Away We Go (***)

Expecting couple John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph decide to audition new home towns in this pleasant comedy-drama. It ranges from broad comedy—they visit a couple of wacky relatives and friends—to wistful romance, without becoming clichéed. Stops include Tuscon and Montréal, less common film settings. Krasinski (of NBC’s The Office) brings a low-key charm to the role, while Rudolph, whose only other lead was in Idiocracy, shows some dramatic skills. She’s one of the very few Saturday Night Live veterans who I’ve seen do something that didn’t just seem like an outgrowth of a skit. The two actors seem like a real couple, and another thing I liked was that in the whole movie they never fight, even though they disagree. It’s nearly a cliché of any road movie that the travelers at some point have to have a big blow-up. Here, they just pretend to have one, in one of the lightly comic moments in which the movie is at its best.

Director Sam Mendes has a résumé loaded with heavy (pretentious, some might say) films—American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead, and Revolutionary Road—but there is nothing to suggest that here. Partial credit goes to married novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, who make mostly successful screenwriting debuts. Mendes doesn’t make the movie any sort of a travelogue; instead, he reminds us that sometimes the most satisfying part of a trip is arriving home.

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viewed 6/11/09 (screening at Ritz East) and reviewed 7/16/09

Reno 911! Miami (*1/2)

? The fictional bumblers of the Reno sheriff’s department, mildly popularized by the Comedy Central series, get their chance to strut their inept stuff on the streets and beaches of south Florida during a police convention. This is the kind of movie that’s hard to describe without using the word hijinks. Despite a few raunchy moments and some foul language, this is more or less the same sort of thing the Police Academy movies did in the 1980s, or the Keystone Kops in the 1910s.
+ Making no pretense of realism, or three-dimensional characters, the movie is simply 80 minutes of silliness, and you’re probably bound to laugh at something. For me, it was the Rock’s self-parodying cameo.
- The TV show is a parody of the reality show Cops, but that’s less emphasized here. A lot of the action is the gang traveling, or playing sexual shenanigans in cheap motels, etc. They still occasionally talk to the camera. They vaguely mock cop movies like Die Hard, at least in the opening scene, and those with Paul Rudd as a Cuban-sounding crime lord. But mostly it’s just an extended sitcom episode in which characters accidentally shoot each other, or mistakenly blow stuff up and say “My bad.” One of the women spends half the movie figuring out how she drunkenly got a tattoo; you wait for a comic payoff that never comes.
= *1/2 Strictly for fans of the TV show (the cast is pretty much intact) or those who longed for another Police Academy sequel, this misfires almost as often as the characters.

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reviewed 2/23/07

Miami Vice (**1/4)

 Resembling director Michael Mann’s recent features like Collateral more than the 1980s TV series it’s supposedly based on, this ostensible thriller is nearly devoid of either action or real drama until its decent second half.

Apparently this movie has something to do with a TV series from the 1980s that had the same name, and main characters called Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs. The show’s executive producer, Michael Mann, has even written and directed its namesake. But it’s been almost 20 years since the series ended its run. Mann’s said he’s not interested in nostalgia, a weird thing to say when that’s the most obvious selling point of your movie. The series was often described as “MTV cops” and celebrated for its incorporation of pop tunes, glitzy aesthetic, and pastel-inspired fashion sense. But silence and quiet electronica replace the pop tunes, the pastels are gone, and the aesthetic is very much the dour one of recent Mann features such as Heat, The Insider, and Collateral. Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are the 21st-century Crockett and Tubbs.

With no preamble, the two Miami cops go undercover trying to fix the mess the feds made on their drug-smuggling operation. There’s supposed to be some business with skinheads and Russians and so forth, but between the accents, the jargon, and the quiet talking, I had some trouble following the details. The first half of the picture is full of talk, but no action. The two cops barely speak to each other, so there’s very little character development. Crockett does find time to hit on the businesswoman (Gong Li) who’s financing the drug deals, observing two clichés of thrillers. One, if there is only one reasonably attractive female in a movie, the unattached male lead (Tubbs isn’t single) will pair up with her. Two, if there is a woman among a group of criminals, she alone will be portrayed with moral ambiguity. Li brings a lot of credibility to the role, and is arguably more interesting than the leads, but there’s still something of the perfunctory about her character. All this is by way of saying, Miami Vice has one of the plain dullest first halves of any major motion picture of 2006. In the second half, Mann’s realistic approach pays dividends. A hostage rescue sequence is genuinely thrilling, and the final shootout isn’t half bad either. Walk in an hour late and you really won’t miss much.

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Transporter 2 (**3/4)

Brit Jason Statham again plays a character so stoic as to make Arnold Schwarzeneggar seem expressive. Statham barely flinches when a dozen guys confront him at once or, for that matter, when politely declining an offer of easy sex. Disappointly, the setting is transferred from the mildly exotic South of France to Miami, our hero slumming as a rich tyke’s chauffeur. This is fortunate for his employers when some generic bad guys snatch the child. In keeping with its American setting, the action is a bit more over the top than in Transporter. It’s nowhere near as absurd as Bad Boys II, another Miami-set action film, but there are not one but at least three scenes where the bad guys have guns pointed at Statham and inexplicably hesitate to shoot, and the bad guys’ scheme is pretty silly. On the whole, fans of the first Transporter will still find appeal in the character, the various scenes of Statham fending off faceless adversaries, and a couple of flying-vehicle sequences that better the ones in Dukes of Hazzard.

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viewed 9/3/05 at Moorestown and reviewed 9/6/05