Travelers' Treks: THE TRIP TO GREECE

Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip series has become one of modern moviegoing's most reliable pleasures. What a comfort and joy to return to these journeys following Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as versions of themselves on some new sightseeing and dining tour around a European country. They started in 2010 in England, went to Italy in 2014, found their way through Spain in 2017, and now find themselves in Greece. Each installment builds on loose, clever, absorbing conversations and patiently teased out accumulation of character details. Regular travels with these blokes gets only more enjoyable with each wonderful entry, as their focus on history—global, writerly, personal, ancient—feeds an ever more bittersweetly charming interest in fleeting pleasures and enduring truths, the mortality of man and meal, the lasting effects of work and art. All along they talk and talk and talk. These are literate, cultured dialogues, peppered with impressions and resentments, pop songs and poetry. I could listen to them for hours. In fact, by now, I suppose I have.

The gents at the center maintain a crackling chemistry, bantering easily, slipping into a similar frame of reference, steeped in knowledge of the classical world, lovers of literature, fluent in 20th century pop culture. At each stop, they’re given gorgeous food lovingly prepared and photographed. Around the table and behind the wheel the words chatter and clatter, clash and build, jest and jab. It’s a procession of rambling travelogue Dinner(s) with Andre, deep and shallow, fascinating and facile, learned and light. They get along—but are informed by the public personas which dovetail and diverge in interesting ways, needling Coogan for trading his comedian roots for his Hollywood and award-circuit aspirations, while Brydon eagerly chirps along his “light entertainer” reputation. As funny as they are, alone and together, there’s always a sense they really care — care about their trips, their passions, their understanding of history and culture, their careers, their families, their friendship. How refreshing, and how beautifully understated it is, to be around people of intelligence and complication for a time.

Last time had, appropriately enough, overt Quixote references, which are here fittingly traded for a structure related to Odysseus’ winding way home. As the camera makes its way after their vehicles across picturesque landscapes—verdant forests, vast fields, beautiful blue waters, rolling hills, impressive ruins—or parks at their tables in all manner of restaurants, the men are most excellent company. As the series has grown, it's endlessly enjoyable to watch the repetitions and variations, jocular accruals of recurring bits and in-jokes and a lovely circular logic of a friendship deeply felt and convincingly expressed in all its complications and charms, equal parts companionship and competition. The familiarity of this dynamic, and the constant breathtaking backdrops, make the films familiar and comfortable as the best long-form stories while maintaining distinct pleasures. That these films have been happening for ten years now only enhances the sense that they’re about the passage of time—and this new one most of all. It’s a movie about the past piling up behind an ever-shifting present, big life events and modern reference points the fleeting backbeat to a tour of modern life perched on antiquity. In The Trip to Greece’s quietly moving final sequences, there’s a confrontation with mortality—a sudden shift of mood that plays fair with the audience’s connection with these characters and understanding of their lives. I hope we can keep traveling with them as long as they’ll let us.

On the Road Again: THE TRIP TO SPAIN

With Hollywood in the grip of its latest bout of late-sequel-itis, is it too much to idly wish for a My Dinner with Andre 2? (I’d settle for the action figures, at this point.) At least we have The Trips, now a trilogy of Michael Winterbottom films following Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as versions of themselves bickering, bantering, and playfully marking their showbiz territory while dining and driving through beautiful European countryside. The Trip to Spain may not have the sparkle of discovery the first one had, or the fresh melancholy fully flowering in the second (to Italy). But the filmmakers haven’t skipped a step, creating a lovely portrait of quixotic, drifting middle-aged ennui, a sort of prickly Antonioni by way of Michael Palin’s travelogues. What a deft wonder, allowing Coogan and Brydon to play up and against their individual vanities, prattling like better than the best comedian podcasters – full relaxed, erudite, anecdotal mode dotted with the expected bursts of dueling impressions. (Best is an extended bit in which Brydon drives Coogan crazy pretending Moorish architecture was created by Roger Moore. Runner-up: Coogan’s constant Philomena humblebrags.) 

One could hardly ask for funnier company, and Winterbottom (and uneven and eclectic director, but when he’s on he’s on) maintains a perfect balance of casually beautiful location shooting, drooling food close-ups, and witty chatty conversations that prattle on and on, pleasurable looping around the same pet themes. Professional contentment and resentment, literary and cultural references, and off-handed tossed-off commentary about the Way We Live Now are once again topics du jour. It’s all filtered through the recurring motifs of creative frustration, business negotiation, petty jealousies, fatherhood, and legacy. They’re soulful comedians, not quite sad clowns, but certainly on the way to wintering into wisdom if they’ll let themselves. It’s familiar, but comfortingly so, while differing slightly, and not only in the locations. The ending this time is a stinging scorpion’s tail, puncturing the good mood with a topical surprise cliffhanger (of sorts), darkly funny and tremulously unresolved. As Coogan pontificates in the picture, European films are allowed big, obvious metaphor. They just work. Here a story about aging entertainers enjoying the sights and tastes of a foreign country, trading tales of the biz with subtle power plays and literary/historical references becomes a subtle, sad portrait of two men – and maybe a culture – on the precipice, uncertain where to go but onwards, anyway.

Mellow Yellow: MINIONS

Minions, the scene-stealing little yellow pill-shaped babblers from the Despicable Me movies, have been spun off into a feature film all their own. You could say they’ve gotten this honor because, with a distinctive look and elemental appeal, they’ve proved themselves instant members of the Cartoon Characters Hall of Fame. You could also say it’s because they’re a money-minting merchandise machine. It’s a bit of both. Minions follows the title group’s antics from before they met up with Gru, their supervillain-with-a-heart-of-gold boss in their earlier films. They’re shorn free of his story’s sentimentality, involving fighting off worse villains for the sake of his adorable adopted daughters. Instead, the Minions are careening on a fast-paced consequence-free zip through sequences of amiably silly animated slapstick. There’s not much to it, but it’s often too pleasant and amusing to resist, at least for those of us predisposed to find the Minions funny.

Screenwriter Brian Lynch and co-directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda are smart to keep the story simple, the action goofy, and the focus on the cute, unpredictable lead creatures. What is it that makes the Minions so appealing? They have visual simplicity, aural abstraction, and physical malleability. They speak near-total nonsense, and yet because they wobble their bodies and stretch their little faces, we can always figure out what they’re feeling. It’s pleasing inscrutability.  They’re ageless, genderless, and timeless, speaking language made up of gibberish and bits of every language under the sun. But they’re so strong-willed, we can watch them express elemental emotions. Minions are mischievous troublemakers, quick to laugh and quick to get angry, easily frustrated, sputtering and grumbling, or opening up their mouths in blasts of staccato laughter.

We open on a montage of their failed attempts to find a boss, the more despicable the better, from prehistoric times on. The Minions (all voiced by Coffin), wander through the ages inadvertently leading a variety of employers (a dinosaur, a caveman, a vampire, Napoleon) to their doom. These early moments play on pre-verbal visual jokes and cartoony energy, while a booming narrator (Geoffrey Rush) speaks over-emphatically about whatever silliness we observe – a T. Rex trying to balance on a boulder, a caveman using a flyswatter on a bear, an army of Minions in Napoleonic uniforms wobbling through the snow. Eventually, the creatures flee an angry mob into the wilderness where they hide in a cave for many decades, luckily avoiding work for Hitler or the KKK while they’re at it.

By 1968 they’ve grown bored of their exile. Three Minions, a tall one named Kevin and two shorter ones named Stuart and Bob (I could rarely tell them apart) leave in search of a new home where they can serve a villain. After a long trek through the wilderness, a rowboat across the ocean (complete with the old reliable seeing-others-as-giant-fruit hunger pains), and a stop in New York City, the trio finds their way to Orlando for a Villain Convention. They hitchhiked, picked up by a deceptively sunny couple (Allison Janney and Michael Keaton) and their kids, whose family secret is too funny to reveal. At the convention, they win the affection of the terrifically named villain Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock, teetering smoothly between sweet and mean), who invites them back to her place in London and demands they help her execute a heist.

That’s the long and short of the plot, with a series of manic antics and rubbery cartoon violence twisting and turning its way to a slaphappy conclusion. The Minions almost can’t quite hold down a full, interesting story on their own. But every stop on their trip is bright, colorful, and manic, full of characters and designs appealingly clever and round. Retro-cool supervillain gadgetry, wardrobe, and architecture fit right in with a Swinging Sixties London. The likes of The Beatles, The Who, and The Kinks jump on the soundtrack as the Minions are stuck in a vintage Bond meets Rube Goldberg meets Thunderbirds aesthetic. There are lots of visual gags from slapstick violence, cultural iconography, and teasing naughtiness – characters flailing every which way in loose hectic zaniness. In the center of it all, Kevin, Bob, and Stewart are Looney Tunes crossed with Three Stooges, pliable indestructible absurdities driven to get a job done, but too incompetent to do it right.

They bumble into conflict with a Tower Guard (Steve Coogan), a lanky inventor/torture chamber enthusiast (Jon Hamm), and the Queen (Jennifer Saunders), before Overkill herself turns on them. It's good for conflict. But the people and all their funny chattering and flailing can’t match the little yellow guys for appeal. The Minions have no emotional arc or great lessons to learn. Not even Gru could be so purely powered by id. They want their buddies. They want fun. They want bananas. They’ll do anything to get back to a comfortable status quo serving Saturday morning cartoon villainy. There are car chases, hypnosis, disguises, trap doors, elaborate weapons (a lava lamp gun was my favorite), and mad science gone wrong, but the stakes never feel all that high. (Look what happens to a time traveling scientist for an example of matters straight-faced horrifying this movie’s bouncy tone covers up.) It’s a simple jaunt through rubbery ridiculousness. Minions’ only interest is in tickling you into distraction.

Mama's Boy: PHILOMENA

When we first meet Philomena Lee, it’s easy to tell she’s not herself today. Her eyes are misty, distant, lost in thought. Her adult daughter, heading out to work, stops to tell her mother goodbye when the old woman tells her some surprising news. “He’d be 50 today,” she says, holding up a faded black and white photograph of a toddler. Her daughter is confused, a response that quickly turns to surprise when her mother tells her that fifty years earlier she had a child out of wedlock who was taken away from her by the nuns at the abbey in which she was living. The mystery of who this child is powers Stephen Frears’ Philomena, which becomes a sweet and delicate story about an elderly woman who decides to track down her long lost son and the kind and patient journalist who helps her.

Judi Dench stars in the title role. It’s a wonderful performance in which she convincingly inhabits the meek and polite personality of Philomena. The son taken from her has weighed on her thoughts for so long. At the time, she believed what the nuns told her, that carrying the child, suffering the pains of childbirth, and ultimately letting the baby go is God’s way of punishing her for giving in to sinful lust. And yet there’s been a nagging doubt growing in the back of her mind. How can she, through no fault of her own, be denied access to a life she brought into this world? She now can hardly believe the abstract concept of her missing child is now quite possibly becoming a reality. Her main question is simply, “has he thought of me?”

Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope from the true story as told by Martin Sixsmith, plays the journalist who helps her. He’s here for some wry commentary and sweet banter with the woman. His drive to write an article starts simply as a career move, a way to bounce back from some minor scandal that bounced him out of a high profile position. But he quickly comes to care for Philomena, and she for him. There’s affection there, a sort of maternal warmth between them that becomes, through their journey of investigation, a stand-in for the son she hopes to find. Dench, a quiet marvel, her face creased with every emotion implied while she puts on a brave face, stands in contrast to Coogan, who towers over her and yet finds such compassion underneath his dry wit.

It’s a study in empathy. By the time all is revealed, Coogan has become so invested in the story he’s been researching, he’s far more outwardly emotional than Philomena herself. Dench and Coogan make for a most charming odd-couple as the film follows a sturdy road movie path. It’s simple and nice, tracing comfortable paths to a conclusion that hits with some force. In the end, it is not shocking revelations or cruelty, but simple acts of kindness and forgiveness that are truly moving. Here, Dench and Coogan sell a climax that tidily answers questions raised in ways unexpectedly satisfying and complete. It is done perhaps too tidily, condensing hard real life into something that plays easily on screen. But so what? It plays.

Frears, a quiet, steady presence behind the camera, allows the film to simply exist with a minimum of fuss or insistence, recording fine performances from a skilled cast. Like many of his films – The Queen, High Fidelity, Dangerous Liaisons – he lets his excellent actors do the heavy lifting, bringing out the script's emotions as they sit pinned in by nice, solid framing. Where it could have gone broad and treacly, it instead finds fragile grace notes of performance that lend it the grace and dignity it deserves. It’s so nice and warm, capturing two mismatched characters on a journey of kindness in performances that are quietly funny and poignant.

More (and Less) of the Same: DESPICABLE ME 2

Did you like the 2010 animated slapstick comedy Despicable Me? Well, have I got news for you. Here’s Despicable Me 2, featuring more of everything you liked about Despicable Me except 1.) the sense of surprise, 2.) narrative momentum, and 3.) a non-monetary reason to exist. Oh, sure, Steve Carell’s Gru, the failed supervillain who decided being a dad is even better than being bad, is still a funny voice performance married to distinctive hunched design. His adopted daughters are as precocious and cute as ever. His army of yellow, nugget-shaped, gibberish-babbling Minions represents an often-hysterical expression of pure cartoony id in the best Looney Tunes tradition. But what’s missing most of all in this sequel is a sense of purpose. It’s cute, but the scope of this film feels so small, cramped even. It’s pitched at the level of a not-especially hardworking Saturday-morning cartoon series, smaller stakes, simpler emotions, and a safe, comforting plot that never strays too far from the status quo. As a handful of episodes in this hypothetical TV show, it’d be an amiable time-waster, but as a feature film, this doesn’t quite cut it. Though still amiable, on the big screen its time-waster status looms large.

Since tradition dictates sequels need plots, this one gets one. Gru, having retired from supervillainy at the end of the first film, is asked by the Anti-Villain League to put his skills to use spotting a supervillain in hiding. He turns them down at first. He has a comfortable life throwing his daughter’s birthday party and putting his Minions to work making a line of jams and jellies. But, plot intervenes, and one Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan, in a pinched, nasally voice) pairs Gru with Agent Lucy (Kristen Wiig) to go undercover in a snazzy geodesic-dome-shaped mall and find the person responsible for pilfering an entire Arctic research station in a giant flying electromagnet. (In true cartoon fashion, the ship is in the shape of, what else, a giant horseshoe magnet. I liked that.) So this time around Gru is a good guy who helps the good guys. Gone is the sweet-and-sour core that gave the first film its altogether unexpected, but most welcome, bite. Now it’s just a typical busy kiddie flick that’s broad and appealing without ever much breaking out of the box it has built for itself.

And that’s not a bad thing, necessarily. To sit and watch Despicable Me 2 is not an unpleasant experience. There are bright colors and funny noises and sometimes the 3D bops something towards your face. There’s bouncy cartoon-violence slapstick and plenty of silly moments throughout. Several subplots bounce around within the main throughline: a mysterious something is kidnapping Minions; Gru’s oldest daughter (Miranda Cosgrove) has a crush on a cute boy (Moises Arias) she met at the mall; Gru’s youngest (Elsie Fisher) is struggling with her lines for the Mother’s Day pageant (sadly the middle child (Dana Gaier) is left without a plot of her own); the flighty Lucy just might be a source of Gru love if he ever realizes it. On a simple plot level, a lot is happening here, and it converges into a climax that ties up all the plotlines in a pretty bow. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all mildly entertaining, sometimes kicking up past mild and into very. At one point, the Minions recreate a mid-90’s pop ballad and the scene had me in stitches, though I bet the little kids in the audience might’ve wondered why it was that funny.

Movies like this make me wish we still had a viable market for animated short films. Why force Gru, his girls, and his Minions to fill a feature length runtime with every outing? They’re hugely appealing and animated with bright, round, colorful visuals. Imagine a world in which Universal opts to create dozens of six or seven minute shorts with these characters. Wouldn’t a few minutes of inspired Minion madness be just the thing to show before, say, Furious 6? (Maybe Fox could jump on the bandwagon and put Scrat the prehistoric squirrel before X-Men or something.) Alas, that’s not what we’re considering here. Despicable Me 2 is a safe and competent kids’ movie that’s happy with its smallness and tameness (not to mention sameness). It’s a quintessential “good enough” sequel, satisfied to simply say, you liked this last time so here’s some more. It’s coasting on audience goodwill.

Brother's Keepers: OUR IDIOT BROTHER

Despite a title that sounds like a mean-spirited insult, Our Idiot Brother turns out to be one of the sweetest, kindest, warmest, and generous comedies of the year. It’s an R-rated movie that’s so big hearted it barely registers as raunchy, that loves its characters and wants to see them end up happy. It’s surprisingly fleet, nimbly shifting registers between straight-faced silliness and heartfelt emotion. By the time the film ended I was sad to see it go. Perhaps this summer’s mostly misfiring comedies wore me down, but this is exactly the kind of nice, refreshing, genuine entertainment I didn’t know I was yearning to see.

The film stars Paul Rudd as a man who has to be one of the nicest people on the planet. He has long hair, a casually messy wardrobe, and an easy smile. He treats everyone he meets in a similar way, speaking to them in a soft easygoing voice. He just loves life, aimless and simple as his is, but he keeps inadvertently making things difficult for those around him. He means well, but his complete refusal to go along with little white lies, his scrupulous honesty and his instinctual mellow kindness, unravels situations that are held together by nothing more than all the small untruths people tell themselves and each other. He’s lucky that his unconditional love for his family is (mostly) returned. Even when they are utterly exasperated, there’s real familiar warmth.

He bumbles through the lives of his sisters after he’s released from jail. Oh, he’s not a criminal of any terrible import. In the opening scene, he sells pot to a uniformed police officer just because the man seemed to be having a tough day. Upon his release, it’s this fact that causes his parole officer (Sterling Brown) to assume that he’s “retarded.” “I get that a lot,” Rudd says.

Since his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) dumped him and won’t even let him take Willie Nelson, their dog (major bummer), the newly free Rudd crashes at the house of his mom (Shirley Knight), but soon makes his way to each of his sisters’ New York houses in turn. There’s the high-strung sister (Emily Mortimer) with two kids and an inattentive husband (Steve Coogan), the ambitious professional journalist sister (Elizabeth Banks) with a casual relationship with her neighbor (Adam Scott), and the free-spirit lesbian sister (Zooey Deschanel) in a committed relationship with a lawyer (Rashida Jones). While there are differences between the siblings, and a fair number of conflicts, this is not simply a dysfunctional family. This may be a film that showed at Sundance, but it doesn’t betray the aggressive quirk for quirk’s sake, the ugly look-at-these-wacky-losers aftertaste that infects the worst of what is lumped into loosely defined “indie comedy” prejudices.

Director Jesse Peretz and writers Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall have crafted a rather loose and unhurried film that amiably ambles from enjoyable scene to enjoyable scene, funny in ways that provoke smiles more often than belly laughs. It’s remarkably unremarkable. The very lack of showiness – there’s no irritating insistence in its comedy – is its greatest virtue. This gives room for the characters to completely take over, dominating the central interest. The ensemble is uniformly excellent and their characters compelling. The relationships and conflicts between these characters are written in an ever so slightly over-the-top way that manages to stay relatable, if not entirely believable.

In this talented cast, Rudd stands out above them all. He’s such an appealing character. He may wear Crocs, lack ambitions, and be way too trusting, but he’s so very nice and, doggone it all, wouldn’t it be fun to hang out with him? It may be tiresome, it may be trying, but just like his sisters, I found that this is one social idiot just too lovable to dismiss. Likewise, the film is, in its own quiet way, utterly charming, sneakily effective and even a little bit moving.

Traverse City Film Festival Dispatch #3: THE TRIP

In 1981 versatile French director Louis Malle made My Dinner with Andre, a feature-length conversation between friends and colleagues Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn playing fictionalized versions of themselves. It's a favorite film of mine, an intelligent, dense discussion of art, philosophy, and the ways in which these topics can inform a life in the arts. It's also a delightfully engaging work that's a deceptively simple and endlessly complex work about friendship and the exchange of ideas.

I didn't expect to find that film's equivalent when I stepped into equally versatile director Michael Winterbottom's new comedy The Trip. And yet, here it is, a road trip comedy starring British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing fictionalized versions of themselves, traveling together on a restaurant tour of northern England. While sightseeing and eating, they talk and talk and talk and in the process reveal deep truths about their characters. It's a total lark on the surface and just underneath it's startlingly moving.

The reason for the trip is an assignment given to Coogan from a newspaper looking for a piece of celebrity travel-writing. He took it in order to go on a weeklong romantic vacation with his girlfriend but, at the last moment, she alighted to America to take a job and informed him that they should "take a break." After exhausting his other options, he finally breaks down and asks his colleague and sort-of friend Brydon.

So, they somewhat reluctantly set out on an epicurean jaunt through the countryside, stopping in little towns, staying in several quaint hotels, and eating in plenty of restaurants of varying degrees of fancy. The two of them fall into a pattern of banter, needling, and running jokes. This playful behavior ever so slightly masks their twinges of competitive jealousy towards one another.

These men are two extremely charming, fantastically funny gents and it's a pleasure to spend time with them. What slowly becomes apparent is the small underlying spite in the jocularity. Coogan is a success in Britain but is finding frustration in his attempts to make that celebrity worldwide. He yearns to take his career to the next level and when he looks at Brydon he sees all the more clearly his personal estrangements, his recently dashed romance, his ex-wife, his distant but loving son. He sees his acceptance of loneliness as a price to pay on the road that hopefully will lead him on to bigger and better things.

Brydon has never achieved quite the same level of prominence as Coogan, but he doesn't hold the same level of ambition for his career either. He's happily married with a little baby at home. On the road, he misses them. His goals in life lie not just for his career but are more for his personal life. He wants to love and be loved. Taken just a smidgen out of his familial comfort zone, he finds himself just a bit closer to Coogan. This trip is defined, in part, by their being alone together.

As they travel they use each new location as a backdrop for impromptu improvisational comedy and to talk about pop culture, their comedy craft, food, poetry, history, architecture, geology, music, film, geography, family, and eventually even themselves with glimpses of their own inner lives. The subjects are varied and unfailingly interesting. I could listen to them talk for hours, but what makes the movie really moving instead of merely charming is the way all this talk reveals the tensions and similarities between the men and creates a relatable push and pull between them.

Coogan and Brydon sometimes draw closer to new understandings of themselves and respect for each other. Then there are times that they pull further apart. What starts as a gag can turn suddenly serious. What starts earnestly can end in a laugh. The emotional trip is believably drawn, and though its nuance can lead to a feeling of almost painful emotion at times, there's always another impression, factoid, or laugh line to keep things going along splendidly. These two guys are often having a great time on this trip, and so am I. It's only when the laughter dies down, when they're alone again, that the truths revealed weigh on the mind. It’s a funny, moving trip that I would gladly take again.

Bad Cop, Bad Cop: THE OTHER GUYS

It has slowly become apparent to me that Adam McKay is one of the best directors currently working in studio comedies. That’s not to say he alone is responsible for all of the recent great comedies, far from it, but he’s far beyond the typical style of a studio comedy that does little more than set a camera in front of funny people and wait for the magic. McKay’s a skillful filmmaker. He is at his best when he has plenty of genre or period bric-a-brac to play around with like the cool 70’s vibe of Anchorman or the deep-fried NASCAR-crazy South of Talladega Nights. He pushes the styles and production design so heavily that by the time his dialogue grows increasingly off-the-wall with bizarre one-liners and the plot slips towards the surreal it feels like a natural outgrowth of the surroundings. (Maybe that’s why his last film, Step Brothers, didn’t work as well for me, as it contained the same level of weirdness rooted in a world more like our own).

With The Other Guys, McKay gets a chance to direct a buddy-cop action-comedy.  With the help of cinematographer Oliver Wood (who has worked on the Bourne films, Face/Off, and Die Hard 2 in his career), it contains enough good-looking slam-bang spectacle to rival a Bruckheimer production, but it deploys its set pieces with skill and energy that could only arise from comedy. The film opens with a literal explosion of action-packed hilarity with super-cops Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson careening through a car chase gun-battle that is both thrilling on an action level and hilarious in its (barely) exaggerated presentation. Collateral damage flips around the frames that catch shattering glass and bullet impacts in the same moments as the overheated machismo of its two cops. By the time the sequence reaches its fiery conclusion, the movie had me in its grasp.

Jackson and Johnson do a fine job inhabiting, and poking fun at, the types of overblown action heroes they typically play. They’re quickly cast aside, though, in favor of the movie’s real heroes, the cops who sit in offices far more than cop cars and fire up computers far more than weapons. Yes, police partners Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg never patrol much farther than the water cooler. Ferrell’s okay with that, preferring to remain in his comfort zone as a meek, nerdy police accountant and going home every night to his plain wife (Eva Mendes). Wahlberg, however, is boiling inside, ready to spread his wings and soar as the hero he knows he is. After accidentally shooting a famous person (a funny cameo), regaining his dignity may be harder than he thinks. Soon enough, the mismatched pair get sucked into a larger conspiracy involving all kinds of very real threats, which include, but are by no means limited too, a mysterious Australian thug (Ray Stevenson), a slimy lawyer and SEC employee (Andy Buckley), overzealous colleagues (Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr.), a creep of a Wall Street big-shot (Steve Coogan), and, of course, the police chief (Michael Keaton) who’s always saying that they’ve gone too far and then threatening to confiscate their weapons.

Under the direction of Adam McKay, from a script he co-wrote with Chris Henchy, The Other Guys has the specifics of a cop movie down perfectly. It’s full of fun supporting turns (between this and Toy Story 3, I hope we’re at the start of a Keaton comeback), funny little moments of detective work, and well-used action beats. But the film also manages to use the genre as a springboard for the kind of weird digressions that make McKay’s films so memorable. This film stays closer to what’s expected from a buddy-cop film, with the weirdest moments having nothing on the equivalent moments in, say, Anchorman’s news-team brawl or Talladega Night’s meal-time prayer. Here, the bizarre slips in through the flashbacks to Wahlberg’s shooting accident and Ferrell’s unpredictable part-time job from his college years, the phrase “I’m going to break your hip” spoken as a token of affection, a charming series of economic charts during the end credits, or a night of drunkenness portrayed through a frozen tableau of weird and (kind of) wonderful sight gags. It also fills up all the cracks in the dialogue with odd asides and goofy monologues, not to mention the way the action set pieces sometimes include dazzling moments of the ridiculous sailing in from left field.

Ferrell and Wahlberg make a great team as comedy, but a horrible team as cops. They manage to botch nearly every major moment of police work they take on, and yet because of the likability of the two leads, there’s always the hope that they’ll succeed one of these times. It’s strange to watch a movie where the two protagonists manage to mess up nearly everything they try. These two cops are always trying to figure out the central mystery, but can never quite get there. It’s almost like what might have happened if, say, Luis Buñuel helped direct The French Connection.

Nothing New Under the Sun: PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is the biggest hunk of indigestible, derivative fantasy-adaptation nonsense to hit the big screen since Eragon. That film played like a teenager got tired of having to watch both The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and decided to just mush them together. If you know anything about the creation of that aberration, then you know that that’s pretty much how it happened. Percy Jackson, on the other hand, is a blatant Harry Potter rip-off based on a book by Rick Riordan that’s slightly better than the movie would have you think. Instead of a young boy with special powers discovering a world of wizards and Hogwarts in Europe, here we have a boy with special powers discovering a world of Greek gods and Camp Half-Blood in America. I guess it makes a certain kind of twisted Hollywood sense that Chris Columbus, director of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, got hired to direct this movie.

If nothing else, the existence of this movie confirms my suspicions that the first two Potter films succeed in spite of, not because of, their director. Take away the great source material, good scripts, excellent art direction, wonderful cinematography, and fun visual effects and there’s not a whole lot for a movie to stand on. Such is the case of Percy Jackson, although, to be fair, Harry Potter doesn’t have a montage set to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” You win some, you lose some.

Everything about this film seems priced at a lower level and pitched at the undiscerning. Sure, it doesn’t have great source material, but that’s no reason for Craig Titley’s script to contain dialogue that calls into question whether or not he’s actually heard human beings interact. With plenty of howlingly clunky lines, it often undermines the fairly impressive cast. In fact, it’s the cast that starts the movie on a good note. As the opening credits started, I had to smile seeing likable actor after likable actor listed. Once the movie proper started my smile slowly faded.

Logan Lerman is cast as Percy Jackson, a teenager who is unaware that his deadbeat dad is none other than Poseidon, god of the sea. Now, Lerman’s a promising young actor. He held his own on the screen with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in James Mangold’s very enjoyable 3:10 to Yuma remake a few years ago. But here, he’s not given much to do other than pose heroically or act as an audience for characters who are delivering exposition. But, at 18, he’s the youngest teenager in the cast, so he looks the part, at least. His fellow teenagers are a different story. As his sidekicks, Brandon T. Jackson (25, memorably seen as one of the hilarious cast of Tropic Thunder) and Alexandra Daddario (23, in her first major role) are capable but out-of-place playing the Ron and Hermione roles, respectively. It doesn’t help that they have the same lame dialogue as everyone else.

The script also does no favors to the adult cast performing as various mythical creatures and mythological characters. Pierce Brosnan is a centaur and head of Camp Half-Blood and he never fails to look ridiculous wearing half a CGI horse. Catherine Keener, fresh off of playing Max’s mother in the transcendent Where the Wild Things Are, puts in her time in the thankless role of Percy’s mother, wearing for the entirety of her screen time a look of desperation that only sets in when an actor’s paycheck vastly outweighs their understanding of ridiculous material. It’s nice to see Uma Thurman as Medusa, but the inspiration stops there. It’s also nice to Joe Pantoliano in two brief scenes, as Percy’s stepfather. He might have the most thankless role of the film, even including Sean Bean’s Zeus whose lines could be counted on your fingers.

Explaining the characters and actors in that manner might have seemed a little dull and clunky, but it’s a perfect emulation of the way the movie works, shuffling a character on screen just long enough for them to impact the plot, but just quickly enough so that no one character can leave much of an impact on the audience. This is the kind of movie that can barely keep its own plot straight and is therefore constantly informing us about what’s going on. The movie’s so generous with the exposition that nearly every character gets to spout some. I’m a little surprised there isn’t someone talking over the end credits, still explaining while the audience is out the door.

The movie sparks to life on occasion, like in a briefly enjoyable Vegas escape, but those moments are all too brief. Most of the movie is consumed with a tedious video game style of plot development wherein the characters repeatedly move to a new location, find a trinket, and battle something. There’s terrible dialogue and endless exposition around every corner, or, even worse, overly obvious music cues. Hey, our three protagonists are on their way to the underworld to confront Hades or to find something or other. Start up “Highway to Hell.”

Funnily enough, once they do reach the underworld, the movie reaches its greatest portion of sustained inspiration. The effects and design are fairly striking, as are the performances from Steve Coogan and Rosario Dawson, as Hades and Persephone, who play their gods as glam-rock egoists while pronouncing every line with just the right amount of bemusement. This good will carries into a modestly likable airborne swordfight amidst the rooftops of New York that brings a much needed energy boost. But even this late save doesn’t stop the thoroughly mediocre nature of the movie. It’s clunky, episodic, and lame. It goes by fast enough with a nice enough cast, but pacing and casting can only carry a movie so far before the production needs to keep up its end of the bargain.

Percy Jackson isn’t exactly disappointing because it’s not very good. It’s mostly disappointing because it’s subpar in entirely uninteresting and unsurprising ways. The biggest surprise of the movie is that it’s actually not terrible, just frustratingly mediocre and fatally confused.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009)

The first Night at the Museum was a dull, sad experience as it was nothing less than a feature-length death of a great concept, killed by neglect. Sure, Ben Stiller stood amiably in the center of crazy CGI gewgaws as New York City’s Museum of Natural History came to life after nightfall, but it was repetitive, never clever, and just plain boring. It was a tacky mess of bad jokes and unearned sentiment, but it made a lot of money so here we are with Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. In this new picture, there are some nice visual moments and some genuinely funny moments, but it’s also louder, longer, and more nonsensical and unnecessary than last time.

This time around, Stiller follows most of the characters from the first movie (including a monkey, Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan) to the Smithsonian where they are being terrorized at night by a very mean ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Hank Azaria is very funny as the pharaoh. He steps through his scenes with a goofy, lisping accent and speaks through it with such oddball intensity, that I couldn’t help but be amused. Unfortunately, he’s the villain, and I just couldn’t take him seriously as a threat. At one point he takes one of our wax-figure heroes and threatens to bury the figure in sand if Stiller doesn’t do as he’s told. So off Stiller goes, worrying about this wax figure and all I could think was: he’s a wax figure! He won’t suffocate! This led me into a larger, more fundamental problem I was having with the movie. I didn’t understand why we were supposed to care about these statues and figurines. Just because they can move and talk doesn’t make them human. Why does Stiller care and why should I? This sort of thing can really work (see: the Toy Story films) but here is a sad, sorry case of botched anthropomorphism.

There’s a host of very funny people here, too, but they don’t have time to create anything really funny as they just dash about, shouting a line or two here and there. Amy Adams is her usual brand of charming as an Amelia Earhart statue that struts through the picture spitting out roughly 30s-style screwball-comedy lines. Christopher Guest and Bill Hader have some funny moments as Ivan the Terrible and General Custer, respectively. Jonah Hill, Mindy Kaling, and Ricky Gervais, as well as the Jonas brothers as singing cherubs, each get a brief scene to shine, but too much of the movie is given over to a totally bland Ben Stiller performance and uninspired plotting that sends characters everywhere and nowhere at the same time while seeming to change its fantasy rules whenever it suits the filmmakers. Early on, much is made of the Egyptian tablet that causes the museum to come to life, and yet (little spoiler) the Smithsonian creatures stay very much alive when Stiller flies off at the end with tablet in hand.

This thing is a mess, woefully inconsistent, chaotic, and overlong. I laughed a little, and found some of the visual tricks clever (there’s a neat moment involving a hall of artwork), but even for lightweight summer entertainment this is junky and ill conceived, an uncalled for expansion of a what was a poor property to begin with. At times, when I lost myself in laughter at Azaria's performance, I could almost forgive the movie. But every time I stopped laughing, I crashed back into reality, wondering when the movie would ever end. And yet, I still think the idea of all the things in a museum coming to life is a great concept, just not in the hands of the people who've been inflicting these upon us.