I want to love Jupiter Ascending. SO MUCH. And make no mistake, there is plenty here to keep you entertained, including some beautiful outer space visuals, Channing Tatum's anti-gravity rollerblades, the adorable Elephant Man and every second of Eddie Redmayne's utterly batshit performance which consists solely of hoarse whispers punctuated at random by ear-splitting screams. But in the end, the most impressive thing about the latest Wachowski film is that it somehow manages to feel both thinly drawn and completely overstuffed at the same time. Throw in a surprisingly inert Mila Kunis and a stifled Channing Tatum, add a romance with absolutely no chemistry whatsoever, and you end up with a movie that simply collapses under the weight of its richly detailed yet completely empty spectacle.
And yet, part of me can't wait to watch it again. I guess that's just the kind of guy I am.
Jamie and Bart join me on the podcast to break down this big bad space opera, plus Bart and I continue to forge ahead through the Bourne franchise with The Bourne Supremacy. Bart didn't particularly care for it, while I discovered that I've apparently been confusing it for the third Bourne movie for years. Who knew?
PS: At one point I suggest that the Wachowskis particular brand of storytelling would be far better served by a long form premium TV series, completely forgetting that their next project, Sense8, is exactly that. It airs on Netflix this May. Huzzah!
Next Week: We celebrate Bart's Birthday with Kingsman: The Secret Service and The Bourne Ultimatum.
No one was more surprised than me at how much I enjoyed Magic Mike. My dude-crush on Channing Tatum is now undeniable, as is the majesty of this teaser for the unlikely-yet-impeccably-titled sequel, Magic Mike XXL.
Seriously, this thing is perfect in every way. From Tatum's bench spasms turned gravity-defying dance moves, to Joe Manganiello opening beverages through sheer cock strength, to the sassy "You're Welcome" title card, to the fact that this will seemingly be a film which attempts to glamorize Myrtle fucking Beach. But most of all I adore when Tatum tells Amber Heard his name, does a little spin move, doesn't quite stick the landing but MAINTAINS EYE CONTACT and then saunters off like a boss. You just can't teach that stuff.
Am I a little worried that Soderbergh and McConaughey are both AWOL? Sure. But I'm excited at the addition of Heard, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Glover and even Jada Pinkett Smith. If she does her weird Eartha Kitt voice from Gotham, I'll be over the moon.
Magic Mike XXL will make 50 Shades Of Gray look like a punk ass bitch on July 1st.
Sony's having a rough time of it. In the wake of their massive data breach (which may or may not have been a North Korean preemptive strike against The Interview) all of their dirty laundry is now being made a matter of public record. Right now, as we speak, news agencies have teams of investigators (a.k.a. interns) pouring over all the leaked documents in search of juicy tidbits. I don't really want to encourage this sort of thing, the fact that I am a former Sony employee notwithstanding. That being said, in the last few days some stories have come to light that simply cannot be ignored. Chief among them, the notion that there is currently a Jump Street/Men In Black crossover movie in development.
I'll give you a minute to process that.
The end credits gag in 22 Jump Street pretty effectively took the wind out of every possible alternate spin on the buddy cop genre, so why not turn Jenko and Schmidt into MIB agents? The only real obstacle I can see here is a tonal one. I can't believe I'm about to say this, but the Men In Black movies actually feel way more grounded in reality than Jump Street, which is constantly on the verge of breaking the fourth wall to comment on the cinematic tropes involved, be they in regards to action movies or sequels in general. Would we lose all that in the world of MIB? I would think so, and that thought makes me more than a bit sad. The meta-ness of it all is what makes Jump Street so damn compelling.
For the record, there is currently no script and it's unlikely that Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones would be involved, although I wouldn't rule out a Depp-esque cameo at some point. If they do pop up, I hope it's solely to get killed off in the opening scene. That would make Jenko the new Agent J, yeah?
It's been a long and fretful week over here, which means that I didn't get last week's podcast cut together until Thursday night. Now here it is Friday before I'm finally able to write anything up about it. On top of that, Bart a.k.a. my podcasting Kato will be out of town this weekend, meaning that the podcast will likely be pre-empted next week. Ah well, sometimes them's the breaks.
Anyway, this week we talk about Foxcatcher, a movie full of strong, Oscar-caliber performances that are somewhat mired in a fairly weak story. The big three here are Steve Carrell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo and I really love all three characters in their own peculiar ways. Still, it's hard to top Steve Carrell's Giant Schnoz inexplicably wearing a revolutionary war jacket or referring to himself as Golden Eagle. That's just some top notch shit right there.
We also delve into last week's big trailer releases, particularly Star Wars and Jurassic World. These are old news now, but whatever. You still get to hear Bart's impression of the talking velociraptor from Jurassic Park III.
One of my biggest disappointments of the summer was the loss of the Wachowski's sci-fi epic Jupiter Ascending which was intended to hit theaters in July. We can argue about the diminishing value of the later Matrix movies from now to eternity, but I remain a staunch defender of both Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas. I'll grant you that their aspirations sometimes exceed their capabilities, but I hardly see that as something worth punishing. There are few other filmmakers nearly so bold or exciting in their filmmaking choices, to the point that even the Wachowski's failures are significantly more interesting than most director's successes. You've got to admire them for painting on a huge canvas.
We may have to wait until February to witness Jupiter Ascending in all its weirdness, but in the meantime here's a third trailer to tide you over.
We've got winged lizard people, rocket boots, badass spaceships and another inevitable Sean Bean death! If nothing else, this trailer is really giving the hard sell on the actual story while still showing plenty of oddball alien shit. Again, some of this stuff might just fall flat on screen, but I still can't wait to drink it all in.
Channing Tatum and Steve Carrell look poised to win all the awards this year with Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, the true story of Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz (Tatum) whose complicated relationship with his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo) and team sponsor John Du Pont (Carrell) leads to shocking and violent consequences. It also seems to lead to a lot of sharply protruding jawbones.
It's been a while since I revisited Miller's Capote but I'm awfully fond of Moneyball, which sort of feels like a diet version of The Social Network. That film works largely because of the script's breezy sense of fun, so hopefully Miller will be able to handle this markedly darker tone with just as much energy. I'm also curious to see how Tatum fares with what looks like a lot of heavy lifting in a serious drama, and one where he's not cast largely for his good looks and charm. Tatum has built up a lot of goodwill with me the last few years because of his strong comedy work and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little wary of the return of Wooden Channing.
That said, I find wheezy, graying Steve Carrell with his marble-mouthed Southern drawl downright enthralling.
I'll keep this short and sweet. You should really go see 22 Jump Street because it is funny as shit. In fact, I think it's set a crazy high bar for summer comedies that I don't see anyone else clearing this season. (Sex Tape? Jason Segel, you're better than that.) Hill and Tatum are an amazing and unlikely comic duo and if we're lucky this is just the start of a long running theatrical bromance that will stand the test of time.
Comedy sequels are almost invariably a disappointment (I'm looking at you, Anchorman 2) and 22 Jump Street is actually the exception that proves the rule. There's plenty of stuff that is simply preposterously funny on its own merits, like Channing Tatum's prolonged reaction when Jenko discovers who Schmidt's been sleeping with. But what really puts the movie over the top into true brilliance is the way that it directly comments on the very nature of sequels themselves. By the time we get to the closing credits, directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller absolutely assassinate the idea of continuing the franchise any further while simultaneously eliciting some of the biggest laughs of the whole movie. It's absolutely sublime.
Bart, Jamie and I discuss the movie along with the epic trailer for Birdman, as well as DC's as-yet-unconfirmed and insanely ambitious slate of upcoming titles. You can also hear me get myself into domestic trouble once again. I expect that to be a recurring feature of these podcasts from now until forever.
The Cannes Film Festival is currently underway in France and we're already hearing all sorts of interesting buzz from a few highly anticipated films. Grace Of Monoco starring Nicole Kidman was apparently a huge bust while everybody is raving about Steve Carrell and Channing Tatum in Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher. Get ready for a million "That's what she said" jokes come Oscar season.
Somewhere in the middle ground lies Lost River (formerly How To Catch A Monster), the first film directed by walking meme generator Ryan Gosling. The film was reportedly met by a mix of applause and boos. Cannes audiences are notorious for having extremely vocal and I really think we should follow their example. Look forward to hearing me boo the shit out of Transformers: Age Of ExSTINKtion this summer.
If you want to see what all the fuss is about, here's a fairly cryptic first look teaser. It features moody cinematography, burning things, and a gold sequined Doctor Who screaming about his muscly muscles.
You've gotta give Gosling credit for not taking the easy road. As a darling of the internet and basically the most attractive man alive, he could be churning out a romantic comedy or two or year and making piles of Fuck You Money in the process. Instead Gosling's repeatedly chosen to work with artistic and challenging filmmakers like Nicolas Winding Refn and Derek Cianfrance; the guy's got an odd streak a mile wide and thankfully he's chosen to embrace it. All that being said, it's little wonder that a movie this bizarre would sharply divide audiences and I quite frankly cannot wait to see it.
Once it hit theaters, I expect Tumblr to promptly implode.
I really want to see Godzilla again this week. In listening to this podcast and reading a few reviews, I suspect that we may have been a little unduly harsh on the film and that it might play much better now that I know what to expect.
In our fifteenth episode, Bart (my resident Kaiju Guru) and I might focus largely on the stuff that doesn't work in this new iteration of the character, but rest assured that there's still a lot that does work, and it works like gangbusters. The biggest oversight of this podcast is that we fail to mention the absolutely breathtaking direction by Gareth Edwards. He absolutely kills it, so that even in a scene like the Honolulu landfall where I care very little about the humans scurrying to and fro, the action is staged so perfectly that I'm still riveted to the screen. Anyone who's seen Edwards' first film Monsters shouldn't be surprised that he holds back on the Kaiju mayhem for as long as humanly possible, but when he finally does let loose...HOLY FUCK. I defy you to watch the last 20 minutes of Godzilla without cheering.
The movie had the second best opening of the year so far (trailing only Captain America: The Winter Soldier) so of course Warner Bros has already greenlit a sequel. This can only be good news as Edwards, assuming he returns, can ditch all the deathly dull humans and double down on the King Of The Monsters. If this movie's worst sin is that it leaves me wanting MORE Godzilla, that's a sin I can live with.
Bart and I also mull over the first peek of Ben Affleck as Batman, the deaths of H.R. Giger and Malik Bendjelloul, and the future of the X-Men as Channing Tatum steps into the spicy Cajun shoes of Gambit and Bryan Singer's Days Of Future Past potentially hits the reset button on the entire franchise over Memorial Day Weekend.
"I kinda thought we would just wing it, you know? Running in, guns blazing. Make it up as we go."
A few weeks ago I had the great privilege of traveling to New York City in order to not only attend, but actually officiate the wedding of my two dear friends Rob and Kristina. Rob and I met sixteen years ago on the first day of freshman year of high school. At the end of the previous year, the admissions department had assigned every eighth grader an incoming freshman that they were supposed to call during the summer to answer any questions the new student might have, and so that the new kid would know at least one person when they got to school. I didn't know any of this at the time, but when I happened to start talking to some guys at orientation and eventually introduced myself, Rob turned to me and said, "Oh hey, I was supposed to call you this summer and answer questions or something."
"Don't worry," I answered. "I wasn't really home all summer so you probably wouldn't have gotten a hold of me anyway."
"Good." Rob said. "If anyone asks, I totally called you."
That's how we got to be friends.
Kristina was a girl who went to Emerson with me and actually ended up living with another friend of ours from high school. I suppose I can claim some credit for helping to bring Rob and Kristina together, but then again if Rob hadn't attended USC then I never would have met Jamie. I guess that makes us even.
The wedding was on a Friday night, which meant I had to be there on Thursday for the rehearsal. Fortunately the trip from Boston to New York is fairly painless, so Jamie and I took a Thursday morning Bolt Bus out of South Station. If you're unfamiliar, the Bolt is a fairly inexpensive bus service that provides free wifi on board as well as an electrical plug for each passenger. The wifi usually isn't very fast and the chances that your power outlet will be fully functional are probably about 70/30, but at least it's not as likely to break down and/or flip over like the Fung Wah.
Rob is a big fan of action movies, so when I cleaned out my local Redbox in anticipation of the trip, A Good Day To Die Hard somehow seemed appropriate. The Die Hard franchise is an odd duck. The first movie is a classic, the second is an uninspired retread, the third is exceptionally entertaining (mostly because of Sam Jackson) and the fourth is an overblown mess of action that's really a Die Hard movie in name only. The fifth entry seemed like a bad idea from the start, so it's fair to say my expectations were pretty low.
Not low enough, apparently.
At this point I'm baffled that the entire franchise doesn't have a stake through its heart. Hopefully this Russian non-adventure will finally be the last straw. Willis looks downright bored at this point, and his John McClane is barely even a character anymore. He's just a guy who shows up in the wrong place at the wrong time and is forced to shoot stuff before tiredly muttering "Yipee-kayee" at the end. McClane is interesting in the first and third films because he's got a flawed backstory, separated from his wife and a borderline alcoholic who's ill prepared for the shitstorm he's thrust into as well as being physically incapacitated in some way. (In Die Hard he has no shoes and in With A Vengeance he's perpetually hungover.) It's not that I have a problem with McClane as a family man, and substituting his now grown kids for his wife Holly does alleviate a certain degree of repetition, but all of the wisecracking asshole has been sanded blasted out of McClane and it's becoming increasingly clear that the only reason that Willis keeps making these movies is because someone at Fox is dumb enough to keep paying him just for showing up.
After the initial success of the first Die Hard, there was a glut of pretenders to the thrown, with every other producer in Hollywood pitching "Die Hard on a boat" (a.k.a. Under Siege), "Die Hard on a plane" (a.k.a. Passenger 57), or Die Hard on a bus (a.k.a. Speed). This past year, we got not one but two movies that are essentially "Die Hard in the White House" in the form of Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down, or as I like to call them White Olympus Has Fallen Down. Tragically I missed both in the theater, (I'm planning on a double feature once they both hit DVD) but by all accounts they were each better Die Hard movies than A Good Day To Die Hard, a film whose only redeeming quality is that it makes Live Free Or Die Hard look brilliant by comparison. At this point, I've decided that I'd much rather watch a dozen movies starring Channing Tatum or Ryan Gosling that riff on the basic structure and premise of Die Hard than watch Bruce Willis shuffle around with a shotgun one more time.
It's no fun anymore. Now it's just sad.
We arrived in New York and hopped a train to my friend SJ's apartment in the Bronx. We had time for a quick drink with her and her boyfriend Travis before it was time to head out again. The cab ride over to the rehearsal was filled with the sounds of an ultra-Christian call in show, which is ironic considering that I'm a devout atheist and was on my way to practice officiating a wedding with a ministry certificate I got over the internet. Dinner was a lot of fun, held at a cute little Italian restaurant near the wedding venue in Manhattan. Late in the evening I was goaded by Rob's dad into saying a little something, which I drunkenly tried to conclude by toasting with my water glass. I immediately abandoned the gesture as bad juju, and instead took up my wine glass, which was predictably empty. I ended up toasting with an entire carafe of wine instead.
Classy, I know.
--------------------------------------- Title: A Good Day To Die Hard Director: John Moore Starring: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Rasha Bukvic, Sergei Kolesnikov, Yuliya Snigir, Cole Hauser, May Elizabeth Winstead Year Of Release: 2013 Viewing Method: Redbox DVD (Laptop on a bus)
"It doesn't make you anything you're not. It just makes it easier to be you."
Knowing that we had some late night activities planned, I opted to start the day with a movie rather than end it with one. I've been on a real Soderbergh kick recently, mostly due to the spectre of his apparent retirement from filmmaking. Assuming he maintains his inactive status,* Soderbergh actually ended up with a sort of double swan song; while Behind The Candelabra is his last film, the fact that it was made for HBO means that his final theatrical release is the psycho-pharmaceutical thriller Side Effects. The trailers went pretty far out of their way not to reveal a lot of specifics about the plot mechanics, but it's essentially about a depressed, potentially suicidal woman who stands accused of murder but claims that one of the side effects of her anti-depressants rendered her completely unaware of her own actions. Her shrink (Jude Law) is held responsible in the court of public opinion and launches his own investigation in order to clear his reputation, which leads to the revelation of either a criminal conspiracy or his own psychosis.
I'm not a big fan of the thriller genre, as I feel it's been largely watered down by a glut of generic, boring films (mostly starring Ashley Judd) around the turn of the century. But I have to admit that Side Effects is actually pretty cleverly constructed; whereas most thrillers are built around some specific lack of information, thus forcing the audience to guess at what happened off screen during a key scene, Soderbergh instead goes the other way, showing us everything as it happens until the viewer is sure of what's going on and then pulling the rug out and revealing that was what it seemed. It's a very strong choice, essentially forcing you to empathize with Jude Law even as you begin to question his sanity. The film also has a lot to say about our cultural dependence on medication to solve all our problems as well as some curious double standards in terms of gender in the doctor/patient relationship. While the final few turns of the plot felt a bit murky, it's still thoroughly engrossing. Over the course of watching Side Effects, Candelabra and Magic Mike, I've come to seriously fall in love with Soderbergh's camera work and visual style. If the man really does stop directing films, I think it's a pretty crushing blow to the community at large.
Once Jamie woke up and we'd had breakfast, we decided to return to the northern beaches of Tulum, but this time we'd learned our lesson. We drove instead of walking and we settled into a more secluded spot, complete with shady lounge chairs, purple hammocks and many, many grande caipirinhas delivered right to the beach. We basically had the place to ourselves for the day, a gorgeous little inlet that stayed largely shallow until you reached some decent sized waves out past the rocks. Eventually we went back to Charlie's for a late lunch/early dinner, opting this time for a chorizo quesadilla (my favorite) and chille rellenos.
We took a brief siesta and then drove back out to Akumal to observe sea turtles climbing out of the ocean to lay their eggs up on the shore. The turtles are afraid of white light, so we brought headlamps with red bulbs in order to see in the dark. We were a little worried that the turtles might be a no show due to the bright glow of the an almost full moon and the frequent flash of lightning bolts all along the horizon. But not only did we see multiple tortugas crawling in and out of the surf, but we saw multiple nests and even a little hatchling that Jamie got to hold in the palm of her hand. Apparently the number of turtle nests rises and falls on alternating years, but this year has seen a record high despite being a scheduled low year.
After walking about a kilometer down the beach to see all the nests, we decided it was time to head back around 10:30. We got halfway back to our starting point when suddenly the skies opened up and we were caught in a torrential downpour. The wind whipped the water at us from every angle and the lightning struck so close that it momentarily bleached out my entire field of vision, as if someone had set off a camera flash an inch from my eyeballs. I saw one guy on the beach calling out for his daughter and I could barely hear him over the wind, despite the fact that the was only standing about three feet away. We ducked under a thatched roof mean to provide shade for a couple of lounge chairs until the wind died down and made the remainder of our walk bearable. It was still raining but by then we were soaked to the bone anyway, so we didn't really mind.
But it did make for a soggy drive home and a musty smelling car the next day.
*Turns out we may have little to fear. Since I first wrote this, Soderbergh has already announced that he'll be producing and directing all 10 episodes of Cinemax's new Clive Owen series The Knick, about the Knickerbocker Hospital in downtown New York in the year 1900, before the advent of antibiotics.
--------------------------------------- Title: Side Effects Director: Steven Soderbergh Starring: Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Channing Tatum, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Vinessa Shaw, Ann Dowd Year Of Release: 2013 Viewing Method: Redbox DVD
No, this was not a Wife's Choice. In fact, Jamie hated the movie far more than I did.
For years the line on Channing Tatum was that he was one of those guys who "killed in the room," which is to say that when he sat down with casting directors or producers he was charming and funny and likable and (obviously) good looking. Putting him in your movie seemed like a no brainer. But once cameras started rolling it was Tatum himself who appeared to lack brain activity. He came off stiff, boring and he had no chemistry with anyone. The guy was pretty much unwatchable.
When I tell that story to my future kids, they're never going to believe me.
Just a few years later Tatum is not only watchable, he's magnetic. He's got personality oozing out his perfect cheekbones and on top of all that he's fucking hilarious. In fact, I find myself inordinately excited for movies like White House Down simply because of Tatum's presence. There are two movies we can credit for suddenly propelling his career to the next level and they were both released in 2012. The first is Phil Lord and Chris Miller's brilliant 21 Jump Street, one of the funniest movies released that year. The second is Steven Soderbergh's stripper anthem Magic Mike.
In Jump Street Tatum is paired with Jonah Hill, playing a physically adept but intellectually stunted cop. Hill does the real emotional heavy lifting in the film, leaving Tatum free to look cool in the action scenes and be generally hilarious. That's not to minimize his comedic skills; before Jump Street you could not have convinced me that the man would be able to match humorous wits with Carrot Top, let alone Jonah Hill. But you can tell that, as opposed to something like G.I. Joe: Rise Of Cobra, the pressure is largely off here. Tatum is absolutely essential to the film's greatness but he doesn't have to carry the thing single-handedly. Without that weight on his shoulders, he's able to really loosen up and be the guy who wins over producers so easily.
There's a similar factor at play in Magic Mike. The script by Reid Carolin was largely influenced by Tatum's own experiences as a Florida stripper before he got into modeling and later acting. The fact that he's in a familiar world here goes a long way towards elevating Tatum's comfort on camera, but so does the copious amount of dancing. Just like we all go to Michael Bay movies to see shit explode, a big part of the draw here is seeing good looking, muscular dudes show off their assets on stage. But this isn't just grinding and ass-shaking, this is legitimate dancing with impressive choreography and Tatum is more than equipped handle the challenge. He and the other dancers really shine whenever they're up in front of the screaming ladies of Tampa, dressed in a variety of amusing costumes that range from Tarzan to cowboys to Tatum's shirtless paramilitary getup.
Again, it's as if knowing that he's got a handful of ace dance numbers up his sleeve gives Tatum the freedom to be himself throughout the scripted stuff. He's got an easy, almost goofy charm as Magic Mike that makes you simply fall in love with the guy as he struggles to leave the stripping life behind in favor of his dream career of designing and building custom furniture. He's got two love interests in the form of Olivia Munn as his frequent booty call and Cody Horn as the sister of his protege "The Kid" played by Alex Pettyfer. Tatum has an easy rapport with both actresses and the relationship with the no-nonsense Horn (who's a dead ringer for Missy Peregrym) works precisely because it's kept to a minimum. We don't get any of the cliched, expected story beats given the set-up (they fall for each other, her brother gets pissed and lashes out, etc) and it never feels like the story hinges on whether or not they get together. All they have to do is make each other laugh and look hot walking on the beach.
Then again, the story doesn't really hinge on much of anything, which is precisely what drove Jamie up a wall. The movie sort of meanders around a couple of half-hearted plotlines without ever focusing on any of them. There's Mike's furniture-based aspirations, his constant hustling at a half dozen jobs, his mentorship-turned-rivalry with The Kid, his double edged relationship with Matthew McConaughey's Dallas* and his romance with The Kid's nurse sister. Throw in a drug overdose and a violent shakedown with some dealers and you end up with a collection of vapor stories that never quite coalesce into a full-blown plot. I enjoyed Tatum's performance and Soderbergh's sharp eye enough that I was willing to overlook it to a certain degree, but I can see why Jamie found it so frustrating to watch. But in a way that seems like an even bigger test of an actor's ability. Can they give a performance that elevates a mediocre script into a movie worth watching?** That takes a special kind of something.
I think that Tatum has a lot of room to grow and I mean that in the best way possible. He can clearly handle both comedy and action. Careers have been built on far less. I'm actually curious to see Tatum really start to stretch himself dramatically in the future. He recently did nice work in the high school reunion flick 10 Years, and perhaps he'd benefit by doing some more ensemble pictures where he can soak in the work of some talented veterans. He was pushed into starring roles pretty quickly when he might have been better served by paying his dues and slowly working his way up the Hollywood ladder. But I think that the driven aspect of Magic Mike, the guy who's always working and willing to go in any direction and seize any opportunity to achieve his goals is also true of Tatum himself. He certainly doesn't seem interested in coasting on his success and the guy seems up for just about anything, as evidenced by his absurd appearance in one of this summer's biggest comedies. Tatum's got the Wachowskis' sci-fi epic Jupiter Ascending coming next year and, after being totally floored by Cloud Atlas, I'm fascinated to see what kind of performance Andy and Lana are able to coax out of him. No matter where Tatum goes from here, it's sure to be an interesting journey.
And I'm totally on board.
*Also not to be undersold is McConaughey's performance. Dallas is one of those roles that simply couldn't be played by anyone else - for shit's sake, at one point he comes out on stage with bongos. The guy is on a cinematic hot streak the likes of which I've never seen and right now I'm just enjoying the ride... **To be clear, Tatum is only half the reason Magic Mike works as well as it does. The other half is Soderbergh, whose direction and cinematography are frankly superb. His adoption of the digital aesthetic really works here, with the dark sheen of the strip club standing in stark contrast to the hazy golden Florida exteriors.
--------------------------------------- Title: Magic Mike Director: Steven Soderbergh Starring: Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Matthew McConaughey, Cody Horn, Olivia Munn, Matthew Bomer, Joe Manganiello Year Of Release: 2012 Viewing Method: HBO HD
Lately I've been feeling like there hasn't been enough variation in my cinema diet. I've watched a lot of movies from the last two or three years, mostly through Netflix Instant. I have no doubt that once the summer movie season really gets into gear I'll be spending a lot more time in the theater, but there have certainly been a few new releases that have piqued my curiosity, even if my expectations aren't particularly high.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation falls squarely into that category. Before venturing out, I re-watched Stephen Sommers's G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra just for comparison purposes. My recollection was that the movie itself was essentially kind of fun in a cartoonish, over-the-top kind of way, somewhat appropriate considering the source material. The biggest stumbling block was casting Channing Tatum in the lead role of Duke. Putting it kindly, Tatum still hadn't really loosened up and shown any of his own real life charisma on screen. Putting it unkindly, Tatum was a walking absence of personality and seemed incapable of walking and talking at the same time. So, when the new creative team set about to make a sequel, they made the downright ballsy move to redefine the franchise by killing off Duke in the very beginning of the film. At the time, it seemed like a great idea, a clever way to recognize the first film's mistakes and literally expunge them.
Then 21 Jump Street happened. And Magic Mike.
Surprisingly, Tatum was not only watchable, he was entertaining. Turns out the guy is really funny! And on top of that, he's box office gold. All of a sudden Tatum's early onscreen demise seemed like a terrible miscalculation. So, at the last minute, the producers pushed the film's release back nine months, ostensibly for 3-D conversion but also to shoot extra scenes with Tatum to squeeze in before Duke's execution.
I'm certainly glad they did, as the first 15 minutes or so is mostly scenes with Duke and Roadblock (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) being hilarious. This stuff engenders so much goodwill that it makes everything else feel like more fun than it really is. In fact, I wish the whole rest of the movie was just the two of them shooting bad guys and making fun of each other. (Seriously, someone put these two in a buddy cop movie STAT!) Unfortunately, it's not meant to be, as Duke's death, along with the rest of the G.I. Joes, is unavoidable, the inciting incident that sets the rest of the scatter-brained story in motion.
I'm not gonna delve into the plot, as it's fairly simple: The three surviving Joes have to figure out who set them up and why in order to foil the plot of the evil Cobra Commander. There are a few problems, the first one being that our heroes spend half the movie just catching up to what the audience knows before they walk into the theater, as the replacement of the U.S. President (Jonathan Pryce) by a Cobra agent is the only real thread picked up from the previous movie. To make matters worse, our three surviving Joes are booooooring. Roadblock is clearly upset about the slaughter of Duke and the other Joes, but there's no real exploration of his desire for revenge, which is an odd choice considering that the name of the movie is "Retaliation." There are a few moments where we're reminded what's motivating Roadblock (including him dropping a huge pile of dogtags on a coffee table) but we never get a sense of real anger, righteous or otherwise, as if the producers were afraid of letting the film get too dark. Once Tatum exits, so does Johnson's personality. Adrienne Palicki is fine as Lady Jaye despite being given the bare minimum of dialogue that can be mistaken for character development. Anyone who's familiar with her work from Friday Night Lights knows that Palicki's got chops and one of these days someone's gonna put her in a movie worthy of her talents. This isn't it. Last is Flint, played by D.J. Cotrona, who somehow manages to channel Tatum's anti-performance in the first film. He is a non-entity, and he made me wish that Flint had died saving Duke instead of the other way around.
Oh yeah, there's also Snake Eyes, the faceless, black-clad ninja Joe. His is the most clumsily handled story, but amazingly it ends up yielding my favorite two non-Tatum related things in the film. Snake Eyes is MIA (but often referenced) for the first half hour or so of the movie. While I'm sure it was meant to be mysterious, instead it just feels like they forgot about him, especially when it's revealed that he's really just training an inconsequential new apprentice named Jinx in the house of the Blind Master, played by RZA. That's right, RZA plays a blind ninja master, complete with bleached out eyes and a complete lack of articulation. It's fantastic, and you can tell he's just having gobs of fun with it. Snake Eyes and Jinx eventually head up into the mountains to capture his nemesis Storm Shadow, leading to a really fun sequence that's been heavily featured in the trailers and TV spots, with the ninjas all fighting each other on zip lines, rappelling down the face of a cliff. It's visually inventive while also being just plain cool.
Everything else is pretty uninspired. Jonathan Pryce is clearly enjoying himself in dual roles as both the real and imposter President. The scene in the bunker where he fucks with all the other world leaders is particularly great. Casting Bruce Willis as the original G.I. Joe seemed like a great idea and he even wears the old school army greens of the early over-sized toys. Unfortunately Willis looks beyond bored here, displaying little to no personality on screen. This feels like the epitome of a paycheck performance. The continuation of the Snakes Eyes/Storm Shadow storyline feels like a misfire, which is a shame as it was one of the more interesting aspects of the first film. The villains are largely dull; there's a prison break sequence when they free Cobra Commander (captured in the last film), but abandon Destro, seemingly for no other reason than they couldn't get Christopher Eccleston back and they didn't want to animate his head for the whole movie. Speaking of "not back for the sequel," Joseph Gordon-Levitt is understandably gone as Cobra Commander, replaced by up-and-comer Luke Bracey. He's fine, spending all but seven seconds of the movie behind a much improved chrome mask. He looks great, but I will admit that I miss the old screechy voice from the cartoon of my youth. Despite some large scale destruction, the film's finale is practically paint-by-numbers. What's worse, it feels cheap, with Roadblock driving around a very flimsy looking tank that's seemingly made out of PVC pipe, firing at unseen bad guys before finally engaging in the beyond-tired cliche fistfight for a remote control.
As much as I've shit on this movie, it's really not all that bad. It's pretty inoffensive and fairly enjoyable while you're in it, there's just nothing really notable that stays with you after you've walked out of the theater. The first movie is a mess, but it's a mess that really goes for something, with it's crazy accelerator suits, futuristic weapons and cool vehicles. That's a perfectly reasonable approach when you're making a movie based on a line of toys, even if it ultimately doesn't pay off. Instead, Retaliation just feels like a boilerplate military adventure flick that happens to be populated with familiar characters. It's water off a duck's back, the kind of movie that you'll find playing on FX some Saturday afternoon 18 months from now and you'll leave it on in the background while you check your email and clean up around the house. You'll look up for the mountain fight scene and anything with RZA, you'll be disappointed that you wandered in 40 minutes into the movie and missed all the Channing Tatum stuff, and then three hours later you'll go out to dinner and forget you were ever watching it in the first place.
--------------------------------------- Title: G.I. Joe: Retaliation Director: John M. Chu Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Adrienne Palicki, D.J. Cotrona, Channing Tatum, Jonathan Pryce, Luke Bracey, Bruce Willis Year Of Release: 2013 Viewing Method: Theater, Showcase Revere
