FINDING DORY (2016) MOVIE REVIEW

In this sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo, an infant Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) is separated from her parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy) and aimlessly searches for them throughout her life until…the narrative of Finding Nemo begins.

 

A year after the events of that film, something triggers in Dory a rare memory which sends her on a trip to find her family once and for all.

This premise guarantees a movie with less narrative stakes than the original. Where Nemo engages in a very real and heartfelt race for a father (Albert Brooks) to find his son (Alexander Gould), this sequel endeavors to have the same feel, but this is accomplished through pitting characters in peril again and again without narrative drive. Characters will essentially switch places solely to instigate a longer film.

Sure, there are worthwhile moments. When the Marine Life Institute is first introduced, there are plenty of fun sequences. This is also where the character of Hank (Ed O’Neill) is introduced, and he is easily the best new character we meet in the film. The reluctant relationship he has with the title character makes the film interesting for far longer than the plot actually is.

What the premise does guarantee is an incredibly repetitive first act in which Dory repeats lines over and over again. In-between this are relatively clever lines, but the repetition screams of a lazy script.

Where the first act is repetitive, the movie does pick up in the second act given the introduction of a new setting. This is the heart of the film in many ways, and it ends with a break into three that brings this emotional through-line to a head in a satisfying way. Unfortunately, the remainder of the film does not hold this same drive, leading to a lackluster climax.

As much as Dory is a good character to drive a narrative forward in spite of obvious logical pitfalls, the narrative as a whole does not warrant the film’s creation. It is another well-animated Pixar film, which is certainly nothing new, but it lacks the deeper and more nuanced children’s film story of last year’s Inside Out and the narrative cohesion of Finding Nemo.

This said, Finding Dory brings enough heatfelt moments and vaudevillian place-switching gags to keep a child’s interest while only slightly dumbing it down for them.

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE (2016) MOVIE REVIEW

Two high school peers: one, Calvin (Kevin Hart), is destined for greatness, and the other, Robert (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is relentlessly bullied into submission. 20 years later, Calvin is at a dead end job with no hope of upward mobility and Robert is looking to reconnect. Only, this seemingly innocent encounter promises to be something much more impactful on Calvin’s life.

This is the basic setup. Hart plays the straight man and Johnson plays the odd man. Johnson here plays a character with a similarly ignorant worldview as his character in Pain and Gain. Hart is playing a similar to character to all other characters he has played on-screen. In this case, neither of these are bad characters for the narrative.

As far as comedy narratives go, this one is fairly original. With Hart’s character as the audience surrogate, we follow an oscillating expository voice that keeps us questioning the true motivations behind the other characters. Of course, the questions aren’t unpredictable enough to make this a mystery thriller. It is easy enough to see through the conventions of the narrative. Additionally, some questions are easily answered based on casting choices. Overall, though, the story keeps you involved.

Pacing helps pass over logical pitfalls and the occasional lazy joke with ease. Not every line of the script proves to yield side-splitting results. Some jokes are eye-rolling, but the narrative moves fast enough to get to the next effective joke before audience interest is compromised.

Johnson and Hart have great on-screen chemistry, which is good considering they are essentially the only real characters on screen. Others are merely archetypes or play dumb for the sake of narrative convenience. The latter is particularly evident in the character of Maggie (Danielle Nicolet), Calvin’s wife, who serves very little purpose in the film and is only utilized to cause tension with Hart’s character.

Underdeveloped characters aside, Johnson and Hart make the film work through carrying the bulk of the screentime playing off of each other’s strong points.

Comedies are hard. It is hard to make them with universal appeal, as comedic sensibilities are so diverse. As such, comedy films with little narrative investment are always a mixed bag. Central Intelligence has enough entertainment value and pacing to be engaging with audiences in spite of some stale jokes.

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CELL (2016) MOVIE REVIEW

Cell is a movie based on a novel by Stephen King. In this adaptation, Clay Riddell (John Cusack), is an artist who, while in an apartment, becomes witness to an apocalyptic event in which a cell phone signal causes users to become feral (in inconsistent ways). They foam at the mouth, attack people, attack themselves, and become utterly unaware of their own humanity.

The opening shots of this film set the tone for its overall success.They hold and pan shakily over the airport bustle as blocky opening credits cover most of the frame. It is hard to see anything in this visual climate, but what we do see is an airport in which literally every person has their phone in their hands. I mean, does nobody read books at the airport anymore? Do people actually talk on their phones at the urinal?

Once the dust settles, Clay is in denial. Having just gotten off the phone with his estranged wife, and later texting her to a response of absolute gibberish, his wife is likely zombified (phonified? these zombies are called phoners). Clay, ignoring these signs, decides to go out in search for his wife and son instead of staying in his apartment where he is objectively safe. Voila, we have a movie!

After this opening sequence, the visual composition of the film levels off a bit, but it is still not particularly pretty. Edit points are awkward and sloppy. The camera, in moments of action, return to a state of frenzy. The soundtrack in these moments, too, is a loop of gurgling moans that is obtrusive and unnecessary.

Once the film breaks away from its initial conceit, which is to say when Cusack stops reminding people to not use their cell phones, the film becomes a run of the mill zombie movie. Save for the zombies becoming a living embodiment of their phones (and we thought the phones were an extension of us!), where they make inhuman noises that sound like dial-up and power down at night, they are merely zombies. The added elements are flair, and reverse the day-night dynamic of the horror genre, but they are not really interesting.

This angle Cell takes is a thinly veiled metaphor for our dependence on cell phone technology, but that doesn’t make the premise worthwhile. As the characters discuss the nature of the disease, trying to crack the code of the phone’s grasp on the phoners, nothing progresses. Given the outlandishly fantastical way of the phonies, the source and reasoning behind them should not be the central interest. The narrative is a travelogue, at its core, which would lend its hand more readily to an exploration of slice-of-life snippets in the survivor landscape. We get plenty of characters along the way but little in the way of travelogue intrigue.

The acting performances from leads Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, and Isabella Fuhrman are fine, but it means little. The narrative drags so hard in the second act that it is easy to ignore their performances. It is easy to ignore much of what is going on, as a matter of fact. By the time we start approaching the climax, all we can hope for is an ending. We get there, eventually, but not before being subjected to a very tepid climax that attempts to achieve multiple things while succeeding at none.

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The Divergent Series: Allegiant "REVIEW"

That other YA-dystopia series about a young woman fighting bad guys phones in a penultimate chapter

If you're not mad as hell, so mad that you're not gonna take it anymore, then you damn well ought to be. The Divergent Series: Allegiant is another one of those cynical Hollywood cash grabs that takes the third book in bestselling juvie-lit trilogy (see Twilight and The Hunger Games) and stretches that last book into two movies so audiences are tricked into paying twice for egregiously padded piffle. Diligent Divergent readers probably know Veronica Roth's third book was hardly good enough for one movie. So the screenwriters actually invent stuff of their own. If only their stuff had a spark of life it might be forgivable, but Allegiant plods along like a franchise on its last legs. Who remembers where we left off last time in Insurgent? My point exactly — no one.

Intrigued? Don't be. You thought maybe the old caste cast system that divided the city into five factions (Erudite, Abnegation, Candor, Dauntless, Amity) died with Jeanine. Joke's on you. David's got his own system, which basically turns his new plan into the same old plan we had before with worse screenwriting, lousier acting, tortoise-pacing and way cheesier computer effects. Director Robert Schwentke and his trio of writers haven't given us a single reason to hang around for the last installment, due out next year and laughably called Ascendant — ironic, considering the only place the misbegotten series is going is down down down.Shailene Woodley, who deserves better than working paycheck duty, is back as Tris or The One of whatever you want to call her. She hangs out in Dystopian Chicago where evil leader Jeanine (Kate Winslet) has been replaced by evil Evelyn (Naomie Watts). Evelyn's plans for domination send Tris over the wall, along with her hunky love, Four (Theo James), her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort), her friend Christina (Zoe Kravitz) and Peter, so cleverly played by Miles Teller that we don't know who's side he's on. However, I should remind you that Evelyn is Four's mother and that a new villain pops up in the form of commander David (Jeff Daniels) who's a honcho at the Bureau of Genetic Welfare located on the grounds of Chicago's former O'Hare Airport.

Intrigued? Don't be. You thought maybe the old caste cast system that divided the city into five factions (Erudite, Abnegation, Candor, Dauntless, Amity) died with Jeanine. Joke's on you. David's got his own system, which basically turns his new plan into the same old plan we had before with worse screenwriting, lousier acting, tortoise-pacing and way cheesier computer effects. Director Robert Schwentke and his trio of writers haven't given us a single reason to hang around for the last installment, due out next year and laughably called Ascendant — ironic, considering the only place the misbegotten series is going is down down down.

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The Warcraft review

    

Warcraft: Durotan, played by Toby Kebbell

Director: Duncan Jones. Starring: Travis Fimmel, Toby Kebbell, Paula Patton, Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga, Daniel Wu, Ben Foster, Ben Schnetzer, Robert Kazinsky. Cert 12A, 123 mins

It’s easy to predict whether Duncan Jones’s take on the world-conquering online role-playing game World Of Warcraft is for you. If you take delight in names like "Orgrim Doomhammer" and have a high tolerance for randomly scattered apostrophes and superfluous "h"’s, it could be your film of the summer. If not, you should avoid it at all costs.

While there’s something admirable in Jones’s steadfast adherence to naff fantasy tropes, it makes no concession to fans of realism.

Our setting is in the world of high fantasy, a genre based on Tolkien but largely stripped of his poetry and mythological depth. It’s marked generally by elves, cod-medieval societies and more magic than Gandalf ever employed. Terrys Goodkind and Brooks, Dungeons & Dragons and Robert Jordan are its mainstays; George RR Martin’s Song Of Ice & Fire is a nastier offshoot. But for World Of Warcraft, it is the background where millions of gamers save the world every month.

Play!02:09

The theme is lebensraum. The hulking orc inhabitants of a dying world are led by Dominic Wu's sinister sorcerer Gul’dan - there’s that apostrophe – to the world of Azeroth, arriving in a remote corner of the kingdom of Stormwind. Among the performance-captured Horde is Durotan (Toby Kebbell), an honourable brawler and family orc who comes to doubt Gul’dan’s motives.

Meanwhile on the human side, Stormwind’s King Llane (Dominic Cooper) and his right-hand man Sir Anduin Lothar (Vikings’ Travis Fimmel) must find a way to stop this incursion, enlisting their old friend, the magician ‘guardian’ Medivh (Ben Foster). The half-orc Garona (Paula Patton) provides vital translation services between the two sides, while beings of goodwill struggle to find common ground and others plot betrayal.

This is all ancient history in the game, brought to life almost too vividly. If The Lord Of The Rings aesthetic was a restrained, almost elegiac depiction of a decaying world, this is a civilisation in full flower, bathed in sunshine broken only by the shadow of the odd passing griffin.

Our human heroes wear wildly impractical plate armour and Technicolor tunics straight out of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, while the orcs are overly familiar tusked apes, though at least given impressive weight and bulk by the effects experts at Industrial Light and Magic. 

But the pristine setting never meshes with Jones’s efforts to give emotional reality to his army of characters, who cannot escape their tropes: leader, hero, warrior woman, mystic.

Durotan and the orcs of the Horde fare best, because little exposition is needed to establish their primitive society. But the human characters keep solemnly alluding to (presumably) game business far outside the scope of this film.

Fimmel’s barefoot knight, who displays hints of impish charisma and an uncanny talent for almost crying, and Patton’s conflicted Garona manage to carve a little space temporarily, but they too are derailed by endless scenes of magic being waved about.

Where Jones deserves most credit is in daring to kill named characters in a summer blockbuster. Admittedly, two of those might as well have "Dead Meat" tattooed on their foreheads, but most come as a surprise (at least to those of us unfamiliar with the history of Azeroth) and some are genuinely upsetting.

Still, it’s a far cry from Jones’s elegant debut Moon or the time-travel cleverness of Source Code. While there are pleasures here for fantasy fans and game players, for everyone else this fantasy is likely to prove so high it’s dizzying.

Demolition Review

Demolition feels like Jake Gyllenhaaldoing someone a favor

  

Jake Gyllenhaal in Demolition

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée. Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, Judah Lewis. 100 mins. 15 cert.

Prisoners. Enemy. Nightcrawler. Southpaw. And now Demolition. Jake Gyllenhaal certainly springs for a single-word title promising danger, melodrama, and dirt under his fingernails.

His director, Jean-Marc Vallée, has been an award-season fixture of late with Wild and Dallas Buyers Club, both of which sprung off the festival blocks with a great deal of acclaim for the acting. Demolition flinched at the starter pistol last year, and all but sits down failing to budge.

The opening sequence, shot with beady wide-frame verve by Vallée’s gifted cinematographer, Yves Bélanger, has Gyllenhaal’s investment banker and his wife (Heather Lind) crossing the Manhattan River in their car, where their distractable chit-chat is cut short by a sidelong collision: Gyllenhaal’s Davis sees this coming for an eye-widening split-second, but it’s she who takes the brunt and dies.

“Someone, somewhere figured that Gyllenhaal taking a mallet to his kitchen surfaces and TV would at least make for a pretty cool trailer”

Conventional stages of bereavement be damned: the script, by Brian Sipe, is determined to make Davis do things his own way, and he reacts with a disembodied calm you could easily mistake for callousness. His father-in-law and boss Phil (Chris Cooper) certainly suspects as much.

The film makes its first lunge for black comedy when Davis writes to a vending machine’s customer services department, explaining not only his accident, moments after being widowed, with a bag of peanut M&Ms, but his entire life story leading to that point.

It feels like the sort of storytelling gambit Kurt Vonnegut might have fiddled with on an uninspired morning, then screwed up, only for Chuck (Fight Club) Palahniuk to fish it out of the basket some time in the late Nineties.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Judah Lewis in Demolition 

Said aftercare team consists wholly of Karen (Naomi Watts), a kooky single mother who professes herself unaccountably moved by Davis’s repeated correspondence, and begins to stalk him. Watts is powerless to make this groaner of a character feel like flesh and blood: it’s the kind of part that makes you pause and seriously consider how many of these second-tier, any-old-co-lead, also-starring-Naomi-Watts roles she really needs on her résumé.

Karen’s barely pubescent son, a cross-dressing tearaway played by Judah Lewis, forms a more significant relationship with Davis than she does, and becomes an accomplice in the latter’s relentless coping strategy (if that’s what it is) of dismantling every appliance and mechanism, from fridges to office computers, he can get his hands on.

When pondering how a script as vague and confounding as Sipe’s got financed at this level, the penny drops during these sequences: someone, somewhere figured that Gyllenhaal taking a mallet to his kitchen surfaces and flat-screen TV would at least make for a pretty cool trailer.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Demolition

The effusive Vallée has described this as his “most rock and roll” movie, but it's strictly rock and roll for investment bankers: the gasps of horror it's aiming for could only come from people a little too attached to their polished granite work-tops, and any laughter is nervous and confused – it's a comedy, right?

Gyllenhaal gets his best scene when the boy, who might be a refugee from Vallée’s gay coming-of-age flick C.R.A.Z.Y (2005), probes him on the question of figuring out your sexuality – an amusingly awkward exchange played with punchy comic timing. On the whole, though, he feels like he’s doing the film a huge favour just by being in it.

Cooper comes away with the most credit, perhaps because it’s hard not to empathise with his increasingly thunderous air of grievance: he wants Davis to get his whole act together, just as we want the film to shape up and mean something.

Stuffed with so many strenuous editing ideas you suspect the influence of something illegal, Demolition is mainly casting about for a point, when it doesn’t feel like a wrecking ball aimed squarely at itself.

The conjuring II review

 Set in a gloomy North London council house in 1977, “The Conjuring 2” is a work 

of British kitchen-sink realism in the guise of a supernatural thriller: Call it Ken Loach’s “Poltergeist,” or perhaps “The Exorcist” as imagined by a young Mike Leigh. The actual director is James Wan, who has followed up his superb “The Conjuring” (2013) with another virtuosic exercise in mobile camerawork and moldering production design, tethered to a story that handles its characters and their working-class milieu with an unexpectedly grounded, sensitive touch. Generous with jolts but devoid of gratuitous bloodshed, these are the rare horror movies that seem more interested in how people live than how they die.

The sequel picks up several years after the events of “The Conjuring,” which introduced us to Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), a real-life married couple who devoted their lives to investigating the paranormal, most famously the Amityville Horror in 1976. Chillingly re-enacted here in a prologue worthy of “In Cold Blood,” that notorious case took a terrible toll on the Warrens, and has left Lorraine especially reluctant to leave their New England home to chase yet another haunting. History and Hollywood, alas, have left them little choice.

Loosely based on a series of wall-rattling, furniture-throwing and thoroughly hair-raising events that gripped the London borough of Enfield in the late ’70s, “The Conjuring 2” takes its time flying the Warrens across the Atlantic. (A bit too much time, given the film’s generous 134-minute length.) The Enfield demon likes to get to know its victims: first Janet Hodgson (Madison Wolfe), an impressionable 13-year-old whom we first see fiddling with a homemade spirit board, and then her three siblings, and eventually their single mother, Peggy (the excellent Frances O’Connor), who’s already at her wits’ end trying to keep food on the table.

The terrors that befall this struggling family are nothing you haven’t seen before: chairs that rock of their own accord, a TV that suddenly switches channels (never more scarily than when it lands on Margaret Thatcher), guttural voices and possessed toys and doors that go bump in the night. But Wan has a gift for investing even the creakiest cliches with shivery élan. He has always been a versatile connoisseur of genre thrills (his credits include “Furious 7,” the original “Saw” and the two “Insidious” movies), but there is something about the Warrens’ case files that pushes his filmmaking into the realm of the rhapsodic.