The House (2017)

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Tags

Amy Poehler, Andrew Jay Cohen, Casino, Comedy, Gambling, Jason Mantzoukas, Nick Kroll, Review, Will Ferrell

Cast: Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Jason Mantzoukas, Ryan Simpkins, Nick Kroll, Allison Tolman, Rob Huebel, Cedric Yarbrough, Michaela Watkins, Jeremy Renner

Okay, let’s get this out of the way at the start: The House is not a great movie, and this isn’t going to be a review that attempts to rehabilitate it in the eyes of audiences who have been less than won over by its occasional charms. This is also not a review that will attempt to fly in the face of critical opinion. To repeat, The House is not a great movie. But it is a movie that does what a lot of other modern comedies do, and that is that it operates in a kind of alternative reality where the accepted rules are cast aside, and things happen randomly without any pause for credibility or even clarity. It’s an alternative reality that allows movie makers to ignore certain precepts and create scenarios that would have no credence in the real world, but which are ideal for the manufactured world they’re creating. In short, it’s an alternative reality that creates its own rules (and sometimes, as it goes along).

The clues are there right from the start. This is a movie about a married couple, Scott and Kate Johansen (Ferrell, Poehler), who have somehow managed to produce a child, Alex (Simpkins), who is brighter, smarter, and more aware of the world than they will ever be. Scott is another patented Ferrell man-child, someone who manages to hold down a company job while also being a complete idiot. Poehler is the eternally confused wife for whom everything is too complex, and who struggles to keep track of everything going on in her life. (How they ever managed to conceive a child, let alone raise her to be so independent and intelligent is a question the movie never asks, but it’s in keeping with the nature of the world they inhabit.) They live in the kind of nice, well appointed house that all middle-class American citizens inhabit (in the movies at least), and have a fairly good standing in their local neighbourhood. They’re nice, averagely average, and without a speck of original thinking between them.

When Alex’s college place is threatened by the loss of an expected scholarship, her parents descend immediately into meltdown territory. They can’t afford to pay for it themselves, so they do what every sensible, right-thinking couple would do: on the advice of their gambling addict friend, Frank (Mantzoukas), they open an underground casino in Frank’s house. It’s all entirely illegal, they have no clue what they’re doing, but the money comes rolling in from friends and neighbours who all seem completely okay with gambling and losing their hard-earned money in such a cavalier manner (there’s obviously a lot of money in suburbia – who knew? – as the same people turn up every night). As always happens in these kinds of scenarios, the casino is a huge success, and soon Frank has expanded the operation to include a pool, a massage room, and a strip club (hey, it’s a big house).

All this activity starts to attract the attention of dastardly councilman, Bob Schaeffer (Kroll), who recruits the only policeman in town, Officer Chandler (Huebel), to find out where everyone is going at night when they should be at town council meetings. Meanwhile, Scott and Kate have taken to acting cool and looking ridiculous as they confuse looking like casino owners with looking like pimps from the Eighties. And when Frank catches someone cheating at one of the tables, it leads to Scott chopping off one of the guy’s fingers, which allows the movie to invalidate the laws of blood loss by having Scott covered in enough plasma for two people while the unlucky gambler remains as rosy-cheeked as before. Cue the police? Cue Ferrell in orange prison attire? No, wait, he’s done that before, in Get Hard (2015). No, this being an alternative reality, the unlucky gambler is allowed to leave but not before promising reprisals from his criminal boss.

At this point, the movie is primed to put Scott and Kate through the wringer, and sure enough, Schaeffer confiscates the money they’ve made so far (none of which has gone to pay for Alex’s scholarship), and the unlucky gambler’s boss (Renner) turns up to kidnap Alex for ransom. There’s more, and it’s just as absurd and ridiculous as Scott being known as the Butcher for chopping a guy’s finger off (hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity). But by now it’s all completely and utterly irrelevant. The script is prepared to lurch in any direction it sees fit in its efforts to wring laughs out of its low-concept premise, and just when you think the world all this takes place in can’t possibly take one more hit of absurdity without collapsing in on itself, it rallies round and adds yet more nonsensical moments to the mix. If you take a step back and look at it all objectively, you can’t help but admire the effort that’s been put into making a movie that has such an obvious disregard for plausibility, and which is saying, loudly, this is what it is, so either deal with it or go home.

With all that in mind, a movie can be as crazy and subversive and wacky and as deliberately dumb-ass as it wants to be, but if it’s a comedy then it has to be funny. No amount of alternative reality building can compensate for a comedy that doesn’t raise the requisite number of laughs, and though it has its moments, The House is just not that funny. Partly because Ferrell and Poehler are rehashing the same schtick we’ve seen them do too many times elsewhere, and partly because Cohen (making his debut as a director), doesn’t have the skill to make the most of those scenes where laughter should be automatic and not haplessly manufactured. The fantasy world that Cohen and co-writer Brendan O’Brien have created should have given them enough ideas to pepper the script with enough one-liners, comical confrontations and physical gags to make this a laugh riot. Alas, there are too many dead spots, the performances are middling to bland (except for Mantzoukas and Huebel, who rescue the scenes they’re in by sheer dint of effort), and any attempts at consistent characterisation are, predictably, undermined by the demands of the script (which change every few scenes).

Rating: 4/10 – for viewers prepared to go along with its absurdist reality, The House is still a doubtful prospect in terms of getting a good return on your investment; brash and loud and with a clumsy approach to its basic premise, it’s a movie that squanders a lot of opportunities to be better than it is, and which shows that even in an alternative reality, it’s structure that’s really the key ingredient.

Heist (2015)

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Bus 657, Casino, Crime, Dave Bautista, Drama, Gina Carano, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Review, Robbery, Robert De Niro, Scott Mann, Thriller

D: Scott Mann / 93m

Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Robert De Niro, Dave Bautista, Gina Carano, Morris Chestnut, Kate Bosworth, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Summer Altice, D.B. Sweeney, Lydia Hull

There are few things in the world of cinema more dispiriting, more dismal, than the sight of good actors struggling to make something out of nothing. We’ve all seen them: those star-drenched movies that feature a great cast; the kind of movie where you can’t help but think, “Well, if they all signed up for it then it must be good”. But here’s the thing, the thing that a lot of people forget: actors, just like everyone else on the planet, have bills to pay, and so, sometimes, they forget about the “art” of cinema and focus on getting paid. And you can tell within minutes of the movie starting that the Oscar-winner in the supporting role is bored, or that the up-and-coming actor with a few good roles under his belt is trying too hard by way of compensating for the paper-thin nature of his character, and the star looks weary throughout, as if once committed to making the movie he can’t wait for filming to be over. (And let’s not mention any promotion work, where they might have to talk about the movie and how “good” it is…)

And so it is with Heist, a movie that has no real reason for existing, and wouldn’t be missed if by some chance it suddenly didn’t. This is knock-off movie making of the finest ordure, a terrible waste of the cast’s time, the crew’s time, your time, everybody’s time. It sucks, and royally. Despite what you see on screen, the overwhelming impression is of a movie made just for the sake of it, because somebody – and here we have to lay the blame very firmly at the feet of writer Stephen Cyrus Sepher – had an idea for a movie and they managed to persuade five separate production companies to cough up the money to make it. And as so often happens in these situations, nobody looked at Sepher’s script and said, “Er, hang on a second…”

Ironically given the movie’s subject matter, this should be filed under “take the money and run”, as everyone involved does not quite enough to make Heist a watchable affair, from Mann’s uninspired, by-the-numbers direction to Sepher’s cliché-ridden, nonsensical script to half a dozen bored performances that help to sap the life out of a movie that’s already on life support. The main offender is De Niro, giving possibly the worst performance of his career, a lazy, credibility-free caricature of a gangster. De Niro is so bad that if you were to show someone who had no idea about his career or his legacy this particular movie, and then showed them, say, Raging Bull (1980), that someone would be completely baffled as to how it could be the same actor. This is a role where he mugs his way through in lieu of providing a recognisable character, and where he makes absolutely no attempt to convince the audience that his character’s sudden change of heart in the last ten minutes is in any way believable.

Elsewhere, the movie’s star looks tired and/or bored, with Morgan summing up just enough energy to get him through each scene, while Bautista undoes the kudos he’s gained from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) by giving such a one-note performance it’s embarrassing (though to be fair his character doesn’t exactly benefit from being written that well). He’s matched by Chestnut as De Niro’s psychotic right hand man, but both actors are outdone by Gosselaar’s crooked cop, a wise-cracking annoyance who’s introduced in the most unlikely of fashions and continues to be annoying until the script finally has done with him. And Carano continues to undo the good work she did in Haywire (2011) by steadfastly refusing to alter her expression no matter what.

With so many things going against it, Heist struggles along from scene to scene, clearly happening in its own little alternate universe where the laws of plausibility are flouted with impunity, and where bad directing, writing and acting are actively encouraged and supported. The plot, such as it is, involves Morgan teaming up with Bautista to rob De Niro’s casino, but when the robbery goes wrong, they hijack a bus and head for Texas (as you do). Bautista is bad through and through – hey, he doesn’t care if the pregnant lady on board goes into labour, that’s how badass he is – but Morgan is doing it to pay for his sick daughter’s transplant operation (so he’s much more noble). The threat of passengers being killed keeps the police at bay, while De Niro and Chestnut beaver away in the background looking for a way to isolate Morgan from the bus and for De Niro to get his money back. Along the way Carano becomes an ally, Bosworth cameos as De Niro’s daughter, and bus driver D.B. Sweeney continually looks like he’s wondering what happened to his career.

So, it’s a bad movie, but it’s professionally made and manages to look a little more glossy than your average TV movie, but with so many “did they really just do that?” moments littering the narrative, no amount of goodwill generated by the production crew can mitigate for the farrago of bad ideas and decisions made in front of the camera. This could – and should – have been better in every way but sadly, no one took the time or made the effort to improve things, and the result is a movie that should be a dictionary definition of the word lame. Or awful. Or lousy. Or rubbish (you get the picture).

Rating: 3/10 – one to avoid, Heist only scores so highly because the crew, at least, weren’t asleep at the wheel; with no one attempting to correct the mistakes inherent in the script, or even recognise them, all the viewer can do is to try and stop their jaw from continually hitting the floor from seeing all the ridiculous antics the script is packed with.

Short Movies Volume 1

27 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Aliens, Andrea Jensen, Animation, Blue Sky, Brian Dietzen, Camera, Casino, Christmas Scrat-tastrophe, Dave Calub, David Mead, Devon Avery, Documentary, Erinn Hayes, Galen Chu, Gambling, History, Horror, Invasion, Is This Free?, Jack Hawkins, Lauris Beinerts, Matthew Kalish, Megan Prescott, Mike Thurmeier, One-Minute Time Machine, Ransom Riggs, Reviews, Romance, Ryder Bach, Salton Sea, Scrat, Short movies, Spaceship, The Accidental Sea, The Plan (2008), Time travel, Turn Around When Possible

The short movie is an oft-neglected aspect of movie viewing these days, with fewer outlets available to the makers of short movies, and certainly little chance of their efforts being seen in our local multiplexes (the exceptions to these are the animated shorts made to accompany the likes of Pixar’s movies, the occasional cash-in from Disney such as Frozen Fever (2015), and Blue Sky’s Scrat movies (see below). Otherwise it’s an internet platform such as Vimeo, YouTube (a particularly good place to find short movies, including the ones in this post), or brief exposure at a film festival. Even on DVD or Blu-ray, there’s a dearth of short movies on offer. In an attempt to bring some of the gems that are out there to a wider audience, here is the first in an ongoing series of posts that will focus on short movies. Who knows? You might find one that becomes a firm favourite – if you do, please let me know.

One-Minute Time Machine (2014) / D: Devon Avery / 6m

Cast: Brian Dietzen, Erinn Hayes

Rating: 9/10 – A comedy about a young man who invents a time machine in order to impress the girl of his dreams, this brief but inventive short is like a sci-fi version of Groundhog Day, but with a humorous sting in the tale. The two leads are well chosen, with Dietzen (NCIS‘s Jimmy Palmer) playing the lovelorn geek to perfection, and Hayes proving to be an equally effective sparring partner. It does make up its own rules about time travel but that’s no bad thing, and Avery makes a virtue of the way in which he cuts between his two characters. A rewarding little movie that is well worth watching.

Turn Around When Possible (2014) / D: Dave Calub, David Mead / 7m

Cast: Megan Prescott, Holly Hoyland

Rating: 7/10 – Two young women trust their sat-nav too much in this British short that sees them lost in the forest and at the mercy of something strange lurking in the undergrowth. Just what is lurking in the undergrowth is very reminiscent of a creature you shouldn’t get wet or feed after midnight, and the acting is a little amateurish, but this is still an atmospheric, well-shot movie that also manages to provide viewers with a surprisingly ambiguous ending.

Is This Free? (2011) / D: Lauris Beinerts / 8m

Cast: Jack Hawkins, Tarryn Meaker, Abdiel LeRoy, Cornelia Baumann, Julian Lamoral-Roberts, David Cullinane, Chloe Massey, Katie Goldfinch, Véronique Sevegrand

Rating: 8/10 – Observational comedy is the focus here as Hawkins’ Luka illustrates the various responses he gives to people who ask if the seat next to him is free. Ranging from the risible – woman agrees to pay £2 to avoid someone else getting the seat – to the awkwardly humorous – Luka allows someone to sit next to him on a bench but tells them they’re being watched – Beinerts makes the most of his central idea, and it’s put together with a great deal of heart. And of course Luka doesn’t get it all his own way, which helps the movie avoid being too clever for its own good.

The Plan (2008) / D: Matthew Kalish / 4m

Cast: Ryder Bach, Andrea Jensen

Rating: 8/10 – Mitch (Bach) is unhappy with his life and decides to ditch his job, his girlfriend, and travel to Las Vegas to bet everything’s he’s got on red. Along the way he meets a young woman (Jensen) who steals his camera, but proves to be an augur of a better future. Shot in black and white, and with a Fifties feel to it that adds to the movie’s overall charm, this is both romantic and transformative at the same time, and despite Kalish’s predilection for unnecessary camera angles.

The Accidental Sea (2011) / D: Ransom Riggs / 6m

Rating: 8/10 – The writer of the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children‘s trilogy provides a potted history of California’s Salton Sea, from its origins as a major engineering mistake to its heyday as a holiday destination before the sea became too salty to sustain the surrounding infrastructure. Of particular interest thanks to Riggs’ modern day footage, where the area looks like the aftermath of the end of the world, the only fault is the sudden appearance of an old man who’s been making art out of the area’s refuse, and who isn’t on screen for nearly long enough. Haunting and wistful, this is a documentary short that is visually arresting and endlessly fascinating.

Christmas Scrat-tastrophe (2015) / D: Mike Thurmeier, Galen Chu / 5m

Cast: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Chris Wedge

Rating: 9/10 – Scrat’s back, and this time his obsession with keeping his nut all to himself leads to his being aboard the spaceship we glimpsed in the first Ice Age movie. From there, Scrat heads off into space to play havoc with the planets and go for a space walk, with predictably disastrous effects. Unabashedly entertaining (and with a complete disregard for physics and astrodynamics), this is top-notch stuff that, unfortunately, serves as a reminder that Scrat’s solo adventures are still far more entertaining than the full-length movies he has a supporting turn in.

Wild Card (2015)

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Casino, Domink Garcia-Lorido, Gambling, Jason Statham, Las Vegas, Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Review, Security consultant, Simon West, Stanley Tucci, The Golden Nugget, Thriller

D: Simon West / 92m

Cast: Jason Statham, Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Hope Davis, Stanley Tucci, Max Casella, Sofia Vergara, Jason Alexander, Anne Heche

Nick Wild (Statham) is a security consultant living and working in Las Vegas. He’s also a gambler with a dream: win $500,000 and spend five years living the life he’s always wanted, starting with a year sailing around the Mediterranean. He takes a job protecting a young man named Cyrus Kinnick (Angarano) while he plays at the casinos. At the same time he receives a message from a friend called Holly (Garcia-Lorido), asking him to visit her. When he does he finds she’s been raped and beaten up by three men she met at the Golden Nugget. She tells Nick she wants to find out who they are so she can sue them.

Nick soon discovers the three men were local gangster Danny DeMarco (Ventimiglia) and two of his men. He’s warned not to go anywhere near them, but when he tries to tell Holly he couldn’t find out who the men were, she realises he’s lying and reminds him of a debt he owes her. Knowing it will cause trouble for him, Nick pays a visit to DeMarco at his suite. He disables DeMarco and his men, giving Holly – who’s never intended to sue them – a chance to exact her revenge on the gangster. She threatens to cut off his penis, and even nicks the side of it; he cries and pleads for forgiveness. Relenting, Holly takes $50,000 from him and splits it with Nick before leaving town.

Nick takes Cyrus to a casino, and while Cyrus plays at a craps table, Nick takes his half of DeMarco’s money and begins to gamble. He’s soon on a winning streak that culminates in his winning $506,000, enough for him to leave Las Vegas. He’s about to cash in his chips when he’s struck by an anxiety attack. He tells Cyrus that he’s been fooling himself: the money isn’t enough for him to avoid having to come back to Vegas after his five years are up. Telling himself he needs a bigger pot of money he stakes all his winnings on a single bet… and loses it all. Afterwards, he’s attacked by DeMarco’s men but manages to defeat them. But this leads to Nick being summoned to see Baby (Tucci), the boss of organised crime in Las Vegas. DeMarco has come to him with a story that Nick came to his suite, beat him up and shot his men, and stole the money to gamble with. Now Nick has to prove to Baby that DeMarco is lying, or his life will be forfeit…

A remake of the Burt Reynolds’ movie Heat (1986), Wild Card is a project that Statham has been trying to get made for around five years. It’s also an adaptation by William Goldman of his own novel and a reworking of his script for Heat. A crime drama that features another of Statham’s occasional forays into character acting, the movie doesn’t offer anything new (hardly possible given the material’s history), but it does make for an entertaining, if occasionally risible, trip through the underbelly of life in Las Vegas.

It’s a milieu that’s been explored many, many times before, but here there’s a sense of ennui that drifts alongside the narrative, making the characters’ desperation and need for self-improvement all the more affecting. Cyrus is a twenty-three year old self-made multi-millionaire who wants to know what it’s like not to be afraid, and to have the self-confidence to “be a man”. Holly is an escort who, like Nick, wants a better life where she’s not always at the mercy of others. And Nick himself is afraid that he’ll spend the rest of his life in Vegas, scratching a living and ending up alone. A lot of this is underplayed, a smart move by Goldman, and it gives the movie an edge that comes as a bit of a surprise.

With Las Vegas providing a more than suitable backdrop, Wild Card keeps its themes of redemption and avarice well to the fore. Nick’s return to the table after winning the money he’s always dreamed about is both inevitable and startling, and gives Statham the chance to show that he can be a better actor than a lot of people give him credit for. Sure he can pull off an action scene without breaking sweat or getting out of breath, but here he’s stretched on more than a few occasions – lying to Holly, appearing to kowtow to DeMarco, going back to the tables, looking bereft after he’s lost – and while he still maintains an aloof, taciturn presence, it’s a more rounded performance than usual.

But this being a Jason Statham movie, and one directed by Simon West – they also collaborated on The Mechanic (2011) – there’s room for a clutch of exhilarating, superbly choreographed fight scenes. Fans won’t be disappointed by the brutally inventive ways in which Nick dispatches various henchmen – one close up of a nose being broken is particularly impressive – and if these sequences still prove to be the main highlights of a movie that does its best not to be “just” an action movie, then it’s unfortunate but not entirely surprising.

The rest of the cast provide adequate support, though some are reduced almost to cameos or appear to have done only a day’s filming. Angarano and Ventimiglia have more than most to do but have a job with characters who remain cyphers throughout, with Ventimiglia in particular struggling to make more of DeMarco than the preening, psychotic gangster he appears. Garcia-Lorido brings an emotional intensity to her role that bodes well for her future, while Tucci phones in one of his patented “man with excess mannerisms” performances as Las Vegas’s capo di tutti capi. But with the likes of Davis, Heche and Vergara reduced almost to walk-on roles, the movie ends up feeling a little misogynistic.

All in all, West directs with his usual visual flair and helps Statham give one of his best performances. Goldman’s script is peppered with some less than quotable lines of dialogue – “He goes crazy and he shoots maybe my best two friends in the whole world” – but the structure is solid and Nick’s love/hate relationship with Sin City is woven into the storyline in a way that is meaningful and instructive of Nick’s personality. There’s a pleasingly claustrophobic feel to the casino scenes, and Shelly Johnson’s cinematography captures the glitz and the glamour of Las Vegas alongside its less attractive features.

Rating: 7/10 – worth seeing as a movie where Statham stretches his abilities as an actor, and for a couple of outstanding fight sequences, Wild Card is the kind of action movie that starts slow and builds to a (vicious) climax; unpretentious, and occasionally solemn, one can only hope that Statham and West get a chance to team up again soon.