Don't Think Twice

Alternate Title:  The Delusion of Spontaneity

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:   Six underground improv comedians find their troupe turned upside down when one of them is picked to join the cast of an SNL-style network sketch show.


Things Havoc liked: "Dying is easy," said Edmund Gwenn (Santa, from the 1947 Miracle on 34th St). "Comedy is Hard." Or maybe he didn't say it, and Jack Lemmon or Gregory Peck or Milton Berle made it up. Nobody's really sure. But whoever said it was absolutely right, because comedy is fraught with peril. A bad drama, for instance, or a horror film that fails to horrify, can at least take solace in being unintentionally hillarious, and thereby become a staple of midnight screenings and cult followings forever (consider Plan 9 From Outer Space, or The Room). Such infamies are not what one sets out to make, generally speaking, but they can still provide entertainment and joy to their audience. A bad comedy however, leaves one with nowhere to go, because it fundamentally isn't funny. There is no safety net, no backup plan for comedy. It fails or succeeds entirely of its own merits, as what it was intended to be. The prospect must be terrifying. And yet people keep throwing themselves into comedy, including several that I have now seen repeatedly in these little weekly excursions of mine to the theater.

One such person is Keegan-Michael Key, the taller half of the comedy duo Key & Peale, who graced us earlier this year with their first foray into filmmaking, Keanu. Keanu was a fun little movie, and so I decided that it was a good idea to see what he and a number of other talented comedians had to offer, among them Kate Micucci, of half a dozen TV shows that even I know about, and Tami Sagher, a comedy writer for 30 Rock, MadTV, and Inside Amy Schumer. Top everything off with a 99% Rotten Tomatoes rating (I'm not kidding), and it seemed like a good time.

Things Havoc disliked: So... you know how I was talking about bad comedy a minute ago? Yeah...

Don't Think Twice is a bad comedy, but more than a bad comedy it's a continuation of a trend that has become a full blown epidemic this year, of movies that every critic on Earth rates highly turning out to be pieces of crap. Sometimes they're just mediocre, sometimes they're unwatchably awful, but always they're the sorts of movies that the critics like to fawn over because it makes them seem superior to the unwashed masses. Normally I just remark on this when it happens. Taste is subjective, after all, and critics can simply be wrong sometimes. I'm the guy who praised Suckerpunch, remember? But subjectivity ceases to be a defense when literally everybody praises the movie in immodest tones, like it's the second coming of the medium of film, and all those who fail to see it are dooming themselves to lives of deprivation and despair. Kubo got this kind of reaction, and High Rise, and The Lobster, and Hail Caesar, and I am getting very, very tired of it. I try to see movies because they appeal to me, because they look interesting or daring, and not to be influenced by the critical opinion on a movie, but it's hard to ignore sometimes, particularly when every other critic in the world is lauding something to the skies and pronouncing it the finest film to ever grace the screen. And for the same critics to then turn around and declare that the aforementioned films are better than things like Deadpool or Triple 9 because the subject matter of the latter is not as artistic or intellectual is flat out dishonesty. One bad film I can forgive. Three I can understand. But a dozen movies in a row starts to look like either incompetence or gross bias on the part of those who get paid for this sort of thing.

*Sigh* So, the movie...

Don't Think Twice is an improv comedy, about a troupe of players in New York who are distinctly small-time, but have the passion (maaaan). And because many of the comedians involved are good comedians (I haven't mentioned Gillian Jacobs or Chris Gethard yet), you'd expect some decent improv at least. Well no such luck here, because the improv on display from these starving artist players is shit. Boring, unfunny, uninteresting shit. And I don't wanna hear about how hard improv comedy is, because I've seen much much better stuff from local troupes around here in San Francisco, to say nothing of things like Second City or Whose Line is it Anyway. Hell, the comedians here had it easy! They could have either scripted the stuff, or if that was too artificial, done what a lot of troupes do and done a lot of improv, so as to cherry pick the best bits to be shown in the film. Instead, we get "comedy" that would be booed off the stage at a third rate amateur club. There is one, I repeat one funny bit in the movie (a routine involving the appearance of imaginary friends to a twice-divorced man in his fifties). All the rest of the comedy is barely chuckle-worthy, the kind of stuff you laugh politely at if you are related to the people involved, and otherwise check your watch a lot. And yet, we are expected to believe that this awful material of theirs is good enough that the players involved (but only some of them) are invited to audition for "Weekend Live", an SNL-knockoff looking for new talent. Admittedly, this conceit does allow for Seth Barrish, a veteran film and stage actor, to do an absolutely dead-on sendup to SNL's Lorne Michaels. But mostly, it's used for, of all things, melodrama.

Oh. My. God. Is there melodrama in this movie. You see, only one of the six players in the troupe (Key) can join SNL, and once they do so, what happens but terrible rifts and falling out. You see, it's not good enough for the other comedians to get jealous of the success of their friend, they have to have BIG DRAMATIC SPEECHES about how their friend has changed, how success has gone to their heads, how they have forgotten their roots (maaaan), and are now soulless and lost. Yes, these speeches are intended to showcase the insecurities of the other troupe members more than reflect the reality of the film, but they are so far over the top that they destroy the entire dynamic of "plucky group of friends trying to succeed at comedy" that the film has been desperately trying to build. Nobody capable of literally punching their friend in the face for having failed to secure them a guaranteed audition could possibly have been stable enough to have been a member of a troupe like this in the first place, and I don't care how "quirky" the film wants to make all comedians look. This is a movie about assholes acting over-dramatically and occasionally pausing so that you can laugh. Sound fun?

And whose fault is all of this? Well I can't know for sure, but my guess would be Mike Birbiglia, a claim I make based on the fact that he produced, wrote, directed, and stars in this movie. We met Birbiglia way back when in Sleepwalk with Me, a movie whose biggest flaw was simply being too awkward. Well Birbiglia has graduated now from being uncomfortably awkward to painfully awkward, with a good heaping scoop of narcissism piled on. Not content with mining the vein of betrayal (maaaan), Birbiglia has to give everyone a series of melodrama staples to pout and stare sadly out windows about, from the cast member whose father is dying, to the cast member who is living off her parents, to the cast member who is a slacker and depressed, to the cast member struggling to grow up. In a film that was toned bittersweet, where the comedy was an intentional juxtaposition with the misery of the characters' lives, in short in an actual drama, this might have worked. But Don't Think Twice is pitched, paced, written, and shot like a slapstick comedy without the slapstick, and consequently falls flat on its face. Only this time, there's nobody to laugh.

Final thoughts:   I am probably angrier at this movie than I should be, because the base fact is that Don't Think Twice isn't an awful film, just one so painfully mediocre as to render one exhausted with the entire thing. But what annoys me about this movie isn't simply that it failed, it's that it represents arrogance at every level, arrogance necessary to stuff a comedy full of melodrama in the belief that one's life (or facsimile thereof) is so fascinating that everyone will immediately hold tremendous sympathy for all of your travails. This particular type of arrogance has bitten Birbiglia before, and this time it proves so insurmountable that the entire film is wrecked upon it. And as to those who called this movie "Laugh-out-Loud funny" or "genuinely moving", all I can suggest that you stick to your "counterprogramming" and railing incessantly against how dumbed down Hollywood has become, go see your quirky indie movies made by the right directors and praised by the right publications, and leave me to watch actually good movies in peace, if ever there are any to be found in this miserable year.

Final Score:  4/10

Next Time:  Let's see if the Greatest Actor in the World is up to the task of turning things around.

Kubo and the Two Strings

Alternate Title:  The Cold Facts

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:   A young boy with powerful origami magic sets out to retrieve the magical artifacts that will enable him to defeat his grandfather, the Moon King.


Things Havoc liked: Laika Studios is an interesting anachronism in Hollywood today, a stop motion animated film studio founded by Nike chairman Phil Knight, whose specialty is the sorts of children's' movies that have never really existed beyond early 70s Christmas specials and big budget epics from the mid-1930s. Beginning with Coraline in 2009, Laika has carved quite a nice little niche for itself in the realm of studio animation dominated by giants like Pixar-Disney, and Dreamworks. The last film of theirs that I saw was 2012's Paranorman, a very good movie that showed a lot of promise, and following one or two short or lesser-reviewed films, they have returned four years later with a movie that got so much hype, I was frankly worried.

Set in mythological Japan, Kubo and the two strings is a fairly standard hero's journey tale with a style that is entirely non-standard, a stop-motion and practical-effect-laden aesthetic that is simply gobsmacking in its richness and style. Animation can do wonders, this we would all know even if we weren't smack in the middle of the Third Golden Age of Disney, but Laika's greatest strength has always been the way that their laborious, hand-crafted art style and stop motion design produces a truly unique effect on-screen, and Kubo may be their magnum opus insofar as such things are concerned. Every frame of the film is drenched in art, from the earthy sequences of Kubo's local village, to the truly fantastical designs of his aunts, or of the strange and horrible creatures that inhabit the world. How Laika contrived to produce all of this, I have no earthly idea, only that the labor must have been immense,and the result is apparent to all. Whatever faults it may have, Kubo is a gorgeous film, and those who go simply to drink in its richness will not be wasting their time.

It's always hard to criticize a movie that tells a simple tale, as this one does, because the sheer familiarity of a story is not a flaw, especially not in a children's movie, whose target audience will not be as jaded by a hundred thousand retellings of Joseph Campbell. In this case Kubo, a boy with the power to animate origami paper and produce living, moving figurines, lives with his mother by the sea and works as a storyteller in the local village, before the hero's journey inevitably whisks him away. This is the kind of simple story that is used as an excuse to provide other delights, such as visuals or memorable setpieces, one where the stakes and the direction are fairly obvious, and yet that's no slur. Pursued by a group of evil spirits, tasked with retrieving the magical artifacts once wielded by his warrior-father, protected by a group of magical creatures including a Japanese macaque with a distinctly martial bent, and a larger-than-man-sized beetle, it is a story of adventure and danger and family and lessons learned. Kubo himself, voiced by Art Parkinson (Game of Thrones' Rickon Stark), is a perfectly compelling protagonist, brave and kind and sly in his own way, and the movie's recurring theme of metaf-iction, drawn out through Kubo's own profession telling stories with inanimate objects brought to life, complements the main plot perfectly. The rest of the voice cast is provided by other stalwarts, including Charlize Theron, whose role as a swordfighting monkey is actually fairly badass for a G-rated kids movie, while the ever-reliable Ralph Fiennes gets to play an evil god (again). Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa , Rooney Mara, and George Takei also lend their voices to more minor roles, all doing a fine job. For those interested in nothing more than a quality children's film, Kubo has everything you are looking for.

Things Havoc disliked: I really hate to do this.

People accuse me on occasion of being contrary, of hating movies simply because they are popular, and while I won't deny that there is definitely a correlation between a movie receiving universal critical acclaim, and said movie being a piece of crap, I do not go out of my way to bash movies that are popular just to be different. I want movies to be good, that's why I do this in the first place, and when a movie comes out with a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes, I still expect, despite the Leviathans and Under the Skins and Beasts of the Southern Wild, that I'm going to get something special from seeing it. And if I don't, then I am not going to sit here and blow smoke at everyone just to pretend that I have some kind of non-existent credibility. And so it is in the interests of honesty for my readers and myself that I report that there are two major problems with Kubo and the Two Strings. One of these problems is survivable. One of them is not.

The first problem is Matthew McConaughey. Anyone who's spent any time reading my reviews knows how big a fan I am of McConaughey ever since he stopped playing vapid action leads, but here he's a voice actor, and voice acting is not the same thing as regular acting and never will be. It's not that McConaughey is awful, it's that his voice, his cadence, his vocal presence is so strong that it knocks you right out of the movie you're watching. Some actors, no matter how good they are, have such a strong persona as actors that it's entirely impossible to picture them as anyone else once you hear their voice. Asking McConaughey to play a Samurai warrior (who is also a giant beetle), while giving him the sorts of snarky lines that he would get in a traditional McConaughey movie, and then expecting the audience to see anything but Matthew McConaughey wandering onto the set of a Japanese children's show, is like asking people to hear Nicholas Cage or Joe Pesci or Tommy Lee Jones and not instantly think of the iconography around Nicholas Cage, Joe Pesci, or Tommy Lee Jones. McConaughey is flat-out distracting, there's no other way to put it, and while that's certainly something that probably afflicts adults more than children, even absent the baggage, the introduction of McConaughey as McConaughey is totally anachronistic to the fantastical magical world that the filmmakers have laboriously created. The effect is rather like Robin Williams' performance in Fern Gully, a performance that, irrespective of the quality of the voice work or the pedigree of the actor, simply takes you out of the film every time you encounter it.

But distracting as McConaughey is, he's not a lethal blow to the film. Recasting him would have solved everything, after all. The biggest problem with Kubo and the Two Strings, and the one that cannot so easily be resolved isn't McConaughey. It's Laika.

Kubo and the Two Strings is a movie that wants to be a rousing adventure, a trip through mythological Japan complete with monsters, magic, swordfights, action, and all the good things that fun animated kids movies have nowadays. But it also wants to do all of those things purely with practical effects, miniatures and stop motion and the like, and unfortunately what Laika has discovered and inadvertently revealed to all of us is that these two goals are antithetical, because Laika just can't do it. You cannot make a full-speed action-adventure feature film using nothing but stop motion, not without taking sixteen years and $200,000,000 to do it, neither of which Laika can feasibly take. When one must re-arrange every frame of a 100+ minute film by hand, it means that every frame of animation takes longer to produce than it would being drawn on cell paper, let alone rendered on a computer. And because of this, with a limited budget of money and time, Laika has been forced to cut corners, in the time-honored method of budget-crunched animators everywhere. Action sequences are stilted and slow, lacking the explosive movement that we've come to expect from animated films nowadays. Scenes designed to generate energy grind to a halt so that minutes can be taken up with pace-shattering filler material, throwing off the balance of the entire movie and rendering several long sections flat boring to watch. To save frames, the animators even resort to the old anime trick of moving the background while the characters stay motionless, a staple of Saturday morning anime, unworthy of the feature film that it is used within. Even the plot is harnessed to push the required frame count down, tieing itself into knots to avoid having to show any more action than is absolutely necessary, and leading unavoidably to the conclusion that despite the gorgeous look and style of the film, this is a movie that should have been made by Disney or Pixar or Dreamworks. Laika is simply not up to the task of realizing it.

Final thoughts:  Kubo and the Two Strings has a universally-sterling reputation, and I do see why, but the film is not the masterpiece that it is being made out to be. I would never begrudge someone from enjoying themselves insofar as a movie is concerned, of course, nor do I wish to pretend that literally everyone else is obviously wrong and I am clearly right. But pacing is not an afterthought when one is crafting a story, and it is equally not a place one should cut corners just to make the movie come together. Laika's insistence that their methodology was the right one to bring this story to life is commendable, certainly, but also completely wrong-headed, as a brief credit sequence done with traditional animation proves more lively than the entire movie it follows. And while I hate to denigrate the tremendous work that a great many skilled professionals put into the movie, I cannot pretend that the result was the untrammeled success that I was promised. After all, if I did, then what praise would I have left for the next time Laika does pull it off?

Final Score:  5.5/10

Next Time:  Comedy is hard.

Hell or High Water

Alternate Title:  Peak Texas

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:    Two Texas brothers execute a plan to rob banks to save their ranch, while being pursued by an old Texas Ranger nearing retirement.


Things Havoc liked: It's about goddamn time.

For those who don't follow the movie calendar the way that I do, we're now in a period colloquially called the "September Slump", which is exactly what it sounds like. It's the blank space in the calendar between the blockbusters of summer and the award bait of the late fall, a period which often has lots of movies that superficially appear to be worth seeing, and prove ultimately to be pieces of crap unable to compete with the films actually coming out of Oscar season. The Judge and Gone Girl both come to mind. As such, while the options around September generally dictate that I go see them anyway, I've become rather gun-shy about movies that might appear at first glance to be the first blossoms of the fall flowering, as these films typically devolve into cheese, schmaltz, and general crap.

But not always.

Hell or High Water is an excellent film, bordering on a great one, a movie made with consummate skill and sure-handed direction by one of the best up-and-coming directors that I have yet to encounter over the course of this project, Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie, whose previous credits include Young Adam, Starred Up, and the extremely underrated indie sci-fi drama Perfect Sense. I've not run into MacKenzie so far doing this because the majority of his movies are strange indie flicks about odd people that don't get a lot of play over here, but as his star has risen, so has the reach of his movies, and here we are at last, with a film that bears all his hallmarks, save with a bigger cast and a homegrown setting.

West Texas, an area of the country all its own, where the men are men and the women are armed. Brothers Toby and Tanner Howard, poor Texas folk whose mother's ranch is now being repossessed by the bank she had her reverse mortgage with, have decided upon a scheme of bank robbery and casino-based money laundering to pay off the debt and re-acquire the ranch for Toby's children, not that the ranch seems all that useful an asset, at least at first. Bank robbery is not a career move one makes if one has either brains or options, but the Howard boys have a plan, one that bypasses the dye packs and traceable bills and security systems that most banks are equipped with nowadays. As the brothers strike and strike again, an old nearly-retired Texas Ranger, and his half-Mexican, half-Commanche partner, is pulled off his desk in Ft. Worth to hunt down those responsible for the armed robberies, trying to divine who they are and what they are attempting to do so as to head them all off.

The setup may all sound familiar, but it's the execution here that pays the bills. The Howard brothers are played respectively by Chris Pine, whose range as an actor has never been properly appreciated, and Ben Foster, who I may have to revise my opinion on after this turn. Both brothers are fantastic, world-weary poor Texas folk, the former more or less law-abiding, the latter a hardened criminal, but both entirely believable, with characters that eschew stereotype and sound perfectly authentic. I've always liked Pine, but Foster, whose most memorable credit to-date was in X-Men 3, is a goddamn revelation here. His character seems to be set up for the Joe Pesci role of the hothead who blows everything by being stupid, only for the screenplay to turn on its head, revealing that hotheadedness and criminality are not necessarily vices when it comes to the business of robbing banks. It's a star-making performance from an actor I previously had no use for, and yet even it pales by comparison to Jeff Bridges (in his finest Rooster Cogburn style) and Gil Birmingham, who play the aforementioned Texas Rangers with a ribald ribbing that is among the truest partnerships ever committed to film. The old standby of the mismatched buddy cops is a tough one to see afresh, but the script holds up, as these two ornery old men rip one another's age, heritage, and intelligence in an exceptionally believable way. Bridges is always great, of course (as is Birmingham when he's not stuck in a Twilight movie), but rarely this good, and as the hunters relentlessly track down the hunted, the characterization only gets stronger along the way.

People have been predicting the death of American film for as long as it has been around, but it is true that the last decade has seen more and more foreign directors trying their hands at the Great American Classic Film, be it Alfonso Cuaron with The Revenant or Steve McQueen with 12 Years a Slave. Hell or High Water is a movie firmly in this genre, and Mackenzie, like the best of the foreign directors who have attempted this, brings his unique eye to the proceedings while still respecting the subject's conventions. The cinematrography is grand and sweeping, with desolate plains and empty tracklands, boarded-up stores and artificially-cheery diners or casino lobbies. Decay and dislocation are everywhere, for sale and payday loan signs choke the streets and highways, graffiti complains of poverty and economic misery. Yet the movie does not turn into some maudlin lament on the starvation of labor or some damn thing. The rough vernacular color of West Texas pervades the entire enterprise, with even bit characters given blunt, plainspoken dialogue, such as the bank clerk who tells the brothers to leave, "because so far, all you're guilty of is being stupid." The movie also delves a bit into just how hard it must be to commit armed robbery in a place where literally everyone is armed all of the time, and prepared to form a posse at a moment's notice. The sheer sense of place that Hell or High Water produces is rare in film, indie or mainstream, and it is a credit to Mackenzie and to screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (of Sicario), that they've managed to produce a film this richly appointed.

Things Havoc disliked: And it's a good damn thing that Sheridan and Mackenzie do such a good job with the dialogue and localizing, because the movie would quite probably fall apart if they did not. Nowhere is it indicated, for instance, just where these two brothers, who are, after all, doing all of this because they have no money, are getting the many and varied cars, automatic weapons, and earthmoving equipment that appear to be integral to their plans. Neither does the film bother to explain away certain fantastic coincidences, or convenient turns of mind that overtake certain characters in the run up to the climax of the film. I understand that this movie isn't about its plot, and I further understand that even if it was, we are not here to get a seminar on the mechanics of rural bank robbery in the American Southwest. But the film does ask us to swallow quite a lot of contrivance in order to make its point, something that I'm usually willing to do, but only if the movie proves itself deserving.

Final thoughts:  This one, however, does, and so there's really nothing to complain about.

Hell or High Water is an exceptional film, a high point in a year that has thus far been notably bereft of them, an excellent film that is both loyal to the oldest conventions of American cinema (the evil bank trying to take the land of the poor ranchers), and entirely defiant of all conventionality. It is a movie that boasts excellent acting, superb writing, and brilliant styling, all in the service of a thoroughly enjoyable movie, one of the very few whole-hearted recommendations I have been able to make this year. Insofar as I write these reviews so as to tell people whether they should or should not go and see a given movie, which is certainly one of the goals that this little project of mine serves, let me be clear. Go and seek this movie out. For once, this summer, you will not be disappointed.

Final Score:  8/10

Next Time:  Laika's at it again.

Sausage Party

Alternate Title:  Foodfight II:  Electric Barbecue

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:    A hot dog and his girlfriend the bun dream of being selected by shoppers at their supermarket home before discovering the awful truth about what happens to food once purchased.


Things Havoc liked: Seth Rogan has been one of the more reliable features at the movies in the last couple of years, and ever since I was dragged to This is the End against my will (thank you, Steve), I've made a point of checking out what I can of his work. Last year's The Night Before was pretty good, as was the unreleased Interview, but this year Rogan decided to take on an animated feature about food that comes to life, all with an R-Rating. You don't see a lot of R-rated animated features around, so this was one I decided was worth considering, especially given its pedigree. There were worse options available.

Rogan, like a lot of filmmakers, has a stable of actors he likes to work with, most of whom make voice appearances in this film. While Rogan himself voices Frank, the lead sausage of a pack of hot dogs who, initially at least, wishes simply to make it to "The Great Beyond" in the company of his girlfriend Brenda Bun (Kristen Wiig), his reliable co-conspirators Jonah Hill and Michael Cera voice Barry and Carl, two other sausages from the same package who actually make it out of their supermarket home and discover what becomes of food in the aftermath of being purchased. Following a series of disasters, our heroes are all separated, and must make their way through the store and the world at large, all while encountering a panoply of other characters voiced by Rogan regulars. David Krumholz and Edward Norton take on comic relief characters of a Lavash and a Bagel who (predictably) hate each other, while Craig Robinson and Bill Hader take on the role of the wise old elder foods (non-perishables) who know the mysterious secrets of the universe. Everyone is fine in the movie, and in fact as the cast elongates, there's a number of legitimately funny, if predictable, jokes to be found in just the concepts people are asked to play. James Franco, for instance, plays a drug addict who discovers he can talk to food after shooting up with bath salts, while Selma Hayak is a lesbian taco shell who gets to be a thin pastiche of every Selma Hayak role ever invented. Assorted smaller roles go to everything from a piece of used chewing gum/Stephen Hawking (just go with it), a potato who is possibly the most Irish thing since Darby O'Gill and the Little People, and a recurring joke about how the Sauerkraut jars are all Nazis who drove the bagels from their original aisles and into the middle eastern foods section. But the best one goes to Nick Kroll, a veteran of many recent comedies (and, weirdly, Terrence Mallick's experimental art film Knight of Cups from last year), who plays the primary antagonist of the film, a douche, both literal and figurative.

As I'm sure you can tell by now, the parallels to Toy Story are many and obvious, and to the movie's credit, it plays the concept reasonably straight. The cosmology of the universe posits that the humans who purchase the food are "Gods", and that the Great Beyond is some form of Heaven, and the attempts on the part of the disillusioned sausages to convince their fellows what actually awaits them results in abject rejection from those who prefer to believe that something good awaits them. This could easily turn insufferable, but instead becomes a weird kind of semi-parody of both religious movies and message movies. Along the way, the film is filled with spoof moments that feel like a cross between The Lego Movie, and something Kevin Smith might have come up with back when he was still making good films. An early scene spoofs the opening to Saving Private Ryan in one of the funniest ways imaginable, while the climax comprises an orgiastic battle with an actual, full-blown orgy. Let it never be said that the movies can't still find a way to show me something new...

Things Havoc disliked: For all that though, Sausage Party is a movie that has about forty-five minutes of good ideas stretched to near the breaking point by the need to come up with a feature-length film. Even at a slim 88 minutes, there are entire sequences in the film that feel like enormous padding, including most everything that happens for the first ten minutes, which, for those who aren't up on your narrative theory, is not the section of the film you want to bore people with. This tendency persists throughout the film, particularly in the middle sections, which involve a series of odyssies on the part of our heroes, who must traverse one aisle after another for no reason other than a couple of jokes at the expense of the foods in question. The main character, Frank, spends nearly ten minutes speaking to a wise council of elder foods, only to go on a quest to find a secret trove of knowledge, which reveals to him... pretty much exactly what the wise council of elders already told him in explicit detail. Meanwhile his girlfriend meets one character after another who have no real reason to be there at all, be it Hayek's taco (who's at least good for a little self-referential humor), or Danny McBride's suicidal Mustard Jar, who exists apparently so that Danny McBride could be in another Seth Rogan movie.

The other major issue with Sausage Party is that... well... it's just not that funny. I mean, don't get me wrong, it is funny, occasionally very funny, especially in the climax, but a lot of the humor falls into that Seth MacFarlane zone, wherein things are funny because they are weird, not because the weirdness is itself amusing. The aforementioned orgy comes to mind, which once you get past the fact that food is having an orgy (which admittedly takes a moment), is just shock humor without any real cleverness to it. It's not that the movie isn't clever at all, it's that it's spotty, with moments of inspired sight gags and visual puns, alternating with long stretches of fairly stale, obvious humor derived from the premise more than anything else. It doesn't make the movie bad, but it does make it somewhat less than one might expect from this team and this concept.

Final thoughts:  Sausage Party is an amusing enough little film, but taking the weirdness of the concept out of things, it's also a movie that probably belongs somewhere around the level of The Interview or Neighbors when it comes to the Seth Rogan oevre. It's a film that needed either to be made as a short film (to cut out the padding) or made by someone with an edgier sense of humor (which Rogan is not and has never been). Still, all in all, if the strangeness of the premise or the appeal of the cast and crew are enough to interest you in a movie about a sex-crazed hot dog who murders a tweaker with an axe, then this one's probably worth a look. And after all, who hasn't wanted to see something like that on occasion?

Final Score:  5.5/10

Next Time:  Time to go back to Texas...

The Infiltrator

Alternate Title:  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

One sentence synopsis:    A US Customs Agent executes an undercover sting designed to bring down Pablo Escobar's drug cartel.


Things Havoc liked: I do like the format I customarily use for movie reviews, the "Things I liked" and "Things I Disliked" and so on, but I will admit that recently it's begun to feel a bit more constraining...

Things Havoc disliked: ... especially for movies like this one.

I'll be quick here, guys, The Infiltrator is a bad movie. Not an awful movie, not a disaster of a movie, not a movie that deserves to be written about in breathless horror, or savage, Churchillian rhetoric, just your run-of-the-mill, everyday, mediocre-to-bad movie, the sort that studios push out by the dozens every year. Its greatest sin is being boring and derivative, and taking few to no chances. It did not cause me to doubt the existence of a loving God, nor to consider the pros and cons of arson. It just made me want to be elsewhere.

But what is this movie, about which I assume none of you have heard anything? Well, it's a drug cartel drama about a man named Robert Mazur, an agent with the US Customs Service who, in the early-mid 80s, went undercover within the drug cartels operated by Pablo Escobar. Robert Mazur was a real guy, who wrote a real book on which this movie is based, and for the purposes of playing him and his associates in this movie, the filmmakers have acquired the services of Brian Cranston, who in a daring departure from his previous roles, is here playing a guy mixed up in drugs while trying to maintain his normal, middle-class life. He is joined by John Leguizamo, once one of the most annoying human beings on Earth, and Diane Kruger, as fellow undercover agents, and must go up against Benjamin Bratt, playing the head of Escobar's operations in Miami.

Honestly though, all of the above people are fine. Yes, Cranston is slumming it here (he was doing the same in 2014's Godzilla), but the fact that he can play this stuff in his sleep doesn't change the fact that he can play it. Leguizamo has long-since earned his way back into my good graces now that he's too old to play The Pest anymore, and while Krueger's not my favorite actress, she doesn't have enough of a role to make much of a difference here. Even Bratt, who is about as intimidating as a stuffed animal, is not the problem.

No, the problem here is Brad Furman, director of this film and largely nothing else with the exception of the McConaughey (and Cranston) vehicle The Lincoln Lawyer back in 2011. That movie was decent, but it was decent because of its cast, not its direction, which was lackluster and overshot. The Infiltrator is moreso, even, to the point where its cast cannot save it, and it is not helped by the fact that the film's script, written by Furman's mother Ellen, is a boring affair with no actual energy to it. Crime dramas are inherently dramatic, but they require more than simple A -> B -> C plotting like these, wherein every scene is measured out to give just enough family tension as the strains of undercover work take their toll, just enough veiled threats delivered by a charming bad guy who is doing quotidian things that could be interpretted as nasty, just enough scenes where the main hero must resist the seduction of the life of crime, etc etc. The film trots out the occasionally half-interesting supporting character, like Cranston's mob-connected Aunt, played by the wonderful Olivia Dukakis, but beyond establishing that she exists, does nothing whatsoever with her, and forgets about her halfway through the movie. Each scene, stolen from better movies, feels like it was copied from a "Crime Drama Writing for Dummies" book, all the way through until the movie reaches the end it was fated to reach from the beginning. Roll credits.

Final thoughts:   Apologies for those looking for more thunderous fury from me, but the fact is that The Infiltrator doesn't merit even as much effort as I've put into it already. It is a completely forgettable movie which only manages to stand out by virtue of just how boring it actually is. I was reading articles on my phone at the back of my mostly-empty theater more than an hour before the end, glancing up every so often just to ensure that, yep, the movie was still running.

Movies can be bad for many reasons, dear readers, but the sad fact is that some bad movies are bad simply because they haven't the wit, skill, or guts to be terrible.

Final Score:  4/10

Next Time:  A month like this demands some radical changes.  Maybe it's time for something more animated...

Suicide Squad

Alternate Title:  A Tale of Two Studios

One sentence synopsis:    An elite task force comprised of assorted supervillains is set loose to stop an ancient evil from destroying the world.


Things Havoc liked: ...

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Er... Things Havoc Liked?

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...so... let's talk about Batman v Superman for a moment.

Batman v. Superman sucked. There's really no other way to put it. It was a terrible goddamn film, a useless waste of two, hell three of DC's most important and popular superheros, a maudlin, ugly, disaster, which I hated with every fiber of my being. It had a stupid, needlessly-byzantine plot that made no sense once strung together and was cored around a jar of urine, a directing style that eschewed everything fun from the first movie in favor of a bitter polemical rant against anyone who enjoys superheroes, movies, or life, and a central premise which ultimately pitted a depressed headcase against a roid-raging dudebro for eight freaking minutes before resolving its primary conflict with one of the stupidest contrivances I have ever seen in all my years of moviegoing. I hated Batman v. Superman, and I vented my hate for it in these very pages, denouncing it with all of the biblical savagery that I could muster before announcing that I was rejecting the entire DC cinematic universe wholesale, and that whatever they wanted to do next, I would leave to others to see.

So, obviously, that didn't happen, because here we are. But the reason that didn't happen is more complex than my being a sucker for buzz or a slick trailer (though it definitely does involve those things). The reason that I, in defiance of my previous ban, went to see Suicide Squad, was because it looked... well different I suppose. The rumors that came out of its production that things were not working properly and that DC had decided to re-cut the film to be more like Deadpool were certainly concerning, but it's not like the notion that DC has been having problems making their movies work was a new one, and frankly, I liked Deadpool. With Batman v. Superman, DC's filmmaking seemed to have entered a tailspin, and perhaps ripping off the closest Marvel film in reach (even if it's not an MCU one) was not the worst way to try and pull out of it. Though haters and trolls may say otherwise, I am not against DC in their efforts to replicate Marvel's success. If I was, I would not have stuck with them after such disasters as Green Lantern or Batman v Superman. And so that, combined with the oddball nature of the trailers, the rumors of re-writes, the pedigree of the filmmakers involved, and the fact that several of my stalwart viewing companions expressed some interest in seeing this one, all combined to get me to reneg on the vow I had made not a couple of months before, and go see DC's attempt to get something right this time.

You learn things, seeing a movie a week. Things you might not otherwise have ever known. You learn which actors grate on you like nails on a chalkboard, and which ones are good enough that you'll go see anything if they're in it. You learn how to read between the lines of a teaser or a full length trailer to anticipate what movies have real potential and which ones are just the marketing department desperately trying to cover a flop. You learn that highly-praised indie movies can suck, and that the difference between a good, stupid brainless action movie and a bad one is that the good one isn't as stupid or as brainless as it initially appears to be. Lessons hard bought, the lot of them, some from the collective gestalt of a hundred movies seen, and some from a single moment's revelation after only one. But in all the years and all the reviews that I've done, one of the greatest surprises I've ever had came to me last Tuesday, as I watched this movie, and I learned that Batman v. Superman, a movie I hated with every fiber of my being and condemned in language appropriate for a war crime, was actually the best movie that DC would make in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Sixteen.

Batman v. Superman was bad, believe me, you all heard me rant about its decrepitude and ugliness, but Suicide Squad is, contrary to all reason, logic, and the laws of physics, not only worse, but much worse a movie so bad as to defy description, one of the worst films that has ever been made by anyone for any purpose. Not only worse than its predecessor, but worse than every touchstone of failure that this genre has ever experienced, worse than Catwoman, worse than Barb Wire, worse than Electra and Amazing Spiderman, Batman & Robin and Superman IV, worse than every Fantastic Four movie ever made, the worst superhero film ever committed to celluloid or digital media, and quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen as a part of this project. A bad movie may bore or annoy you, a terrible film may fill you with frothing rage, but Suicide Squad is so bad as to be numbing, a shell-shock-inducing calamity of a film that left me struggling to form complete sentences. Not bad like Green Lantern, not a sneering idiocy like Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad is a systematic, comprehensive failure of basic storytelling, film-making, and human endeavor from start to finish, a movie which, if the Gods are just, will live on in the annals of man as one of the handful of films synonymous with anti-quality, standing in company with giants like Battlefield Earth, Heaven's Gate, and Manos: The Hands of Fate. And yet to scream and rend garments over this eldritch cataclysm of a movie is not sufficient to come to grips with its decrepitude. Instead we must look at what happened and attempt, as might an arson investigator, to determine where it all went wrong.

Movies fail for many reasons, from bad direction to bad acting, but the one that seems to kill the majority of them, and the one that sits like a naked singularity at the heart of the issues afflicting Suicide Squad is the writing, writing so unremittingly ham-handed, so overwrought, so clunky and shapeless that no movie and no director could possibly survive its advent. Lines that could not ever have been a good idea, not even in the vacuum of a table-read, are littered throughout the film like land mines, waiting for a hapless actor to tread upon them. Moments where the cast is asked to exposit actions that the audience has just seen take place, or to tearfully recite some kind of supposedly heartwarming "bonding" dialogue, despite having no setup whatsoever for that statement, could not have been performed satisfactorily by anyone, let alone the flywheels that occupy the majority of this film. And yet to simply call this the result of a bad script or a hack writer is, once again, not sufficient, because this script was written by none-other than writer-director David Ayer, one of the very best filmmakers working, a man who also wrote and directed such films as Fury, Training Day, and End of Watch, a man who knows how to both create and realize not just good but excellent movies. So how could this script have gotten so far away from him as to produce something this bad?

Simple. Ayer wanted to make Suicide Squad. DC wanted to make Guardians of the Galaxy.

You see, for all the rumors about this film being re-cut to take advantage of Deadpool's success, the end result is about as far from Deadpool as it is from Citizen Kane, if only because it has no, and I repeat no humor in it, not even a semi-decent one-liner. What it does have is a desperate attempt to replicate Marvel's "bad people form a surrogate family" dynamic from Guardians of the Galaxy, an attempt so brazen that multiple characters describe the rest of their team as "family" despite having never once evidenced behavior that would support that. While I can understand DC trying to do something, anything to capture even a small piece of the magic Marvel has been using to craft their cinematic universe, the result is nothing but further evidence of just how difficult a line Marvel walked when it came to Guardians of the Galaxy. Guardians had, among other things, a cast that was both razor-sharp and incredibly strongly defined, even with one member a mute (essentially), one a cartoon, and another purposely written around the fact that the actor playing him could not act. And yet even with those things, Guardians only managed to make their movie work by armoring it with a thick layer of snark and self-awareness, bending over backwards to gain the audience's permission to be cheesy and schmaltzy when it counted. Suicide Squad, like the DC universe it comes from, does none of those things, attempting to drop a "found family" dynamic directly on top of a collection of gaping-mouthed douche-hats without a single redeeming feature between them, all in the middle of a universe that has quite clearly evidenced its bilious contempt for such notions as human warmth or joy. To say that the result is a tonal clash is like saying that the Titanic was a boating accident.

The actors caught in this suck-vortex suffer different fates, mostly in line with their abilities. Better actors like Will Smith (playing team-lead Deadshot) or Viola Davis (playing arch-strategist Amanda Waller), manage to survive by more or less retreating into their established personas, strong enough in Smith's case that he can simply turn his role into "another Will Smith outing" and get away with it, while Davis switches her emotions off and forces her way through the material as though none of it matters to her in the slightest (this is the correct move, lest I sound critical). Basically everyone else goes down with the ship, either because they are bad actors, because they are stuck in a bad role, or both. Margot Robbie, trapped within the role of Harley Quinn, is one such tragic victim, as her character is simultaneously drill-bit-annoying and Westboro-Baptist-stupid, to the point where she sits and pouts over events that both she and everyone else within a million light years knows have not actually taken place. Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney, the Tweedle-Dipshit twins of bad action movies, have no chance at all, and consequently fail just as miserably as they always do, as does newcomer Karen Fukuhara, whom the filmmakers task with playing Katana without evidencing the common decency required to give her a character, a backstory, or even a viable reason to be present at all. The same is true of the other eighteen or so members of the Suicide Squad, each of whom get a generous nine seconds to establish themselves in, nicely conveying the fact that the movie has too many goddamn characters to try and pull off an ensemble piece, particularly since we have never seen any of these characters before now, and rapidly don't want to see them ever again.

And then there's the Joker, oh god is there ever the Joker. Not that we get to see him a lot, for contrary to what the trailers told us, Jared Leto gets all of ten minutes of screentime, is not the main villain of the movie, and in fact, has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, the actual villain, or any goddamn thing. And yet those ten minutes of facetime that Leto gets are more than enough to tell me everything I need to know about this new and updated version of the Joker, namely that he is catpiss-annoying on the level that Jessie Eisenberg's Urine-obsessed Lex Luthor was. The character looks and acts like what would happen if the entire marketing department at Hot Topic were fused together in a bizarre transporter accident, a disaffected hipster affecting pathologies because the alternative would be "conformist". I've long suspected that Jared Leto is an insufferable human being, but he plays this character like he's trying to confirm all of the worst rumors ever spread about him, and the camera lingers on his gold teeth and carefully-selected "gang" tattoos as though the cameraman was bribed by a cabal of his sworn enemies. Insofar as one should hate the villain of a movie (even though Joker is, I repeat, not the villain here), his character is something of a success. Insofar as one should also wish to continue watching the villain, much less so.

All of this seems to take place in a world devoid of anything but grunting shitheels packing heavy weapons and claiming membership in various elite military formations who would, in reality, piss themselves laughing at the prospect of inducting any one of them as a member before kicking their asses just for the fun of it. The film has the customary DC trait of causing major cities to be destroyed without consequence or even concern by the cast as a whole (I speak here of the US government, not the Suicide Squad), only this time, instead of making said destruction at least interesting to see, the movie is so uninterested in the prospect of showing us something interesting that it cuts away from it after a few desultory montage shots. The plot holes are many and cavernous, of course, including a main villain who can apparently defeat half the US army and shrug off direct hits from cruise missiles, but is taken out by a bomb so puny that people standing twenty feet away with no cover are not even knocked over. But the plot holes, as well as the knots that it ties itself into (to the point where I couldn't tell you what the actual plan was for using the Suicide Squad), seem less like carelessness or even stupidity this time than they do the result of complete indifference. The plot of Suicide Squad makes no sense because, on a fundamental level, nobody gave a shit about it, certainly nobody involved in its actual creation. Whether this was always the case, or whether it's simply a matter of the dramatic and brutal editing done to the film in desperation by a frightened studio, the result is a movie where characters find convenient binders labelled "Top Secret Information", whose contents they apparently absorb in fifteen seconds, all while major MacGuffins like a set of sub-dermal explosives injected into the Squad Members to keep them in line, cease to and resume working at what appears to be arbitrary moments, and characters that have been established as being immune to gunfire and rocket strikes not minutes before are suddenly felled by a baseball bat.

Final thoughts:   David Ayer, I wish to remind you all, is a man of talent. Zack Snyder, despite what many people believe, is a man of talent. A good many of the other people involved in this movie, from cinematographer Roman Vasyanov (End of Watch, Fury), to composer Steven Price (Gravity, Fury) are men of talent, as are members of the cast, both of this film and of its predecessor. And yet all that these men of talent managed to do in this case was to produce one of the most staggering misfires of modern times, a movie so bad that I struggle to find a single point to recommend it with. Had I not expended the bulk of my rage at DC with Batman v Superman, this review might have consisted of nothing but incoherent screaming, but as it stands, for all the efforts I've made to diagnose what happened here, I still feel rather like the explorer surveying the blasted ruins of a lost civilization and attempting to guess at what unfathomable catastrophe overtook it.

It should be no surprise that after watching Batman v Superman, swearing off DC forever, relenting, and being presented with this movie, that I intend to see the error of my ways and return to my policy of bothering only with superhero films attached to the MCU. But to write off Suicide Squad as nothing more than a bad entry in a series does not do justice to the transcendent majesty of its failing. This is a film that, by sheer awfulness of writing and acting and plotting, manages to be physically uncomfortable to watch, not because its subject matter is objectionable nor because its cinematography is frenetic, but because one is embarrassed to be watching tripe of this grade, both for yourself and for those forced to participate in it. This is a film destined to be remembered, by me at least, and likely by everyone else forced to see it, a film that will be recalled in hushed whispers around quiet corners of bars, as men grasp glasses of stiff whisky with white knuckles and speak tremblingly of a film they once saw whose gaping void of quality could extinguish the very stars.

 

Final Score:  1/10

Star Trek Beyond

Alternate Title:  Where Everyone Has Gone Before

One sentence synopsis:    The crew of the Enterprise confront a mysterious assailant who seeks a doomsday weapon with which to destroy the Federation.


Things Havoc liked: As is inevitable with anything related to Star Trek, the 2009 and 2013 JJ Abrams-helmed reboots of Star Trek were... well let's say contentious. I know people who burned their Star Trek collections because of the "betrayals" inflicted upon them by Abrams and his gang of slick iPod-aesthetes. As for me, I'm an old-time Trekkie, Next Generation, Original Series, Deep Space Nine, the works. And as a credentialed member of one of Nerd-dom's most storied fan clubs, I thought the reboots were... actually really good. Not the same, certainly, and not flawless either (especially the second film), but then what of that? It's not like the original continuity shows and movies didn't have stinkers (every odd-numbered film, anyone?). What the reboots did have was casting and writing, with a host of younger actors who did almost uniformly fantastic jobs with the old characters, particularly the trio of Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), and Bones (Karl Urban). The revised movies were fun and campy (just like the original series), written with tongue firmly placed in-cheek, with plots that did not take themselves overly seriously (especially the first movie), and character interplay that just worked. Yes, the plot of both films was unnecessarily convoluted. Yes, both movies had villains that needed more time in the oven. Yes, there were questionable decisions throughout, but you know what, the absence of perfection, even in a holy canon like Star Trek's, is not a slap in the face to the fanbase. As someone who has seen slaps in the face to fanbases, and recently, I appreciate the difference.

So this time, Abrams has taken a back seat, and the director's chair has been yielded to Justin Lin, a strange choice on the face of things, as he's a man who made one great indie film (Better Luck Tomorrow), before going over wholly to the really stupid side of Hollywood action (Fast and Furious). And yet, when you think about it, Lin is a fine choice for a series like this, one that has always looked to bring back some of the madcap energy and action of the original series, which for all its deification as one of the great cultural works of our times, was also a television show that featured a barfight in every third episode. If Lin knows anything, after all, it's how to direct action, and given that this movie has a lot of it, it's work remarking that the action in Star Trek Beyond is generally (though not tremendously) better than that of its predecessors. Scenes are less frenetic (though still somewhat), with a broader scope and (somewhat) better eye for actually framing an action shot, something important when we're dealing with disintegrating spaceships with wonky gravity, or tesseract-folded cities that taurus-wrap around themselves. I won't call Lin one of my favorite directors or anything, but he's competent at the least, and given the flirtations that the previous movies (especially the first one) had with dreaded Shaky-Cam, it's worth noting the absence thereof.

The cast is back, as I mentioned, and just as good as they ever were, whatever the quality of the material (we'll get to that). Highlights this time are Urban's McCoy, who gets some of the meatier scenes, along with John Cho's Sulu, who actually gets to command things this time, and Simon Pegg's Scotty, who has taken the screenwriter's privilege of giving himself most of the best lines in the movie. Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo (of Mass Effect), continues the new series' tradition of having excellent Admiralty actors (joining Bruce Greenwood and Peter Weller). But the standout of the film is actually a newcomer, Algerian-French actress Sofia Boutella, whom you may remember last trying to cut Taron Egerton to pieces as the Blade-running henchwoman from Kingsman. Unrecognizable here beneath layers of typically-Star Trekian makeup, her character, a scavenger named Jaylah, doesn't actually get a lot to do beyond play the "token tough self-reliant girl", but Boutella elevates the character beyond the thin material, and also gets probably the best action sequence in the movie, as befits someone of her pedigree.

Things Havoc disliked: Those of you familiar with this movie and its cast, may notice the lack, in the previous section, of an actor whose presence, even in bad movies, can be generally counted upon to drive me into paroxysms of rapturous delight. I am referring, of course, to the villain of the film, played by none other than Idris Freaking Elba, and yet his absence above is no oversight, for it is my duty to inform you that contrary to all the laws of filmmaking, decency, and frankly, physics, this film managed to make Idris Elba suck.

It's not Elba's fault. Of course it's not Elba's fault, how could it be? This is the same man who was literally the only thing worth watching in 2013's otherwise execrable Pacific Rim, he knows how to salvage his dignity in an otherwise bad movie. Instead, this is the fault of Lin and Pegg, who decided to repeat the same mistake that X-Men Apocalypse made earlier this year, specifically take the fantastic actor they had gotten to play their leading villain, and immure him within layers of fake laytex costuming and makeup that not only renders him unrecognizable, but robs him of the ability to actually, you know, act. And just like Brian Singer did with the third installment of his reboot X-men series, Lin and Pegg compound the issue here by giving him nothing whatsoever to work with. His character, a warlord named Krall, has no motivation beyond wanting to destroy the Federation because... because sharing and kindness are marks of weakness or something equally stupid. Yes, there's ultimately more to it than that, a lot more actually, but the "revelations" as to what Krall is actually doing are delivered so late in the film, and in such a ham-fisted exposition-heavy manner (I'm reminded of the resurrection-blood introduction from Into Darkness), and leave such gargantuan character holes in their wake, that the result isn't surprise or delight at the cleverness of the filmmakers, as it is confusion and disgust from an audience who presumably came here to watch a story about characters with believable motives and actions. I don't know if this is an editing problem, wherein the arrangement of the material available was simply botched, or if Lin couldn't be bothered to actually devote attention to the plot of his own movie, but the result is to torpedo any possible levels of interest, or god help us, social commentary (this is fucking Star Trek, people), that might have gone into the movie.

And it's not like the rest of the film really picks up the slack in this regard. Indeed, the movie that this film reminds me of the most is Star Trek Insurrection, the Johnathan Frakes-directed 1998 disappointment, whose failings were primarily that the entire movie felt like an extended episode of the Next Generation TV series. Beyond isn't as bad as Insurrection was, certainly, but it has the same feel. There are no real stakes for the characters, despite desperate attempts by the plot to inject some, and the character subplots are firmly in autopilot from where they were before. You know an ensemble film has no real ideas as to what to do with a character when they have not one, but two separate "maybe I should resign from Starfleet" subplots at the same time. Characters like Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Chekov (the late Anton Yelchin) are given nothing to do beyond exist and service the plot, interpersonal relationships, even between Spock and Kirk, are sort of left to sit, unaddressed, as though the filmmakers had no interest in them. As such, the movie is left with a script that would probably make a serviceable episode of a rebooted Original Series TV show, if one were to exist. Tune in next week to get some actual characterization, but meanwhile, here's Kirk riding a dirt bike and shooting at aliens as we play the Beastie Boys!

Final thoughts:     Star Trek Beyond is not a bad movie, but it is certainly a mediocre one, and a big step down for the franchise as a whole. While the series has seen far, far worse than this, it does lend itself to questions about just how viable the ideas of the filmmakers are, moving forward. I have my own opinions as to what makes good Star Trek, as does anyone who has ever called themselves a Trekkie, but this... this is not it. This is a mildly-entertaining filler episode that you get through without remembering much of while you're binge-watching the third season on your way to the actual good stuff.

A lot of people hated the first two films of this re-imagined series, and most of them, to my surprise, actually thought that Star Trek Beyond was a big step up for the series as a whole. I can't pretend that I understand why, unless what these people think of as "good" Star Trek, is space silliness with no actual content (maybe they were Voyager fans?). As always, I don't concern myself overmuch with the opinions of other critics, mired in the swamps of bad taste and poor judgment as they are. All I will say, as a result, is that if this is the direction that the majority of Trekkies actually want this new series to go in, then by all means, they can have it.

 

Final Score:  5/10

Next Time:  Brian Cranston, in a daring departure from his previous roles, gets involved in the drug trade.