If there’s one thing I’ve learned from crime films, it’s that lying about a small crime is always a bad idea. At least for movie characters like police Detective Ko (Lee Sun-kyun), who hits someone while driving on a dark highway on his way to his mother’s funeral, trying to cover his tracks creates one problem after another. Perhaps being investigated by internal affairs has messed up his judgment, though it doesn’t seem to have affected his ability to think up clever ways to cover his tracks, including, in one hilarious sequence, the truly resourceful employment of a children’s toy, an air vent, and a casket.
The tone is light and funny at first, but as Ko realizes he’s gathered an inadvertent enemy (Jin-Woong Choi), the thriller and action elements take precedence. Still, the film is extremely clever to the end, and the humor doesn’t entirely disappear even as more violent elements come to the fore. The inevitable car chase has one the oddest, most amusing conclusions I’ve seen. This was a word-of-mouth hit in South Korea, and only the language barrier would prevent a similar success elsewhere, at least with those who don’t equate a high body count with quality.
IMDb link
viewed 10/23/14 9:40 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14
Showing posts with label action-comedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label action-comedy. Show all posts
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Friday, February 17, 2012
This Means War (**1/4)
When computer programs become sophisticated enough to write and direct movies on their own, this may be the kind they create. Carefully designed with an easy-to-describe high concept—CIA agent pals fight over Reese Witherspoon—it’s the perfect entertainment to sell to men and women, whether they like a little comedy, a little romance, or a little action, and it’s unerringly pruned of any possible dull moments. Appealing up-and-comers Chris Pine (Star Trek’s Kirk) and Tom Hardy (Warrior, Inception) are a complementary womanizer/sensitive guy pair; both guys can kill a bunch of folks or destroy a restaurant or almost die and still manage to make a wisecrack right after. This isn’t exactly Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Of course, at least for awhile, you won’t expect a computer to create characters that seem like real people, or for the movie to spark the sorts of feelings one feels about real humans, but a certain type of formulaic humor will not be beyond the capacity of the machine. Most of the humor revolves around the males’ predictable attempts to undermine each other’s attempts at seduction, and one scene involving some private viewed, very expensive art definitely made me chuckle. (How being a CIA agent gives you access to million-dollar paintings, or how one might explain this to a date who thinks he’s a cruise-ship captain, is one of several such situations that go unexplained.)
It’s pretty certain the real CIA didn’t cooperate with this, since none of their agents seems to have any qualms about spying on a coworker or private citizens who happen to be dating the coworker. I longed for the scene in which Reese’s character finds out how much her dates have been lying to and spying on her, but maybe that’s in the sequel. Then again, she herself lies too, at first inventing a boyfriend to impress her ex, then avoiding telling either of two about the other. The most interesting thing for me was watching how the potential sexual complications would be handled. It’s okay for Chris Pine’s character to have a fuck buddy, but is letting Reese Witherspoon sleep with two guys at once acceptable? Hmm.
Actually, a computer didn’t make this film, although you could be forgiven for thinking that McG, which is what the director goes by, is one. He’s best known for the Charlie’s Angels films, and if you can think of something like that with a little more comedy replacing some action, you’ll have an idea of his approach. That is, this is pure Hollywood product, but with a slick competence; it’s silly but not cheesy, and never slow. I suspect it will be appealing, if quickly forgettable, to many people. The action scenes are too choppily edited, though. They’re just okay. Of the actors, Hardy has a certain charm, and Chelsea Handler invests her best-friend character with more personality than the leads.
As for the heroine’s dilemma, you won’t figure out who she winds up with by watching the date scenes—we never really see these characters connect, so any resolution would have made equal sense—but rather by using a simple romantic comedy truism, which is that no character, except a villain, can be allowed to be sad and alone at the end of the movie. Realize this and you can figure out what happens. (Hint: sadly, they don’t end up as a threesome.) In fact, though, you can skip the whole movie.
viewed 2/9/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 2/9 and 2/10/12
Of course, at least for awhile, you won’t expect a computer to create characters that seem like real people, or for the movie to spark the sorts of feelings one feels about real humans, but a certain type of formulaic humor will not be beyond the capacity of the machine. Most of the humor revolves around the males’ predictable attempts to undermine each other’s attempts at seduction, and one scene involving some private viewed, very expensive art definitely made me chuckle. (How being a CIA agent gives you access to million-dollar paintings, or how one might explain this to a date who thinks he’s a cruise-ship captain, is one of several such situations that go unexplained.)
It’s pretty certain the real CIA didn’t cooperate with this, since none of their agents seems to have any qualms about spying on a coworker or private citizens who happen to be dating the coworker. I longed for the scene in which Reese’s character finds out how much her dates have been lying to and spying on her, but maybe that’s in the sequel. Then again, she herself lies too, at first inventing a boyfriend to impress her ex, then avoiding telling either of two about the other. The most interesting thing for me was watching how the potential sexual complications would be handled. It’s okay for Chris Pine’s character to have a fuck buddy, but is letting Reese Witherspoon sleep with two guys at once acceptable? Hmm.
Actually, a computer didn’t make this film, although you could be forgiven for thinking that McG, which is what the director goes by, is one. He’s best known for the Charlie’s Angels films, and if you can think of something like that with a little more comedy replacing some action, you’ll have an idea of his approach. That is, this is pure Hollywood product, but with a slick competence; it’s silly but not cheesy, and never slow. I suspect it will be appealing, if quickly forgettable, to many people. The action scenes are too choppily edited, though. They’re just okay. Of the actors, Hardy has a certain charm, and Chelsea Handler invests her best-friend character with more personality than the leads.
As for the heroine’s dilemma, you won’t figure out who she winds up with by watching the date scenes—we never really see these characters connect, so any resolution would have made equal sense—but rather by using a simple romantic comedy truism, which is that no character, except a villain, can be allowed to be sad and alone at the end of the movie. Realize this and you can figure out what happens. (Hint: sadly, they don’t end up as a threesome.) In fact, though, you can skip the whole movie.
viewed 2/9/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 2/9 and 2/10/12
Friday, November 4, 2011
Tower Heist (***)
Ben Stiller plays Josh, the hotshot in this movie. You can tell he’s a hotshot because the movie has one of those hotshot sequences, wherein the character is introduced with a bunch of quick cuts, fast talk, and a bunch of other characters greeting him (rarely her), imploring him, interrupting him, and so on. Also, the movie takes place in Manhattan, where all movie hotshots reside. Josh is a residential building manager in charge of all the other employees who make the lives of the wealthy residents easier. In particular, they make the life of Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) easier. Shaw is a big-shot investor, and when he turns out to be a fraudster too—think Bernie Madoff—the big shot and the hotshot become enemies.
Their decision to become criminals is slightly more believable than in Horrible Bosses (which was produced by this film’s director, Brett Ratner), but the execution is much less so, since that comedy reminds us that most criminals, let alone dilettantes, aren’t good at it. Here, the defrauded workers turn, too easily, into some kind of Ocean’s Eleven. Cowriter Ted Griffin wrote the screenplay for the 2001 version of Eleven, so that makes sense.
Call this Stiller’s Six, counting his costars Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, Michael Peña, Casey Affleck, and Gabourey Sidibe. Murphy, recalling his earliest roles in Trading Places and 48 Hours, plays the petty thief recruited to aid their plan. The comedy is about average (“don’t talk to me for the rest of this robbery” is one of Stiller’s lines). The heist is pretty ridiculous, but it has some great visuals in which the tower comes into play.
viewed 10/12/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/12/11
Their decision to become criminals is slightly more believable than in Horrible Bosses (which was produced by this film’s director, Brett Ratner), but the execution is much less so, since that comedy reminds us that most criminals, let alone dilettantes, aren’t good at it. Here, the defrauded workers turn, too easily, into some kind of Ocean’s Eleven. Cowriter Ted Griffin wrote the screenplay for the 2001 version of Eleven, so that makes sense.
Call this Stiller’s Six, counting his costars Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick, Michael Peña, Casey Affleck, and Gabourey Sidibe. Murphy, recalling his earliest roles in Trading Places and 48 Hours, plays the petty thief recruited to aid their plan. The comedy is about average (“don’t talk to me for the rest of this robbery” is one of Stiller’s lines). The heist is pretty ridiculous, but it has some great visuals in which the tower comes into play.
viewed 10/12/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/12/11
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Red (***)
This is kind of like a cross between True Lies and Space Cowboys. The one because it involves a regular guy (Bruce Willis) who turns out to be a secret agent, much to the surprise of the woman he loves. The other because it’s about a bunch of older folks (Willis being the youngest) who reunite for a new mission. The old folks include four Oscar winners—Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, Richard Dreyfuss, and Ernest Borgnine, the hardest-working 93-year-old in show business. Adapted from a comic-book series by Warren Ellis, Red has the same tongue-in-cheek vibe as both of those older films, though the action scenes bring it closer to True Lies.
Willis plays a retiree who pretends to lose his government checks in the mail just so he can flirt with the kindly bureaucrat on the phone (Mary-Louise Parker). When he shows up in her Kansas City apartment claiming he’s ex-CIA and she’s in danger, she can’t quite believe it. So he has to kidnap her in order to save her. Not the best first date she’s had, although, she observes wryly, not the worst. Parker is as sweet and light here as she is hard-edged in her other 2010 role in Solitary Man. Her I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening reactions bring out the humor in these scenes. It’s too bad the movie rushes forward to get to all the firepower.
What seems fresh in the first half devolves into formula, although it’s certainly fun to watch Helen Mirren pumping a machine gun in an evening gown. Still, it’s only a matter of time before Parker’s character is referred to as “the girl,” and you won’t be able to shake the feeling you’ve seen this before. John Malkovich plays one of those wacky sidekick characters like Doc in Back in to the Future. On the whole, Red is very slightly better than the average film of its type, not as good as its stellar cast, or as it thinks it is.
IMDB link
viewed
Willis plays a retiree who pretends to lose his government checks in the mail just so he can flirt with the kindly bureaucrat on the phone (Mary-Louise Parker). When he shows up in her Kansas City apartment claiming he’s ex-CIA and she’s in danger, she can’t quite believe it. So he has to kidnap her in order to save her. Not the best first date she’s had, although, she observes wryly, not the worst. Parker is as sweet and light here as she is hard-edged in her other 2010 role in Solitary Man. Her I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening reactions bring out the humor in these scenes. It’s too bad the movie rushes forward to get to all the firepower.
What seems fresh in the first half devolves into formula, although it’s certainly fun to watch Helen Mirren pumping a machine gun in an evening gown. Still, it’s only a matter of time before Parker’s character is referred to as “the girl,” and you won’t be able to shake the feeling you’ve seen this before. John Malkovich plays one of those wacky sidekick characters like Doc in Back in to the Future. On the whole, Red is very slightly better than the average film of its type, not as good as its stellar cast, or as it thinks it is.
IMDB link
viewed
Friday, May 7, 2010
The Good the Bad the Weird (***1/2)
I don’t think I’d seen a Korean movie until maybe ten years ago, but now I try not to miss the ones that manage to get theatrical releases. That was also pretty much none until recently, but in the last few years a spate of good to very good movies have made their way to American shores. Although some of these have been arty fare such as the lovely Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, most are of the type that would be enjoyed by exactly the sort of audience that would never think of seeing a subtitled movie. And although not a few of these were action films (e.g., Old Boy) one thing I hadn’t seen was a western.
As the title, a spoof of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti western” The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, suggests, it’s a comic variation on the genre. A noodle western was the term applied to the Japanese movie Tampopo, and so this has been called a kimchi western. Yet that doesn’t mean it skimps on the action, at all. The opening sequence, in which not one, or two, but three bandits independently attack the same train, would be the envy of most Hollywood directors. (Director Ji-woon Kim is best known for the psychological horror film A Tale of Two Sisters.) This sequence sets up the rest of the movie, in which a lot of things happen, but which can be pretty much summed up as the different bandits all trying to possess a treasure map or, failing that, the treasure, though no one seems to know what it is. The map is a classic MacGuffin, a plot device whose main purpose is to propel the action—and the comedy.
The three bandits include the Johnny Depp-like Byung-hun Lee (G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra) as the baddest, and Kang-ho Song (The Host) as the weirdest, a likable bumbler who’s sort of tbe hero. A novel element is that the film is set in 1930s Manchuria, an area of China then occupied by Japan. Imperialism becomes a subtext to some of the story, though it’s mostly played for laughs. There’s a hilarious sequence with what seems like the entire Japanese Imperial Army chasing down, or being chased by, one of the bandits. If you don’t mind some scattered gruesomeness, this is altogether entertaining.
IMDB link
viewed April 11 at Prince [Philadelphia Film Festival Spring Preview] and reviewed 5/9/10
As the title, a spoof of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti western” The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, suggests, it’s a comic variation on the genre. A noodle western was the term applied to the Japanese movie Tampopo, and so this has been called a kimchi western. Yet that doesn’t mean it skimps on the action, at all. The opening sequence, in which not one, or two, but three bandits independently attack the same train, would be the envy of most Hollywood directors. (Director Ji-woon Kim is best known for the psychological horror film A Tale of Two Sisters.) This sequence sets up the rest of the movie, in which a lot of things happen, but which can be pretty much summed up as the different bandits all trying to possess a treasure map or, failing that, the treasure, though no one seems to know what it is. The map is a classic MacGuffin, a plot device whose main purpose is to propel the action—and the comedy.
The three bandits include the Johnny Depp-like Byung-hun Lee (G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra) as the baddest, and Kang-ho Song (The Host) as the weirdest, a likable bumbler who’s sort of tbe hero. A novel element is that the film is set in 1930s Manchuria, an area of China then occupied by Japan. Imperialism becomes a subtext to some of the story, though it’s mostly played for laughs. There’s a hilarious sequence with what seems like the entire Japanese Imperial Army chasing down, or being chased by, one of the bandits. If you don’t mind some scattered gruesomeness, this is altogether entertaining.
IMDB link
viewed April 11 at Prince [Philadelphia Film Festival Spring Preview] and reviewed 5/9/10
Friday, April 9, 2010
Date Night (***)
Is it a romantic comedy if the couple are already together, and nearly get murdered in the first reel? Maybe, but the movie to which I want to compare this is The Hangover, only with the raucous groomsmen replaced with Steve Carell and Tina Fey as the suburbanites who find trouble in the big city. And the city is Manhattan instead of Las Vegas. The similarity is that, like the Hangover guys, they plan a small adventure—dinner in town—and wind up causing a bizarre series events involving a police detective, a muscular guy, a fancy car, and more.
More to the point, it’s a comedy where the mistaken-identity plot hovers between the zany and the ridiculous, and, if you don’t mind that, it becomes as much a reason to watch the movie as the laughs. Carell and Fey have a nice chemistry, and after a few minutes where screenwriter Josh Klausner tosses out borderline clichés about men and women, the rest is all about marriage as a partnership, which is nice. Perfectly pitched (not overdone) is the husband’s antsiness at seeing his wife getting flirty with the muscle guy, a shirtless Mark Wahlberg. Given that they’re supposed to be regular folk, the story requires them to be way too brave and resourceful (e.g., way to adept at donning disguises and breaking and entering), but everything does fit together at least. Frizzy fun.
IMDB link
viewed 5/4/10 at Riverview and reviewed 5/5/10
More to the point, it’s a comedy where the mistaken-identity plot hovers between the zany and the ridiculous, and, if you don’t mind that, it becomes as much a reason to watch the movie as the laughs. Carell and Fey have a nice chemistry, and after a few minutes where screenwriter Josh Klausner tosses out borderline clichés about men and women, the rest is all about marriage as a partnership, which is nice. Perfectly pitched (not overdone) is the husband’s antsiness at seeing his wife getting flirty with the muscle guy, a shirtless Mark Wahlberg. Given that they’re supposed to be regular folk, the story requires them to be way too brave and resourceful (e.g., way to adept at donning disguises and breaking and entering), but everything does fit together at least. Frizzy fun.
IMDB link
viewed 5/4/10 at Riverview and reviewed 5/5/10
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