A B (plus), a C, and a D
Three Movies I’ve Seen Recently That I Need to Acknowledge
The Boondock Saints (released in 1999)
Grade: B+
Written and Directed by Troy Duffy
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Sean Patrick Flannery, Norman Reedus, David Della Rocco and Billy Connolly
Rated R for strong, bloody violence and gore, language, some sexual content, and brief nudity
One film I had never gotten around to seeing even though many regard it as the epitome of cool, Boondock Saints begins slowly but starts picking up the pace quick, soon fascinating and enveloping the viewer in its electric world, the way great thrillers always do. Featuring some tremendous acting, dark, dark humor and some terrific action set pieces, Boondock’s premise is fairly simple. Forced to kill a pair of Russian mobsters in self-defense in the aftermath of a bar fight, a pair of tough, sophisticated brothers from South Boston decide to take to heart the sharp teachings of their priest, who insists that the world’s greatest evil is the “indifference of good men”. Well-played by the low-key but superb Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus, the brothers soon become something of cult heroes as they start bumping off infamous mobsters in the city—they’re praised by the locals even though their specific brand of vigilante justice would make Batman queasy. The brothers’ exploits understandably put them in the cross-hairs of both organized crime syndicates and low law enforcement, but it also earns them a special place in the heart and imagination of FBI Agent Smecker (Willem Dafoe), who’s supposed to focus on stopping them. Instead, he (like the audience) begins to look forward to the next bloody crime scene, where he can begin to piece together what these badass vigilantes did this time.
It’s all very well done, with deliriously great action punctuated by moments of outrageous humor, such as a brothers’ slugfest collapsing an air vent—causing them to fall through the ceiling of a room full of Russian mobsters they were out to whack—and one of the best Unexpected Movie Deaths I’ve ever seen. The flashback-heavy plot keeps the viewer on their toes, and the acting is solid across the board. While Flannery and Reedus are the most recognized for their tough/cool portrayals, they’re ably supported by the normally-genial Billy Connolly as a tough-as-nails fellow hit man and David Della Rocco as a wisecracking would-be hit-man. And the film is anchored by the ever-slippery Dafoe, whose sarcastic, homophobic, crime-loving, eccentric FBI agent is a near-perfect amalgam of bits from all his best performances (Platoon, Shadow of the Vampire, Spiderman and Out of the Furnace among them).
Grade: C
Starring: Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Wyatt Russell, Ice Cube, Peter Stormare, Amber Stevens, and Jilian Bell
Premise: Budding detectives Jenko and Schmidt go undercover again, this time as college students, to try to find the dealer of a new dangerous drug called WhyPhy.
Rated R for constant profanity and graphic sex-related dialogue, crude and sexual humor, and violence
It’s becoming less and less of a surprise to find such movies these days, but 22 Jump Street was made only because its 2012 predecessor did better at the box office than most people expected. Not that anyone really cared about sending up the TV show that made Johnny Depp famous—the odd-couple pairing of dorky goofball Jonah Hill and studly jock Channing Tatum turned out to be magic. So, after going undercover as high school students and stopping Rob Riggle from supplying grade-schoolers with a drug called HFS in 21, police partners Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are sent to MC State college to try and find the distributors and supply of a new drug that’s caused a few deaths—this one called WhyPhy.
Unsurprisingly, the best thing about 22 is the amusing sight of the strapping Tatum and the round-ish, tottering Hill together, let alone the fact that they actually have pretty good chemistry. Unfortunately, however, upon seeing 22, I can tell it would probably be every bit as fun to simply watch the two actors talk, rather than watch them try to wring laughs from an over-blown, over-stuffed, clichéd, annoying comedy like this one. There are a few good laughs, courtesy of the torrent of expletives spouted by Jenko and Schmidt’s precinct captain, played by Ice Cube, or a few amusing plays on words (“I just found out you can get it anywhere on campus, 24/7”, Jenko tells Schmidt about WhyPhy, not realizing what he heard about is actually WiFi). But endless tides of sex jokes, private parts jokes and beer and drinking jokes plus increasingly corny faux-break-ups and couples-counseling sessions make the movie start to feel tired, not to mention the new tide of co-stars (Wyatt Russell, Amber Stevens, Jilian Bell and Peter Stormare) don’t have the natural heart or humor of the first movie’s supporting cast—Riggle, Dave Franco, Brie Larson and Ellie Kemper, among others.
I won’t deny 22 has some funny parts, but it’s telling when the best part of your nearly two-hour movie is a credits montage of sequels they could make (putting Jenko and Schmidt undercover in Medical School, Military School, Culinary School, Mariachi School, etc…).
Transformers: Age of Extinction
Grade: D
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, and John Reynor, and featuring the voices of Peter Cullen (as Optimus Prime), John Goodman (as Hound), Ken Watanabe (as Drift), John DiMaggio (as Crosshairs), Mark Ryan (as Lockdown) and Frank Welker (as Galvatron)
Premise: A dirt-poor car mechanic buys a beat-up old truck, which turns out to be a transformer, a fact that brings squads of government special ops troopers and less-friendly transformers onto his tail.
Rated PG-13 for intense action and violent content, constant sequences of peril and destruction, and language
The fourth movie in a lucrative but brain-dead franchise, Transformers: Age of Extinction proves once and for all that Michael Bay Pearl Harbor to Bad Boys loves to blow things up, cause mass destruction, kill off some bad dudes, and let his camera linger on barely-dressed women. Throw in scores of completely computer-generated robots that like to smash and bash each other in rough-and-tumble fights, plus a bloated running time, and you’ve got a ridiculously busy but also relentlessly-stupid movie, a movie that’s more irritating than entertaining.
There’s no point in talking much about the plot, in which a couple of cliché, one-dimensional human characters occupy some time in the foreground just to provide a sort-of-meaningful set-up for giant robots to start punching each other’s faces in. The new “reboot” cast fares no better than the old, with Wahlberg a better actor than former Transformers star Shia LaBeouf but saddled with an even more meaningless character, Stanley Tucci a tiny bit less annoying than John Turturro, and spray-tanned newcomer Nicola Peltz actually (dare I say it) making one pine for Megan Fox. It really is the laziness put into the setting-up of the human characters that kills all joy and excitement for Transformers—if we as viewers can’t care about the actual flesh-and-blood humans, why should we care about the giant robots, most of whom get blown up anyway? And it’s probably a bad sign when I privately cheered the early offing of the main character’s best friend, because the dude was so freakin’ annoying, only around to try and generate laughs from his hyper, dumb-ass white persona.
While I can appreciate the work put into making some admittedly impressive CGI characters and fights, I had zero appreciation for the characters or the plotting of this new movie. Maybe that’s to be expected, that the movies are only made to pit giant alien robots against each other. Well, if they assume we want to see giant robots fight giant robots that bad, can’t we just have a couple of hour/hour-and-a-half long movies just about the robots heading toward an imminent clash with each other? We might actually care more.
Rated R
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