RED 2; Oblivion

RED 2

I enjoyed RED, the movie about Dame Helen Mirren machine-gunning baddies while wearing a slinky white evening gown.

RED 2 is more of the same, but it suffers from its lack of novelty. There are new baddies and a new evening gown, but the entire film basically exists to showcase older actors shooting younger ones while tossing off one-liners that make us worry more for their mental health than their physical safety. It's still fun, but it's not much of a surprise this time around. You may want to give this one a pass.

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Oblivion

Oblivion is a beautifully crafted, high-concept sci-fi action picture – the kind of thing I usually go for.

In the film, Tom Cruise plays a drone repairman in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. By night, he lives in a beautiful, modern outpost. By day, he braves the wilderness to find downed (alien-hunting) drones, fix them, and sic them on any Morlock-like aliens they should happen to find.

And away we go. As I said, I enjoy this kind of thing. And I enjoyed it well enough, but something about it seemed rote. Cruise ran away from an explosion. Cruise was forced to choose between improbably beautiful, age-inappropriate women. Cruise saved the world and earned a respectful head-nod from a reluctant ally. You know – the usual. The big concept was the metaphor for American drone wars in a part of the world that's basically a pre-industrial hellscape. And that was it.

I'm not saying that Oblivion was bad. Generally speaking, Tom Cruise doesn't make bad movies. It just seemed limp, uninspired. If you're in the mood for a Tom Cruise science fiction film, go see Edge of Tomorrow again. Now, that's a movie!

The Lego Movie

The Lego Movie is clever, visually pleasing, and flat-out hilarious. My wife and I have been quoting it back and forth to each other for weeks.

The film begins as a relatively straightforward action-adventure, albeit with a Lego twist. The cleverness comes from two sources: the gags, which seem mostly to consist of taking down mainstream culture in general (a bold move for a mainstream film) and Batman in particular, and the structure. I particularly enjoyed all the digs at the Caped Crusader, whom I've always found to be a ridiculous character better suited to Adam West than Christian Bale. It's difficult to praise the film's structure without getting into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that the movie takes everything you know about how these movies go, inverts it, then twists it sideways. It works, it's seamless, and it's wonderfully creative. I loved it.

Visually, The Lego Movie looks great. In fact, I've never seen a film animated quite like this one. It looks like a computer rendering of stop-motion animation using actual, used Legos, some of which appear to have been scavenged from one of the piles on my kids' bedroom floor. Some light research tells me that filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller (of the hilarious 21 Jump Street and good-enough Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) employed a computer program that modeled how actual bricks to fit together to ensure that most everything shown onscreen can actually be built. The effect? A palpable sense of wonder.

Finally, The Lego Movie is hilarious. Now, I'm an easy laugh – when my wife and I used to frequent comedy clubs, we'd always get seated right up front because laughter's infectious. That said, I laughed out loud throughout this film. From little gags like Abraham's Lincoln's unique mode of transportation to Will Arnett's 90-minute Batman parody, this picture scores again and again and again.

In short, everything about The Lego Movie is awesome. I can't wait for Lord & Miller's next picture.

The Dark Knight Rises

I saw The Dark Knight Rises while staying home with a sick child.  Consequently, I saw it in two sessions while my little one slept.  I spent the film’s entire 2.5-hour running time with my finger on the volume control.

The problem, at least with the film’s BluRay release, lies in the sound mixing.  The gunfire and explosions are so loud in comparison with the dialogue that I felt it was giving me a choice between waking my son during the action sequences or understanding the dialogue during the rest.  If you live in an apartment or share space with people who don’t wish their living room to sound like Armageddon, be warned.

On to the movie.  The Dark Knight Rises asks the filmic question: what if the Occupy people get their wish?  Its answer: French Revolution 2.  Despotism.  Kangaroo Courts.  Chaos.  Only the rich, working anonymously and unfettered from the rule of law, can protect the cringing middle class from the depredations of the fickle mob.

I’m not even a hippie, and I could see that message as if it were carefully painted in Sterno on an icy bridge in the middle of the night and set afire because some rich guy thought it would look cool.

Ok, but is the film any good?  Well, it does move along at a speedy clip, the freakishly beautiful Anne Hathaway actually made me forget about Michelle Pfeiffer for a good two hours, the rest of the cast turns in respectable performances in none-too-demanding roles, and lots of stuff blows up real good.  In other words, you get what you paid for.

Just keep your finger on that volume button.

Red

RED is a silly, ultraviolent, pulpy action picture that features Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown.

I know.  I had you at “Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown.”  Now, try this on: “Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown, wielding a machine gun.”

Woof.

Here’s the story: Bruce Willis is a retired CIA covert ops guy.  For reasons that will be revealed later, the CIA decides that he and his buddies all need to die, and quickly.  Well, as we’ve learned in The Losers, The Expendables, and The A Team, it’s always a bad idea to try to kill off covert ops guys – they can kill back.

So what?  What differentiates this from the other three “superduper commando teams solve the mystery and kill a bunch of people” movies that came out last year?

Um.  Helen Mirren.  Slinky white evening gown.  Machine gun.

Ok, there’s more to RED than Dame Helen Mirren mowing down hostiles while clothed in a slinky white evening gown.  Bruce Willis is a natural movie star who’s just plain fun to watch.  His team is made entirely of outstanding actors: Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, even James Remar and Mary-Louise Parker.  We also get the Great Ernest Borgnine in a crucial supporting role and Karl Urban and Richard Dreyfuss as villains.  We’re talking about serious wattage here: these people know how to own a movie screen.

And it works.  All that charisma carries RED’s wafer-thin story for a solid hour and a half of gunfire, ‘splosions, and a brand of carefree murder so blasé that we cease to think of the targets as characters and see them as the stuntmen they are.  Red turns out to be silly, fun, anarchic, and a great time at the movies.

I just wish I’d seen it on the big screen.

The Dark Knight

I went into THE DARK KNIGHT skeptically, wondering whether the ballyhoo surrounding Ledger's performance was justified or sentimental. It was justified.

The Joker, as written in this film, is a high wire character. The actor who plays him will either fail or succeed spectacularly, and Ledger succeeds. His Joker is terrifying and sad and sickly funny and wholly compelling, the Joker by which other incarnations of the character will be judged. As for Batman and Gordon and Dent and Dawes, well, they're all fine, but the fact is that I can barely remember them. That Joker, though, he gives me the shivers. And not in a good way. From voice to mannerisms to makeup to worldview, he's a complete character, one who espouses chaos while wreaking it through meticulous planning; one whose backstory shifts and morphs with each retelling; one you can't put your finger on, but who stays with you.

Wow, what a performance. What a movie. I look forward to seeing THE DARK KNIGHT again.

Gone Baby Gone

Since I'm unfamiliar with South Boston, I can't comment on the veracity Ben Affleck's vision of that locale and the people who live there. I can, however, say that his portrayal felt sufficiently true that it almost made me forget that I was looking at actors, as opposed to real Dorchester residents.

I say "almost" because right there, in the middle of the movie, there pops up the perfect complement to "The Wire" veteran Amy Ryan: Omar himself, one Mister Michael K. Williams. Here, Williams plays a straight-shooting cop and deliverer of inside dope to hero Casey Affleck. One can hope that, should GONE BABY GONE inspire sequels, Williams's role will grow.

But that's neither here nor there. What matters is that, with GONE BABY GONE, Ben Affleck has gone and crafted a genuinely excellent film. Here's a movie that I thought was finished around halfway through, then took me into completely unexpected territory. Maybe I'm a sucker, but I didn't see any of the later developments coming, and I appreciated the ride and the director's faith in that ride.

GONE BABY GONE looks great, or as great as I suppose South Boston can look. It's well written, well shot, and well performed. Good on you, Mr. Affleck.

Evan Almighty

Oh, how I loathed EVAN ALMIGHTY. Here's a movie that takes the most banal platitudes:
((1) Dad needs to make more time for the kids.
(2) McMansions are bad.
(3) SUVs, and particularly Hummers, are bad.
(4) Development is bad. (5) Realtors are bad (ok, that was a new one).
(6) Animals are good.
(7) That "random acts of kindness" meme is the height of Divine truth.
(7) Wanda Sykes is funny.),

combines them with stunning ignorance:
((1) Small-time TV news co-anchors and congressmen can afford giant houses and fabulous cars.
(2) House committee chairmen are just slightly less powerful than the President.
(3) Congressional chiefs of staff and legislative aids are basically the same thing.
(4) A committee chairman can fire a congressman.
(5) The Blue Ridge Mountains are short commute to DC.
(6) God is a moron.
(7) Anyone would choose to live in Buffalo instead of anywhere else in the world, including Port au Prince.),

and creates a lazy, preachy, treacly, unfunny mess of a film that amused my 7-yr-old, but made my wife and me want to stick forks in our eyes.

EVAN ALMIGHTY's jokes are lame. Its characterizations are lame. Its politics are lame. Its religion is lame. Its dialogue, its CGI, its direction, its music, its buildup, its climax, its ending, even its closing credits are lame (Ok, its ending and closing credits are more desperate than lame, but still...). Morgan Freeman makes for an agreeable King of Kings and Steve Carrell makes for an agreeable prophet, but that's about all this movie has to offer. Avoid, avoid, avoid this movie. It's not worth seeing.

March of the Penguins

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS spends an hour and twenty minutes anthropomorphizing birds. It's bad science and it's bad film.

Sure, it looks great. Emperor penguins are cute and the Antarctic is beautiful, so it's pretty hard to screw up that element of the film. Nevertheless, I just couldn't get past the film's conceit that penguins are basically people with beaks. They aren't, and all of Morgan Freeman's protestations to the contrary can't make it so. I spent my viewing time utterly mystified as to why this documentary was such a huge hit.

Million Dollar Baby

MILLION DOLLAR BABY worked, from beginning to end. Where some saw a hodgepodge of cliches, I saw the assured hand of a master filmmaker paring a genre down to its core elements, then working those elements to create a simple, yet effective picture. It's hard to believe MILLION DOLLAR BABY is from the same guy who made BLOODWORK.

One friend of mine took issue with the portrayal of Swank's white trash family, seeing it as a cheap shot at the demographic America loves to hate (or at least mock): hillbillies. I found the characterization to be effective and wholly realistic. I've spent a little time around that particular demographic, and I thought it was refreshing to see characterizations that spoke more to my personal experience than to the standard Hollywood dictum that poverty = saintliness.

Regardless, I thought that MILLION DOLLAR BABY was an effective motion picture. Its fight scenes were far more exciting than those in the last three ROCKY movies, and they knock out UNDISPUTED in the first round. The leads were all interesting and engaging, and I was happy to follow them on their journey.

There's a fair amount of hate for MILLION DOLLAR BABY out there, but not from me. I think it's a winner.