Fresh Prince: COMING 2 AMERICA

In 1988, Prince Akeem of the small fictional African nation of Zamunda came to America, hoping to find a wife. It resulted in an amusing-enough culture-clash comedy that benefited from a star turn from Eddie Murphy at the early height of his powers, and the big budget Hollywood gloss that makes any even halfway decent comedy from the days of shooting on film look just a little bit better than the digital non-style style that passes for big screen comedy these days. Now it’s the latest 30-year-old comedy to get a belated sequel in Coming 2 America. Although this time it’s shot bright and flat like a sitcom, returning screenwriters Barry W. Blaustein and David Sheffield (with an assist from Black-ish’s Kenya Barris) have retained the original charms while dialing back some of the raunch and retrograde gender politics. Director Craig Brewer (not for nothing a better director than the original’s John Landis) finds a mellower key for a surprisingly sweet goof that flips the dynamics in clever ways.

It finds Akeem is now King of Zamunda, but without a male heir. In this male-dominated monarchy, that might cause some trouble about lines of succession, even though his hyper-competent and confident daughters are clearly some fine royal specimens capable of leading. For one thing, they’re all excellent fighters — his oldest is even The Old Guard’s KiKi Layne, so you know she can take care of herself. Still, the King’s hopes for a son are answered by the revelation that he fathered a son off-screen during the last movie. Surprise! (His best friend (Arsenio Hall) vaguely remembers the details.) So the movie’s about a thirty-year-old from Queens (Jermaine Fowler), with mom (Leslie Jones) and uncle (Tracy Morgan) in tow, turning up in the palace somewhat ready to claim his place in the royal family. (Some Princess Diaries crash courses might apply.) Though it threatens to become a loud romp, the movie is more interested in a mellow, low-key vibe, letting family dramas just sentimental enough ring out in a comic key surrounded by some good gags, and even a few musical numbers.

The cast keeps it as pleasant as the design of Zamunda — in retrospect a Wakanda spoof avant la lettre — is pleasing to the eye. They’re decked out in Ruth E. Carter’s finest patterns and styles, a little Black Panther here, tribal patterns, flowing fabrics, and elaborate jewelry there. That these comic performers carry out their silly little bits of business and amusing patter in this stunning wardrobe adds to the charms. Above all, it’s nice to see Murphy back in a comedy that plays to his strengths. It’s a perfect blend of the wilder energy of his early roles and the gentler family fare he aged into. There’s some impish sparkle in his eyes (especially in his under-makeup multiple roles reprising the barbershop jokesters from the first film), and a comfortable fatherly cuddliness to his paternal interests in the plot. And it’s poignant to see his dawning awareness of a need to push back on the patriarchy that forces him to ignore his wonderful daughters in favor of a son he barely knows. Yet best of all, perhaps, is his willingness to cede some of the spotlight to Fowler’s Prince Lavelle Junson of Queens, an appealing performance that’s in a slightly different register from Akeem. He plays the culture clash here, bringing a New York swagger to the formality of the palace. He gets a more earnest rom-com plot as he’s torn between a stunning princess (Teyana Taylor) from neighboring country Nexdoria (maybe too lightly treated for being run by a peacocking warlord (a game, energetically goofy Wesley Snipes) and his child soldiers), a match that might make good political sense, and a more relatable court stylist (Nomzamo Mbatha), who might be better for him personally. It's serious, but cute.

The whole picture is uneven, with some jokes flat and a few conceits a tad under-cooked, but the project has enough charms that I found it hard to resist. Brewer keeps the tone on track, with the simple sitcom staging inviting enough emotional investment without stamping out laughs, which in turn keep the more serious geopolitical allusions at bay. This is a character piece, not a world building endeavor or cultural argument beyond the softly insistent gender balancing. The ensemble is on the same chill wavelength, resisting overt farce for something more relaxed, an amusing and amiable consideration of generational conflict wrapped up in semi-serious stakes for this never-quite-believable kingdom. It honors the original in its throwback appeal—a reminder of a time when a movie could be a couple good star turns, some funny supporting roles, and a simple high concept executed well enough.

Home of the Free; Land of the Dead: CHI-RAQ

Chi-Raq is a movie only Spike Lee could make. It’s one of his trademark State of the Union pictures overstuffed with thematic intentions because he’s squeezing in provocative reactions to every current event since the last time he made a movie this long, loose, sprawling, sharp, and engaged. (The last was 2004’s She Hate Me, a bursting-at-the-seams Bush-era message about soulless capitalists and bad business ideas.) This new movie is hugely ambitious, telling its story in big hit-and-miss swings, rich with allegorical force, ablaze with righteous fury. It opens, after a rap overture, with a map of America, the states filled in with red, white, and blue guns. A siren goes off. A black screen fills with blood red letters repeating the urgent warning booming through the speakers. “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.” Timely and essential, this complicated and uneven film is a frustrated dispatch from deep within a damaged nation. Chi-Raq is a pained lament and a riotous satire, a hip-hop musical and soapbox sermon, alive with activist fervor over gun violence, mass incarceration, poverty, police brutality, Confederate nostalgia, institutional discrimination, and gangs.

The messages are forceful; the filmmaking is vibrant, as alive as Lee has ever been with excitement and passion, synthesizing all sorts of ideas into one mesmerizing jumble. One need only glance at the film’s DNA to realize how wide-ranging and eclectic it is. Taking his title from a slang term for Chicago – its origins the statistic that the last 15 years have seen more murders in Chicago than American casualties in Iraq – Lee, viewing the city though an outsider’s eyes, finds inspiration for his story in the nearly 2,500-year-old Greek comedy Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ account of the title woman’s effort to end the Peloponnesian War with a sex strike. The concept transplanted to 2015 on the South side of the Windy City, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson wearing colorful suits and oozing fourth-wall busting charm, finds a gang leader, Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), left without the physical act of love. His girlfriend (Teyonah Parris), fed up with drive-by shootings and stray bullets terrorizing their neighborhoods, decides there’ll be no more sex until the shooting stops. She organizes every woman in town, including the rival gang’s girls and the local sex workers, to deny their men intimacy until peace reigns.

This broad satire grows wacky – the women invade a local armory and refuse to leave, much to the dismay of the local police who don’t what to do with an army of chastity belt-wearing protestors – while the serious underpinnings remain potent. The epidemic of gun violence in America fuels devastating scenes with a mother (Jennifer Hudson) weeping over her slain child, a wise older woman (Angela Bassett) organizing more conventional protests, and a kind priest (John Cusack) who delivers a fiery Chayefsky-esque sermon against gun culture (calling out the NRA for aiding and abetting murder, legislators their co-conspirators). Lee puts the serious and the silly right next to each other. One sequence finds a goofy, cringe-worthy scene of a black woman seducing a racist old official in order to tear the Confederate flag off the wall of his office: an uncomfortable moment turned triumphant, and a perfect example of the flailing that happens when the tone flops around.

But Lee isn’t doing anything small here. Matthew Libatique shoots in popping primary colors and the editors cut it together with a jazzy meandering pace. Lee, with Kevin Willmott (a filmmaker and professor at the University of Kansas), has written it in rhymed verse, a half rap/half Shakespeare vernacular that’s as artificial as it is dense and beautiful. One part Do the Right Thing neighborhood portraiture, two parts scathing Bamboozled social commentary, and three parts theatrical flourishes of cinematic style, Chi-Raq may have bitten off more than it can chew, but there’s always something interesting and entertaining going on. We linger in moments of pain – Bassett confronting a shady insurance salesman, a somber funeral, and earnest monologues about society’s ills – then bounce to moments of light comedy – like Wesley Snipes as a one-eyed gang leader named Cyclops, a group of pathetic men impotently counter-protesting, and Dave Chappelle as a strip club proprietor lamenting his slow business on account of striking strippers. It is confrontational enough to seem like too much, so many real traumas and eccentric laughs bumping into each other, but is sufficiently committed to its wild mishmash to mostly work nonetheless.

Lee is making a picture of the national mood, painting in bold strokes invigorated by a frayed political climate’s roiling disagreements, mentioning recent murdered young black people, killer cops, and mass shooters by name. (Just imagine the annotations a fresh viewer will need a few decades hence.) It’s overflowing with timely discussions and ideas, even when some of the flailing comedy lands flat (mostly because the sexual politics aren’t as sharp) and the plot takes unfruitful detours and tonal loops. The movie’s unafraid to be goofy, like when Chicago’s slimy (fictional) mayor excuses his racism by saying, “my wife’s biracial,” or a dance number breaks out when police try to break the strike with smooth ballads. Later, though, there’s a moving breakdown in a fantastical scene when a gangbanger is confronted with families of those destroyed by crossfire. The comedy and the tragedy are equally heavy-handed, not always landing, but packing a tremendous wallop when they do. It’s the rare angry political film that’s hardly cathartic. It knows America is too stuck in intractable problems to do anything but laugh and cry while we agitate for a better future. The film’s messy, but too vital and urgent to ignore.

Exhaustible: THE EXPENDABLES 3

A reunion of box office has-beens, the first two Expendables movies worked on some dumb level through nothing more than the novelty of seeing Sylvester Stallone and fellow veteran action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme stomping through scenarios reminiscent of their greatest hits. But by the time we arrive at The Expendables 3, the novelty has worn off. There should be something poignant about the idea of an aging team of mercenaries confronting their mortality and finding new ways to push old bodies through a young-man’s sport. Instead, it’s a mechanical and joyless contraption that grinds out what they think we want to see them doing. So here’s Stallone, squinting through displays of physicality no 68-year-old could ever pull off. To his credit, he sometimes does pull it off. But by the time he’s outrunning a collapsing building and leaping towards a waiting helicopter, it’s clear this is mere wish fulfillment.

The story in this outing is stupidly simple. After a failed mission, Stallone retires his team of old buddies (Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews). He contacts a black market talent scout (Kelsey Grammer) to find a younger team to help set things right for his C.I.A. contact (Harrison Ford). The mission fails again. This time, the villain (Mel Gibson) captures the muscled twentysomethings (Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz, Glen Powell). Now it’s up to the old team to save the new team. Built around three action sequences – a train rescue that segues into a firefight with Somali pirates, an infiltration of a skyscraper, and a siege of an abandoned warehouse or something – the script, by Stallone and Olympus Has Fallen writers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, continually maneuvers the cast into place, half-heartedly giving them lame wisecracks and rote motivations until the shooting can start again.

It’s overburdened with too many characters. I didn’t even mention Antonio Banderas as an endearingly talkative out-of-work mercenary desperate to get back in the fight and a brief appearance of Jet Li, who gets a surprisingly tender moment with Schwarzenegger, or as tender a moment as a meat-grinder macho movie can supply. With all these people standing around, the action scenes don’t have time for complicated choreography or suspenseful crosscutting. You can almost see contract negotiations and scheduling difficulties on screen with sequences seemingly slapped together with whatever shots were most convenient to everyone’s calendars. I doubt the whole Expendables team ever shared a single frame together. A character is left dangling in an elevator shaft for nearly the entire final melee. Every time we cut back to him straining for the next ledge, I thought, “Oh, yeah. He’s here, too.”

The hectic but flatlining action is mind-numbingly violent, but bloodless since it’s PG-13 this time. Thousands, maybe millions, of rounds of ammunition are expended in the course of this movie, leaving hundreds of unidentified, usually ethnic-coded, figures blown apart. It’s tiresome, repetitive, a little offensive, and cartoonish in its lack of weight or resonance. “How hard is it to kill 10 men?” Gibson yells at his flunkies after an entire third-world army fails to even injure an Expendable. It just goes on and on, gunfire, helicopters, and punches shot in a flat, unremarkable chaotic style. There’s no variety here. They couldn’t even throw in a car chase or a plane crash to mix things up a bit?

I like some of the personalities involved. The new recruits don’t make much of an impression, aside from Ronda Rousey, the first female Expendable. She’s also the only woman to appear in more than one shot in this testosterone overdose. It’s the caramelized veterans who are of some interest, bringing to their roles their histories as screen presences and public figures. When Ford says to Stallone, “good to finally meet you,” there’s a microscopic twinge of action movies past as Indiana Jones shakes Rambo’s hand. It’s the little things, like Snipes (Stallone’s Demolition Man foe) having his character joke he’s been in prison for “tax evasion.” Ha. Ha. Worse is Gibson’s winking at his checkered recent history, snapping that the heroes would be scared if they saw him angry. That’s a tad too close for comfort. At least the script gives him one good goofy villainous threat: “I’ll cut your meat shirt open and show you your heart!” That’s the kind of line B-movies are made of!

Alas, this movie’s too flavorless for those pleasures to save. It’s a largely anonymous work coasting off the personalities on screen while director Patrick Hughes does what he can with the material he’s been given. Not much can be done. This series has exhausted what little inspiration it once had, having never quite lived up to its fullest potential. There’s something almost sweet about a movie full of AARP action figures passing the torch to Jason Statham and now on to even younger potential action stars. But it’s buried under the grinding routine of so much mindless carnage and nothing story. I just didn’t care. It thinks it’s funny, exciting, and maybe even a little melancholy, what with it’s closing Neil Young sing-a-long and all. But it’s mostly sad and tired.