Trip Despise-Her: SNATCHED

Snatched is one of those disappointing high-concept, mid-budget, star-driven Hollywood pictures that seems to come around every so often. It has the right cast, a fun premise, and a few funny moments, but otherwise just sits there on screen collecting dust. The basic fish-out-of-water adventure comedy plotting finds a dopey daughter (Amy Schumer) and dotty mother (the great Goldie Hawn in her first role in fifteen years—sadly she should’ve waited longer) on a South American vacation. They inevitably get kidnapped and must cease their squabbling long enough to survive and maybe, just maybe, learn a little about themselves along the way. On this sturdy, predictable structure director Jonathan Levine (The Night Before) and screenwriter Kate Dippold (The Heat) pile flat, simple, one-note scenes. This is a movie that only can hold one idea, and often only one person, in a frame, plodding simply without escalation from plot point to plot point, allowing its performers just enough personality to fill out just barely more than a trailer’s worth of entertainment.

 

Cut together with journeyman boredom in every choice – a tourism brochure montage of establishing shots, a slow-mo dance sequence or two, vistas of B-roll you’d find on a hotel lobby TV – the whole endeavor could only succeed with diminished expectations. It’s too thin and grindingly workmanlike in its impersonal bare-bones competence, flatly staged and unimaginatively developed. Comedy and action work best with surprise: an unexpected swerve, a shock reveal, an eccentric resolution. Here we get a smattering of these moments. In an opening scene, Schumer’s boyfriend (Randall Park) says he’s breaking up with her and she responds, “When?” Later a grizzled jungle guide (Christopher Meloni) is asked if a piece of fruit is okay. “Yeah, sure,” he replies, then takes a beat and adds, “Oh! You mean to eat? Probably not.” Funny. So too are Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack as vacationing gal pals intensely interested in looking out for their fellow foreign ladies because you simply never can trust a foreign vacation. (There’s unexamined Ugly Americanism here, natch.) But we’re talking silly little grace notes on the edges of a leaden comedy, flat-footed and tone-deaf, in which two American women get kidnapped and flail around Latin American stereotypes for 80 minutes. 

Why take Hawn, capable of effervescently charming performances, and make her a dowdy scold? Why take Schumer who, at her best, can lampoon awkward social issues in casually biting satire, and make her a routine R-rated comedy-style stunted adult-child? They’re allowed to play against type to fit the dragging constraints of a hectic and unfunny action plot that’s so narrative heavy it rarely pauses to let its leads breathe. Their best moments allow the two of them space for banter that feels like a real testy mother-daughter relationship, one with some history and tension that could flower with room to grow. Instead they’re shoved into tumbles down muddy jungle roads and made to slog through tone-deaf humor. When they arrive at a distant village, it’s a cue for smug eye-rolling and flailing gross-out humor at the expense of the native’s customs and well-meaning doctors, culminating in a sequence involving a tapeworm that’s just flat out nasty. The movie just doesn’t have a point of view, has no idea how to maximize the inherent charms of its cast or activate any sense of tension or suspense in its premise. The emptiness just makes it seem limp and sad, so much running around and yelling and frantic flailing for naught.

Spaced: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

A moderate blast of novelty was what Guardians of the Galaxy brought to the Marvel formula with a soundtrack of needle drops and a tone as breezily goofy as the characters it introduced (a cornball lead, a stoic green lady, a hyper-literal lug, a talking racoon, and an ambulatory tree man). This allowed the movie to build considerable affection, despite succumbing to all the worst tendencies of hectic, anonymous destruction in its protracted climax. So it was surely too much to hope Vol. 2 could have the same sense of unexpected. (The only thing that beats the sudden blast of “Come and Get Your Love” in that film’s opening is probably the trailer’s memorable use of “Hooked on a Feeling,” fitting for a multi-tentacled franchise whose films are always also advertisements for itself.) But what Guardians Vol. 2 has going for it is being the rare Marvel Cinematic Universe production that mostly consists of what works best about these pictures. Going light on overlong CGI slugfests and interlocking self-importance, this one is all about the likable characters, eccentric performances, pseudo-psychedelic visual atmosphere, off-kilter semi-Shakespearian sci-fantasy pulp family drama, earnest sentiment, a dusting of sarcasm, comic book splash pages and punchlines, topped off with screwball fizz.

In fact, for those of us who prefer these behemoths at their lightest, most frivolous and goofy, this one starts with payoffs and just keeps returning on that investment. Sure, it gets dragged down at its most static with long sequences of characters marveling at each other’s squabbles and petty exposition – worst is a living planet who walks us through tableaus of his life that are hollow visualizations where an evocative monologue would do. But when it works it works, a buzzy blast, a popcorn entertainment happy to be a good hang. Who cares if Chris Pratt (Star-lord) isn’t much of a dramatic performer and Zoe Saldana (Gamora) has the thankless task of scowling and posing while slathered in dull green makeup? The rest of the ensemble is crackling, from the good-natured single-minded Drax (Dave Bautista) to the chattering racoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) to a dancing sapling (cooing voice-modulated Vin Diesel) to the bit parts made into meals by the appealing likes of Michael Rooker and Elizabeth Debicki. Best is Kurt Russell playing pure swaggering charm as what we soon learn is a literal manifestation of ego run amok. They’re all having fun goofing around in special effects, knowing they can go big and silly without upstaging the multicolored save-the-universe lightshow splattering around and behind them. 

There’s hardly anything to it, but writer-director James Gunn stages it with some visual panache, more confidently maneuvering the Marvel house style into interesting curlicues of delight and surprise. There’s an opening action sequence set almost entirely in the background of a shot focused on an oblivious adorable little guy dancing to ELO. (Predictably, but still successfully, the movie is set to greatest hits from any AM oldies station.) There’s a whistle powered arrow zipping around a ship, its trailing red laser beam allowing us to see its progress Family Circus style in the back of slow-mo frames and, later, through a massive, askew bank of security monitors. The whole movie is nothing but goofball details – a race of golden humanoids who pilot a hive of drone attack ships from a command center that looks like the palace of Versailles had an 80’s arcade; an antennae-wiggling empathic bug lady (Pom Klementieff) who tries her best but smiles in an unhinged grimace; a god whose self-justification for abandoning his family hinges on a close reading of the lyrics to “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” 

It adds up to a good time at the movies, with lower lows that a great many of its franchise compatriots. (Its highs are also lower, but what are you going to do about it?) There’s still not much of a story going on here, and for all its zipping around and moments of dramatic import the impact is gentle and borderline forgettable. But the fizz and fun are good in the moment. Perhaps that’s the MCU’s biggest success. Barely any of these feel quite enough because they’re perfectly calibrated to leave you happy but wanting more.

Fast Past: THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS

No matter how ridiculous or improbable the Fast and Furious series became on its journey from humble street-racing Point Break riff to international heist pictures to blockbuster secret agent spectacles (what an evolution!), it always retained its emotional core. Until now. Even at peak jump-the-shark, when Seven had characters not only jump a sports car between the upper levels of two gigantic skyscrapers, but also survive multiple head-on collisions and a rollover accident down the side of a rocky cliff, it could still manage an emotional sendoff to the late Paul Walker. (Play the opening notes of “See You Again” and even the stoniest of gearhead hearts might melt a smidge.) They may have become unbelievable vehicular superheroes, but they still really cared about each other and even their most outlandish feats made sense in the context of the lengths they’d go to show that love. Alas, the eight installment in the seemingly unstoppable franchise, The Fate of the Furious, ditches its core consistency of character relationships for a misguided attempt to mix it up. It’s almost fun – starting with a silly street race prologue and some dark notes of discord – but then bungles the execution.

This time out Dom (Vin Diesel), the patriarch of the makeshift family, betrays them and joins forces with Cypher (the great Charlize Theron, a welcome if underutilized addition), a hacker bent on sending our team chasing her fetch quests. She wants the world to fear her, so she needs weapons of mass destruction. Makes sense. But the leverage she has over Dom to force him to help her, kept fruitlessly secret for the bulk of the runtime, only goes so far. Sure, it’s a tortured melodramatic twist, but the movie doesn’t milk suspense out of the betrayal. His friends pulled into the conflict (Ludacris, The Rock, Tyrese, Michelle Rodriguez, and Nathalie Emmanuel), chasing him down New York City streets and across frozen lakes, register only mild disappointment in his switch, and shrug when the truth of his double-double-cross is revealed. They’re too busy outrunning a nuclear submarine or avoiding fleets of technologically hijacked self-driving cars. Those are cool, goofy, over-the-top sequences full of revving engines, spinning wheels, and crashes both real and digital. But when director F. Gary Gray (who usually has decent thriller instincts; see The Negotiator or the chases in his Italian Job) simply cuts between careening car coverage and close ups of the people behind the wheels without thinking about what they’re thinking, it’s hard to care. The film has Idiot Plot in the extreme, keeping characters (and often us) outside important information while exhibiting no curiosity about how anyone would react in these topsy-turvy scenarios.

Screenwriter Chris Morgan has created a world in which every villain, no matter how horrible their actions, eventually becomes their friend. It made sense when undercover cop Walker fell in love with their ethos and fell in with their grey-area car culture back in the first movie. And it even (sort of) made sense that lawman The Rock would, despite chasing after them, begrudgingly call on their help in Part 6. Here we have Jason Statham, who has previously murdered one of their best friends and blew up Dom’s house, freed from prison by mysterious government suits (Kurt Russell and Scott Eastwood) to join the team. How do the characters feel about this? Other than a few joshing quips thrown his way and a one-scene threat of Rock-sized retribution, it fades away as he becomes just another familiar face behind the wheel. In this context, no wonder Dom can willy-nilly switch sides and its nothing more than a MacGuffin for the plot engine strung between the action. it hardly matters what anyone does because everyone can survive and anyone can be redeemed. 

Now the stakes can be nuclear war and the movie, aptly dropping the fast from the title, feels turgid and vacant and slow and, worst of all, just plain boring. This has been a series so good at retooling, I hope they can find a better route next time. They had such a good escalation going for six films, building on what works and pivoting before it got stale. But now it’s stuck in a futile need to top themselves with each outing, going bigger, dumber, louder, longer. The strain is showing. This one has apocalyptic stakes and yet nothing to care about. Characters and cars careen through cartoonish outlandish destruction without breaking a sweat, or an emotional beat that lands anything but false. To the extent it's watchable, it is because it's drifting off affection for its own past.