After Hours: OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY

Through how many tableaux of bad behavior have we suffered over the last several years? And I’m talking of only the party movie kind. The slow-mo drinking and dancing. The messy floors. The pounding dance music. The people making out or throwing up or swinging punches. The appliances hurled out windows. The drugs splayed out on tables, smoked up in clouds, or dusted over crowds. The bottles broken, syrup spilled, clothes flung, cars crashed, and animals wandering. We’ve seen this in basically every other R-rated comedy of the past decade or so. It no longer has much in the way of shock value, and is only a fun party by proxy if the mix of naughty to nice is exactly right. (Think more Sisters than Project X.) By now it’s a predictable and hyperbolic version of the lampshades on heads or pizzas on turntables of yesteryear. Now here’s Office Christmas Party, the latest excuse to stage the same wild party behavior.

Proficiently and competently directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck (of similarly sturdy slight comedies Blades of Glory and The Switch) the whole thing contrives a reason to get rowdy. Set almost exclusively on a couple floors in a Chicago skyscraper, where a tech company (an old-school kind, more Dell than Uber) has its annual Christmas party cancelled. The CEO (Jennifer Aniston) threatens cuts, but her brother (T.J. Miller), as head of this branch, goes behind her back to throw the biggest bash yet. It’s a last ditch effort to pitch an older businessman (Courtney B. Vance) on signing a new contract, the only thing that’ll keep layoffs out of the picture for the next quarter. This leaves decent middle managers (like Jason Bateman and Olivia Munn) scrambling to make sure the wild night saves everyone’s jobs. The stage is set for a commentary on good people trapped in a debased culture – between ruthless profiteering on the one hand, total anarchic largess on the other. But the movie mostly throws that overboard in hopes we’ll root for the corporation.

There are some funny ideas here: a huge company run like a family squabble, markets driven by a rapacious need for constant growth, employees listless and only motivated by fear of firings, society a mindless rabble willing to throw off bounds of decorum at the first opportunity. There’s something perceptive under the surface. Tip the whole thing five or ten degrees in perspective and tone and you’d have a vicious satire of modern America. Alas, it’s just another glossy spread of dumb sitcom excess and juvenile antics dressed up as cutting loose and living it up with no connection to any reality. Watch Miller’s rich dope spend money on a living nativity, huge Christmas trees, a DJ, endless booze, profane ice sculptures, and let the vibrantly devolving bacchanal begin. It’s like Wolf of Wall Street without the bite or wit. Instead we’re just supposed to find it amusing, as wish fulfillment or vicarious thrill. How sad if this is any fantasy earnestly harbored. Worse still the implications in letting quiet, dull, dutiful good-behaving office parties be the enemy. What’s wrong with a simple cheese plate and a non-alcoholic beverage between polite work acquaintances and assorted colleagues?

In some ways, it makes more sense as a disaster movie. Like The Towering Inferno it gathers a lot of characters in a tower and introduces them all with an emotional or professional loose end that’ll be tidily resolved in chaos to come. But that movie had the good decency not to ask us to be primarily invested in whether or not the company that built the structure would be able to make money off the madness. Office Christmas Party is smartly cast down to the smallest role with fun scene-stealers – Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park, Sam Richardson, Karan Soni, Jamie Chung, Abbey Lee, Andrew Leeds, Matt Walsh, and many more recognizable to anyone who has seen a comedy or two lately. They’re just given routine sitcom plots to enact through the party – a guy who tries to hire an escort to act like his fake girlfriend; a guy who doesn’t tell his boss he has a better job offer; a woman trying to avoid a co-worker after learning something embarrassing about him. They wring some pleasant entertainment, personalities and a brisk pace papering over the fundamental emptiness at its core: a bland celebration of a vulgar holiday spirit, with capitalism and commercialism for all.

Dead and Loathing It: DEADPOOL

At last there’s a movie for anyone who really wants a cheap R-rated X-Men entry. Deadpool, a comparatively low-budget and almost entirely disconnected spin-off of Fox’s superhero mutant team-up franchise, follows a sampler of the exploits of a smart aleck mercenary (Ryan Reynolds) who is cured of cancer and given regenerative powers like Wolverine’s. Ah, but the mad scientists who do it (led by the new Transporter Ed Skrein and Haywire’s Gina Carano) have vague and nefarious ulterior motives. This leaves the guy left for dead a scarred and burned mutant with a bad attitude. He’s out for revenge, putting on a tight red suit and mask and calling himself Deadpool, determined to kill everyone who wronged him. That doesn’t sound very heroic, and indeed he resists the label the entire way through a movie of nonstop profanity and violence interrupted only by its protagonist’s wall-to-wall interior monologue. He turns to the camera and speaks directly to the audience in a motormouthed outpouring of cynical snark, as if winkingly calling out its own shortcomings and relentlessly lampshading the usual superhero formula will inoculate it against criticism.

It’s faithful to the original comics creation, presenting an arrogant self-aware fourth-wall breaker engaging in huge amounts of potty-mouthed violence. He talks to us, dictates some edits, calls for needle drops, and even moves the camera at one point. Mostly he just comments on the events in progress with juvenile wisecracking, or spits out cultural references and self-deprecating comments. He tells us the budget was cheap, Reynolds is a bad actor, and nods towards the franchise’s knottiness. (He throws out an action figure from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and upon hearing a reference to Professor X he asks, “McAvoy or Stewart?”) The movie goes out of its way to smarmily flatter the audience for catching the references.

But for all the screenplay (by Zombieland’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) literally protests that this isn’t the usual superhero movie – taking potshots at the competition while admiring its own casual vigilante gore, filthy language, and mind-in-the-gutter exploitation – this is a movie undeniably built on the bones of a thoroughly exhausted and totally predictable origin story structure. It opens with a nasty fit of bloody action – crunching cars, flying decapitations, and viscera splattering on road signs – before flashing back to happier times that slowly catch us up. It fills in details of his pre-power days, introduces his comic relief buddy (T.J. Miller) and his lost love (Homeland’s Morena Baccarin), and the wrongs done to him. Then it’s back to the action, as X-Men Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), stepping in as if from a better, brighter movie, reluctantly join superpowered fights hammering toward a conclusion.

The edgier elements may be turned up to 11, but the more it loudly and repetitively claims to be something new and innovative, the less it seems true. The movie is terminally impressed with itself, convinced putting blood, boobs, and bad words in a standard superhero revenge actioner inherently makes it better. The script, and the chatterbox commentary from Deadpool, has the wit of a particularly unimaginative adolescent boy, preoccupied with bodily functions, focused on sexual and violent fantasies, and punctuated with four-letter words and bullying insults. Puerile and putrid, it finds sex acts, gory kills, and vulgarity equally giggle-worthy.

As a result, Deadpool is irritating, repetitive, and deadening. It’s a smug, smutty, and self-satisfied movie as ugly as it is off-putting. It drains all natural charisma from its performers, sending them through bland effects sequences dirtied up with extra splashes of strained irreverence and material trying so hard to offend it’s just sad. Give director Tim Miller (an effects’ artist making his feature debut) some (very small) credit for wanting to stretch the superhero movie a bit, but maybe we should stop complaining about the genre’s homogeneity if this is what passes for trying something different. The characters are thinly sketched. The look is flat, flavorless, and grey. The tone is a swamp of pointless nihilism laughing at itself. The plot is too thin for narrative propulsion, and too hobbled by its smirking protagonist for emotional investment. Everything’s a bad joke, and nothing is worth taking seriously, although the movie has enough bravado and posturing that it’s clear it convinced itself it’s a hip puncturing of the genre instead of a mean-spirited affirmation of its nastiest impulses.

And then there’s its repellent, often disgusting, love of violence. The movie revels in it, not the choreography or the spectacle but the visual fact of innards spurting from wounds, projectiles ripping flesh, and blades impaling organs. There’s an extended slapstick gag about Deadpool breaking his hands and legs and wobbling around in pain before he heals himself. It’s loud, overextended, pointless, and uncomfortable, but par for the course in a movie that treats a gunshot to the head as a punchline – not once, not twice, but every time. It’s no funnier than the tired improv insults and cheap shots that pass for humor in the rest of the movie. This all adds up to an interminable experience, none of the best parts of superhero movies and all of the worst, plus a whole bunch of added irritants.

A Boy and His Robot: BIG HERO 6

Turns out there’s some creative life left in the superhero movie. It just took Disney Animation to step away from the endless synergy, in-jokes, crossovers, and five-year plans to find it. Their team of computer animation artists took Big Hero 6, a Marvel comic so obscure their corporate cousins didn’t want to hold onto it for their massive Cinematic Universe, and focused on telling a contained story and doing it well. The result has everything you’d expect from a superhero movie: a tragic inciting incident, tight suits, high-tech gadgets, a supervillain with a connection to the heroes, and a finale involving a massive energy beam and billions of dollars in property damage. So it’s nothing new. But by keeping it simple and energetic, Disney has made the brightest and most colorful superhero movie in quite some time. It reminded me why I ever liked these kinds of stories in the first place.

Directors Don Hall (Winnie the Pooh) and Chris Williams (Bolt) create a vivid near-future mashup metropolis called San Fransokyo, filled with a variety of architectures and influences from its portmanteau component inspirations. Fans, like me, of imaginary cities should get a kick out of it, even more so in 3D. But that’s the set dressing whizzing by in the backgrounds. The filmmakers take their time building the characters, confident enough to be bustling with worldbuilding spectacle firmly in the background, as sci-fi concepts drive the plot without taking over.

We meet Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter), a 14-year-old robotics genius who graduated high school early and isn’t feeling up to college. Instead, he makes money gambling in illegal back alley robot fights. But his older brother (Daniel Henney) insists on introducing him to the high tech robotics lab on campus, tempting him with promise of resources and collaborators to help him achieve his fullest potential. It’s a strong brotherly bond we observe, which makes its quick severing all the more impactful. There’s a fire at a science fair and it claims the older boy’s life, leaving the younger depressed and lonely.

Hiro’s only companion is the prototype healthcare robot his brother built and left behind. The robot, named Baymax, is the film’s best creation. He’s built to be huggable. A large, inflated, soft plastic body makes him look something like a robo-Totoro. There’s a rubbery squeak to his every movement. He speaks (charmingly voiced by Scott Adsit) in loveably logical constructions and programmed intelligence that slowly accrues personality. When his battery is low, he sounds drunk. He’s a fantastic presence, bursting to life diagnosing Hiro. Observing the boy’s depression, the bot’s programming determines that cheering him up will be his mission, even if it means helping to track down the arsonist behind the fire. Hiro doesn’t waste any time building Baymax slick armor and programming him some kung fu knowledge.

As the boy and his robot build a relationship that helps bring the boy purpose in life, the film doesn’t have time to spend moping and brooding, launching quickly into the fun. It helps to have a bright palate filled with vibrant young characters. The older brother’s robotics classmates join Hiro and Baymax’s quest for justice, and are eager to form a makeshift superhero team to help do so. It’s a typical origin story, with mourning geniuses who have access to incredible high-tech gadgetry vowing to set things right. But the film gets a great deal of humor and excitement out of the characters’ repartee and diversity. There’s a goofy geek (T.J. Miller), a sunny egghead (Genesis Rodriguez), a serious gearhead (Jamie Chung), and a muscled nerd (Damon Wayons Jr.). Together with the cute robot and precocious teen, who help them turn their lab experiments into suits and weapons, they form a group that’s fun to be around, and the sense of camaraderie and individuality doesn’t disappear when the action starts.

That’s what ultimately sets Big Hero 6 apart from the competition. Even charming superhero teams like The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy get swallowed up by the spectacle. But these characters, by virtue of their animation, don’t disappear into CGI costumes and stunt doubles. Their movements and personalities are constant whether running from swarms of nanobots or sitting around a table. Their talents and gadgets are well developed for clever payoffs in clear, confident comic book framing turned fluid motion. Animation needs thought behind every motion, every gesture, every frame. They don’t waste time animating endless punching matches and collateral damage to be chopped to ribbons in an editing bay. Apparently the way to improve the culture-dominating live-action cartoons is to bring them closer to their roots.

Here rambunctious action is well timed and staged, used sparingly. There’s cleverness and coherence to the construction of these sequences, so the action doesn’t grow exhausting. It’s informed by character and, even better, manages to be exciting and energetic without imperiling thousands of innocent lives. It’s actually a buoyant superhero action movie about the value of life, and the futility of violence. You’d think movies ostensibly about characters who save people would figure that out a little more often. The more time we spend watching the interplay between the boy, his robot, and their new friends, enjoying the humor and feeling the sadness of their loss, the more impact the handful of action sequences have.

I cared about the relationships, as formulaic as they are. The voice work is appealing. The character designs are the usual rubbery realism of Disney CG animation. And their world is so colorful and full of energy. It’s a good reminder that formula storytelling gets to be that way because once upon a time the structures worked. In Big Hero 6, it works. On a plot level, there’s not a single surprise to be had, but I was swept up in its momentum and imagination. Running a trim 108 minutes, it’s the first superhero movie in a decade to leave me wanting more in a good way. What a difference having loveable characters, pleasing design, economical storytelling, coherent themes, and action that doesn’t outstay its welcome makes.

High-Flying Adventure: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2

Like all good fantasy sequels, Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes the world its predecessor built and expands upon it. The first film introduced us to the tiny island of Berk where a village of Vikings lived to fight off dragons preying on their flocks of sheep. It followed Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the shrimpy son of the leader (Gerard Butler), as he learned dragons aren’t so bad once you get to know them. By the end, he’d trained a fierce and adorable one he named Toothless as a pet and saved his village from destruction in the process. Now, as the sequel starts, the village lives in peace with the dragons, having realized they’re lovable, loyal, useful animals. There’s no conflict there, so the movie pushes forward, opening five years later on Hiccup and Toothless flying out over the ocean exploring new islands and finding new species. When they land on what is to them uncharted territory, he takes out his hand-drawn map and adds a new page, as fitting a symbol for the start of a new chapter as any.

Writer and director Dean DeBlois, who served as co-writer and co-director with Chris Sanders on the first film, takes the light boy’s adventure and enriches it by foregrounding the boy’s evolution into a man and bringing the cast of background characters more clearly into focus. While struggling with his status as heir, Hiccup, now taller, more toned, and with a touch of stubble on his chin, is drawn into conflict. First, he runs into dragon trappers, led by a hunky, ambiguously bad guy voiced by Game of Throne’s Kit Harington. They’re mercilessly poaching the majestic beasts. But that’s merely prelude to bigger trouble care of a distant warlord (a growling Djimon Hounsou) who threatens hostilities with his army of captive dragons. With a name like Drago Bludvist, pronounced “blood-fist,” he’s born to be bad. Riding out to help quell this new conflict are Hiccup’s father, as well as a likable ragtag band of villagers (America Ferrera, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig) who last time were background color, but this time come into focus as their own distinct characters with subplots and emotional throughlines. 

The first time around, the dragon training was a highlight, a boy-and-his-dog dynamic between a scrawny teen and a jet black, bat-winged, puppy-dog-eyed salamander. Never better than when in flight, the 3D animation dipped and spun with immediacy and vertiginous beauty. It was a thrill. This time, the thrill comes not just from that relationship and the dragon flying, which is as nicely and excitingly rendered as before, but also in the conflicts complicating this fantasy world. The threatened destruction is at a higher magnitude, the characters have more at stake, and the scale towers over them with subwoofer-rattling rumblings. New dragons include a skyscraper-sized alpha beastie that breathes icy breath leaving jagged icicles in its wake. The damage to dragons is also more personal. The introduction of a mysterious figure in the wild, a protector of dragons (Cate Blanchett) who unlocks further secrets of the species, finds time to highlight sliced wings and missing limbs, the result of near-misses with hunters. There’s an ecological weight to this film, a sorrow and responsibility.

The dragon protector has an important connection to Hiccup and much to teach him. The way the plot unfolds finds surprisingly rich emotions to tap into as their relationship is fully explained. The scene where this woman meets Hiccup’s father is astonishing in its tenderness and maturity. It could’ve gone in many big ways – tearful, scary, or regretful – but instead goes for a hushed whisper and a sweet folk song. The film is all about surprising with those kinds of scenes. An early moment between Hiccup and his love interest has a loose conversational quality as they flirtatiously tease each other. A late turn that deepens and darkens the relationship between boy and dragon is unsettling and a real shock, making the resolution all the more stirring. There’s seriousness to the storytelling here that respects both the fun of its colorful fantasy and the emotional lives of its characters.

It’s a movie about responsibility, aging, death, abandonment, and environmental destruction. You know, for kids! It’s bright, vibrant, has a soaring score and rousing action. But there’s a melancholy beneath that’s unexpected in its gravity. I appreciated how respectful of its audience the film is, unwilling to talk down to children and not feeling the need to stretch for adult attention. It’s simply a good story told well. And that’s more than enough to captivate. The animation is gorgeous, digital-painterly tableaus of fantasy landscapes and fluid character movement. The images within stir the imagination. A swarm of dragons flutters about like a flock of birds. Rising slowly and silently out of the clouds, a lone rider wearing a horned mask and carrying a rattling staff, sits atop a massive creature. A boy flies his dragon into the wild, and returns something closer to a man. It’s a terrific, exciting, involving adventure told with great feeling and a good eye.

Clickety-Clack: UNSTOPPABLE

Early in Unstoppable, two slacker train-yard workers (T.J. Miller and Ethan Suplee) fumblingly start a chain of events that leads to a large freight train carrying toxic chemicals going full speed and unmanned down the tracks. In the grand tradition of Speed and, well, Runaway Train, Unstoppable is an action film about a seemingly unstoppable force. The train blasts down the track, its constant chugging animating the soundtrack as a constant source of tension. It literally howls an animalistic roar as it blasts forward. The danger is omnipresent. This train is clearly on a collision course and when it crashes, it will be messy.

It’s directed by Tony Scott and so is, perhaps inevitably, filled with the kinds of stylistic ticks that he has accrued over the last several years. The camera jitters around while the editing cuts away mid-pan. There are tense little zooms that come out of nowhere. Color filters are intermittently applied. Shots slip out of focus, or start blurry just to be pulled sharply into extreme clarity. Quick frames of double-exposure or pops of white light show up intermittently. You’d think I’d consistently dislike all this busyness, but sometimes Scott puts it to good use. (I particularly enjoyed its deployment in such confidently preposterous actioners as 2005’s Domino and 2006’s Déjà vu). In Unstoppable, the train careening nonstop throughout provides enough of a steady stream of tension that his style here ends up distracting much less than it should.

Speaking of distracting less than it should, the ham-fisted screenplay by Mark Bomback is never afraid to spell out messages in capital letters. Corporations don’t care about people! Rosario Dawson spends the movie in a train control center, sweating out the crisis with safety expert Kevin Corrigan who (irony!) just happens to be visiting this day. She gets on the phone with higher ups (like Kevin Dunn) that are only worried about the bottom line. Repeat. Veteran train engineer Denzel Washington and rookie Chris Pine might have a good idea about how to stop the train. Higher ups don’t listen. Repeat! It’s a good thing the cast has such great charisma and unexpected chemistry. They make their often corny dialogue sound, well, not exactly natural, but somehow simply right.

When the plot ventures outside of the propulsive thrills of that crazy train, the movie is generally out of its comfort zone. Where the movie succeeds the most, though, is in its matter-of-fact moments, portrayals of people at work. It’s something approaching fascinating when the movie takes, even for just a few seconds, a look at the process of how trains work, to simply pay attention to how Dawson, Washington, and Pine are just doing their jobs on a day that happens to feature some particularly harrowing life-and-death decisions.

Where it’s most disappointing is in the cursory family subplots given to Washington and Pine. They’re our main protagonists, but Scott could have easily cut Washington’s two college-aged daughters waitressing at Hooters, especially the uncomfortable scene that cuts from his paternal concern to a close-up of their tight orange shorts. Also easily removed is a vaguely defined subplot about Pine’s estranged family life. Sure, it’s nice to know more about the characters, but not if the information will be dumped into the film indiscriminately. These scenes are just dead weight.

But this is a movie that’s always moving forward. There is always something happening. It may not be something that will be explained, but it will be something exciting, or, failing that, just something loud and frantic. Though it comes with plenty of potential for nitpicking, I must say that this is a fun movie. It’s a kinetic explosion of thrills that barrels along without a second thought given to nuance or meaning. This is cinema that is little more than pleasingly stupid and exciting.

Not a Big Splash: SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE

She’s Out of My League is a thoroughly ordinary romantic comedy. It appears to be slanted more towards a male audience than is usually expected from this type of bland outing, but aside from that it offers up very few surprises. It’s comfortably helmed by Jim Field Smith in an unmemorable way. It has pounding pop songs, slick photography, and a photogenic cast. It even has a few jokes, or at least some mildly amusing moments where other, better comedies put their jokes.

Longtime second-banana Jay Baruchel, from Knocked Up and Tropic Thunder to name a few, becomes the lead-banana in a movie of his very own. He stars as the kind of guy whose old girlfriend (Lindsay Sloane) still gets invitations from his parents to join them for dinner or to go on family trips. She can even bring her new boyfriend along. Don’t we all know someone like that?

Anyways, this guy works at an airport doing his part to keep America safe by inspecting each passenger that moves through his security station. One passenger he doesn’t mind inspecting is a woman (Alice Eve) so attractive that we get a slow motion montage of drooling, wide-eyed men as she moves on her way to catch her flight. She loses her cell phone. He finds it, but she’s already airborne. They decide to meet (meet cute) when she gets back in town so he can return it to her.

So, they start dating, right? But all this guy’s friends (T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel, and Nate Torrence) say things like “Hey, dude! She’s hot! You’re a 5! She’s a 10! This can’t work out!” or variations thereof for, like, the next 40 minutes. Then, well, you’ve probably seen a few romantic comedies before, so you can probably guess what happens. You know, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, etcetera.

This is an acceptably standard rom-com and when so many in the genre can’t even pull that off, it’s some small accomplishment. Then again, “Not Painful!” is not exactly something that can be slapped on an ad in the paper. There’s some nice chemistry between the cast, even though the gaggle of babbling dudes plays like hand-me-down Apatow and the Perfect 10 remains too distant and idealized, so much so that a chance for emotional connection to these people is allowed to escape. It also doesn’t help that the movie plays like a gentle PG-13 forced into an uncomfortably fitting R, which also does nothing to stem the undercurrent of cruelty in the presentation of the protagonist’s family and ex-girlfriend, who are played as rude and ridiculously over-the-top idiots at a level that seems out of context with the rest of the movie.

The movie never becomes a dull dance of numerology, but it never quite becomes a satisfying romantic comedy, either. I didn’t have a bad time watching it. I smiled from time to time, I even managed a few chuckles, but as I left the theater the movie threatened to leave my mind. I kept it in my thoughts long enough to type out this written equivalent of a shrug, but I’ll let it go now. One day, a few years from now, I’ll be channel surfing and spot it and think: what’s this? That’s right, I think I saw that.