Spy

I’ve been slow to climb aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  Her performance in Bridesmaids reminded me of Chris Farley, who made a string a successful movies built around fat jokes.  Sadly, Farley was consumed with self-loathing, and the drugs to which he turned eventually killed him.  Thus, it felt cruel to go to the movies just to laugh at the fat lady.  Cruelty is not my idea of a good time.

And yet, there I was: stuck in Coach on a long flight, having already seen most of the pictures the in-flight entertainment system had to offer.  I remembered that Spy garnered good reviews, so I decided to give it a (skeptical) shot.

I laughed all the way through Spy, from the first silly gag involving bats in the CIA Comm Center through the silly gags involving various sequel ideas that played through the closing credits.  Spy is not 90 minutes of laughing at the fat lady.  It’s 90 minutes of laughing with the clever, capable woman who just happens to be a little larger than normal.  Oh, and lots of laughing at Jason Statham.  Jason Statham.  Who knew?

Here’s the setup: McCarthy is a “back room” CIA agent along the lines of Mission: Impossible’s Simon Pegg.  Like Pegg, she winds up doing field work even though nobody (including her) thinks she’s up to the task.  Like Pegg, she turns out to be awesome.

Spy, of course, plays this setup entirely for laughs.  To do so, it recruits a murderer’s row of some of the finest supporting talent working in movies today, from Jude Law to Rose Byrne to Bobby Cannavale to Morena Baccarin to Peter Sarafinowicz to Allison Janney.  And this isn’t the kind of movie in which various big name supporting actors just turn up to cash a paycheck: each of them endows his or her character with enough personality, enough life, to make every moment pop.  Even the Big Bad, while dangerous enough to present a credible threat within the context of the film, exhibits just enough silliness to put a smile on our face.

I loved this movie.  Spy is raunchy and goofy and laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, and it’s all that not only without demeaning its star, but with making her absolutely awesome.  Writer/Director Paul Feig nails it, and I’m now firmly aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  I can’t wait to see what the two of them do with Ghostbusters.

Death Race

There are some actors out there who are in it for the paycheck. There are some who are in it solely to explore their art. There are some who explore their art when they can and take the paycheck when they must.

I guess Joan Allen had bills to pay.

I'm tempted to write that DEATH RACE is a bad, bad movie. Its races are incomprehensible agglomerations of gunfire, explosions, and quick-cuts that left me utterly mystified. When a movie's ostensibly about racing, even death racing, shouldn't one be able to tell who's in the lead, or even what's going on, without a ranking board popping up every now and then? Ms. Allen has a climactic outburst of villainy that was so ridiculous I nearly laughed. And don't get me started on the crime to Robin Shou's hair that this film represents.

But 40-year-olds with colds who can't muster the energy to do more than see a bad movie are not the target demographic of this particular film. The target demographic of this particular film is males aged 15-25. I saw this movie at an on-base movie theater at a naval airfield in Japan. The crowd was 100% male, and I'm pretty sure I was twice the age of the next-oldest guy there.

They loved it.

They cheered the explosions. They laughed at the comical kills. They howled at the pretty women. They hooted at the dialogue. Man, they ate DEATH RACE up. It was like their favorite video game come to life. On the way out, they chatted and laughed and high-fived and generally went home happy.

So, hey, if you're a 15-25 year old guy, you'll probably love DEATH RACE. If not, well, you'd better have one hell of a cold.

The Italian Job

Oh, how I love 2003's THE ITALIAN JOB.

This is a movie that looks great, that sounds great, that's packed with charismatic and interesting stars, and that is both complex enough to reward careful viewing and broad enough to play in the background at a get-together. It's not the greatest heist movie ever (That's RIFIFI. If you haven't seen it, your life has no meaning.), but it does everything it needs to do, and it does it with style.

THE ITALIAN JOB begins with a job in, well, Italy. Venice (top city on my 'to visit' list), to be precise, and the job is a clockwork masterpiece of timing, guts, and skill. From there, we're on to a world of doublecrosses, revenge, Charlize Theron looking impossibly beautiful, fun dialogue, neat car chases, exciting practical stunts, and did I mention Charlize Theron looking impossibly beautiful?

The last time I saw this movie, it played in the background during an impromptu get-together. It was easy to settle into during lulls in the conversation, and it had lots of pretty pictures to display when the talk picked back up again. What a fun movie.

The Transporter 2

The Transporter 2 takes direct aim at your inner child and gives it everything it could possibly want. If, that is, your inner child is a 15-year-old boy.

Fortunately, mine is: I had a great time with TT2. It's basically action porn, with a paper-thin plot just moving us from one set piece to the next. It pays minimal attention to character development or motivation, but it does spend a lot of time lovingly filming cars in various states of speeding, sliding, flying, rolling, and getting shot at. This is a movie that goes easy on the dialogue and heavy on the kicking of people in the face, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Bring on The Transporter 3!

Crank

Last fall, I was faced with a dilemma. I had one night at an airbase in Rota, Spain, and CRANK was showing at the base theater. I generally like Jason Statham movies, and I wanted to see this one. I’d been to Rota many times before and felt that the city had little new to offer. Nevertheless, it was Spain and I did know that CRANK would show up on Netflix after a while. Ultimately, I chose to go out. Even if Rota was a familiar city, after all, it was Spain.

I chose well, for, as it turns out, I am not CRANK’s target demographic. In fact, this film was made with such laserlike focus that anyone who is not a male between the ages of fifteen and seventeen is not CRANK’s target demographic. CRANK is pure adolescent male fantasy with a Nietszchian disregard for anything like the bounds of societal restraint. In the world of CRANK, every car goes fast, every gun makes a big loud bang, every normal person is either a target or an obstacle, and every woman is merely a vagina transportation system. This movie scorns everyone and everything, except for men with power, and it gets tiresome quite quickly.

I have no problem with Crank’s premise: a hit man has been injected with a compound that will kill him if his heartbeat gets too low, so he needs to keep the adrenalin flowing just to stay alive – now he’s got to keep his heart racing long enough to exact revenge. It’s a great idea, and Jason Statham is a great choice for such a role in such a movie. It’s the execution that bothers me: the fight choreography is pedestrian and the editing indecipherable; the only noninterchangeable female character is an insufferable idiot whose only redeeming trait is her nonstop sexual availability; and the postproduction work is so intrusive that not only did it keep reminding me that I was watching a movie, it kept reminding me that I was watching a bad movie.

If CRANK had trusted its premise, had trusted its star, had trusted in the moviegoer’s recognition that women are, in fact, human beings, it could have been a fun action picture. But then, what do I know? I’m not a male between fifteen and seventeen. I am so glad I went out in Rota.