Extracurricular Applications: ADMISSION

Admission is an agreeable diversion. It’s a mellow college comedy set not amongst the students, but among the employees. Specifically, as the title may have revealed for you, it’s set in the admissions department. Our protagonist is Portia, who has been reading Princeton’s college applications and their attendant essays for sixteen years now. Played by Tina Fey, reason enough to like her immediately, she’s a hard-worker firmly settled into her comfortable and predictable life. She’s in a long-term relationship with a tenured English professor (Michael Sheen, in another one of his uncannily convincing embodiments of insufferable academics), a man who clearly takes her for granted. He’s dismissive and only vaguely affectionate towards her. It’s one of those movie relationships that’s obviously doomed from the get go. The story that follows involves Portia’s slow realization that the life she’s living is not the one that will make her happy.

Enter Paul Rudd, playing the principal of an experimental high school who invites her to visit their campus and give her usual spiel about applying for Princeton. He’s taken a special interest in a gifted student with a rocky transcript (Nat Wolff) and wants to make sure she notices and gives this underdog a chance. It goes against all the rules, but in the movie’s totally soft and unemphatic way, it forms a minor critique of the college admissions process as one that is, in some cases, designed to weed out the more unconventionally promising candidates. But that’s on the film’s thematic back burner, since what it’s really interested in is showing us that the admissions Portia most needs to make are to herself. It’s a low-key movie of self-discovery, personal growth, and slow evolution of relationship statuses. Admirably serious about its setting in academia, an unconventional setting and approach for Hollywood films of any kind, it’s a film that’s nonetheless so low-key that I was almost afraid that movie itself was going to fall asleep right before my very eyes.

That it doesn’t is a testament to the charms of the cast which, Fey and Rudd aside, features lovely small-scale character work from national treasures like Lily Tomlin (as Fey’s proudly liberal mother) and Wallace Shawn (as the head of the admissions department). Director Paul Weitz (working in a mode much closer to his About a Boy than his American Pie or, God forbid, Little Fockers) and screenwriter Karen Croner (adapting the novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz) keep things moving along cleanly and clearly with a gentle tug of narrative to push the emotions along in easy and relaxed ways. It’s sometimes funny, but in an off-hand way rather than through any conventional zingers. It’s sometimes romantic, but in such a wispy way that it almost registers after-the-fact. It’s sometimes pointed in explicit summoning of sociopolitical concerns and cultural studies, but only in the softest possible ways. I found myself smiling and soothed, if not exactly captivated and entertained.

A tidy embrace of open-endedness and a polite salute to mildly bad decisions snowballing into big life changes for the better, Admission ends up in a sweet, tender place as an appealingly minor work. Never once does the movie insist upon its own worth. Nor does it reach for anything more than its deliberate slightness. It’s merely a pleasant time with pleasant characters played pleasantly. It’s the kind of entertainment I’d imagine would play just as well, if not better, when viewed on cable TV while curled up on the couch some lazy wintry weekend when a combination of coziness and the common cold demand a just-complicated-enough piece of comfort. 

Girls Gone Wild: SPRING BREAKERS

Spring Breakers is a film that has its cake and eats it too. It’s a turbulent high/low collision, an art house exploitation film and moody mainstream wallow. It springs from the head of Harmony Korine, a once-precocious filmmaker who has made a career out of creating films that serve as thumbs in the eyes of both propriety and audiences in detestable artfully artless small-scale grime like Gummo and Trash Humpers. (The outlier is the sweetly, emptily bizarre Mister Lonely.) What’s left to do once you’ve so thoroughly cultivated a niche aura of punk unpredictability? His new film is a stab towards something like mainstream disreputability with a topsy-turvy R-rated update of the squeaky clean 1950s teen beach movies that’s been driven off the surf and into a neon beach out of a Michael Mann film, a feature-length montage overlaid with Malickian voice over and a non-stop dubstep and hip-hop soundtrack (Skrillex wrote the music with composer Cliff Martinez). It’s a film that sends its characters straight into a horrifying bacchanalia and keeps pushing until it finds the even more horrifying criminality simmering permanently underneath. It’s ugly, volatile, occasionally offensive, largely troubling, and always mesmerizing. What a trip.

It all starts at an unspecified any-college, where whomping bass seeps out of carousing frat house gatherings and bored youths stare vacantly at their history professor, the darkened classroom a sea of glowing laptop screens. We first meet Faith (Selena Gomez) at a campus church group. Afterwards, one of the other young congregants (Glee’s Heather Morris) asks Faith if, for Spring Break, she still plans on going to Flordia with a group of rowdier girls. “I’ve known them since Kindergarten,” Faith says, summoning a kind of protective innocence. (Her friend’s advice? Pray.) Everything will be fine, Faith thinks. It’s all going to be fun. But, with her religiousness and her name being clear thematic markers, what she’s really in for is a trip to a metaphoric Hell above and beyond the collegiate partying she’s witnessed. She’s also not aware that, with money tight, her travelling companions (Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, and Rachel Korine) have just raised the money necessary for their travel by robbing a diner armed with squirt guns and a sledgehammer.

That this information, when revealed, isn’t an immediate red flag to Faith is a little disconcerting, but away the young women go, itching for adventure, St. Petersburg bound. Once there, they find themselves in the middle of the prolonged beachside riot of drugs, alcohol, and young bodies in slippery swimsuits that is Spring Break in certain areas of the nation’s warmer climes. Korine films it all so closely and lovingly that I felt the need for a new word, one that would go above and beyond “ogle.” The way his camera lunges towards and lingers on extras, but especially at his constantly skimpily attired stars, is about as subtle as a cartoon “ahoogah!” Numerous scenes of youthful people engaging in varied, energetic, and dangerous activities immediately follow. Now, I don’t think I’m being a premature fuddy-duddy to say that this kind of partying seems to have nothing to do with fun. It’s an endurance test of ingesting the most mind-altering, mood-scrambling substances, damaging property, staying out in the sun all day and risking severe bodily harm all night. Inevitably, I suppose, the girls end up in jail when a party they’ve stumbled into gets broken up. Standing in the courtroom for sentencing – pay a fine or spend two days in the slammer – wearing only their Day-Glo bikinis, the judge takes one look at them and asks “spring breakers?” knowing full well the answer. He must see a lot of them this time of year.

The girls are unexpectedly bailed out. Alien, a creepy low-level, drug-dealing, wannabe rapper who gazes out at them from over dark sunglasses with a smile so wide they can admire his grill, pays their fines in full. Played by James Franco in spectacularly ratty cornrows, this self-styled gangster brags about wanting to “do bad,” not wanting to “do good,” shows off his guns and knives, lets them try his weed, and makes sure to put in a plug for his music which he proudly says can be heard on YouTube. He oozes a sense of danger and razor’s-edge impulsiveness that informs the rest of the film as the college girls (all at first, but as some return home, their number grows smaller and tougher) get slowly pulled into the local underground scene of drug dealers, thieves, and club owners that feeds parasitically off the marginally more reputable waves of spring breakers that annually flood the city. Let’s just say that the guns at play are squirt guns no more. That in this final narrative descent, Franco’s rival, played by Gucci Mane, is the only black character to have any lines and is here only to create a clear villain (or something close to it) is ugly, an example of the film’s occasionally offensive jumble.

But, troubling though it is, Korine’s film is both ugly and sublime, sometimes at once, as in a string of shakedowns shot in slow motion and accompanied by only the sound of Britney Spears’s ballad “Everytime.” (Earlier, the girls goofily sang “…Baby One More Time” to each other, though the Britney songs that you’d think would be most apt to the proceedings – “Oops! I Did It Again” and “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Women” – go unheard.) It’s hard to parse if the film is reveling in the teasing debauchery or drawing a stark lesson in its inevitable descent into greater and greater criminality. Is it a film of instant-gratification nihilism or stylish hedonism? Is it aghast or roused by the behavior on display? Is it corrosive or celebratory? I choose all of the above. It’s at once objectified youth culture hothouse and giddy satirical denouncement. Is Korine creating a millennial Gatsby party or participating in the emptiness of it all? (A key may be the fate of Faith.) It’s often hard to tell with a movie so close to an embodiment of the subject at hand if we’re experiencing a work of understanding or scorn or both at once. My verdict was prone to shifting mid-scene. Either way, it’s artful trash that’s far from Korine’s usual overthought sloppiness; it comes by its loose sliminess, its casual beauty, and its most offensive qualities quite honestly. In fact, one might call it a trash-terpiece.

Go West, Young Writer: ON THE ROAD

I, like many bookish English major types I suppose, have some lingering Beat desires to road trip across America and see what inspiration and experience I can stumble upon. To drive across the vast expanse of roadways crisscrossing the United States, open to possibility, ready to gather raw material for projects made up of the written word, has a powerful romantic pull. For me, this doesn’t even have anything to do with Jack Kerouac or his novel On the Road, which has its minor pleasures, but is no sacred text to me. No, this desire within me is inherited from nothing more than the reverberations of the Beat generation’s go-west-young-writer influence, a sense of literary manifest destiny and direction.

So I have both a rooting interest and a disinterest in the film adaptation of On the Road. I’m sympathetic to the impulse behind the plot, while conflicted over the source material’s place in the literary canon. Over half a century after the novel’s release, it is director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera who have brought the book to the screen, finding some compelling episodic energy here and there in this period piece as young writer Sal (Sam Riley) makes his way through American landscapes. The majority of this particular picture, however, is a slog of a road trip. This is a drudgery in which the sights out the windows and the character actors at each stop are meant to carry the day. This is an adaptation that misses the point. For me, what pleasures that can be found in Kerouac’s novel are all in the prose. It’s not what happens, but how it’s recounted through the flavor and cadence of the writing. Of course that’s tricky to capture cinematically, but once removed, all that’s left of On the Road is an opportunity to really highlight how empty a narrative it is.

How strange, then, or perhaps how lucky, to find nice performances scattered throughout the morass of it all. They are occasional crackles of charm in an otherwise overwhelmingly bland trudge. The road takes Sal to Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Elisabeth Moss and Steve Buscemi, among others doing fine work in underserved roles. Sal is sometimes joined by Dean (Garrett Hedlund) and Marylou (Kristen Stewart). Those two actors in particular are delivering something approaching career highlight work in a movie that plays as if destined to be largely forgotten. Hedlund and Stewart are two performers who, when thrust into big budget material (like Tron and Twilight, respectively) are consistently (unfairly, I would say) derided as one note, stiff and unconvincing. Here, they’re loose – naked and emotional, open and vulnerable, confident and hesitant – in ways that prove their detractors wrong. They’re actors and good ones at that, able to convincingly play blank blockbuster types just as thoroughly as more nuanced character work. They’re rather enjoyable at times, just as the rest of the exceedingly talented cast is putting in agreeable hard work.

But this shouldn’t feel like work. Salles’s picture is trying so hard for freewheeling filmmaking that it’s a strain. The stream-of-obviousness plot stumbles when it should glide, muddles when it should clarify. It wears out its welcome then drifts, feeling repetitive and tiresome until it finally ends. Worst of all, there are dumbly obvious scenes of Sal bent over a typewriter, hammering away at the prose some of us will recognize from the novel. It’s a typically movie portrayal of a writer, scrunched and self-important, as if our Kerouac proxy already knows that he’s writing a book of some historical note. He types as if he’s placing himself on syllabi before our very eyes. But here is a film that is so relaxed and aimless that it fails to work up the energy to make an argument for its own existence, let alone its source materials. It’s just too low-key to do itself justice. 

Slight of Bland: THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE

What a difference ten years makes. In 2003, Jim Carrey starred in the comedy Bruce Almighty as an average guy given the chance to borrow God-like powers, but the real scene-stealer, indeed the only person whose contribution I can remember to this day, was Steve Carell in a supporting role. Now here we are in 2013 with the comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. It stars Carell in the title role while the more memorable moments appear courtesy of Carrey in a supporting role. It’s amazing what can happen to a showbiz career in only a decade, an observation worth noting in connection with Wonderstone since it happens to be a point on which the plot hinges. Carell plays a cheesy, theatrical, old school magician who, with his partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), has headlined at a Las Vegas hotel performing the same magic act for ten years. They were wildly popular and wealthy, but the act’s gone stale and ticket sales are plummeting. Their hotelier boss (James Gandolfini) says he’ll fire them and hire a flashy new magician (Jim Carrey), a decision that spurs Wonderstone to put together a new show that’ll wow the crowds all over again.

What follows is a movie that’s big, broad and bland. It’s predictable in every beat right up to the rather mean-spirited finale that’s nonetheless played as triumphant victory. Carell’s Wonderstone is nothing more than a pompous and out-of-touch cheeseball, a sort of softer, off-brand Zoolander. In the movie he follows the predictable arc that starts from top of the world before getting knocked down to low lows until he finds it within himself, through the help of the characters around him, to know better how to find his way back to the top. What little that’s interesting here relates to the tension between the older style of magic making, typified by a mail order magic kit hawked by a slick showman (Alan Arkin) that holds a special place in the lives of Carell and Buscemi, and the newer more aggressive and ugly magic as practiced by the flashy, gross magician played by Carrey. Where our protagonists are average guys all dressed up with pompadours and in velvet making a dancing entrance to Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra," he’s wiry, with long stringy hair, black clothing and pounding heavy metal. He’s obnoxious, at one point cutting open his cheek to pull out a bloody, folded up playing card. “Is this your card?” he asks. It is. (His final trick is super gross, too. I shall not spoil it, except to say it’s horrifying, cringe-worthy, and a little funny.)

The tension between types of magic, though, is ground under by the homogenized mediocrity of it all in a film eager to use that central conflict as set dressing rather than utilizing it as the intriguing idea that it is. Director Don Scardino (a sitcom staple) finds little of visual interest, preferring instead to keep the in medium shots and let the lines land. It’s too bad the lines in the script by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (they of Horrible Bosses) are largely inoffensive clunkers that go down easily and without impact. It’s a comedy that fails on both on a plot level and on a scene-by-scene basis, gathering up few laughs and even less of a reason to care. Why, then, did I not out-and-out hate this movie? It’s the cast and the cast alone. Carell and Buscemi have a funny sort of buddy chemistry that occasionally wrings some laughter out of the neglected premise. A few of Gandolfini’s line readings are just unexpected enough to bring a sort of backwards gravitas to some very silly moments. And Carrey, flailing about with little to do, nonetheless makes a big impact by bringing total commitment to a nutty part that a lesser comic actor would’ve no doubt undersold.  

I haven’t even mentioned Olivia Wilde yet and that’s a shame. She’s playing a nothing character, a token female presence that is only around to provide an anemic romantic subplot. You could take Wilde out of Wonderstone entirely and the movie would lose exactly nothing in terms of coherence and impact. That’s unfortunate, but the movie is a big nothing all around. It has so many promising elements mixed in with a game cast and yet proceeds to make use of none of them. It’s blandly uninvolving and perplexingly dull, aside from the once or twice I snickered or half-smiled at the best efforts of everyone involved. The whole thing was leaving my head even as I walked out of the theater. I barely remember it as I type these words a day after I saw it, so I doubt I’ll remember anything about it in ten years.

Hold the Phone: THE CALL

I could never be a 911 operator. I don’t have the emotional stamina for the job. On the other end of the switchboard is an unpredictable deluge of human misery, waves of terrified and traumatized callers reporting their lives’ greatest horrors, sometimes inconsequential, sometimes matters of life and death. I have nothing but admiration for those who work calmly and professionally through these calls, sending help to the right locations, expediting responses to emergencies. The modest thriller The Call gets a lot of mileage out of this work environment. Its protagonist, a tough, professional operator played by Halle Berry, answers a call from a teenage girl (Abigail Breslin) who has been attacked and now finds herself trapped in a trunk. Berry can’t get a lock on the location and so together with the girl they work out a way to find clues to the location of the car and the identity of her kidnapper.

The bulk of the film is devoted to this titular call. It’s like the inverse of the unfortunately forgotten 2004 David R. Ellis thriller Cellular, the first movie to really milk the then-newer technology of the cell phone to get nonstop genre chills and spills out of it. That movie had Chris Evans getting a call from a hostage who managed to hotwire a broken telephone to dial a random number. Much fun is made out of moments like a mad scramble for a phone charger, what with having to keep the connection while Evans dashes about trying to get clues and get help for the mystery caller. This time around, the hostage is on the move. In trembling close-ups, we cut between Berry and Breslin, talking through the nerve-wracking scenario. The operator, with little information, tries to gather up what she can and send help to the appropriate spot. One fun trick involves kicking out a taillight and sticking a hand through the hole, hoping that another driver will notice and call in to 911. The sight of a pale arm awkwardly waving through a hole in a dark red trunk is vivid genre imagery.

In terse crosscutting, we follow Berry’s cop boyfriend (Morris Chestnut) as he provides the plot with the necessary role of a protagonist on the move. With information fed to him by Berry, he leads the charge in sending police to and fro, picking up on the trail of breadcrumbs left by the various clues. Director Brad Anderson shoots things with a no-nonsense simplicity that keeps the plot moving along tensely and efficiently. I usually find him to be a director whose films kick up fine mood, but tend to seem awfully undercooked on the level of character and narrative. In films like Session 9 and Vanishing on 7th Street, I find myself wishing that he could push his neo-Twilight Zone narrative tendencies further into abstraction, leaving the pesky clumsiness of his storytelling behind.  In The Call, as in his best film, the icy train-set twister Transsiberian, he has a nice, simple premise to work with, matching mood with action in a way that’s largely satisfying for much of the runtime.

It's too bad that the script by Richard D’Ovidio (his first produced screenplay since the remake of Thirteen Ghosts over a decade ago) has a howler of a climax, a sustained sequence of one character acting outside the law, setting off on a secretive investigation that’s filled with all kinds of reasons to exclaim “Don’t go in there!” “Watch out behind you!” and “What do you think you’re doing?” It’s a particularly icky form of exploitation revenge and a sour note on which to end an otherwise trim and crisp thriller.  It doesn’t help that the more we learn about the kidnapper, the more he seems to be nothing more than a generic creep of the kind you could see on any TV procedural any night of the week. Come to think of it, though The Call is ultimately only a slightly-better-than-mediocre B-movie, it’d have made a fine pilot. (Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Anderson has done his best work on TV, especially in his handling of 12 episodes of the paranormal investigation procedural Fringe.) Wouldn’t you want to watch a detective series about Halle Berry taking 911 calls and sending Morris Chestnut to investigate? I know I would. There’s even an ideologically interesting hero shot of Berry towards the end of the film, a low angle image that captures an American flag billowing in the background. The filmmakers have ahold of something intriguing with this premise and they come close to pulling it off.

Behind the Curtain: OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL

It can’t be easy to set out to make a film dancing around in the iconography of one of the greatest films of all time. Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful, a film that may not be great and powerful, but is certainly good and entertaining, uses memorable aspects The Wizard of Oz both big and small in inventive and surprising ways without embarrassing itself or seeming a diminishment of a beloved cultural masterpiece. That is some kind of wonderment. The film itself, which is set decades before the 1939 classic and follows a Kansas con man magician into Oz, is an earnest work of sturdy craftsmanship and showmanship, sparkling with a zippy sense of fun. Though it seems to wobble here and there, threatening to fall flat on its face, it rallies for a rousing ending. Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire’s script constantly walks up to convention only to back away in delightful flourishes.

James Franco plays the magician who will become the Wizard of Oz. He’s not quite believable, which is in some ways the point. (Just don’t imagine what Raimi’s regular character actor Bruce Campbell, who appears late in the film in a cameo, could have done with the role.) He’s a huckster with sparkling charisma hidden behind a desperate layer of slimy smarm. The prologue, set in a classically square aspect ratio and filmed in jaw-droppingly gorgeous black and white, finds his magic act at a county fair dying painfully when a sweet girl in a wheelchair begs him to make her walk again. The crowd turns on him (“He’s not a real magician!”) and on Oz’s face is written both the pain of a performer facing a hostile crowd and a man torn up by the fact that there’s nothing he can do to help someone in need. He feels like an unhelpful man without a purpose, unable to scam more than a few coins from people he considers country bumpkins.

His personality problems don’t go away, but take on larger phantasmagorical stakes when circumstances conspire to send him over the rainbow. When he’s sucked into a tornado, he’s terrified that he’s about to die, a natural reaction I’d say. When he lands in Oz, the screen expanding, filling with color and obvious digital fakery, he’s befuddled and amused, but tries to hide behind an opaque confidence that slips a bit when the real magic starts sparking around him. It’s an interesting role that calls for a leading man to fall into the background, confused and adrift in a sea of colorful spectacle, while, thrillingly, the women around him hold all the real power in this land and, whatever emotions romantic or otherwise they feel towards him, view him as a pawn in their game of thrones. He meets three witches (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and Michelle Williams). At least one is a good witch. One’s a bad witch who, by film’s end, becomes awfully wicked. The third will probably have a house dropped on her head at some point in her future.

The man who would be Wizard is told he’s fulfilling a prophecy by showing up in Oz. To claim the Emerald City’s throne – and all the riches the position supplies – all he must do is kill a wicked witch. Seems easy enough, so off he shuffles down the yellow brick road where, along the way, an ingratiating flying monkey (Zach Braff) and a broken China Doll (Joey King) join the quest. Raimi draws upon his directorial skill sets from both his horror background (The Evil Dead, Drag Me to Hell) and his big budget spectacles (Spider-man, Spider-man 2), staging sequences like a tantalizingly creepy/funny walk through a gloomy forest with ominous crows, snapping plants with glowing eyes, and a hooded figure gliding out of the fog of a graveyard, modulating tension and relief in supremely entertaining ways, cut together in a variety of pop art frames with smartly varied pace. Later, he’ll stage a dazzling witch-on-witch battle that follows a supreme visual and narrative pleasure in the reveal of the surprising way the fraudulent Wizard claims him throne. It’s all of a piece with Raimi’s skill with mixing humor and thrills, creating playful spectacle that’s always aware of its own fiction without lessening the impact of its storytelling.

And what storytelling! It’s lumpy in spots and the character arcs are obvious, but the film is wrapped up in an old-fashioned, hyper-earnest sense of theatrical flourish. By the time the curtain (quite literally) falls, there’s a sense of a master showman shouting “ta-da!” To the tunes of one of Danny Elfman’s best scores in recent memory, the screen is filled with colorful CGI landscapes and charming creature work that’s gloriously fake, approaching the Technicolor perfection of The Wizard of Oz’s painted backdrops. But that’s not to say the effects are wholly unconvincing. On the contrary, they’re often quite spectacular when they need to be. Franco’s travelling companions are effects that work incredibly well. The monkey, for instance, sells some nonverbal punchlines through nothing more than the shifting expressions on his face. The look of the film is appealing through and through. The Land of Oz itself is a glittering jewel of manufactured whimsy and the witches’ elegant wardrobes look like they were cut from the same cloth as MGM’s 1930’s costume department. To top it all off, the 3D is as dazzling as any I’ve seen. (Put it on the short list with Avatar, Hugo, and Life of Pi as essential live action 3D.) Oz is a funny, surprising magic music box of sturdy childlike wonder.

Note: Although I like this film a bit less than the unfairly maligned and forgotten John Carter, it’s interesting to note that two years in a row Disney has released in March an expensive live action film inspired by turn-of-the-20th-century genre fiction about a man in the early 1900s who is whisked away to a different world where he’s just the variable needed to tip the balance in a struggle between competing factions.

Hill of Beans: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER

When it comes to recontextualizing an old tale as a modern would-be blockbuster, Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer is way better than Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, but doesn’t even come close to the entertainment value of Snow White and the Huntsman. I suppose that’s the very definition of middling. I may not have liked it much, but it’s certainly not worth disliking, not when it’s so colorful and good natured, a kind of square, clear-eyed spectacle, a red-blooded adventure that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in the 50s with Harryhausen animation instead of blandly intricate CGI fakery. In this new telling, the story of Jack, the farm boy who trades his horse for magic beans which then grow into a beanstalk that leads to a land of giants, is the basic seed of story which sprouts into a typical hero’s journey complete with damsel so hopelessly distressed and a terribly modern extended action climax that drones on and on through noisy digital destruction.

But before it gets there, it starts simply, with a nicely crosscut sequence of a little boy in a farmhouse and a little girl in a castle, each being read a legend of giants and the king who forged a crown out of a melted giant’s heart to order them back to their realm high in the sky. The boy grows up to be Jack (Nicholas Hoult). The girl grows up to be the princess (Eleanor Tomlinson). She, through a series of events I shan’t relay here, ends up stuck at the top of the beanstalk when it smashes up through Jack’s small house. The king (Ian McShane) orders his best knight (Ewan McGregor) up the stalk with a team of men with the mission to save the princess at all costs. Among the group are the girl’s clearly villainous betrothed (Stanley Tucci, who doesn’t twirl his mustache, but might as well) and Jack, who has taken a liking to the girl and wants to impress her by joining the rescue party. He also feels a little responsible. After all, he’s the one who lost track of the bean that started the whole mess.

At the top of the beanstalk there be giants, of course. The giants’ world is a playground for standard adventure beats, with the men scurrying to and fro through setpieces that play with scale in all the ways you’d expect. There’s a smattering of silly visual moments – I especially liked one involving pigs in a giant’s oven – and a handful of fine action beats. The problem that Singer and his screenwriters Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dan Studney don’t quite get around to solving – until the charming, unexpected epilogue, that is – is how to overcome the feeling that we’ve been here before. If not literally here, then we’ve at least been in the neighborhood. The characters never rise to the level of even fully inhabited, memorable one-dimensional types. The plot never shakes off the feeling that it’s all just a thin fable that’s been blown all out of proportion and along with it, the tone’s gone all misshapen too. It’s at once oversized and modest, an odd combination for something so ostentatiously expensive, dripping with state-of-the-art effects that are what they are. The stalk vines its way into the sky with a convincing slither, the giants stomp with motion captured weightless weightiness, and the humans more or less convincingly occupy the same spaces as all of the above.

As the movie marches forward, with the humans and giants scrambling about in the forest in the sky and back on the ground the kingdom’s citizenry assemble a sort of Ace in the Hole carnival atmosphere around the stalk’s base, the tone grows into what, if I’m feeling charitable, I’d call relaxed, or, if I’m not, I’d call half baked. Still, it allows some of the performers to really pop. I enjoyed McGregor’s smirking swashbuckling and his delight playing his character’s personality as somewhere between a flip Obi-Wan Kenobi and an excessively dashing Errol Flynn. His answer “Not just yet,” to the question “Are we dead?” is one of the movie’s most memorable moments, as is his laughter in a later scene as he watches a giant get repeatedly stung by bees. In a movie with bounteous visual trickery, he’s the best effect. Everything else, from the bland leading roles to the broadly sketched supporting roles and all the borrowed fantasy frippery in between, is so much sleepiness that’s so close to being fun that it’s all the more disappointing for falling short.