment. Other storylines drop off without resolution, maybe for the best, since I don’t think the filmmakers, though they bring the subjects up, had meaningful discussion of body image, sexual fantasies, or sex work in them. What’s here is an attempt to pass off well-intentioned fumbling in the shallow end as an important deep dive.

Fracked: PROMISED LAND

Fracking, the process by which energy companies drill into shale deposits deep underground and then shoot a mixture of water and undisclosed chemicals into the hole in order to extract natural gas, is rightly controversial. You may not have seen Gasland, the essential documentary on the subject, but you’re surely aware of that film’s most remarkable images of people lighting their tap water on fire. Fracking is safe and contamination of nearby water sources is next to impossible, at least that’s what the energy companies have a vested interest in having you believe. The good idea behind the newest anti-fracking film, Promised Land, is the way it puts those words in the mouth of its main character, a company man played by Matt Damon. His job is to ride into a small town and convince property owners to sell the rights to the shale under their feet in exchange for a big check and promises of residual checks to come.

Damon and his coworker (Frances McDormand) go door to door in an economically devastated town where the money offered sounds good. Too good to be true, says the local science teacher played by Hal Holbrook. An out-of-towner environmentalist played by John Krasinski joins the wise old science guy in a campaign to educate the townspeople about the dangers of signing away their town’s livability for an easy payout. Sure, the town would have a brief boom time, but is it worth trading their future livestock, farming, and fresh water? Director Gus Van Sant shoots the small town lovingly, with overhead shots of endless green expanses broken up only by farmhouses, silos, and herds of animals, the better to emphasize what can potentially be taken away.

The script, by Damon and Krasinski with an assist from novelist, essayist, and literary icon of sorts Dave Eggers, makes no effort to hide its didactic intentions. Well, almost no effort, I should say. There’s a wisp of a plot involving both men’s understandable, low-key, low-stakes romantic pursuit of a local teacher (Rosemary DeWitt) that doesn’t really go anywhere productive, but at least it distracts from scenes like Krasinski teaching a class about water contamination or Damon standing in front of an American flag answering tough questions in a local information meeting. It’s all pretty obvious, with character motivations and lines of dialogue blatantly standing in for the sociopolitical argument that’s inelegantly happening in a place somewhere between text and subtext.

The kicker is that the argument is so very noble. Of course we should be worried about what fracking will do to small towns. If anything, it’s a conversation that’s not being held often enough in the public sphere. The way the movie blends an economic and environmental argument is worthy, asking its audience to weigh the considerations of a struggling town’s short- and long-term best interests as the townspeople do. The problem is that there’s nothing else on which to ponder as the film plays out. It’s an editorializing documentary sitting just underneath the thin veneer of drama and I resented being asked to care about characters when they’re nothing more than living, breathing talking points. This is an artless message movie from artful people so carried away with their good message that they forgot to make a movie.

Magical Thinking: THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN

It’s not always promising when a movie starts with the central characters sitting down and saying that their story might be hard to believe. That’s what happens in the opening scene of The Odd Life of Timothy Green, when the Greens, a just-south-of-middle-aged couple (Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton), sit down across a conference table from an incredibly patient adoption official (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and begin to tell their tale. We go back about a year to find them reacting understandably sorrowfully to the news that they will be unable to conceive a child. That night, they channel this type of mourning into an activity. They write down dream attributes for their child, place the list in a box, and bury it in the garden behind their picturesque small-town-Americana home. That night, between a magical thunderclap and the rain falling upwards, something emerges from their garden. Not only that, it gets in their house. Needless to say, they’re a little confused when confronted with a muddy little boy (CJ Adams) who calls himself Timothy and has a handful of healthy, green leaves growing out of his ankles.

Back in the framing device, the adoption official doesn’t quite believe them, but since there’s still most of the running time to go, she allows them to continue telling their story. Happy to have the chance, the Greens tell all about their time with this son, a precocious 10-year-old boy who just appeared. Writer-director Peter Hedges specializes in films about families and, though this one’s not as good as his Pieces of April and Dan in Real Life, it’s ultimately a very quiet, very low-key little movie about how a child can change a family dynamic, sometimes for the better. The Greens casually accept Timothy into their lives, introducing him to their family as a “sudden, miraculous” son. The family members, for their part, react to the child in much the same way that they’ve responded to his parents. Garner’s high-strung perfectionist sister (Rosemarie DeWitt) is skeptical, but their loving, elderly Aunt and Uncle (Lois Smith and M. Emmet Walsh) take to him write away. Meanwhile, Edgerton’s distant dad (David Morse) is standoffish and hard to connect with. In these ways, the film is a little allegory about how dealing with children can be a way for people to relive or reject the ways they’ve been treated in the past.

Hedges’s film has all the simple force of a thin storybook of magical thinking. It works on its own off-handedly bizarre terms, but the extent to which it works on you will completely depend on how far you’re willing to suspend your disbelief. I found myself holding the film at arm’s length for a good long while. It’s so intent on pushing emotional buttons. Here’s where the boy goes to visit a sweet old man in the hospital. Here’s where the boy interacts with the stuffy businesswoman (Dianne Wiest), the interesting, slightly older girl (Odeya Rush), the frustrated soccer coach (Common), or the local pencil factory foreman (Ron Livingston). Each scene has a clear thematic or plot point. Each moment of uplift or mysterious, mystical mumbo jumbo is scored to an insistent piano-heavy score that over-underlines the intended emotion. And that kid, he goes around behaving vaguely childlike and slightly alien, bright and quick-witted on the one hand and a total blank slate on the other, while his parents try their hardest to be parents to him. Even though they make mistakes, they really aren’t mistakes because it’ll still be okay in the end. It’s a twinkly-eyed wishful-thinking version of parenting.

By the end, I was surprised that I was more or less okay with all of that. It’s not exactly The Boy with Green Hair or anything, but it’s still pretty hokey. Still, the movie is so straight-faced and earnest about its mildly perplexing fantasy conceit, so insistent in its magical-child-provokes-the-best-out-of-people plotlines even when they dead-end or remain half-formed. By the movie’s final moments, which I won’t spoil here, I was sort of happy with it and glad I saw it. It’s not a total waste of time. This is a harmless, gimmicky movie that has a pretty terrific cast of character actors lending weight to what is a sweet, if difficult to warm up to, mild fantasy. I get that it’s a tough sell. I’m not exactly sold on the whole thing myself and if you’re one to scoff at the very idea of earnestness I’d advise you to stay far away. Is it corny? Are you kidding? It’s off the cob. But for families looking for a fairly gentle matinee with some well-intended lessons about accepting people, standing by your family, telling the truth, and other such things, it might be just the late-summer movie of choice.

Suburban Space Invaders: THE WATCH

Turning out to be nothing more than a belabored, R-rated commercial for Costco (actual dialogue: “They really do have everything we need!), The Watch is a halfhearted action comedy content to do nothing surprising. The story, such as it is, kicks off when the local Costco manager (Ben Stiller) shows up to work one morning to find that the store has overnight turned into a crime scene. The local cop (Will Forte) informs him that the night watchman has been mysteriously murdered. Shaken up, Stiller puts out a call for his sleepy suburb to form a neighborhood watch and is a little disappointed that the only people who respond are a needy middle aged motormouth (Vince Vaughn) who just wants a break from intruding upon his teenager’s social life, an awkward wannabe vigilante (Jonah Hill), and a bumbling British man (Richard Ayoade) who wants to join a group to fit in with the locals.

Eventually it turns out that the murderer is an alien who is simply one of many who are already in the town, poised to phone home and start the invasion proper. So, it’s up to the four flawed guys to stop the space creatures before they can move forward with their plan. Not that the film gathers any momentum from this threat. No, the movie just meanders through typical moments of male gross-out humor bonding, stumbles into a lame Invasion of the Body Snatchers lite and then lazily gets up the effort to squeak out a typical shoot-‘em-up climax.  Altogether it feels like the result of letting a bad Apatow knockoff write and direct a Hollywood remake of Attack the Block. It’s lazily paced, painfully predictable and unimaginative in all aspects, like two faded copies of copies placed one over the other.

It didn’t have to be this way. The talent involved here is promising. The cast is made up of funny, skilled performers and I haven’t even mentioned Rosemarie DeWitt, relegated to a thanklessly underwritten role as Stiller’s wife, or Doug Jones, the incredible performer behind so many great screen creatures (not the least of which is Pan’s Labyrinth’s terrifying Pale Man) who suits up to play the aliens. But the story, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (of the great raunchy teen comedy Superbad) and rewritten by Jared Stern (of the not-so-great Mr. Popper’s Penguins), is beat-by-beat dull and rote. It feels slapped together in a way that makes everyone involved appear to be shrugging towards paychecks. Everyone on screen has been vibrant and energetic, funny and sympathetic in other roles. Here, though, they’re all playing characters that are thinly sketched and vaguely off-putting while just going through the paces in a movie that can’t quite get its act together. It is witless and lame every step of the way.

The anemic script is certainly the key problem here, but it doesn’t help matters that its tone is so unformed. When it opens on Stiller narrating us through a typical day in the life of his character, the film appears to be sharpening its satirical claws on the gleaming store shelves and perfect suburban subdivisions, looking with scorn upon the hollow homogenized lifestyles of the characters. But, as more characters come into focus and the gears of the plot slowly get up to speed, it’s clear that this movie’s going nowhere fast. Strange detours into the kinky life of a creepy neighbor (Billy Crudup) and a half-formed subplot about a leering teenager (Nicholas Braun) after Vaughn’s daughter sap away momentum and cloud the tone. Are we supposed to actually validate the overzealous behavior of the central characters in so thoroughly, incompetently, poking around where they don’t belong? They’re hard to root for and when the plot resolves, it does so almost by accident.

The biggest disappointment here is the direction from Akiva Schaffer, not because it’s especially bad – it’s slick and competent – but because it’s so devoid of energy and creativity.  After directing so many terrific, hilarious Digital Shorts for Saturday Night Live and the smart-stupid new cult comedy classic Hot Rod, it’s unfortunate to see him deliver something so uninspired. There’s just about nothing here worth talking about or reacting to. I saw the movie amongst a boisterous crowd of people who, as the movie started, fell silent. As the movie played, we stayed silent. Then, a little over 90 minutes later, we all filed out. I went in hoping for a few laughs and left feeling dispirited. It’s not just bad; it’s nothing but missed opportunities all around.