Between The Rock and a Hart Place:CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

It’s one of the oldest action comedy tricks in the book. Pair a tall, muscle-bound action star with a shorter, smaller comedy star. After all, what’s a clearer signal of comedy than putting two people who represent obvious contrasts in the same frame? Once the visual gag is established, the filmmakers only have to let their stars’ combined strengths power the genres’ demands while their likability carries the rest. In the case of Central Intelligence, the leads are Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – bringing amped up physicality and easy charm to action and adventure all over the place, from big splashy studio fare like the Fast & Furious movies and Hercules to scrappier low-budget eccentricities like Faster or, better yet, Southland Tales – and Kevin Hart – one of the most popular stand-ups working today, and a motor-mouth comedy lead in a constant churn of mostly forgettable fare like Think Like a Man and The Wedding Ringer, with a few pleasant surprises like About Last Night. Who knew that putting them together would bring out the best in both?

Johnson and Hart each started their film careers as scene-stealers, filling bit parts with their own unique brands of charisma, and are consequently best when their bigger roles don’t sand down their individuality. The inspiration of Central Intelligence comes in allowing them each to play to and against type in enjoyable silliness given just enough weight to justify a few explosions. Johnson plays a big, bulky man who is effortlessly intimidating and capable, but with a sly sweetness bubbling through. We learn through an opening flashback (slathered in half-convincing CG de-aging and enlarging) he was a fat kid picked on in high school who now, twenty years later, is a ripped secret agent still carrying pain of that long ago bullying. Hart plays a former classmate, an admired hotshot football player who was the only one not laughing at Johnson’s teenaged humiliation. Now he’s the one feeling dumped on, overlooked at work in what is a boring accounting firm anyway. He wishes his life had more excitement. He’s about to regret that.

Johnson, delightfully dorky with a fanny pack and a wide-eyed eagerness to make a good impression, arrives in town for the class reunion and looks up the one person who was remotely nice to him at the time. Hart, sad and low-energy, agrees to meet him for drinks, and is delighted to have a blast: reminiscing, doing shots, beating up bullies, and riding a motorcycle. Hart has a new friend, but it turns out Johnson’s with the C.I.A., on the run for one reason or another, chased by his colleagues and villains alike, and he needs an accountant he cant trust. This brings out the personalities we’d expect from these men: Johnson turning into the strong man of action and Hart jumping into excited nervous patter. The cleverness comes in intermingling these new modes of behavior with the old. Johnson is an action hero and a shy kid wanting to impress the cool guy, while Hart is a fish out of water relying on some of his old ingratiating high school charm to talk his way out of this jam with no hard feelings.

The plot is the usual bunch of hooey hauled out for an action comedy. There’s a USB drive full of shady bank numbers, a mysterious no-good bad guy mastermind with a code name (The Black Badger), government agents hot on the trail, a handful of menacing black market professionals, and a red ticking clock counting down to the climax. It’s an excuse to invite in actors of the sort it’s always a pleasure to see, with small but enjoyable roles for Amy Ryan, Aaron Paul, Ryan Hansen, Kumail Nanjiani, and a few choice Big Names who are smartly revealed for big impacts. There’s nothing too terribly surprising about any developments herein (especially if you’re familiar with Ebert’s Law of Conservation of Star Power). The story is strictly pro forma, a sturdy staging area for its lead duo’s combustible combined charisma. They’re terrific fun bouncing off each other, alternately antagonizing and cooperating as they get deeper into a scenario that involves charming banter, slapstick fight sequences, and grave consequences narrowly avoided.

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber (We’re the Millers) is wise to keep the focus tightly on the hugely entertaining interactions between his stars. They make a good team, pushing each other, Johnson proving once more his facility with humor, here the best he’s ever been on the charm offensive, and Hart showing surprising dexterity with the physical requirements of an action effort, especially one that needs him to squirm and shout protests as he flails into accidental assists. One particularly funny scene has him apologizing to two C.I.A. agents by saying he’s as surprised as they were to find you could accidentally pistol whip someone. It helps that screenwriters Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen (The Mindy Project) leave plenty of room for amusing personality while still keeping the thriller mechanics moving along tight enough to have little use for the drifting improv sag that infects so many studio comedies these days. (There’s hardly any mean-spiritedness either, a nice change of pace.) It’s brisk, efficient, and has a real contagious charge between its mismatched leads, making for a breezy enjoyable good time.

True Detective: VERONICA MARS

Veronica Mars was a high school detective, helping her private investigator father with his caseload and taking on all kinds of unofficial work from peers and acquaintances who found themselves in unfortunate circumstances. Inspired by the unsolved murder of her best friend and her father’s line of work, she threw herself into her hobby, getting into sleuthing scrapes and uncovering the seedy underbelly of her economically stratified hometown full of privileged conspiratorial snobs and rough criminal elements alike. Such was the weekly life of this teenager, a breakout role for Kristen Bell, during the 2004 to 2007 three-season run of Veronica Mars, before the TV series was cancelled after having been tinkered with and compromised by a network eager to make it a bigger hit than it ever would be. Ever since, fans have wanted more of her story, or at least a proper finale, and so has Rob Thomas, the show’s creator and showrunner. Years of studio negotiations and a much-hyped Kickstarter campaign later and here we are with a Veronica Mars movie, a big screen continuation of her adventures.

I didn’t watch the series when it aired, but having gorged on it to catch up in time to see the film, I bet anyone who has long loved this show will be most pleased. It picks up a decade after Veronica’s high school graduation. She’s long since moved from her home in Neptune, California. Still dating her Season 3 boyfriend Piz (Chris Lowell), she has graduated law school and is poised to take a job at a New York City law firm. So far she’s been able to resist the call of Neptune and all the entanglements and pain it represents to her. She won’t even be attending her upcoming high school reunion. But, as was often the case in the series, there has been a high-profile murder in her hometown. Troubled rich kid, and Veronica’s old on-again-off-again boyfriend, Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) is the only suspect. She feels compelled to help, dusting off her old detective skills after having so thoroughly left them behind. Her investigation leads her straight into the reunion, falling back in with old friends (Percy Daggs III, Tina Majorino, Francis Capra) and old antagonists (Ryan Hansen, Krysten Ritter). Soon, the simple murder investigation doesn’t seem so simple.

It’s an entire season of Veronica Mars packed into one 107-minute movie. The screenplay by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero (a writer on the series) has all of the intrigue and relationship melodrama of the show’s overarching big mysteries without the sometimes hit-and-miss nature of the case-of-the-weeks dictated by the demands of the standard 22-episode broadcast order. I found the show often stretched the season-long mysteries too thin, especially by each season’s midpoint, so the necessary compression of the theatrical format solves my biggest problem with the show. It allows for a story that’s tightly structured, full of complications and unexpected twists, and the dark humor and eclectic cultural references fans of the show would expect. It also plays fair with the characters as they’ve been established, providing fans an opportunity to live out the reunion with Veronica, to stay with her father (a warm Enrico Colantoni) once more, and to see all the old Neptune High classmates yet again. It’s nice to see how easily the characters fall back into their old rhythms.

There’s a sense of welcome familiarity here. Even the murder and conspiracies seem like old times. It feels exactly like Veronica Mars, which also makes the whole thing, as directed by Thomas, feel at times like a comfortable TV movie. But, hey, it’s an especially engaging one. It’s an amiable reunion that pulls back the ensemble for another big mystery. The sense of fun is infectious as the movie piles high with callbacks, needling in-jokes, and cameos that add up to an enjoyable story that can stand on its own. Where the movie works best, maybe even for those who know little to nothing about the characters and their pasts, is the tight focus on Veronica with a clear emotional through line. Bell is hugely charming being as much of a clever smart aleck and whip smart investigator as she ever was. But now there’s real reluctance to how comfortable it is falling into old patterns. There is a palpable sense that her teen sleuthing days were a coping mechanism and the continual moral shambles of her hometown is a kind of inescapable tragedy that’s gotten under her skin. 

It makes for a fine detective movie, a digital age grown-up Nancy-Drew-by-way-of-The-O.C. neo-noir, as this ex-P.I. returns to a life she thought she left firmly in the past to find a town that’s only further crumbling under corruption and opportunistic classism. She’s about to fully escape, but finds she craves the rush of cracking a case. She needs to scratch the itch and right some wrongs. Her sense of loyalty to her father, her old friends, and her old life only enables this drive, and makes for an interesting addiction portrait. Maybe it’s also a commentary on the expectations of standard TV plotting. We need everything to be what it was, always ready to perpetuate the old conflicts anew. We need yet another case to be solved. We need the characters ready to play their parts. We need our hero able to step in and do what she does best over and over again.

One of the best things about the series was the way it had consequences linger, the results of a case big or small lasting in the form of grudges, expectations, compromises, criminal records, and plain old emotional traumas. No one emerged clean. The messy business of detective work and soapy mid-aught’s teen drama left marks. The movie is smart to continue along those lines, with stains of the past seeping into seemingly unrelated present day situations, driving old resentments and new crimes. It makes for fun thematic play and a great central hook for a reunion story. The characters are likable company and the mystery is resolved in a way that is most satisfying. But in the end, no one’s addiction will be cured. You just know Veronica will need to be out there solving mysteries. And I know there will be an audience anxious to see her do so.