Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) **/*****

It’s not long into the first post-credits scene of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that you realize you’re actually reliving the climactic events of director Zack Snyder’s previous filmic foray into the world of DC Comics, Man of Steel. This time around we’re not seeing things from the perspective of the heroic Superman (Henry Cavill) and the villainous General Zod—who are busy pounding on each other while the city of Metropolis gets destroyed around them—though, we’re seeing things from the perspective of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who has choppered himself into the city and is running around trying to help people on the ground. Immediately the scenario provides you with the sort of grounded drama and human stakes that it was criticized for lacking in Man of Steel, and it feels like Dawn of Justice might be a big time improvement over its predecessor.

Then you realize it makes no sense that Bruce Wayne would chopper himself into a city under attack by aliens as a civilian instead of flying there as Batman in his bat-shaped fighter jet that’s equipped with all manner of missiles and chain guns, and the wind pretty instantly goes out of the movie’s sails. The moment doesn’t make any sense from the standpoint of character motivation, or even from the standpoint of basic logic, and neither do any of the many moments that follow in this long, confusing slog of a film. Dawn of Justice isn’t the sort of movie that doesn’t make any sense if you stop to think about it, it’s the sort of movie that constantly rubs your nose in the stink of what little sense it makes, to the point where you’re more confused about what you did to deserve such treatment than you are mad about it.

Hail, Caesar! (2016) **/*****

Joel and Ethan Coen have made movies that people didn’t like before. Even their greatest films are far enough afield from normal sensibilities to keep them from being loved by everyone. Then there are the movies they’ve made that most people agree just aren’t very good—things like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. The Coen brothers making movies that people don’t like is nothing new. I never imagined that they’d make a movie that I didn’t like though. I’m the guy who thinks Intolerable Cruelty is oozing with way too much charm to be bad, the guy who thinks that few movies are as consistently hysterical as The Ladykillers. Unfortunately, however, the day that I didn’t like a Coen brothers movie has finally come, and the movie that made it happen is Hail, Caesar!

The film stars Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix, a fixer of sorts for a prominent film studio in the 1950s. His job is to keep the studio’s unruly movie stars in line and to cover things up when their decadent Hollywood behavior threatens to generate bad enough publicity to hurt the company’s bottom line. Though he’s tasked with taking care of several unique problems over the course of the film, his primary concern is that one of the studio’s biggest leading men, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), has been kidnapped by Communists. You see, given his position, it’s his responsibility to negotiate Whitlock’s release. People in the know will tell you that Mannix is based on a real-life figure of the same name, a man who worked for MGM rather than the fictional Capital Pictures that exists in this film.

Jane Got a Gun (2016) **/*****

Throughout the 90s and the aughts, so few people were making Westerns and so few Westerns that got made were any good that it felt like the genre was dying. There were some rumblings of a resurgence back in 2010 when the Coen brothers made a bunch of money and got a bunch of critical acclaim with their True Grit remake though—and with the release of Slow West, Bone Tomahawk, and The Hateful Eight last year (which were all awesome to varying degrees), it started to look like we were on the verge of a full-on Western renaissance. Maybe those films raising expectations is why Jane Got a Gun feels like such a disappointment. Conversely, maybe the lowered expectations the genre came with for so long is why it also feels like Jane Got a Gun should be given a pass for being such a disappointment. Either way you cut it though, the sad truth is that, like most movies that get released in January, Jane Got a Gun has a lot of problems.

The film opens with a man (Noah Emmerich) returning home to his wife and child and their isolated ranch with a small handful of bullets in his body, dying. That’s not the worst of his situation though. The worst is that the bullets were put in him because he crossed a powerful gang of outlaws, the sort of gang who isn’t going to be happy with just seriously injuring an enemy, so now they’re on his trail, they aim on finishing the job of murdering him, and they’ll likely also take care of the wife and the kid when they get there. The wife is Jane (Natalie Portman), and given the fact that her husband has been incapacitated, it falls on her to protect her home and her family. The twist there is that the only gunslinger she knows who might help her is her ex-fiancé (Joel Edgerton). He answers her call, begrudgingly, but once he’s in the house of his former love and her new husband, bad feelings begin to bubble to the surface. Add that to the ticking clock element of the gang of outlaws on their way to wreak havoc, and this doesn’t turn out to be a good situation for anyone. 

Jurassic World (2015) **/*****

A big part of what made the original Jurassic Park work so well and that makes it so memorable is the sense of wonder that comes from experiencing something truly incredible for the first time. In an in-movie sense, that wonder came from the characters being among the first human beings to ever lay eyes on real, living dinosaurs. For the audience, the wonder came from seeing CG special effects that brought these dinosaurs to life on the big screen in a seamless, realistic way for the first time ever. The visuals of the first Jurassic Park still look great even this many years later.

Seeing something incredible again isn’t as memorable as seeing something incredible for the first time, however, so the Jurassic Park sequels each experienced diminishing returns upon release. One might even argue that, despite its success, Jurassic Park was exactly the kind of movie that should never have had a sequel, and now that the franchise is seeing a reboot with director Colin Trevorrow’s (Safety Not Guaranteed) Jurassic World, those problems have multiplied to the point where the characters in the film even have to address them. In this world, seeing dinosaurs has become old hat and boring, much like seeing impossible things brought to life on the big screen via CG effects has to movie fans in our world, so the answer that the film offers up is that it’s become necessary to create a dinosaur that’s bigger, scarier, and more impressive in order to capture people’s imaginations. The problem with that strategy in our world is that, after seeing entire cities destroyed on film countless times over the last decade, the visuals in these summer movies can no longer be made any bigger, scarier, or more impressive, so Jurassic World, as it’s crafted, really has no reason to exist. Instead of solving this franchise’s irrelevance problem by making something bigger, they should have attacked it by making something completely different.

San Andreas (2015) **/*****

Movies have been obsessed with depicting the end of the world for a really long time. Whether it’s death and destruction by storm, volcano, asteroid, or, yes, earthquake, there have never been any shortage of films where some sort of natural calamity strikes a popular area, destroying all of the landmarks and killing all of the nice people who call them home. Audiences love it. Maybe there’s a unique thrill we get from seeing filmmakers depict awful fears that we don’t like to admit to ourselves could some day become real that explains it. Maybe seeing this sort of material visualized taps into a place so deep in our subconscious that we don’t know how to access it any other way, so there’s some part of us that needs to see it. Or maybe people are just really messed up.

Either way, writer/director Brad Peyton’s (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore) San Andreas is another one of these disaster movies, in the most generic way possible. It features all of the same character archetypes that these disaster movies always do, it builds to all of the same moments of peril that these disaster movies always do, and it ends in the same Hollywood way that all of these disaster movies always do. Basically, this is exactly the sort of cookie-cutter, studio movie that feels like it could have been directed by the same guy hired to make things like Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and Cats & Dogs: Kitty Galore. 

Short Round: Road Hard (2015) **/*****

The new crowd-funded film from co-writer, co-director, and star Adam Carolla, Road Hard, sees the modern Renaissance man tapping into his own life experiences by playing a frustrated former TV star whose slagging career has forced him to make money by traveling the road as a standup act, all while growing increasingly beaten down by the red tape, empty talking heads, and soul-crushing hypocrisy of the entertainment industry. “Beat down” being the key words there, because Carolla’s character is one of the most inert, blank-faced protagonists we’ve gotten in a comedy in a long time.

Despite containing a handful of legitimate laughs, the script for 'Road Hard' is nearly as stiff and awkward as the screen presence (which could best be described as Frankensteinian) of the man who co-wrote and stars in it. This film feels like an extended version of the pilot episode of one of those sitcoms they give a standup comic—you know, where huge chunks of their stage act are still being used as clunky dialogue because a full writing team hasn't yet been assembled.

And what a dour mood this movie establishes and then wallows in, even in the scenes where the resigned-to-misery protagonist is supposedly breaking out of his shell and relocating his spark. For something that sticks so closely to classic comedic storytelling structure, 'Road Hard' sure can be a bummer to watch. Maybe Carolla and his writing partner would have had better results if they fully embraced their dark thoughts and just wrote a real tragedy instead of trying to juggle tones. You know that the man’s years of talking to troubled teens about their drug and sex abuse problems on the radio has to have provided plenty of fodder for story ideas that go in that direction. Why not leave the obligation to do comedy behind and swim around in that mess if your head is so clearly in a dark place right now? Road Hard is a big step back from the first comedy Carolla co-wrote and starred in, The Hammer, and the missing ingredients seem to be any trace of life or any sense of fun.

Short Round: The Lazarus Effect (2015) **/*****

Director David Gelb has done great work in the world of documentaries before (Jiro Dreams of Sushi), so while it seemed a little curious that his latest project, The Lazarus Effect, was a dramatic film that fits in the horror genre, it was at least encouraging to know that the man had talent. Even more encouraging was the cast of actors he put together. Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Donald Glover—they’re all fan favorites who have done great work in interesting things before, so who wouldn’t want to see what they have to offer the latest entry in the dead-come-back-to-life horror sub-genre? Well, it turns out you wouldn’t, because despite the fact that this film was made by a talented director and features a talented cast, it’s still one of the more boring things that’s hit theaters in a while.

Even though all of the principals here are charismatic people, the script they’re working with is so inept when it comes to giving them interesting things to say or do that the talent and presence they bring to the film becomes a non-factor. You could have cast amateurs in this derivative snoozer and gotten largely the same results. The story here starts off with a group of doctors and researchers working to bring the dead back to life, which makes it firmly a descendant of the Frankenstein story, and then it takes a turn where it becomes a Carrie-esque story about a troubled girl getting brain powers, the combination of which basically makes it a take on The Dark Phoenix Saga from Marvel’s X-Men mythos; but it isn’t able to be half as interesting as any of its influences. If X-Men: The Last Stand didn’t combine a script as bad as this one with even worse execution while adapting the Dark Phoenix story, this would certainly be the worst version of it made. The people behind this thing should probably send Fox and Brett Ratner a thank you note for that.

The problem with the film, aside from the fact that its characters are anonymous blank faces, is that none of the scary stuff that follows their decision to mess with mother nature is remotely original or even presented with a new twist. This movie exists as basically a pastiche of clichéd, overused horror moments that we’ve all seen a thousand times before, and in lieu of building atmosphere, tension, or mood, it relies entirely on jump scares to get any rise out of its audience whatsoever. Seriously, entirely. Half of this movie’s run time is taken up of people either being startled by loud noises or looking for something scary one place and then having it suddenly appear behind them. If it wasn’t for the amazing canine actor who played Rocky the Sad Zombie Dog, The Lazarus Effect would have been a total dud.

Short Round: The Boy Next Door (2015) **/*****

If there was one thing I thought that the entire world could agree on, it’s that there’s no such thing as a sexy teenage boy. That was before I saw The Boy Next Door, however, which is a movie that sells itself on the titillating premise of Jennifer Lopez giving into the dark urge to indulge herself in some underaged man-meat, and then suffering the consequences of her indiscretion. Of course, the problem of there being no such thing as a sexy teenage boy was mitigated by director Rob Cohen (xXx, Stealth) casting 27-year-old Ryan Guzman as a high school kid, but that premise alone should still be enough to help you understand just how ridiculous and ill-conceived a movie this is. 

From Play Misty For Me to Fatal Attraction to Single White Female to Chuck and Buck, stalker stories have long been a staple of the thriller genre. They’re great for building tension, they tell a story that’s horrific but nonetheless grounded and relatable, and they generally make for a good excuse to inject some sex into a story. Maybe they don’t usually make for great art, but they almost always make for good trash entertainment. So, seeing as the second half of The Boy Next Door moves on from the salaciousness of J-Lo having an underage love affair to the terror of having said love affair turn into a dangerous stalker situation for her, you’d think that maybe the movie would still be able to entertain, if even in a half-ironic way. Unfortunately though, it’s not even competent enough to achieve that small level of success.

The Boy Next Door is a dumb movie—not just dumb in concept, but also dumb in execution. Its characters don’t act like people so much as they act like characters in a movie. They don’t speak like human beings so much as they speak like pawns in a melodrama who were conceived simply to drive a narrative forward. The disconnect between these people and the world they live in and real people and the real world is so severe that it becomes impossible to care about anything that happens to the Lopez character, or any of the peril she’s put in—which is ample. In fact, her stalker goes so over the top crazy, and the danger elements of the film get so broad and unbelievable, that a more charismatic actor could have used the antagonist role here to really chew some scenery and produce a potentially memorable bit of movie cheese, but Guzman is not that actor. He’s committed enough that he doesn’t embarrass himself, even when delivering bad material, but that’s the best that can be said of anyone involved in this production—they’ve made something bad, but something that’s too blandly bad for anyone to remember it or hold it against them in a month’s time. It’s probably best for everyone that we never speak of this movie again.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) **/*****

While Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a landmark series of films that will go down in history as being seminal works, his prequel trilogy, The Hobbit, has been a mixed bag that has produced diminishing returns. At this point, this is the sixth film that Jackson has made that’s set in this same world, striking this same tone, and that has a run time that’s well over two hours. Even for huge fans of the overall franchise, the magic has to be running out. Truth be told, though The Hobbit started off as a less than perfect though perfectly entertaining companion piece to The Lord of the Rings, with this final chapter, The Battle of the Five Armies, the series as a whole has revealed itself to be quite a tedious slog.

If you’ve seen the first two Hobbit movies, then you should have a good idea of what this one is about. If you haven’t, then you’re going to be confused, because Five Armies exists as little more than an extended action climax that caps off all of the setup that was put into place by the first two films. When The Desolation of Smaug ended, the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) had left his home in The Lonely Mountain and was heading toward the nearest town, presumably with the intention of destroying it and killing everyone who lives there. When we pick things up in this film, that’s just what’s happening. The dragon attack is big and spectacular and starts the film off on an exciting note. And then another big action scene follows it. And another. And another. It doesn’t take long before the sight of hoards of CG beings smashing into each other becomes numbing and boring.

Short Round: Foxcatcher (2014) **/*****

After directing Capote and Moneyball, Bennett Miller has become fairly renowned for being a go-to guy when it comes to biopics. So you’d think that him tackling the life of John du Pont—who was an heir to a fortune, weirdly obsessed with amateur wrestling, and who suffered from issues with self esteem and mental illness that eventually led to him committing a murder and being incarcerated—would make for a pretty amazing movie. Unfortunately, this time around, it doesn’t. Miller isn’t a director who I’ve found to be too on the nose in the way he tells stories before, but for some reason his hand gets fairly heavy here (through extraneous use of flashbacks, camera work that over emphasizes what we’re supposed to be feeling about a scene, etc…), and the result is a movie that contains individual scenes that are good on their own, but that doesn’t work as a whole.

Probably the thing about Foxcatcher that’s earning it the most attention is its performances, which makes sense, because Steve Carell is really going out on a limb as du Pont, and Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum are burning an equal amount of calories playing David and Mark Schultz, a pair of Olympic gold medal earning brothers who get sucked into du Pont’s bubble of influence thanks to his obsession with wrestling, and eventually suffer negative consequences because of it. Each performer doesn’t work to the same result, however. Ruffalo is absolutely amazing here, disappearing so completely into the older brother David that you never once catch him performing. Tatum and Carrell are a different story. Tatum is so forcefully playing the younger brother Mark as a hulking, confused, lump of focus and simplicity, that to behold him on screen is like laying eyes on a cave man. But at times he goes a bit far and it feels like he’s doing a caveman impression—and poor Carrell fairs even worse. He’s really making a go of it as du Pont, but they’ve got him buried in so many stupid looking prosthetics and have dressed him in so many silly outfits that it’s never not clear that you’re watching Steve Carell play-acting a wacky character.

The main problem with Foxcatcher is that it’s boring though. Slow burns can be effective, especially when they’re building up to as big a moment as this film is, but this one goes beyond being a slow burn. This movie is barely ever smoldering. It’s so much longer than it needs to be, it spends too much time on scenes that don’t actively drive the narrative forward, and it asks us to be far too interested in the day to day existences of characters who exist as little more than blank slates with one critical personality flaw. There’s no life, no humor, no anything in this script other than a slight awkward tension in the interactions between the principals that’s just barely able to keep you from turning it off. Foxcatcher is a story that may have been worth 100 or so minutes of screen time, but at 134 minutes it gets sunk by its own weight.

Short Round: Let’s Be Cops (2014) **/*****

Jake Johnson and Damon Wayans Jr. are hilarious guys and great comedic actors—and anyone who’s seen the work they’ve done together during the latest season of New Girl can tell you that they have the chemistry necessary to make for a solid onscreen duo. So it makes sense why someone would want to make a big screen comedy and put them in the starring roles. What doesn’t make sense, however, is why Johnson and Wayans, who are both at points in their careers where they’re getting the opportunity to make lots of great stuff, would agree to attach themselves to a script that’s as lame as the one that became Let’s Be Cops. 

The premise of the film—that two underachieving man-children who dress up as cops for a costume party discover that people give them the respect they’ve been unable to achieve in real life while in uniform then decide to exploit the deference shown to police officers by continuing to dress up in the outfits and act like big shots—is fertile enough ground for comedy in theory, but in execution this script proves to be little more than a mixed bag of lame gags and overly serious dramatic subplots that add up to a tonally confused mess. Johnson and Wayans are good enough at delivery that they’re able to get a handful of laughs out of the material, but that’s almost a miracle when said material mostly consist of well-worn racist outrage-baiting, rapey scenarios involving lecherous men, fear of homosexuality, and silly prat falls. A handful of laughs aren’t nearly enough to keep this one from going straight into the toilet.

Especially because the humor is so broad, and the protagonists are so silly, but then a serious story involving gangsters, police corruption, and life or death situations keeps butting in and getting in the way of the jokes. Unless you’re an elite talent, like say the Coen brothers or something, you can’t have it both ways. You can either have a police movie where the protagonists are real people and the audience is supposed to take the action seriously, or you can have a cop comedy where the protagonists are cartoon characters and the plot stuff doesn’t much matter. Co-writer/director Luke Greenfield is apparently not a Coen brother, because Let’s Be Cops plain doesn’t work. This is a movie that asks you to believe that an impeccably quaffed Nina Dobrev waits tables at a greasy spoon for a living, creates horror movie makeup in her spare time, and also doesn’t have a boyfriend. You can’t introduce a premise that ridiculous and then ask us to treat your shootout scenes as if they exist in any sort of reality or that anyone important could be put in any actual danger by them. What we have here is a decent premise for a movie that unfortunately got taken out of the oven when it was still only half-baked.

Short Round: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) **/*****

Just the title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably enough to turn mainstream audiences off of this crazy property. It’s ridiculous—the kind of stuff that only kids could ever like. The fact is though, ever since the original TMNT comic books were turned into a toy line and a cartoon series in the late 80s, the turtles have become a worldwide phenomenon on the back of its little kid fans alone. It’s likely Platinum Dunes had higher aspirations when it came to relaunching them as this live action, big budget, possible franchise-invigorator though. Now there’s a possibility that the Turtles can be followed by new kid fans as well as nostalgia-seeking former fans, which could possibly make it the sort of genre-crossing, money-earning hit that the Marvel movies or the Transformers movies have become. The idea is a sound one, except for the fact that any movie about turtles who mutate into pizza-loving, Renaissance artist-named, ninja teenagers is going to have to primarily concern itself with being a mindless good time in order for broad audiences to really embrace it, and a mindless good time isn’t what this new TMNT movie is at all. As a matter of fact, it’s mostly an exposition-filled bore.

It doesn’t do everything wrong. The special effects that bring the Turtles themselves to life are generally impressive, and may even be an improvement over the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop efforts that brought the Turtles of the 1990 film to life (when we’re watching character-building scenes where they’re just sitting around), and the script seems to have a strong handle on who the turtles are as people—some stream lining and rewriting has been done in respect to their origins, but each Turtle is still easily recognizable as the distinct personality we’ve known them as, and the group dynamic is still largely in tact, so it’s hard to complain about anything that’s happened to the characters. But, on the other hand, this movie sticks so closely to what we’ve gotten in the past, character-wise, that it feels like a huge mistake for it to spend so much time explaining itself. Hollywood has made bad Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies before—really bad ones—but this is the first time they’ve made one that’s completely boring.

This Turtles movie comes after an entire trilogy of live action Turtles movies, countless animated series, countless comic books, countless video game spin-offs, and even an ill-advised holiday special, and yet we’re still asked to wait for a good half hour until we see the characters, as if we’re watching Jaws for the first time or something. This is a movie that has a rock-simple plot—mutants are created, mutants escape, their creators need to get them back—but it spends so much time explaining itself with flashbacks and expositional dialogue that you get a good hour in before the plot moves forward at all. Ninety percent of TMNT is its writers explaining away what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are, like we’re not already aware, and like any excuse could ever be made for how ridiculous a concept it is in the first place, and the other ten percent is inert action sequences where the CG nature of all the effects rob everything of any reality, weight, or urgency, so that none of what you’re watching ends up mattering in the first place. This movie is everything that’s wrong with modern blockbusters, rolled into one big failure. It’s a remake of something we’ve had enough of, it’s derivative of everything else that’s come out in the last five years, it’s concerned more with empty spectacle than character-building, and it insults the audience’s intelligence at every turn. This was the Turtles’ big opportunity to move past its child-aimed roots and become a mainstream property, but if you happen to be past the age of a small child and you find yourself satisfied by this film, then you need to take a long, hard look at what exactly it is you do or do not demand from your entertainment. If you like this one, chances are you might be a Philistine.

Short Round: Begin Again (2014) **/*****

Begin Again, the latest music-heavy drama from Once writer/director John Carney, tells a story that springs out of two other tales that happen concurrently; the dissolution of a young songwriter’s (Keira Knightley) relationship with her boyfriend and writing partner (Maroon 5’s Adam Levine) after he achieves rock star status, and the dissolution of a formerly successful music producer’s (Mark Ruffalo) life and career after a couple of tough breaks lead him into a pattern of alcoholism and self-destructive acting out. One chance encounter between a down-on-her-luck musician and an at-the-end-of-his-rope producer later, and you can pretty much tell what’s going to happen. They decide to make music together, and the process of doing so not only gets them both back on their feet, it teaches them important lessons about life and relationships. Every move this movie makes is telegraphed a mile away, but, if there was going to be a reason to see Begin Again, it wasn’t going to be for the groundbreaking storytelling anyway.

Chances are, if somebody was going to see Begin Again, it was either for the promise of a soundtrack full of great music, or to take in the performances of its two leads. Ruffalo’s scruffy charisma and Knightley’s sweet smile are two very powerful tricks for a movie to have up its sleeve, after all. Unfortunately, while they’re both present here, they’re just not enough to keep Begin Again from being a total bore. The portions of the film that focus on the failed romance of two young, white, attractive, rich people are just too rom-com retread to be remotely interesting. The portions that focus on the down and out record producer could have been something, except they don’t get enough time to fully develop, and the drama of the situation is neutered when Ruffalo’s character is given an out for his behavior and ultimately doesn’t have to own up to his alcoholism. That leaves the portions of the film where Ruffalo and Knightley’s characters get together and make music, and they’re no deeper than a montage sequence from an 80s movie where a bunch of people get together and clean up an old house while a song plays. Begin Again is pure Hollywood formula that has been mined no deeper than usual and that has had no unique spin put on it whatsoever. Tedious.

Which leaves us with the music. There is a lot of good music in this thing, I guess, if you’re into the sort of pop-friendly, singer-songwriter stuff that the people behind the soundtrack have come up with. Is it all so good that an entire feature film needed to be built around it? Probably not—and that’s exactly what this film plays as while you’re watching it—a half-baked promotional vehicle meant to promote a soundtrack. If you’re the type of person who likes Maroon 5 and who wants to hear what Levine did for this movie, then, by all means, give the soundtrack a listen. Fans of Knightley especially might want to try it out to see what a pleasant surprise she can be when put behind a microphone. There’s really no reason for anyone to bother sitting through the movie itself though. Life is too short, and there will be other Mark Ruffalo vehicles.

Short Round: Willow Creek (2014) **/*****

Willow Creek is a found footage horror movie about a Bigfoot enthusiast (Bryce Johnson) and his non-believer girlfriend (Alexie Gilmore) going deep out into the woods to film their attempt at recreating the journey Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin took when they captured their infamously grainy footage of a creature that may or may not have been a female Bigfoot back in 1967. Probably your immediate reaction to this premise is to sigh in defeat. You already know how this story is going to end, you already know every beat it’s going to hit while getting to that ending, and you already know how terrible the camera work is going to be thanks to the found footage gimmick, so what’s the point? Well, once you hear that this is also the latest movie from director Bobcat Goldthwait (World’s Greatest Dad, God Bless America), who’s basically a master of pitch black satire, your opinion probably changes. Clearly the only reason a filmmaker like this would want to take on a project like this is because he has a bunch of tricks up his sleeve regarding the skewering of all the conventions of this recent glut of found footage horror movies, right? Unfortunately, no. Turns out that’s not the case at all.

Never in a million years would I have imagined that Goldthwait would spend his time and energy making a movie like this, that’s made up entirely of cliché after cliché ran through without a single twist on the formula, but here it is nonetheless. From the threatening warnings from the locals to stay away, to the mysterious noises heard in the dark, to the sequence where the protagonists argue about whether or not they’ve already been past that tree before, you’ve already seen every scene Willow Creek offers up, and you have nothing to gain from seeing them again. At one point in the film, Gilmore’s character explains to her partner, “I’m trying to film and walk in a treacherous area at the same time. Bear with me,” and that’s pretty indicative of the experience as a whole. No, we will not bear with you. We’ve paid to watch this movie, and for it to just be a bunch of shaky footage shot by people stumbling over rocks and sticks for a good deal of its run time is completely unacceptable. 

Perhaps sticking to the usual formula would have been reasonable if the protagonists were entertaining, or at least likable in any way, but these two dull drips going out into dense, remote wilderness that’s full of bears and mountain lions and whatnot, without a gun or any survival equipment of any kind, completely fails to inspire even a shred of affection or empathy. If anything, you can’t wait for something scary to tear these idiots apart and put the whole story to bed. The urge to shout, “Why don’t you hipsters have jobs?” at the screen is a real one—and constant. There are a couple of segments early in the film where Gilmore interviews Bigfoot-enthusiasts who are clearly non-actors and who likely weren’t reading from a script that are slightly interesting because of weirdness, and the whole thing only runs 80 minutes, so it doesn’t get too much of a chance to wear out its welcome, but other than that there’s not much to be said in the favor of Willow Creek. Hopefully Goldthwait’s next project will get him back to the subversiveness that he excels at.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) **/*****

Early on in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 there are a handful of scenes where Spider-Man is doing some web-slinging and crime fighting through the skyline of New York City that are absurdly expensive-looking and absolutely thrilling to watch. They represent the most fully-realized and comic book-authentic images of Spidey that have appeared onscreen to date, and they would have gotten the film off to a good start, if they were actually how it opened. Instead though, the opening scene of this movie is an action scene featuring Spider-Man’s parents, from years earlier, that doesn’t really resonate because we don’t know what kind of people they were or even what they were up to during the sequence, and that serves as an early indication that the film would eventually get bogged down in a quagmire of plot and mythology-building. Which it does. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is kind of a chore to watch.

Before we turn this into a bitch-fest though, let’s address the aspects of the movie that worked, because there were a few of them—though they get so thoroughly overpowered by the surrounding crap that they don’t ultimately matter. As anyone who saw the first Amazing Spider-Man could tell you, Andrew Garfield is very well cast as the title character, who’s otherwise known as Peter Parker, and Emma Stone is very well cast as his love interest, Gwen Stacy. Their teenage romance made for the best bits of the first film, and their continued relationship drama is also the best part of this sequel. Not only are these two attractive and charming, but they’re able to handle dramatic material well, they both have excellent comic timing, and they even work well as a pair. Marc Webb couldn’t have asked for a better couple of young actors to direct.

Short Round: Bad Words (2014) **/*****

Seeing as the last decade or so has given us Bad Santa, a Bad News Bears remake, Bad Teacher, and Bad Grandpa, movies that have the word “Bad” in the title and that feature a cartoonishly mean main character can probably now be considered an official comedic sub-genre. The latest, Bad Words, comes to us from director/star Jason Bateman, and it sees him playing a foul-mouthed and bitter 40-year-old named Guy who finds a loophole in a national spelling bee’s rules that allow him to sign up as a contestant—you know, even though spelling bees are supposed to be for kids. Seeing as he’s an overall bad person, it seems to be Guy’s plan to use his superior intellect to make a mockery of the competition, and to crush the dreams of all the little nerds who worked so hard to get there.

The thing that Bad Words doesn’t get that most of the “Bad” movies that came before it did is how to make the man character likable, despite their behavior. In all of those other movies, the mean character in question was a loser, someone who had hit rock bottom and was aiming their barbs at people perceived as being above them. Bateman’s character here seems much too smart and together to really be considered a loser, and he’s aiming most of his insults at children. Like those that came before him, you can describe Guy with words like cranky, crotchety, and cantankerous, but he’s the first of his kind that can also be described as smarmy, snarky, and smug. There’s no joy in watching someone who holds a position of power being mean to those beneath them. It just comes off as being cruel, and kind of a drag to sit through. And while most of these characters have been played as broad cartoons in the past, with a heightened reality that makes their behavior more palatable, Bateman plays Guy far too naturally for us not to take him seriously, which leads to some off-putting shifts in tone. Bateman never digs deep enough into Guy’s pathos for him to be dramatically effective, and his delivery is far too dour and dry for him to be all that effective comedically either.

The movie does start to get engaging somewhere about halfway through, once you realize that the real reason Guy has inserted himself into the spelling bee and the real reason he’s being a total jerk to everyone is being built up into a mystery, but once you finally get your answers, they’re just too unsatisfying and senseless for Bad Words to redeem itself as any sort of character study. It’s clear that the film thinks it has presented a moment of emotional catharsis by the time the end credits roll, but from this side of the screen the final few scenes don’t end up resonating at all. Even when all the cards are out on the table, you’re still just left asking yourself, “So what?” 

Need For Speed (2014) **/*****

When I heard that they were making Need For Speed, a film adaptation of a video game that’s little more than a racing simulator with no built in characters or storylines, I was incredulous. When I then heard that it was going to be the first big starring vehicle for Aaron Paul following his career-making run on TV’s Breaking Bad, my reaction to the project was downgraded from incredulous to skeptical. If Paul, who had reached a career crossroads where he likely had offers coming in from all corners of Hollywood, saw something in this project, then maybe there’s something to it? Maybe some ambitious screenwriter somewhere took a thin premise and nonetheless turned it into a screenplay worth getting excited about? Nope. Need For Speed is one of the most senseless, stupid, poorly written movies I’ve seen in a really long time.

When it comes to the story this movie tells, it turns out a dry racing simulation would have been preferable in almost every way. Instead, we get a melodramatic tale that sees Paul playing a down on his luck mechanic/street racer named Tobey who enters into an ill-advised race with an old rival (Dominic Cooper) that not only causes the death of his adopted little brother type (Harrison Gilbertson), but that also results in him serving two years in jail while Cooper’s character uses his connections to get off scot-free. Upon his release, Tobey decides to get revenge through an inexplicable plan that will see him racing across the country in order to get to San Francisco in time to join an underground race put on by an eccentric recluse (Michael Keaton). He intends to win the race, which would… somehow make things even between him and Cooper’s character? Cooper’s character, of course, doesn’t want this to happen, so he offers up a bounty to anyone who can hunt Tobey down and stop him from making it to the race on time. Oh, and also Imogen Poots is also along for the ride as Tobey’s passenger, because somewhere during the development process someone must have decided that the movie needed a romantic element.

Short Round: Ender’s Game (2013) **/*****

Adapting novels into feature films is always a pretty big challenge. So much so that it’s rarer than you’d probably like that a filmmaker is able to do it well. The problem is that there’s so much more room for a story and a set of characters to breathe in a novel than there is in a movie—which can only last somewhere between 90 minutes and two and a half hours—so there’s always some compromises that need to be made when trying to cram all of that nuance into a work that can be digested in one sitting. Too often filmmakers aren’t shrewd enough when adapting a novel, and they end up making bloated, slow-paced films that still don’t manage to reach the depths that the original work mined anyway. Writer/director Gavin Hood’s new adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s well-regarded science fiction novel Ender’s Game doesn’t make this mistake. It cuts the original work down to the absolute essentials, indulging itself nowhere and only including what’s absolutely necessary to get the story told. It’s nice to see a literary adaptation that doesn’t fall into all of the same old traps that usually spring up. Sort of. What’s unfortunate is that this approach doesn’t end up resulting in a successful film either.

Ender’s Game is so swiftly paced and excises so much nuance and detail from the original text that it feels like you’re watching an outline for a movie instead of a whole feature. Nothing we’re presented with gets any time to breathe, to naturally develop, or to hit with any impact. Basically the whole of the narrative is the story of a bright young boy named Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) being picked to be trained to be humanity’s last hope for survival in a future war we’re waging with an alien enemy, which you would think would mean the focus would be on his development as a soldier. Unfortunately, in a movie that’s trying to squeeze so much in, we get one instruction scene and suddenly he’s an expert in warfare. We get one mock battle sequence and suddenly he’s an expert fighter. He has one hallucinatory confrontation with the enemy and suddenly he’s an expert in their mindset. The movie doesn’t even give us the common decency of a montage sequence so that we can better accept the fact that he’s experiencing growth. When a story flies by so fast that you can barely even keep up with what’s happening, it’s not likely that you’re going to find yourself very caught up in any of the drama, and that’s certainly the case here.  

The acting, the staging, and the dialogue delivered can be so clunky in places that the movie earns unintentional laughs as well. Butterfield is spotty from scene to scene as the lead, which is disappointing because his work was generally strong in Hugo, and he fares the best as far as the younger actors go. One plus is that the adult actors, including Harrison Ford as the commander of the soldier school where most of the action takes place, Viola Davis as something of a child psychologist, Nonso Anozie as a drill sergeant, and Ben Kingsley as a mysterious guru character do much better. It’s especially surprising to see Ford appear to be engaged when having to do ridiculous sci-fi things like manipulate machinery that isn’t really there and spout expositional gobbledygook. He was a good sport here, though it didn’t stop much of what he did from playing so unnaturally that it seemed like the sort of thing Mystery Science Theater 3000 made its name mocking. In the end, Hood has made a movie that’s leaps and bounds better than the genre work he did with X-Men: Origins - Wolverine, but considering that’s one of the worst movies that’s been made in the last decade, it’s not saying much. The long wait fans of Card’s novel suffered through to finally get this film adaptation certainly wasn’t worth it.

The Counselor (2013) **/*****

You can say what you will about Ridley Scott and the trajectory his career as a filmmaker has taken, but it’s hard to deny that whenever you sit down to watch a Ridley Scott movie you’re at least going to be watching something that looks nice. Given that we’re all agreed on this point, it’s a good feeling you get when, from the very first frame of The Counselor, it’s clear that what you’re watching is a Ridley Scott movie. The first scene is a bit of a sex scene, where the title character, a lawyer played by Michael Fassbender, is enjoying some afternoon delight with his love interest, a bombshell played by Penélope Cruz. The sequence is filmed exclusively with close-ups on skin and bright white sheets, and it’s really beautiful to look at. Despite the beauty on display though, it slowly starts to sink in that you’re watching a movie that chose to open itself with a sex scene, not unlike The Room did, and that’s when all the problems start.

Blame for the bad first impression and most of what comes next could probably be laid at the feet of the film’s screenwriter, Cormac McCarthy, a living legend of a novelist who has had several of his works adapted into successful movies (No Country For Old Men, The Road) already, and who is making his debut as a writer of original screenplays here. Unfortunately for McCarthy’s reputation as a legend, The Counselor isn’t a very good movie at all. The plot, to the extent that there is one, sees Fassbender’s character breaking bad by stepping out of his law practice and funding an operation meant to smuggle a ridiculous amount of drugs over the border from Mexico into the United States. That drugs are being smuggled is certain, what’s less certain is the role that any of the characters we meet play in the operation, who they’re aligned with, or who they happen to be thinking about double crossing at any given moment. McCarthy’s script never really fills us in on any of the details, and instead chooses to focus on character. 

Granted, focusing on character isn’t necessarily a bad direction to go in if your character work is intriguing, but unfortunately that’s not the case here either. Mostly, The Counselor feels like one of those cheesy erotic thrillers from the early 90s that play like dated jokes when you try to watch them today. Tell me that this screenplay started off as a Basic Instinct sequel and I wouldn’t be surprised. Tell me that it’s the work of one of the most respected currently working authors and I’m mostly just disappointed.  

Short Round: Bad Milo (2013) **/*****

A movie like Bad Milo has an immediate advantage when it comes to capturing potential viewers’ attention, because its premise is so ridiculous that you can’t help but be drawn to it, even if just for the sake of morbid curiosity. The movie stars Ken Marino (Wet Hot American Summer, Party Down) as a character named Duncan, and said premise is that Duncan has repressed all of his stress and rage so deeply inside of him that it’s created a little sharp-toothed, slimy-skinned demon named Milo who lives in his lower intestine. Whenever Duncan has a particularly bad day his body gets out of control, he shits out Milo, Milo runs around town killing all of the people who have been crossing him, and then he climbs back up inside Duncan’s butt. See? Just a brief plot description already has you wanting to see for yourself what it’s all about. The problem is, when your movie has a premise that’s this far out there, you make an unspoken promise to the viewer that what they’re going to see is going to be crazier and grosser than anything they’ve seen in a long time—and Bad Milo just doesn’t have the stuff to fulfill that promise.

Where the movie goes wrong is that, instead of focusing on things like ridiculous gore or gross out gags, co-writer/director Jacob Vaughan and his writing partner Benjamin Hayes play Duncan’s affliction almost completely straight, and they mine his plight for all of the legitimate drama that it’s worth. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with taking your material seriously and playing things straight, but when you’re making a movie about a butt demon, a little of that goes a long way. In a movie like this you’re better off sticking with the splatter that people expect instead of trying to get them to actually care about supernatural bowel movements and their ramifications. That might be too much to ask of any filmmaker, or any audience.

While the film does have a few moments of gore that are over the top and fun, and it does produce a handful of chuckles thanks to childish humor, there’s also another promise it makes to the audience and doesn’t quite keep that prevents it from being even a middle of the road recommendation. In addition to Marino in the lead role, this movie also has an actress as funny as Community’s Gillian Jacobs playing Duncan’s wife, a character actor as eccentric and unique as Peter Stormare playing his therapist, and a comedy fan idol as iconic as Stephen Root playing his father, and it ends up doing almost nothing with them. Jacobs doesn’t get a single chance to be funny, Stormare doesn’t get enough screen time to turn his character into much, and while Root absolutely steals the scene that’s the big showcase for his character, that moment is so crazy and fun that it makes you wish it would have been more indicative of the somewhat dour film that surrounds it. Bringing all of that talent together and then not doing much with them is a great way to disappoint an audience. Bad Milo isn’t terrible or anything, and it’s probably even pretty watchable in a vacuum, but it isn’t likely going to be the movie that you’re hoping it is.