R.I.P.D.

I liked Men in Black. I liked Ghostbusters. I like Jeff Bridges, Ryan Reynolds, and Kevin Bacon. R.I.P.D. is a mashup up of Ghostbusters and Men in Black starring Jeff Bridges, Ryan Reynolds, and Kevin Bacon. All the movie had to do to get me on its side was not screw up.

R.I.P.D. did not screw up.

Here's the setup: Ryan Reynolds, a Boston cop of questionable moral character, gets killed and assigned to the Police Department of the Dead. A rookie on this new force, he gets partnered with Western lawman Jeff Bridges (riffing on his True Grit character) and is off to save the world.

From there, it's one gag after another as the two cops face off against a panoply of poorly-rendered CGI undead monsters. Wait – don't go away. The poor rendering is a feature, not a bug. This is a lighthearted comedy-horror-action picture, and the monsters' artificiality creates sufficient distance to keep them more amusing than scary. I smiled, I chuckled, I nodded along happily as I watched people I like fight neat monsters in a movie that entertained me from beginning to end.

All this, and James Hong to boot. What more could you ask for in your light summer entertainment?

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!

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 Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSIE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD ("ASSASSINATION," hereafter), is what you get when you put the director of photography in charge of editing. Here's a movie filled with beautiful images that linger, linger, and finally overstay their welcome. ASSASSINATION is an interesting movie. It's a beautiful movie. It could have been a great movie if it had just moved the heck along.

Casey Affleck plays Robert Ford, a man who gives Frank James the creeps just by being around, and who creeps him more the more he is around. Unfortunately, he creeps us out, too, making the seventeen hours the movie spends with the guy remarkably uncomfortable. Robert is, um, fond of Jessie in a creepily warped hero worship / deeply closeted homosexual kind of way. But Robert makes the ultimate mistake for a hero worshipper: he gets too close to the object of his admiration and learns that his hero is just a man, after all.

In the case of Brad Pitt's Jessie James, his hero isn't just a man, but an increasingly unstable psychotic who represents a danger to himself and everyone around him. Hell, by the time Ford takes his shot, it's a no-brainer. And in the moral world of the James gang, a world in which shooting a man in the back is just another day at the office, it makes perfect sense. And that works, and Pitt and Affleck are both quite good (as is the underappreciated Sam Rockwell as Robert's older brother Charley), and everything's fine, but the movie is just so damn slow.

This is a picture whose sunsets seem like they're in real time. Caterpillars mature into butterflies faster than ASSASSINATION moves along. Everything is so stately, so operatic, and for what? The murder of some other murderer? Maybe you have "get" the romance of the James Gang to "get" this movie, but all I saw was a bunch of thugs being led by a charismatic thug who eventually got what was coming to him.

No, thanks.