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Review: ‘Men in Black III’ (a surprisingly superior unnecessary threequel)

Posted by grimdreaper on

Third time’s the charm; director Barry Sonnenfeld finally nails a story cool enough for the Men in Black.

Imprisoned for over forty years, illegal alien Boris “The Animal” (Jemaine Clement) escapes a maximum security prison to exact revenge on the MIB agent who put him away: Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones). The evil alien’s scheme will exact revenge on his jailer and on the Earth itself, but it requires going back in time to 1969. When all traces of Agent K suddenly disappear from the present, Agent J (Will Smith) is the only person who can remember the correct timeline and his partner being alive. As an alien invasion force begins the systematic destruction of all life on Earth, Agent J time jumps to the past, but can he save his partner, stop the bad guy, rescue the Earth, prevent destroying his own timeline, and resurrect a fifteen year-old franchise before the credits roll?

It’s easy to love the concept and characters of Men in Black; the actual films, however, have always seemed hit and miss. The original film was 98 minutes long but seemed too short, hitting its stride right at the finish line and feeling like there should have been more. The sequel was 88 minutes but seemed too long, rehashing the same bits and leaving the MIB agency feeling slapstick rather than incidentally comical. At its core, the whole concept is a sci-fi police procedural, so why construct scenes solely for the sake of a comedy bit when it could be made to serve the story and remain entertaining? MIB III seems to get this at last, giving the Agency and its characters their due while answering some of the oldest questions about K and J that you probably forgot all about.

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Review: ‘Battleship’ (sailors vs. aliens vs. board games vs. plot holes)

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Does a heartfelt and kick ass third act make up for ninety minutes of meandering? Okay, it’s a little better than you were expecting, but not much.

Meet Hopper (Taylor “John Carter/Friday Night Lights” Kitsch), a troubled young man with a heart of gold. Smart, fit, but rudderless, his older brother (Alexander Skarsgård) makes him (?!) join the US Navy, which he pretty much does to get with a girl (Brooklyn Decker). The girl, of course, also happens to be the daughter of an admiral (Liam Neeson) who doesn’t like Hopper or the fact he keeps screwing up. On the eve of losing everything, a deep space communication project based in Hawaii finally yields results: an alien force crash lands into the Pacific ocean. Faster than you can say Pop-a-Matic bubble, a force field dome cuts off the bulk of the naval fleet from Hawaii, leaving only Hopper, a handful of surface ships, and crack teams of special effects wizards to save the world.

Considering this film was developed for Hasbro as a vehicle to push a board game, it’s the pro-military, all aliens are bad, big and loud and dumb special effects summer blockbuster left vacant this year by Michael “Eat Your Awesome” Bay and his Transformers films (except the ships don’t change into giant robots). What’s frustrating is that the third act and big finish is actually kinda cool if completely implausible, the kind of ending that makes guys enlist in the service to fly jet fighters and kill pirates instead of sweeping compartments and painting bulkheads. For the rest of the film, the narrative is simply all over the place, a pile of excuses to get the characters we want where we want them to be just in time to save the day.

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Review: ‘The Dictator’ (committing crimes against humanity for hilarity)

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Do you find rape, murder, oppression, and gross ignorance hilarious? The Dictator hopes you do.

His Excellency, Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen), supreme ruler of the Republic of Wadiya, is ordered to appear before “the jackals” who run the so-called United Nations. It seems Aladeen is intent on developing nuclear weapons and, of course, refuses to let UN inspectors in to see if he’s really about to do so. Unfortunately, the world’s last dictator has envious enemies around every corner, and a vile betrayal in New York City finds Aladeen on the streets, penniless, and unrecognizable. When a local activist (Anna Faris) takes him in out of pity, Aladeen is given the means to take back his regime, but will he still be the kind of kindly, iron-fist ruler his beloved oppressed people have come to pretend to love?

Most Americans know comedic actor Sacha Baron Cohen as the voice of King Julian in the Madagascar movies, but they may also know him as Ali G, Borat, Bruno, and a host of other egotists who are so distinctly different that they are virtually unrecognizable as the same person. Cohen is a brilliantly metamorphic comedian that is rarely ever caught breaking character, but one similarity that most of the characters demonstrate is a complete disregard for anyone outside of their closed-off little worlds. Where most of Cohen’s films exploit non-actors falling for his ruse, this dictator has been banished to one of those flash-in-the-pan SNL movies, the ones that probably sounded funnier on paper and where the filmmakers had more fun than their intended audience.

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Review: ‘Dark Shadows’ (it did not work)

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If director Tim Burton was shooting for better than Beetlejuice, he wound up with worse than Mars Attacks.

Over two hundred years earlier, the Collins family moved from England to the “new world” and settled in Maine, increasing their holdings in the fishing business. Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) was just a young man when Collinsport was established and their hilltop manor of Collinwood was built. After spurning the advances of Angelique (Eva Green) as nothing more than a fling, the wronged woman indulges herself in witchcraft to not only turn Baranabas into a vampire but curse everyone with the name Collins for all time. Fast-foward to 1972 where a chained coffin is found buried with the undead Barnabas still inside. Rising in a new century, Barnabas finds his former family name tarnished and the estate in shambles, vowing to restore it all to its glory days once again. Unfortunately, the witch who cursed the Collins isn’t quite done with them yet and, worse yet, still hasn’t gotten over Barnabas.

One could call this a film about obsession, but it would more correctly be called a mess. For the uninformed, “Dark Shadows” was a soap opera of the supernatural about a vampire patriarch trying to hold his beloved family together. It was played straight in spite of poor production values and cheap effects but still earned its place in television history with five seasons of spooky storytelling. Forty years later, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp tried to resurrect this undead idea, but the problem is in the execution. For all the beautiful, creepy atmosphere and set pieces, the story is a series of hollow plot points without any real flow. If you forgive all the dangling threads and plot holes, what remains could be assembled in any order and still not tell a better story. Did the producers believe this forgivable as long as the movie was funny, or were they thinking at all?

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Review: ‘The Avengers’ (let’s do that again!)

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If you only see one movie this year over and over again, it’ll probably be this one.

After trying to unlock the secrets of the Tesseract (first introduced in Captain America, The First Avenger), the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (aka SHIELD) receives a visitor: Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who in typical arch-villain fashion promptly steals the Tesseract for his nefarious plans of global domination. The top guy in charge of SHIELD, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), then begins assembling a dream team of super heroes to counter the threat, including Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) aka Black Widow, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) aka Captain America, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) aka the Hulk, and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) aka Iron Man. As the film progresses, they also recruit Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Clint “Hawkeye” Barton (Jeremy Renner) to the cause, but before they can battle Loki and an army of alien invaders, they’ll have to figure out how to stop fighting among themselves first… and we get to watch.

Joss Whedon understands. Whether you’re a comics fan from back in the day or new to the superhero party once Robert Downey Jr. suited up, writer and director Whedon knows not only what makes an ensemble film of heroes work but also what we want to see. He already knew what it took Michael Bay three Transformers movies to figure out: give the good guys a reason to fight and let them get to it in the most entertaining way possible. Mix well with a little witty banter and clever character moments to keep the exposition moving along so there’s a good reason for all the violence, and all the production problems solve themselves. Even at its most heroic, the characters still feel very human and relatable, right down to the last frame after the end of the credits. Mr. Whedon was reportedly given advice from Iron Man director Jon Favreau that “the machine will not let you fail” since teams of fantasy filmmaking experts would do or create whatever was needed to make his vision of the film work (and does it ever). Oh, and there’s a helicarrier! Woo hoo!

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Trailer #2: ‘G.I.Joe: Retaliation’ (Cobra isn’t just for government health insurance anymore)

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After the “looks better / inexplicably worse” debacle of Ghost Rider 2, can this new Joe flick pass muster with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Bruce “Die Hard” Willis in the mix? At least Cobra Commander still looks like Cobra Commander.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation Exclusive Theatrical Trailer #2 [HD]
Director: Jon M. Chu
Release: 6/29/2012
Studio: Paramount
Website: http://www.GIJoeMovie.com
In this sequel, the G.I. Joes are not only fighting their mortal enemy Cobra; they are forced to contend with threats from within the government that jeopardize their very existence. The film stars D.J. Cotrona, Byung-hun Lee, Adrianne Palicki, Ray Park, Jonathan Pryce, Ray Stevenson, Channing Tatum with Bruce Willis and Dwayne Johnson. Directed by Jon M. Chu, and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Brian Goldner, from a screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick based on Hasbro’s G.I. Joe® characters.

Review: ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ (cabin with a vengeance)

Posted by grimdreaper on

What do you do when a genre has completely played itself out? You reinvent it one last time and let all hell break loose.

Five friends set out for a weekend of fun, heading to that perfect of all places: an isolated cabin in the woods with an RV stocked with beer and swimsuits. All is not as it seems, however, and as sinister clues begin to drop, a few in the group begin to suspect that everything isn’t cool. Meanwhile, a pair of technicians working at a state-of-the-art facility finish preparations to make sure that their special project goes off without any glitches. Unbeknownst to the happy campers (but beknownst to us), they ARE the project, and it isn’t going to end well for anyone.

Joss Whedon fans have a certain level of expectation, and besides this summer’s The Avengers movie, The Cabin in the Woods has been unleashed upon the world after sitting too long on the shelf. “Buffy” and “Angel” fans won’t be entirely surprised by how many levels Cabin‘s plot delves down into (and we’re talking DEEP), but they’ll still be happily rewarded with the kind of movie budget effects that lets viewers actually see the promised consequences for the actions of characters onscreen (and that alone is worth the price of admission). While the creators have said in interviews that anyone can enjoy it, it’s the true fans of horror that will be most rewarded.

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