Review: ‘Red Notice’ is an Action-Comedy that Leaves the Action at Home and Forgets What Comedy Looks Like

In the lead-up to the release of Red Notice, stars Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds promoted the film by calling attention to the  massive budget granted by Netflix—$200 million, a record for the streaming service. Most of the budget was likely reserved for the three-headed dragon that is the cast: the aforementioned Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Ryan Reynolds also team up with Gal Gadot, with Rawson Marshall Thurber as writer and director, providing a known formula that’s followed almost to a T but disregards quality at every step of the way.

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Review: ‘Free Guy’ is 2021’s Most Fun Film Yet, But it’s Close to Being a Cautionary Tale

Free Guy, the newest film from director Shawn Levy, is the first of its kind: a movie about video games that runs on video game logic, unlike the others that blend games into reality. Starring Ryan Reynolds as a NPC (for the non-gamers here, that’s “non-player character”) in an open-world video game akin to Grand Theft Auto, this sci-fi action comedy runs on references, and feels like a combination of Ready Player One, The Lego Movie, They Live, and The Truman Show all at once. It’s a digitally aware love story, where Guy meets Girl, Guy falls for Girl, and finally, Guy discovers that reality is a lie and God is a troll. Yet despite this implied disparity, the film holds itself together throughout it all. It’s a very entertaining comedy about video games (and a whole lot of other stuff) that, unlike so many blockbusters of the moment, does not collapse under the weight pop-culture references and forget to make actual jokes.

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Retrospective: ‘Adventureland’ is an Underrated Comedy Recalling the Horrors of Post-College Anxiety

It is a truth of being 20-something that if you have a crappy summer job, the best way to take your mind off of it is to befriend the other 20-somethings who hate it there just as much as you do. You are trapped there together, 8 to 10 hours a day for three months, right? So what else is there to do? Even in a film set in 1990, like 2009’s Adventureland, this is all too relatable if you’ve had a summer job. Continue reading “Retrospective: ‘Adventureland’ is an Underrated Comedy Recalling the Horrors of Post-College Anxiety” →

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Review: ‘6 Underground’ is Carte Blanche Netflix Bayhem

Michael Bay’s career stretches back to the humble beginnings of the 90’s music video era, directing hits for singers like Tina Turner and Meatloaf. His first feature film was the mega-hit Bad Boys, propelling his and Will Smith’s respective careers into the stratosphere and subsequently starting his path to become one of the most universally rueful directors who continually produces massive hits year after year. Almost 25 years later, we finally see Michael Bay given carte blanche, thanks to Netflix’s seemingly endless pockets and no real desire for quality control. What we get cannot even be described in a single word. Much more than ‘Bayhem’, 6 Underground consists of all the infamous Bay trademarks that have propelled his idiosyncratic career: sustained formalistic Michael Mann practical action within a thinly stretched story, crude humor, wonky politics, a repetitive plot, and of course: explosions. It also happens to be one of the best action movies of the year.

The “story” (if it can even be called that) of 6 Underground centers around a brilliant billionaire (Ryan Reynolds) who fakes his own death to lead a team of rogue international mercenaries – a group of ghosts designed to do the jobs that world governments refuse to do. Opening with a job gone wrong in Florence, Italy, the team recruits a former sniper battling PTSD to forge a military coup, deposing the authoritarian leader of Turgistan and replacing him with his democratic brother. 

6 Underground begins with the greatest action set-piece of the year and never lets up from frame one. Bay’s trademark of endless explosions and practical plastic inevitability may produce an eye-roll for most fans, but it is also a gift that very few in the turgid digital age of Marvel can pull off. The opening scene is pure Bay, from dick jokes, to Nuns violently waving their middle fingers, to innocent civilian bodies flying, to a severed eye-ball getting passed through a speeding neon green Lamborghini – you get the point. There’s even a scene that implies Bay thinks Dave Franco is famous enough to be Janet-Leighed. In truth, the scene, just like most of the film, is a rapid-fire gloriously crass cluster of violence and awry character. As the film moves from one standout American action set-piece to another, the film somehow maintains this maniacal pacing interweaved with droll expository information and the film’s ultimate enemy: plot. Even 6 Underground’s central politics are so backward, in-bred, and twisted that only the ultimate bad-taste American Maestro like Bay could pull it off. The film carries over the morally reprehensible American ideology of the military state from the Iraq war. It is so formally reprehensible that it almost somehow almost twists itself back around again into a complex companion to Zero Dark Thirty.

6 Underground‘s loose and messy structure perfectly matches Bay’s sensibilities. Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the infamous (and extremely rich) writers of such “comedic classics” as Zombieland and Deadpool barely know where to take the film. The first half of the film is entirely set around flashbacks and set pieces. The back half is entirely set up fake emotional engagements and set-piece. Even calling this a story is a stretch. Yet somehow, theirs (and Ryan Reynolds) stylistic traits match perfectly with the breakneck tackiness of a Michael Bay Netflix adventure.

3.5/5 STARS

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Review: ‘Pokemon: Detective Pikachu’ Solves Its Case, Not Its Narrative

Everyone knows Pokemon. You show someone an image of Pikachu, and there’s a good chance they’ll be able to recognize it. Even Werner Herzog is aware of them. They are a cultural phenomena spanning video games, television, trading cards, and more, giving birth to an insatiable desire to catch ‘em all worldwide. Now we have a live action feature film: Detective Pikachu. Though this is not the first time Pokemon has seen the big screen, it is the first time it has taken on tentpole status.

You can make the claim that this film is the best video game movie ever made, but to take that title, you don’t have to do much. Detective Pikachu pretty much needed to be average in order to clear the threshold and climb to the top of the pedestal, and that’s exactly what it is While Detective Pikachu is enjoyable, it isn’t perfect.The allure of pokemon will get you in the theater, but know now that the film’s narrative alone prevents Detective Pikachu from being nothing more than an all around average film with a few bright spots.

One of the more admirable aspects of the film is how it pulls inspiration from past noirs to build its aesthetic. Being that our protagonists are detectives, it only seems fitting, and surprisingly, the genre applies itself well to the world of ‘pocket monsters.’ Not as dark and seedy as the best noirs — we are dealing with a kid-friendly property after all—, but it channels its essence in a way that melds well with the comedic direction it takes, akin to something like The Nice Guys though not as sexual. 

From the 1940 noir film that plays on the TV to the neon-lit streets of Ryme City to the playful takes on genre tropes, the film wears its influences on its sleeve. Plus, in an utterly unconventional studio decision, the film is even shot on actual film to maintain its aesthetic vibe, giving it subtle textural grain that is reminiscent of the noirs of the past. Creative decisions culminate in a consistent visual style that is surprisingly genuine. Not riffing on the genre and not using it as a crutch, but rather applying it to a narrative that suits it. 

For all its effort to replicate the noir aesthetic, the narrative itself is, well … overt. The buy in for this mystery is low, but as the story unfolds and the conspiracy unravels, it becomes progressively more absurd —when you get to the holograms, you’ll know what I mean. The film will sit you down and spoon feed you information in order to set up the next ten to fifteen minutes of antics until your next information dump. The hand holding is so egregious that ____’s arc feels underdeveloped; the lack of agency comes at the hand of self-explanation, random developments, and necessitated narrative progression which ultimately results in a lead character that is more or less a pawn with surface level characterization.

I’ll leave it unspecified, however, there’s one scene in the trailer that seems seminal to the film, but it’s completely inconsequential and could be entirely cut, only made even worse by the fact that nothing in that scene comes up later. The inclusion of moments like these and then making up for narrative shortfalls with information dumps is where the narrative feels lazy — prioritizing spectacle over logical narrative efficiency. To see a narrative devolve and become weighed down by its own doing is disappointing, especially when it starts off so well. 

Not to sign off on the narrative, but it is Pokemon. Some people may decide to forgive the narrative shortcuts the film takes just so they can see Ryan Reynolds voice a chonky Pikachu drink coffee and solve a conspiracy. And that may be a valid point for the fans. There is some worth in that. Feel free to see it for all the pocket monsters, see it for all the cute monsters running around in a noir setting, but just know that this isn’t a Double Indemnity level story. 

3/5 STARS

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Review: Deadpool 2 Achieves Superhero Mediocrity

It’s not even the end of May and here we are with our third super hero film of the year. As we talked about in our Ready Player One review, the superhero genre has well overstayed its welcome and only once in a blue moon do we see something truly different. One film that self-proclaims its uniqueness is Deadpool 2.

Directed by David Leitch (John Wick, Atomic Blonde), Deadpool 2 promises to be a deviation from the standard superhero fare while upholding the core tenants of the original: a film full of profanity, loads of ultra violence, and an R rating that the MCU won’t dare touch. The good news is the sequel has carried over a lot from the first film. The bad news is the sequel is just like the first and it doesn’t have a leg to stand on beyond its lazy writing and intolerable humor. With few exceptions like the addition of Domino and a fun third act action sequence, Deadpool 2 tries to be differentiate itself from the genre it inhabits, but proves that it is essentially everything wrong with the superhero genre, if not worse.

Deadpool 2 kicks off with Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) living high off the success of the original. He is globe trotting and killing criminals left and right, but after an early film death, Wilson finds himself depressed and his life without meaning. It isn’t until later when he meets Firefist (Julian Dennison), an orphaned mutant who is angry at the world for the tests they conduct on him, that he takes on a paternal role and begins to find purpose. Wilson now chooses to protect Firefist from Cable (Josh Brolin), a cyborg who has time traveled to kill Firefist and stop the death of his family, to not only cause a change within the young mutant to stifle his anger, but also to find meaning within himself.

The major problem with the film is how incredibly stupid it is and how it justifies itself in the name of authenticity to Wade Wilson. The fourth wall breaking habits of Deadpool is fine at the start, but after the twelfth time, the third and second walls are brought down as well and you’re left with a shabby one wall movie that consistently wants to remind you that it’s meta. Piggybacking off of that is the over indulgence in references. Again and again the film makes references and allusions to pop culture items, and in the same vein as the meta jokes, they are fine initially, but by the end you are amazed that the film depends so heavily on them. The self referential nature is not insightful, amusing, or palatable and embodies just how poor the script is. The writing feels phoned in and when it is bad, the lines are written off and justified with a self referential joke. Instead of writing something competent or actually funny, the writers throw in the towel and self-mock itself. And I know what you’re thinking: “This is how Deadpool is in the comics.” Sure, but it’s insufferable. This stuff isn’t funny and by the end of it all I found it profoundly lazy.

Side Note: The reactions in the theater were a kin to my own. No one was laughing all that hard or consistently at the jokes which is problematic when they’re nonstop. It is just one showing, but highlights the broader lack of amusement in the audience beyond my own.

Surprisingly, Deadpool 2 makes the original film retroactively better which is hard to do since it too was lazy and bombastically idiotic, but at least that film had a consistency with its flippancy. In it, the film wanted to be a metaphorical middle finger to superhero films, and while it only partially achieved that goal, it was at least consistent. In this film, Reynolds’ script tries to inject heart and emotion into Wade Wilson where it simple doesn’t belong. To do that, the film wants you to take it seriously at times, particularly with the aforementioned early movie death. In a film that tries so hard at being subversive and against the grain of other superhero films, these periodic moments of gravitas contradict what Deadpool is: a merch’ with a mouth who stands in stark contrast to the MCU. These moments are exactly what the original Deadpool parodied, but Deadpool 2 comes full circle; that is, as it tried to move further and further away from the genre it tried to mock, it eventually came back around and ended up exactly where it started: another mundane superhero film.

There are a few bright spots in the movie. Domino is a welcomed addition due to her luck power, making for clever scenes with fun action choreography. Occasionally a joke will land and get you to laugh (particularly a good mid-credit sequence). And the third act is a true highlight thanks to some impressive parallel editing of three simultaneous sequences that result in a satisfying payoff. However, these are unfortunately my only points of praise. The rest of the film is burdened by my complaints above. 

The way in which Deadpool 2 operates is very flamboyant; the incessant need to embody Deadpool at every breathing moment is exhausting and the narrative that is weaved does not uphold the genre differentiation that Deadpool 2 wants you to think it is. By the end of it all, the film’s gimmick collapses in on itself, and while the original was somewhat permissible, this time it simply exposes how similar the franchise is to other super hero films.

2/5 Stars