Family Plot: STORIES WE TELL

Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell is not a documentary about her mother’s life story. It is a documentary about the stories about her mother’s life. That’s a key distinction. Rather than becoming a simple biographical exploration, Polley puts family members and family friends in front of her camera to tell their recollections and impressions of her mother, actress and casting director Diane Polley, who died of cancer in 1990. This is a movie about how a family reconstructs the memory of a lost loved one and how a family defines itself by the stories they tell about themselves. It’s achingly personal and inherently sloppily complex, but, recognizing that personal detail is just that, personal, Sarah Polley has created a film about itself as well. She reconstructs the facts, as best she can, but also engages both implicitly and explicitly with the question of who can ever really know the truth. Each person involved in the film has the truth they know, with which they’re, if not comfortable, than at least used to. In making the film, Polley, as generous as she is in allowing for each interview to speak and be heard, has inevitably put just one more interpretation into the world.

Though all people, one assumes, are carrying some number of secrets, it is soon apparent that Diane had perhaps a few that are bigger than most. We start with her husband, the person who presumably knew her best. As the film begins, Polley invites that man, Michael, the man who raised her, into a recording studio. She places a thick stack of pages filled with writing in front of him. He begins to recite what we quickly come to understand is his story of his relationship with Diane. He becomes our narrator, linking the varied memories revealed by Polley’s brothers and sisters, aunts and family friends. We learn about Diane through their eyes, but it begins to take on the feeling of literary analysis. To hear them talk about her is to hear discussions similar to what one might hear in an undergraduate course discussing a novel’s main character. Repeated motifs of her life are picked apart for their implications. Actions become rich with ambiguity. Emotion and ambition, spoken and, more often, unspoken, are read carefully. Of course, by virtue of being a real person and not text on the page, these readings are mutable and fallible in ways for which only subjective personal experience can account.

The film is a massive, tricky undertaking that anyone who has sat around a table with loved ones and found contradicting memories behind famous family stories can relate to. That Stories We Tell not only doesn’t fall apart, but grows richer and more intriguing as it goes along is something to be commended. It feels long, but Polley earns her film’s pokiness and digressions. As the story, augmented by archival footage and strategic reenactments, comes into clearer focus, as some mysteries become not so mysterious at all, as the facts lead only to unanswerable questions, it’s clear that this family’s story is one that is both complicated to an observer and simple to those living it. It’s only when they’re forced to stop and think about it, by revelations they’ve recently discovered and through the act of making this documentary, that the attempt to draw a clean narrative arc fails and they’re left seeing the complications of it all.

In the end, those who knew Diane are left wondering, “Why did she do what she did?” and “What was she feeling?” While these questions are worth pondering, they are also meant most for her family alone. Polley makes no effort to solve these unsolvable riddles. Instead, she concludes with a section of film devoted to the participants reflecting upon the very nature of the film. One man, in particular, is a bit reluctant to allow his version of the story to be juxtaposed with others’. His is the version of the story that fills him with satisfaction since, after all, it is the way he experienced his life as it happened. In the end, it is the man who raised her who says that, as writer and director, it is Sarah Polley herself who is controlling this story. Her camera has taken in all views. But by deciding who gets heard saying what when, she has ultimate say. This is an unresolved tension that Polley leaves open, a nagging and tantalizing loose end every bit as rough and deeply personal as the stories her family tells.

To Live Her Life: FRANCES HA

Frances Ha is a trifle – loose, casual, light – but a rich one, full of unexpected layers of sweetness and surprise complexity. Writer-director Noah Baumbach, he of more emotionally unpleasant, though no less thrilling, character pieces like The Squid and the Whale and Greenberg, brings his rawness to a character who is so charming and resilient that it’s hard not to like her. The film follows Frances (Greta Gerwig), a 27-year-old underemployed New Yorker who bounces around small apartments, hangs out with her best friend (Mickey Sumner), goes to parties, makes some money at a rapidly dead-ending job, and circles endlessly for a good way to improve her position in life. She, as one character matter-of-factly lets her know, is old without being grown-up.

Shot in appealing black and white photography and set to a jazzy soundtrack that draws upon French New Wave composers Georges Delerue and Jean Constantin as well as great uses of pop like David Bowie’s “Modern Love” and Hot Chocolate’s “Every1’s a Winner,” the film pulses with an energy that has to skip along to keep up with Frances and her aimless restlessness. She’s continually pushing towards her goals of self-sufficient adulthood, a drive she will usually undercut through some combination of shortsighted thinking and self-doubt. This gives every scene, so carefully observed and precisely performed despite a loose tone, a near-imperceptible anxiety, even when she’s making moves towards some degree of comfort, rooming with a friend or becoming buddies with two sometimes-charming wannabe artists (Adam Driver and Michael Zegen) with lifestyles bankrolled reluctantly, they claim, by generous family.

Often very funny, the film gets big laughs not necessarily out of jokes, but out of situations and interpersonal dynamics so sharply drawn that recognition and empathy spark chuckles. A scene in which Frances finds herself at a dinner party with more accomplished peers plays humorously off of the ways in which she stretches to ingratiate herself as an intellectual – not-so-casually referencing how much she reads – and failing when defaulting to post-collegiate gossip and introspection so haphazardly philosophical she starts to fear she sounds stoned and says as much. The movie’s setting amid those privileged to live lives of such purposeful searching touches upon issues of class and economic conditions, but Baumbach neither cheapens them nor lets them overwhelm the film’s modest character sketch goals and good humor. When Frances hesitates at the ATM when confronted with the fee to be charged, it’s resonant without being heavy-handed. And that’s the way Baumbach and his cast operates here, with a film so light and enjoyable that the resonances and comedy appear casually, naturally.

This is the kind of film that’s a great delight mainly (though not only) for the way it introduces us to an interesting, appealing character. As played by Gerwig, who is also the co-writer, Frances is a person we like spending time with and want to see succeed. Throughout the film’s episodes, she seems to drift away from her goals, finding her way forward through trial and error, but Gerwig deploys winning misdirection in her encounters. Frances may be desperate, even depressed at times, but she diverts her acquaintances’ and colleagues’ attention with affected optimism that’s maybe truer than even she believes. Gerwig has a great physicality here, matching her winning line readings and occasional monologues, beautifully precise and unfussy turns of phrase, with a sense of movement and nonverbal reaction that finds exactly the right emotion to communicate. Gerwig’s performance is the kind that pulls focus without distracting: a real star turn.

It’s refreshing to see a film that takes women seriously by treating female friendship as real nuanced relationships instead of secondary concerns to romantic relationships with men. Frances interacts with her friends with a mixture of love and antagonism, competition and compassion, a mixture that shifts, grows, and evolves. Perhaps not since Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco has there been a film so truthful about this. Frances Ha is a film about a young woman striving towards a better life without once feeling the need to make her future contingent upon her romantic prospects. Instead, she simply exists amongst a group of people in a film that provides each and every character with a generous sense of a life lived. Some gentle fun may be poked at broad generalizations – yuppies, parents, hipsters – but each character comes into the picture with a past unspoken and leaves with a sense that their life continues beyond the frame. It’s a sharply written comedy with a light touch, but one that rings with truth.

Vanished: NOW YOU SEE ME

If you had stopped the heisting magician thriller Now You See Me halfway through, I’d have been just as happy with the movie’s conclusion. Actually, I’d have been a smidge happier, since that would mean I got to leave the theater an hour earlier. Everything about the movie feels arbitrary to its core. If, at the midway point, you’d asked me to explain who the characters are, I’d have been at a loss. They’re given absolutely no characterization outside of what the plot demands of them, which is very little and up to change with the whims of the twists. If you’d asked me to describe the plot, I would’ve vaguely muttered something about stolen money and investigating cops. What happens makes little to no sense in the moment and less when you stop to think about it. By the movie’s conclusion, it’s easy to tell that Important Things are cohering, but awfully hard to figure out why or why we should care.

Within the first few scenes, it’s clear the movie has already failed Siskel’s lunch test: Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? When you see the names in the cast, it’s easy to think a filmmaker can start with this much talent at his disposal and end up with at least a mildly diverting film. (You’d be wrong, by the way.) Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco play magicians who are given the blueprints for an amazing trick under mysterious circumstances. Michael Caine plays their bankroller (and a reminder that The Prestige is a much better magic thriller). Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent are detectives who enter the picture when the magicians appear to heist millions of Euros out of a Parisian bank during their Vegas act. Finally, there’s Morgan Freeman as a magician debunker who exists herein as Mr. Explanation. I knew something had gone horribly wrong when I actually forgot he was in the movie when he wasn’t in a scene.

The arrogantly nonsensical plotting from screenwriters Ed Solomon, Edward Ricourt, and Boaz Yakin does nothing to explain why these magicians are suddenly famous. Their act looks lousy with terrible patter and a sparse collection of cheap tricks, the worst of which are clearly aided by CGI. But, they’re famous nonetheless and though we never get a good sense of their personalities or how they relate to each other beyond what we surmise about the actors themselves from other roles and public personas, they’re supposed to be, well, I don’t know. Are the magicians our protagonists? Maybe. Their stunt ends with the possibly stolen money rained down on the audience. How very Robin Hood of them. But then there’s the dogged detectives, who have a slight edge in the sensible, stable characterization department. I liked them more, but couldn’t make heads or tails of what the movie was trying to do with them.

I’d have actually gone along with it if it gave the actors more memorable reasons for doing what they do. Maybe the problem isn’t that it’s nuts, but that it’s not nearly nuts enough. Either way, I sat dumbfounded by how little I cared. Director Louis Leterrier, who started his career with promising actioners like The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk before hitting Hollywood junk like Clash of the Titans, films Now You See Me in a blur of fast-moving images that can’t move fast enough to outrun the looming sense of unsatisfyingly unstable plotting. Scattershot plot points, aggressively explained shrugs of twists, and nothing characters all contribute to a singularly mindless two-hour sit in a theater. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to me; it’s that the movie can’t even be bothered to come up with parameters for itself with which it could make sense. At least this movie about magic manages to pull two good vanishing acts. The first was when my money disappeared from my wallet. The second was when the movie’s specifics left my mind almost entirely even a mere 12 hours after leaving the theater. 

Just the Two of Them: AFTER EARTH

In After Earth, a distant father (Will Smith) takes a trip with his estranged son (Jaden Smith) at the urging of his wife (Sophie Okonedo). It’ll be good for them, she thinks. Too bad their transport crashes, leaving them stranded in the wilderness. Too badly hurt to assist in finding help, the father sends his son on the journey, traversing deadly terrain while using technology to remain in contact. This is no ordinary story of a camping trip gone wrong, although that simple emotional core is certainly what the film’s about. These characters are humans a thousand years removed from our time, long after our planet has been abandoned and left for dead. Their spaceship has crash-landed on the quarantined Earth, the most dangerous place in the galaxy, a planet that has evolved to reject its long gone human inhabitants. It’s a thin drama of man versus nature loaded up with appealing sci-fi trappings.

Help for the stranded can only arrive by one of the Smiths activating a beacon flung from the wreckage and subsequently now located miles away. It’s a two-person film for the most part, with father and son Smith bonding while trapped apart by necessity, stuck together on a digital tether. The elder Smith plays not just an expert, but the best member of a futuristic army corps knows as Rangers. He knows all about the tricks of survival, including avoiding nasty, blind alien beasts that can only track humans by smelling their fear. As if this metaphor weren’t subtle enough, one of these beasts is tracking the younger Smith as he makes his way up hillsides, down steep cliffs, avoiding angry monkeys, climbing wildcats, and pterodactyl-sized birds of prey. You see, he must literally learn to control his fear if father and son are to survive. He’s hunted by the metaphor of maturity he must physically overpower to grow up and save the day.

The story of a father teaching his son the skills that make him the best at what he does takes on a subtext worth noting when it’s a film starring one of the world’s best movie stars and his relatively inexperienced actor son. (That Will Smith receives a story credit here only further underlines this reading.) Will Smith is a charismatic performer, but here drops his charm into static, stoic, minimalist reserve. It’s a measure of his talent that he’s sometimes compelling and often affecting despite holding so much back. Jaden, on the other hand, has much less of a natural screen presence and when he drops down into the same spare acting style to match his father’s acting choices he simply drops emotionally out of the film entirely. He disappears into the spectacle as nothing more than a lethargic action figure going through the motions in what should be a grand boy’s adventure, tromping through flora and fauna, barely staying alive at every turn, but is in reality thinner and simpler than even that would be.

What keeps the film interesting despite its rather thin plotting and a performance that’s featured in nearly every shot so completely underwhelming is the direction by M. Night Shyamalan. Even when, in recent films like his The Last Airbender, his storytelling arguably creeps towards self-serious silliness (though I’d argue that less vociferously than his detractors), he has an incredible eye. Here, he creates an uncommon stillness and patience in this Hollywood spectacle’s visual style.Working with Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography, this is a film that drinks in natural beauty of its sweeping landscapes. Even when the action, such as it is, begins, there is maintained a refreshing sense of steadiness. In the very best scenes here, as in his very best films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs), Shyamalan builds suspense in simple sequences through nothing more than blocking and crisply edited moments of quiet dread. It’s in his style that the film manages to become something more than its spare, schmaltzy plotting might suggest.

Much of the film plays out in dialogue-free sequences of long shots following the Smiths’ progress. The first scene post-crash finds the younger Smith scrambling through the wreckage in a long take that finds the camera placed behind an emergency flap that’s rhythmically covering the corridor. As we watch the young man assess the situation, the frame is completely covered by the moving spaceship part at regular intervals. It’s the kind of choice that a less visually interesting spectacle would not think to make. As the film progresses through somewhat convincing creature effects and episodic encounters with nature dangers both recognizable and pure sci-fi, the camera remains steady, quiet and interesting. There’s uncommon beauty in some of the film’s passages, especially as consequences are at their most dire and a light dusting of something approaching Herzogian jungle madness descends upon the characters. Still, Shyamalan’s decisions make the film interesting without making it good. It’s the kind of stuff that could potentially elevate good to great, and here brings disposable to notable.

Small Stuff: EPIC

The creators of the computer animated fantasy Epic created an intriguing fantasy world and failed to have anything interesting happen in it. The film imagines a society of bug-sized people living in the forest locked in a battle between the forces of growth and the armies of decay. Growth is represented by plant people, basically human shaped beings with toadstool heads or leafy limbs, who are protected by the brave Leafmen soldiers and bow to their beautiful forest queen (voiced by Beyoncé, pop royalty). Decay is represented by snarling hordes of grey-skinned creepers led into battle by their leader (Christoph Waltz). This potentially interesting world is the staging ground for simple fantasy storytelling at its most basic and predictable. It has a plot in which one-dimensional characters fight over a magical gee-gaw for some time and then it all ends in a big battle. Reluctant heroes find their destiny, outsiders become insiders, and good defeats evil. It’s all very tired.

I would imagine this is what a hypothetical American remake of a Miyazaki film would look like. It has a young girl for a protagonist (Amanda Seyfried), a normal human who is suddenly shrunk down to Leafman size and gets involved in the magical conflict. It has ecological themes that are occasionally prone to acknowledging that growth and decay need to be held in balance. It has a casual beauty to its imagined tiny world in which plants can be controlled with a wave of the forest queen’s hand. And yet, what seems so promising about all of the above is ground into a homogenized bore. A potentially lovely protagonist is turned into nothing more than honorary buddy to a stoic warrior (Colin Farrell) and token love interest to the warrior’s protégé (Josh Hutcherson). The environmental message is reducible to a good versus evil bumper sticker instead of recognition of nature’s natural order. And the animation, though technically proficient, is blandly obvious and overfamiliar.

Rather than take advantage of the potential in the world it creates, a world borrowed from a book by William Joyce, who has his name all over the credits (he’s co-writer, producer, and production designer), it simply coasts on formula. Indeed, the bulk of the imagination seems to have fallen to the casting, which finds surprisingly weird choices of voices to fill the supporting roles. Distinctive sounding comedians Aziz Ansari and Chris O’Dowd show up as comic relief slugs. (I found them more of a distraction, but maybe little kids will like them.) Rapper Pitbull plays a thug of a frog, an amphibian who for some reason sports a suit coat. Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler plays a shaman caterpillar named Nim Galuu (I just had to give you the name) who is so much a showman I thought for sure he was a charlatan. Not so, though. He’s just more weirdly comic support for the otherwise humorlessly serious rehashing of basic fantasy plot points.

In yet another missed opportunity, what with Beyoncé and Tyler and, okay, Pitbull in the cast, the film doesn’t even give us a good song to hum on the way out of the theater. In the end, there’s simply nothing to remember the movie by at all. Directed by Chris Wedge and produced by Blue Sky, the man and the company behind the largely forgettable and yet wildly successful Ice Age movies, I suppose I’m glad they’re trying something different. This isn’t just another lazily formulaic, pop-culture referencing, manic kids’ flick. Instead, it’s a lazily formulaic, mildly serious, boring kids’ flick. I certainly didn’t hate it. The colors are soothing, the motion smooth, and the comfortingly familiar structure has a lulling quality to it. All it lacks is a reason to care.

Souped-up: FURIOUS 6

The Fast & Furious movies are some kind of modern Hollywood wonder: a scrappy franchise built improbably out of humble B-movie origins into one of the most popular and most reliably entertaining series currently running. From its origin in 2001 as a modest B-movie that was an appealing reworking of Point Break that swapped SoCal surfing for street racing, through two largely free-standing follow-ups that drifted away from the central premise, the series has shown a resilient capacity for trial and error and confident course correction. Producer Neal H. Moritz, who has been around since the beginning, and director Justin Lin, who has made four of these in a row now, have been unafraid to try new things – new locales, new characters, new hooks – while keeping what works and ditching what doesn’t. The series finally hit upon the exact right combination with 2011’s Fast Five, a satisfying fast car spectacle of a heist picture that pulled in all the best aspects of the previous four films to casually create the kind of multi-picture mythology Marvel worked so hard to build leading up to The Avengers. It’s all the more appealing for feeling serendipitous, the product of continual underdog status.

The franchise’s growth continues in Furious 6, which is once again bigger and better than anything that’s come before. The series has been honed once again. This time the exposition is tighter, the emotional arcs are crisper, and the action set pieces are more outrageous and insanely gripping. The plot’s as ludicrous as ever, but it makes perfect sense on its own terms. The single-minded agent played by Dwayne Johnson, sweat and muscle personified, hunts a crew of drivers led by a mysterious new villain (Luke Evans) and a mysteriously returning face (Michelle Rodriguez), striking military targets throughout Europe. He decides the only people who can help him capture these bad guys are the very drivers who stole a massive safe out from under his watch in Rio and who he’s sworn to bring to justice. He seeks out their leader (Vin Diesel) and offers to wipe the criminal records clean if he’ll get the gang back together to help Interpol stop these villains. It takes a team of drivers to stop a team of drivers, or so the logic of these movies goes.

Diesel agrees, and so the whole family of series regulars – Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Gal Gadot – comes flying in from all corners of the world to participate in this globetrotting film in which the good guys chase the bad guys through sensational sequences of vehicular mayhem. New to the group is Johnson’s second-in-command, played by Haywire’s Gina Carano, proving in only her second major role that she’s the best action star on the planet. She’s just as hyper-competent and self-assured as the cast, which otherwise joins the chase already crackling with charming chemistry carried over from last time. The group has grown to be terrifically appealing and refreshingly causally diverse. And they’re easy to root for. It’s funny how a series in which all of the leads are so very good at their jobs (and progressively richer for it) can maintain their underdog status. But that’s a key to the films’ success. There’s always a sense that they’re one wrong step away from prison and one wrong turn of the wheel away from death. Keeping Johnson close this time is a good way to keep the threat of the law alive, while Evans provides the most purely threatening villain the series has had yet.

As screenwriter Chris Morgan studiously finds the series loose plot threads that I hadn’t realized existed, pulling the whole initially haphazard enterprise into something of a beautifully retconned coherence, director Lin offers up scenes like an early chase through London streets in which the bad guys have souped-up racecars built with angled armored plates that allow them to hit a police car head on and send it spinning through the air while they zoom away unscathed. It’s an encouraging sign that six movies in there are still new fun, exciting ways to send cars smashing. Later, a spectacular sequence will grow to include helicopters, motorcycles, and one tough tank. And if you thought Fast Five’s extended sequence of two cars dragging a two-ton safe through city streets was something, wait until you see what happens with a cargo plane here! Just when I thought the film was stalling out, it finds another gear. I shouldn’t have doubted.

I haven’t always liked this franchise. It first appeared when I wrongly thought its car chase simplicity was beneath my burgeoning cinephilia, but Fast Five was so entertaining it prompted me to revisit them all in the run up to Furious 6. Doing so, my opinion of them improved (somewhat) and served to reinforce how successfully the filmmakers responsible have gotten the potential out of even the lowest points of the franchise – for me the dull, table-clearing and setting fourth effort – and pulled it all together into a coherent whole. The series has only ever promised dumb fun with fast cars and some minor cops-and-robbers intrigue. Now that it has figured out how to deliver all that as well as gripping heist plotting, satisfying fan-service, unexpectedly emotional arcs, bruising hand-to-hand combat, and gleefully, absurdly, joyfully over-the-top action, I figure this series is downright unstoppable. Furious 6 is not only the best one yet, it’s sequence for sequence up there with the most enjoyable action movies in recent memory.

Note: Be sure to stick around for the rewarding scene in the middle of the end credits that features a killer surprise cameo and a tease of more Fast & Furious to come.

Intervention: THE HANGOVER PART III

The Hangover Part III is a better movie than The Hangover Part II only because I find time spent in complete and total indifference preferable to stewing in boiling rage. The mean-spiritedness from the 2009 surprise hit comedy The Hangover was successfully, for me at least, swept up in the momentum of its mystery of three guys trying to piece together their drug-and-alcohol decimated memories of the previous night. But by the time the retread of a sequel arrived, the meanness went rancid. That film, in doubling down on the perceived selling points of its predecessor, ended up a putrid pile of hateful jokes that shoot past miscalculated and add up to nothing more than a sad waste of effort for all involved. With Part III, the benefit seems to be that no one involved bothered to write any jokes or try very hard to sell the material. So it has that going for it.

This film brings back the so-called Wolf Pack from the previous two films: stuffy dentist Stu (Ed Helms), aging bro Phil (Bradley Cooper), regular guy Doug (Justin Bartha), and weirdo Alan (Zach Galifianakis). This is a rare film in a series in which most of the lead actors appear to be as tired of it as I am. Maybe I’m just projecting. As it begins, the characters apparently finally learned their lessons from having pretty much the same exact thing happen to them twice. But of course, what kind of sequel would it be if they didn’t get into any trouble? Almost immediately, Alan accidentally decapitates his new pet giraffe, a kind of did-they-just-do-that opening sequence that follows an even earlier sequence of a slow-motion Bangkok prison riot.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well, the crazy criminal Chow (Ken Jeong), the exasperatingly annoying returning character, has escaped prison and that’s why a growling John Goodman kidnaps the guys en route to a rehab facility. (After all they’ve done, that dead giraffe was rock bottom, apparently.) Snatched up mid-intervention, they’re told to capture Chow and bring him to Goodman or Doug gets a bullet in the head. Hey, at least it’s something new. The weirdly serious turn is, animal cruelty aside, a far tamer effort than either of the two previous movies, with a plot that assumes you’re entering the theater feeling affection or something like it towards these main characters. I could barely care about them long enough to get me through the first film and the second one made me loathe them, so I suppose I was going in with a disadvantage. I just didn’t care what would happen to them, but I could have gotten over that if the film was funny.

I hesitate to knock this film for being largely laughless since most of its 100 minute runtime plays out like a sluggish thriller entirely uninterested in nothing more than a bit of comic relief here and there. Free (purposefully or not) from the toxic cloud of bad jokes that filled up the rerun that was its immediate predecessor, director Todd Phillips and co-writer Craig Mazin have inadvertently freed themselves from the comedy designation almost entirely. It’s allegedly a comedy. That’s what the studio has marketed it as. It’s the genre of the films it follows. It’s the category provided by the fine folks at the Internet Movie Database. Some of its lines come out as somewhat comic simply by the nature of Helms, Cooper, and Galifianakis and their reputations as funny guys, even though its best joke, such as it is, comes straight out of Zoolander. (I liked it far better there.) But there’s very little here that’s inherently funny.

Maybe this is a feature length demo reel for Todd Phillips hoping to be hired for an action film next time. After all, there’s a lot of technically adept filmmaking here. There’s a mildly enjoyable heist of a mansion in the hills outside Tijuana that involves creative use of dog collars to maneuver past a security system. There’s a briefly gripping tie-the-sheets-together-to-shimmy-down-the-side-of-a-building scene. The movie’s never better than when one or more of its main characters are right on the edge of potential death, but probably not for the reasons the filmmakers intended. This may be the only comedy that disappoints by leaving too many characters alive at the end. Without laughs or meaningful stakes, this makes for an awfully tired, pointless exercise.

Note: I can’t honestly say what anyone who happens to enjoy the series will make of this odd entry, but something tells me the scene in the middle of the end credits is probably where the die hard fans would’ve preferred the movie to start.