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The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016)

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three star

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In the most basic sense The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a sequel that no one was clamoring for. Even the star of Snow White & The Huntsman, my beloved Kristen Stewart, declined to return for this second installment of a franchise practically no one loves. This film’s lack of critical hype or a vocal fandom was a little isolating for me, since I was actually a fairly solid fan of the much forgotten original film. As a low-key fantasy epic that called back to mid-80s productions like Legend, Labyrinth, and Ladyhawke, I found Snow White & The Huntsman to be a mostly satisfying experience. What really stood out, though, was the film’s visual flourishes, which bathed a wicked queen played by Charlize Theron in a milky white porcelain & transformed the evil mirror of Snow White folklore into a menacing humanoid made of dripping gold. In this way The Huntsman: Winter’s War could be understood as being simply more of the same. Anyone who brushed off Snow White & The Huntsman as a dull trifle (most people, I’m assuming) isn’t going to be won over or blown away by what they find in Winter’s War. However, fans of the original’s familiar fantasy realm setting & surprising knack for striking visuals in its villainy are likely to be pleased by the franchise’s years-late return. I was, anyway.

A ludicrously belabored, heavy-handed prologue narrated by Liam Neeson asks the question “What does a mirror show you? What do you see?” The answer is clips from Snow White & The Huntsman, apparently. It’s probably not a good sign that this late in the game follow-up feels the need to remind its audience that it’s not an original property, but I found myself entertained by the film’s strained way of setting up its own Kristen Stewart-free narrative. The prologue is so long & unwieldy that it feels as if Neeson is reading a decades-spanning bedtime story, which is far from the worst effect for a fairy tale, all things considered. By the time the setup is over with, Winter’s War simultaneously functions as a prequel and a sequel, retroactively introducing new characters into its already-established mythology so that it has a place to go in Snow White’s absence. I’m not sure knowing the exact plot of this film’s silly middle ground between Lord of the Rings & Game of Thrones is all that necessary for you to understand what you’re getting into. Winter’s War more or less boils down to a CG action adventure about opposing kingdoms’ quest to obtain & command the evil mirror of the first film, which looks like some kind of all-powerful golden gong. It just so happens that the monarchs of those kingdoms are both badass women.

Besides its undeniable knack for visual effects, Winter’s War mostly finds entertainment value in the strength of its casting. Charlize Theron returns as the golden evil queen of the first film, but this time she’s joined by a (somehow previously unmentioned) sister, played by Emily Blunt (hot off the heels of her roles in Sicario & Edge of Tomorrow). Here, Blunt plays a CG-aided Ice Queen who staffs her tundra-set fortress of solitude with a ferocious army of children she raises to be loveless killers. She trains these tiny tyke murderers to believe that “Love is a lie. It is a trick,” establishing her sole governing rule to be “Do not love. It’s a sin. I will not forgive it.” And, wouldn’t you know it, two of her miniature killing machines grow up to fall in love. One of them is America’s hunky but dim foreigner boyfriend Chris Hemsworth, returning from the first film, and he’s romantically paired with Fellow Beautiful Person Jessica Chastain. The two leads essentially live out a feature-length version of the ridiculous fight-flirting scene from Daredevil, interspersed with their attempts to thwart two evil queens from gaining the ultimate power represented in the mirror by destroying a litany of faceless foot soldiers with their gorgeous weaponry of golden liquids & CG ice shards. Edgar Wright’s pet doofus Nick Frost returns as a CG dwarf to offer some comic relief, but the less I say about that the better.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War boasts three badass women as its leads along with stunningly gorgeous costumes & visual effects, but is hopelessly saddled with goofy everything else. For every brilliant idea in its visual play (like a white porcelain version of the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans), there’s something equally silly waiting to drag down its artistic clout (like an early scene that depicts the most blatantly overwrought “You thought this was just a game?” chess match metaphor I’ve ever seen in my life). I might be the only person in the world who regrets not seeing this ridiculous display play out on the big screen, but I do believe with a little push in a more extreme direction, either towards more over-the-top camp in the performances or some R-rated gore in its fantasy violence, this film & its predecessor could have serious cult following potential. As is, you have to appreciate them for their low-key fantasy realm charm, the absurdity of their surprisingly game cast, and the perfume commercial menace of their imagery to buy what they’re selling. Personally, I’m a sucker for all three.

-Brandon Ledet

April and the Extraordinary World (2016)

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twohalfstar

Movie magic is complicated alchemy. The hand-drawn French animation feature April and the Extraordinary World seems tailor made to have me on the floor, drooling. It’s a welcome reprieve from the flat, CG animation style that’s dominated nearly everything outside Studio Ghibli productions & stray stop-motion animations for the past couple decades. It stars a cool, fiercely independent female scientist & her sarcastic cat sidekick in its lead roles. It begins with an impressively ambitious alternate history sci-fi premise that sets the table for a grand, one-of-a-kind adventure. By all means I should’ve been over the moon with what the film delivers, but it never quite clicked for me. April and the Extraordinary World has all necessary ingredients to make movie magic, but there’s something noticeably off in the recipe.

Part of the problem might be that the movie throws so much of its narrative weight into its go-for-broke premise that there’s not much room left for genuine wonder after its opening exposition. Before we meet our scientist & feline heroes we’re steamrolled with a history lesson in an alternate timeline where famous scientists are abducted by a totalitarian French Empire of Napoleonic lineage and the resulting world is a steampunk’s wildest dream of coal-powered inventions & antiquated-yet-futuristic doohickies. There’s an awe-inspiring aspect to the film’s Future in the Past fantasy realm that recalls Miyazaki works like Howl’s Moving Castle, but never quite touch that master’s skill for emotional impact or his patience with luxuriating in the worlds he creates. The film somehow boils its vast, exciting plot into a generic chase film in which our two outsider heroes must protect a magical MacGuffin (a fix-all cure to death, aging, seemingly any illness) out of the hands of a malicious government & a mutated pair of failed experiments hellbent to destroying the planet. Once you strip it of a few quirks, the story is more or less interchangeable with that of any bloated superhero summer blockbuster of the past decade, which is a damn shame considering the massive potential of its launching point.

April and the Extraordinary World is a beautifully animated film, but I spent most of its runtime passively enjoying that visual treat without engaging with its emotional or narrative core. There are a couple ideas at play that make great use of its premise – only the older generation remembers a world with trees thanks to pollution & the world’s remaining scientists are forced into either hiding or weapons production – but for the most part it crams its extraordinary sci-fi ambition into an extra ordinary action chase plot. April and the Extraordinary World has all the necessary pieces to construct a gorgeous work of sheer wonder, but I found myself instead often wondering when it would finally be over. I hope its formula is more impactful for other people intrigued by the various charms of its individual building blocks, but I mostly zoned out on its emotionless proceedings & focused on the pretty lights & sounds. The movie is almost passable as pretty good, but it’s made of some fantastic material, an alchemist’s formula that should have produced pure gold.

-Brandon Ledet

Hell or High Water (2016)

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three star

I’m going to preface this review by saying that Hell or High Water is far outside my comfort zone in terms of genre. A story about a world-weary lawman attempting to chase down & outwit a pair of haphazard bankrobbers just days before his retirement, the film resembles an awful lot of ultra-macho neo-Westerns I’m often told are great, but usually leave me bored silly. The problem is fairly deep-seated too. Even the Coen Bros’ No Country for Old Men, which I’m sure is fantastic, has put me to sleep every single time I’ve tried to watch it, including twice in the theater. So, I totally believe people when they say Hell or High Water is their favorite movie of the year so far, but I suspect these folks are just more finely tuned to the intricacies of its genre & tone than I am. For me, the film is formally a little flat, playing like what I’d imagine a modern Showtime drama version of Walker, Texas Ranger would look like, right down to the wince-worthy music cues. However, even as an outsider I did find myself entertained, especially by the film’s showy dialogue & muted performances.

Outside being a fairly standard bankrobbing thriller, Hell or High Water mostly stands out as a screenwriter’s playground. Taylor Sheridan, who also penned last year’s Sicario, recognizes the rigid restraints of the film’s simple narrative & throws most of his weight into the its quietly humorous dialogue. When Jeff Bridges’s perpetually exhausted Texas Ranger asks a recently robbed bank teller whether her assailants were black or white, she retorts, “Their skin or their souls?” It’s these kinds of colorful turns of phrase that make him mutter to himself, “God, I love West Texas.” I can’t echo that sentiment, but I do appreciate the film’s ability to capture that terrain’s slow, desolate atmosphere by bringing the more action-packed aspects of the plot down to an occasional halt in favor of some porch sittin’ & beer drinkin’, a perfect stage for showy exchanges of phrase. Sheridan understands the glass beer bottles, vastly empty roads, grunts, football, and poverty that make up a large part of that state & he uses that terrain to stage a somewhat believable modern version of a Cowboys vs. Indians Western. One of those Native Americans just happens to be a cop (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Gil Birmingham) trying to hold his aging white partner together for a final ride. His cowboy opponents are two in-over-their-heads brothers living out a revenge plot similar to Jeff Nichols’s (far superior) Shotgun Stories, except their target is a predatory banking institution instead of a rival family. The only question is if the calm, collected half of the criminal duo (played by an admirably restrained Chris Pine) can hold together his wildcard brother (a grimy Ben Foster, who plays the part like Guy Fieri reimagined as a methed-out murderer), long enough to escape the cops’ wrath. The evenly-distributed amusement of the proficient dialogue leaves a lot of grey area of which side to root for here (although, I guess you’d have to be a monster to root for the banks), so the fun of Hell or High Water is mostly in watching the pieces fall into place in an inevitably satisfying way, whatever the result.

I can’t say for sure if I would’ve enjoyed Hell or High Water more if it were staged in a different setting or if it didn’t feature gruff country songs with lines like, “I am lost in the dust of the chase my life brings” (an aspect of the film Nick Cave had some apparent involvement with, speaking of things I’m often told are great but I don’t really understand). My brain does usually shut all the way off when it comes to certain macho genres like Westerns or James Bond flicks or straightforward war movies, though, and I have to admit I didn’t have that problem here. This was far from my Film of the Year, but I was mostly on board with its Who’re the Real Thieves, Really? approach to predatory banking & its last legs lawman performance from Jeff Bridges (which brought me back to the novelty for Kurt Russell’s similar role in last year’s Bone Tomahawk). Like I said, though, it’s the film’s dialogue that really makes it distinct and I suspect that aspect is what’s going to have the moviegoing dads, uncles, and grandfathers of the world chuckling to themselves in delight. This movie was seemingly made with that specific crowd in mind & I’m not sure they’re going to appreciate its finer charms more than I was able to tap into myself.

-Brandon Ledet

Suicide Squad (2016)

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three star

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I don’t know if it was the two weeks of brutal, tear-it-down reviews or the flattering comparison points of Dawn of Justice & Man of Steel, but the much-maligned third entry in the so-called DCEU (a title that certainly has not been earned at this date) actually wasn’t all that bad. High praise, I know. Suicide Squad is not the winning success the budding DC Comics film franchise desperately needs to turn its frown upside down, but I left the theater in a much better mood than I did with the two Batman & Superman films that preceded it. A lot of the narrative surrounding Suicide Squad‘s critical shortcomings centers on the idea that the film’s messy tone is a result of post-production studio meddling in which DC & Warner Bros. attempted to right the ship by punching up Zack Snyder’s nü-metal glowering in Dawn of Justice with some edited-in comedy after seeing the wonders a sense of humor did for *shudder* Fox & Marvel’s successful Deadpool gamble. The frequent comparisons of Suicide Squad with the MCU’s dark-but-fun Guardians of the Galaxy in particular (most of them citing Suicide Squad as a cheap knockoff) are not off-base, but I do think that the wrong lesson is being learned in the two films’ contrast. To me, both Suicide Squad & Guardians of the Galaxy stand as clear advocates for the virtues of major studio meddling, particularly for the way it can reel in certain directors’ most unseemly sensibilities while still maintaining their sense of style for an amalgamated compromise that affords the resulting films a better chance at wide commercial appeal & likability. Suicide Squad is not nearly as good or as enjoyable as its best MCU comparison point, but it’ll do in a pinch.

The director of this major studio film-by-committee byproduct is one David Ayer, perhaps best known for penning the less-than-subtle exploitation thriller Training Day in the early 2000s. Ayer is ex-military and it shows in his aggressively masculine action schlock, typified in works like the bull-headed tank movie Fury & his nasty Schwarzenegger drug running monster Sabotage. After the dour boredom of Snyder’s two DC entries, though, a subtle hand is the last thing the franchise needed & I have to admit I sort of appreciated Ayer’s bull in a china shop approach to the material here. In a lot of ways Suicide Squad is just as bloated & tonally inept as Dawn of Justice & Man of Steel. It’s never boring, though, and thanks to some studio meddling it actually allowed for some interesting moments & decent performances to shine through all of Ayer’s trashy genre film bravado. If the MCU’s dreaded “house style” had not tempered the sadistic sensibilities James Gunn brought to his other comic book movie, Super, there’s no way Guardians of the Galaxy would be nearly as watchable or endearing as it is. Likewise, the studio meddling of Suicide Squad, with its joke-heavy re-shoots, shoehorned-in neon color palette, diminished screen time for Jared Leto’s Joker, and Guardians-aped soundtrack was much more haphazard & disharmonious, but it at least made the troubled material a decently fun action picture. In an ideal world I wouldn’t necessarily want to see Ayer’s Sabotage (a film I described as “oozing with scum” & “garbage water pessimism” in my review) reworked as a superhero spectacle, but Warner Bros. found a way to make that formula remarkably palatable. Kudos to the studio for reigning in Ayer’s bad taste & aggression just enough to make the movie work while still allowing it to breathe new, testosterone-corrupted life into what was previously a drab, depressive franchise.

Suicide Squad‘s opening credits smear the screen with a presumably after-the-fact splash of neon color that recalls recent works like Nerve & The Neon Demon. Each of its “bad guy” characters is then individually introduced like an overstuffed roster of pro wrestlers. You learn one quick fact about them (what wrestlers would call a gimmick), their corresponding theme music plays, and then you move onto the next contender in this year’s Royal Rumble. The only participants in this endless parade of heels that register as even halfway interesting are the stars of Focus (Is it time for me to churn out a Buzzfeed-worthy “fan theory” about how this film is an unofficial sequel?): Will Smith as the reluctant assassin/sad dad Deadshot & Margot Robbie as the damaged sexdoll/homicidal Jersey Girl clown Harley Quinn. Knowing very little about their characters’ comic book backstories & judging them solely by what’s presented onscreen, I can at least attest that the actors are just as entertaining as a pair here as they were in their comedic conjob thriller past and what’s particularly smart about Suicide Squad‘s post-production meddling/editing is that the movie seems to know it. All other members of the titular squad go by in a wash, outside an occasional flashback to their horrific pasts, but their collective presence as a team of single-gimmick anti-heroes reminded me of the “Attitude Era” of the WWE. For instance, I didn’t need to know any more about Killer Croc other than he’s a crocodile man who likes to watch BET and scuttle into dirty water to enjoy seeing him exterminate faceless baddies and the movie didn’t feel the need to supply me with much more information than that anyway. Smith & Robbie have an interesting father-daughter/killer-murderer dynamic; everything else is background & attitude. The movie does a decent job of letting that formula work itself out onscreen in what I assume mostly came from a damage control-focused editing room.

Besides its cartoonish pro wrestling simplicity, Suicide Squad also reminded me of a very particular campy art piece from recent memory: Southland Tales. Much like Richard Kelly’s technophobic mess of a sci-fi action comedy, Ayer’s comic book movie is a work of sheer excess & a pummeling sense of pace. No idea in either film is allowed to fully sink in before the next dozen line up to bludgeon you in the head in rapid succession. After the endless wrestler gimmicks are introduced, you’re sucked into a standard doomsday device plot in which an ancient witch & her sleepy brother plan to blow up the world with a literal doomsday device because “Now [humans] worship machines, so I will build a machine that will destroy them all,” or some such bullshit. You’d never guess it was as simple as all that, though, not with the nonstop assault of betrayals & abuses from Viola Davis as the shady federal agent Amanda Waller (a steely performance that’s just as much of an oasis of competence as Smith’s or Robbie’s), Ben Affleck’s cameo-relegated Batman (who we were generously kind to in our Batman rankings on the podcast), Jared Leto’s half-Nicholson/half-Ledger with a sprinkle of Spring Breakers Joker (more on him in a minute), lovelorn army officials, and bubble-faced goons made of witchcraft tar. Just like with Southland Tales, I had to struggle to grab hold onto any single idea or individual player in Suicide Squad during its massive flood of content until I just sort of gave up & let it sweep me away. By then, I realized that the movie was already 2/3rds over and it became clear how smart it was for the studio to employ Ayer’s brawn over brains battering ram to get through all of this glut & bloat in the first place.

That brutish sense of cannonball pacing is what Ayer’s aesthetic brings to the table, but I don’t think the film would’ve worked at all if it weren’t for the studio’s after-the-fact meddling that tempered it. The value of the studio-director compromise is not only readily recognizable in the tacked-on jokes & bright, fluorescent colors. It’s also deeply felt in the narrative throughline of the Harley Quinn-Joker romance. In the film Harley Quinn is a flirtatious sadist with clown makeup, a baseball bat, and wildly fluctuating accent. She takes a shining to Will Smith’s occasionally-masked assassin Deadshot, whose wrestler gimmick is aching to be a father figure to someone, anyone, but her closest association is obviously with the wildcard Leto character The Joker, whom she lovingly calls Mr. J. In both the comics & the film, Harley was an intelligent, mentally-stable doctor who lost hold of her sanity when she fell in love with The Joker, a patient. In the comics & the much beloved Batman: The Animated Series, their relationship is portrayed as abusive, both physically & spiritually damaging, with the once self-sufficient Quinn now unable to tear herself away from the psychotic brute and becoming a glutton for his punishment. The movie, which already features two shots of women being punched in the face without that domestic abuse element, smartly trades up in the Quinn & Joker romance angle. Instead of portraying one of the few enjoyable characters in its roster suffering repetitive abuse, Suicide Squad instead re-works her love affair with Mr. J as a Bonnie & Clyde/Mickey & Mallory type outlaws-against-the-world dynamic, one with a very strong BDSM undertone. Affording Harley Quinn sexual consent isn’t the only part of the studio-notes genius of the scenario, either. The film also cuts Leto’s competent-but-forgettable meth mouth Joker down to a bit role so that he’s an occasional element of chaos at best, never fully outwearing his welcome. Not only does this editing room decision soften Leto’s potential annoyance & Ayer’s inherent nastiness, it also allows Harley Quinn to be a wisecracking murderer on her own terms, one whose most pronounced relationship in the film (with Deadshot) is friendly instead of romantic. I know you’re supposed to root for an auteur’s vision & not for the big bad studio trying to homogenize their “art”, but Suicide Squad was much more enjoyable in its presumably compromised form than it would have been otherwise.

Look, Suicide Squad isn’t some overlooked indie production that needs someone to stand up for it. It made a killer profit in its opening weekend despite its brutal critical reception and I feel like its inevitable sequel would’ve been automatically greenlit even if it didn’t, so the movie’s doing just fine. Besides, there’s plenty of things I did hate about it: the aforementioned woman-punching (at least one instance of which was played for a laugh), its relentlessly on-the-nose soundtrack (which included the distasteful likes of Eminem, my eternal pop music enemy), a continuation of Deadpool‘s inane inclusion of unicorns for easy gender-contrast humor meme points, its big bad killer witch’s stupid undulating dance moves, etc. Enough complaining has already been piled on this movie already, though, especially considering that overall it’s just okay, Grade C, trashy action movie fluff. With Dawn of Justice, the DCEU tried to do a dozen MCU films’ worth of bricklaying in a single go, building an entire franchise’s foundation on the back of an overstuffed, overworked snoozefest helmed by one of Hollywood’s least interesting big name directors. Suicide Squad was tasked with the same groundwork-laying burden of setting up future storylines at breakneck speed, except in this case the director’s aesthetic was both more suitable & more entertaining for the job at hand. Ayer does what he always does here & delivers a grimy, trashy action flick with an overtly sexual fetish for firearms & ammunition, as well as human cruelty. The studio that hired him found a way to hitch its thankless superhero workload to that director-specific, hyper-masculine schlock vehicle and after cleaning up some of its rougher edges the resulting product was an easily digestible two hour movie trailer with a handful of memorable performances & a few opportunities to sell some Monster Energy drinks & HotTopic fashion line tie-ins along the way. I’ve paid to see much worse than that in the theater before and one of the most glaring examples came just a few months ago from the very same studio & franchise. If every one of the DCEU’s missteps were a little less depressive glower Snyder & a little more tactless brute Ayer the idea of following this series of bloated action fantasies would be a lot less exhausting. Then again, it just took me 2,000 words to defend a film as “not all that bad,” so maybe exhaustion is just a natural part of the territory.

-Brandon Ledet

Nerve (2016)

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fourhalfstar

If you read this blog regularly you might be surprised that there’s no Camp Stamp perched at the top of this review. Trust me, I’m even more surprised than you are. I went into Nerve expecting a trashy thriller version of Unfriended and, in some ways,  that’s exactly what the film delivered. However, I was shocked to find myself genuinely engaging with its smartphone app paranoia instead of chuckling at that gimmick’s over-the-top absurdity. In fact, I think Nerve is actually kind of brilliant? Like, maybe one of the best movies I’ve seen all year? What am I even saying? There’s something really special about how the film adopts the action thriller genre for teen girl sensibilities that I find really smart & fresh, if not long overdue. Other YA action properties like The Hunger Games & The Divergent Series might have female protagonists, so Nerve isn’t exactly unique there, but they typically appeal to a much wider demographic within a certain age range. Nerve, on the other hand, is the single most aggressively feminine action thriller I can ever remember seeing, an aesthetic that mixes with its killer smart phone app technophobia premise to create something really fun & truly memorable without devolving into so-bad-it’s-good schlock. This film is the biggest surprise of the summer for me & I’m already prepared to watch it again, being “the watcher”that I apparently am.

I guess I should admit up front I was already a little predisposed to root for Nerve‘s success before I even reached the theater, because its trailer promised that it’d indulge in one of my favorite recent movie tropes. Something that really excites me in modern genre pictures is when directors incorporate new, cheap forms of disposable digital imagery in their visual palette. I’ve been delighted by the real time Skype horror of Unfriended, the psychedelic emoji & social media game kaleidoscope of #horror, the pixelated flip phone video footage of Amy, etc. The only time cheap digital imagery has actively bothered me in a film was in David Lynch’s persistently ugly standard-definition work Inland Empire, but I’m willing to chalk that up as a failed early experiment. Nerve joins the fray, picking up with #horror‘s particular adoption of social media game imagery in its story about fame-hungry teens completing an escalating series of dares for large piles of cash. It’s basically Do It for the Vine: The Horror Film, with a steady flow of “like” cartoon hearts & glitchy animated .gif imagery backing up its online visual palette with a kind of creepy, “dark web” terror & grotesque message board sense of humor. The visual choices are not subtle here. When the film wants to conjure Anonymous, it breaks out the Guy Fawkes masks. It is, however, very much of the time and, in my opinion, a fascinating new avenue of visual discovery for cinema to explore while it still feels current to the cultural zeitgeist.

Although the film’s premise of teens competing for social media fame obviously carries a lot of millennial-shaming baggage in its basic DNA, Nerve‘s secret weapon is in how it celebrates teen-specific adventurousness within that digital-age moralizing. High school photography student Vee (Scream Queens‘s eternally hoarse Emma Roberts) finds herself frustrated with her reputation as a boring nerd & decides to shake up her safe, suburban life by adventuring into the big city (think of a less racist Adventures in Babysitting) in a game of Nerve. Hideously self-described as “a game of truth or dare without the truth,” Nerve is a social media game that combines modern surveillance state mining of personal information from various online profiles with a deadly version of reality TV game show gawking not too far off from Roger Corman & Paul Bartel’s creation in Death Race 2000. This teeny bopper millennial version of The Running Man drags a reluctant Vee far outside her comfort zone, Trojan horsing a surprisingly potent coming of age narrative inside a tawdry action thriller shell. Nerve might indulge in some occasional eyeroll-worthy Hollywood touches, mostly in its pairing of Vee with a cute romantic partner (“Lil'” Dave Franco, whose brother James apparently exists in this universe as his famous self) & its depiction of female-jealousies competitiveness between Vee & her best friend, but those relationships are actually determined & manipulated by the game’s “watchers”, so they’re more a part of the film’s audience indictment than a blind misstep. For the most part, this film is about Vee’s journey to find her own strengths & desires in a wild, out-of-character night of teenage rebellion & Bling Ring-esque excess set to aggressively girly pop music beats & the same neon lights nightlife palette of films like Drive. Vee is likeable, but also vaguely undefined in a way that allows her to serve as an audience surrogate for the kids playing along at home (both in the movie & otherwise). I can’t remember the last time a dangerous action thriller was so unashamedly marketed for teen girls. I have to say, it felt refreshing.

Unlike the film’s trailer, I don’t want to give away too much of Nerve‘s plot here, but things do get a little more complicated as the film indulges in some Hackers-style onsceen coding on “the dark web” in the third act. Vee & her mysterious suitor find themselves “prisoners of the game” where “the only way out is to win,” unless they can tear the whole system down against in a life-threatening race against the odds or whatever. In some ways it’s actually a miracle, given how much ground it covers & cinema’s current climate, that Nerve wasn’t adopted from its YA novel source material into a years-long trilogy with a two-part conclusion. Instead, we’re blessed with a fairly concise & effortless action thriller that I expected to find delightfully corny but instead just found delightful. The two leads are cute. The internet-specific imagery gimmick afforded the film some all-important distinctiveness. When two girls have a climactic argument it’s over something much more personally significant than boys (despite that conversation’s catalyst). There’s a moment where Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” is actually put to important, narratively potent use, maybe even standing as my favorite pop music cue of the year so far. There’s a “White People Problems” punchline that’s somehow legitimately funny despite this not being 2009. I’m not sure if this technically counts as a spoiler, but my entire theater gasped with joy when Samira “Poussey” Wiley appeared onscreen halfway into the runtime, which was the best communal at-the-movies moment I’ve had in a long while. For the most part, Nerve just made me feel great, an escapist high that marks the best aspect of the summertime action thriller.

It’d be easy to treat Nerve like a campy farce, thanks to its ludicrous premise or details like its drone-based jump scare or its tense shot of a mouse cursor pensively hovering over the “like” button on a Facebook post. However, I genuinely enjoyed the film far too much to treat it that way and those elements mostly play like self-aware summertime fun once the overall tone finds its appropriate groove. It’d also be easy to fault the film for its millennial shaming in the way it depicts teens as smart-phone addicted fame chasers, but I don’t thank that reading holds water either. If anything, Nerve presents a fantasy world where technology actually makes people more adventurous instead of less insular (the same argument a lot of folks tend to use to defend the popularity of Pokémon Go). Instead, I’d pin the film as the most surprisingly successful popcorn flick of the summer, a thoroughly enjoyable action thriller that shouts its teen girl femininity just as loudly & proudly as its instantly dated, 2016-specific pedigree. I’m honestly still in shock over how much that dynamic worked for me.

-Brandon Ledet

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

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fourstar

A few months back, I wrote about the then-upcoming release of Star Trek Beyond and discussed my hopes for the film and the franchise in general. I wasn’t particularly excited after the first trailer, but the second trailer seemed a bit better, and the fact that Simon Pegg was one of the credited writers was certainly a point in the film’s favor, given his actual fondness for the franchise (in comparison to Roberto Orci, which I’ll get to in a minute). A generally favorable early critical response was also heartening, despite the general dearth of any significant marketing push for the film. I did see the same TV spots play before almost every YouTube video I watched in the past three weeks, but I can never tell if that’s marketed to me specifically as a Star Trek nerd scholar or indicative of a larger initiative. And, as a scholar, was I satisfied?

Yes? Mostly? This is definitely a fun movie, and a major improvement over the tone deaf Into Darkness, which was bad on a such a high number of levels that it’s difficult to nail down which one was most absurd. Was it the nonsensical nature of the motivation of the film’s antagonists? Was it the fact that their motivation might actually make sense when viewed through the lens of the particular madness of screenwriter and notable 9/11 truther Roberto Orci (there’s a decent article about this on BirthMoviesDeath, which is pretty great even though I have mixed feelings about Devin Faraci)? Was it the recasting of a character whose name is Indian and was previously portrayed by a person of color with Benedict Cumberbatch? It was probably that.

I went into greater detail about my feelings about both of the previous films in this reboot timeline in the previous article, so I won’t get into it here, but I will say that, although this film is being billed as a return to Star Trek’s roots or a real “classic style” Star Trek story, that’s not entirely true. Of course, given that the same thing was said about Insurrection back in 1998 (and, for better or worse, that’s a more or less true description of the film’s premise if nothing else), that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is still a film that takes characters from a fifty year old television series where most problems were solved within an hour and attempts to map them onto a contemporary action film structure, which works in some places and not in others. Other reviews of the film have also stated that Beyond is a more affectionate revisitation of the original series than the previous two films, which is also mostly true. The film does suffer from the fact that the opening sequence bears more than a passing resemblance to a scene in Galaxy Quest, which is a stark reminder of the kind of fun movie that can be made when someone loves Star Trek rather than simply sees it as a commercial venture. Overall, though, you’d be hard pressed not to get some enjoyment out of this film, Trekker or no.

The film opens 966 days into the Enterprise’s five year deep space exploration mission, and Kirk (Chris Pine) is beginning to feel the weight of both the mission and the impossibility of living up to his father’s legacy. When the ship docks at Starfleet’s newest starbase, Yorktown, a ship appears from a nearby nebula containing one alien astronaut, who says that her ship crashed on a mysterious planet within said nebula and asking for assistance. In true Federation fashion, Kirk and Krew jump at the chance to help out, but are immediately attacked as soon as they penetrate the nebula; the crew is forced to abandon ship, ending up scattered and/or captured by the villainous Krall (Idris Elba), who seeks a doomsday MacGuffin in order to exact violence against the concept of peaceful unity in general and the Federation in particular because of its idealization of these virtues. Along the way, Scotty (Pegg) meets a woman named Jaylah (Kingsman’s Sofia Boutella), who helps him reunite the crew and to plan a rescue and escape.

There’s a lot to love here. There are references peppered throughout to other parts of the franchise, and instead of feeling hamfisted or forced as in previous installments of the reboot series, they feel natural here. There are more overt connections, with the basic plot about a dangerous planet that acts as a graveyard for various interstellar travelers and their ships being somewhat reminiscent of the animated Star Trek series episode “The Time Trap,” as well as one of the proposed fates of a starship lost a century previous being that it was snatched by a giant green space hand, which happened to the original Enterprise in “Who Mourns for Adonis?” Kirk’s opening log even references the fact that there’s a lot of shacking up going on aboard the ship during its mission, which is undoubtedly a reference to the fact that NBC balked at Gene Roddenberry’s proposal that the coed Enterprise crew be composed of roughly half men and half women; the story goes that one exec stated that this would make it seem like there was an awful lot of “funny business” going on. Likewise, Roddenberry’s original script treatment was about a starship that bore the name Yorktown, not Enterprise, leading to the starbase in this film being named for the former. Those are pretty obscure references to pull out and use for the plot of this movie, and that’s pretty indicative of how much this film cares about the fandom. More obscure references, like discussion of the dissolution of the MACOs and the Xindi and Romulan Wars (all of which are references to Star Trek: Enterprise), the possibility of accidentally splicing two people together with transporters (transporter accidents are fairly common in the franchise, but this is probably a shout out to the Voyager episode “Tuvix” in particular), Kirk’s birthday melancholy and even some of the lines he uses in his toast (from Wrath of Khan), and the appearance of a Commodore Paris (the Parises being a family with a long history of Starfleet ervice, most notably Tom Paris of Voyager) are scattered throughout and are, frankly, quite welcome.

Of course, references do not a great Star Trek film make. There are some things that don’t quite work, and given that the film runs just shy of 2 hours and that there has been some discussion of what was cut (mostly backstory for Krall and Jaylah, but smaller moments like Sulu kissing his husband as well), there are some things that don’t quite read as well on screen as they likely did on the page and/or before the film was edited down. I’m also never going to be completely on board with the use of high speed land-based chases in Star Trek; I know that Justin Lin comes from the Fast/Furious franchise so that’s really his wheelhouse, and as a result these sequences at least work better than previous attempts (I’m looking at you, Nemesis). And I know that it’s nitpicky to point this out, but there’s a lot of Hollywood science going on in this movie. First of all, nebulae are not composed of giant rocks; they’re made up of mostly dust and ionized gases. The film presents the nebula surrounding the mystery planet as being more like the Hollywood imagining of what an asteroid belt looks like, with city-sized rocks knocking into each other; real asteroid belts are mostly empty space with some rock throughout (in space, such a small area with such large pieces of debris would mean that the rocks the Enterprise works so carefully to navigate would pulverize each other into dust within a very short time, relatively speaking).

But, this is still a good movie. There is a classic Star Trek idea here, in that Krall hates the idea that the galaxy is uniting under a banner of peace instead of strength/valor and will do terrible things to demonstrate his devotion to his anti-Federation ideals, as well as the fact that he is opposed and ultimately defeated by the strong bonds that the crew of the Enterprise have and their devotion to the ideals of unity and exploration. It’s not a terribly deep humanistic ideal, and is so faintly traced that the film could be accused of paying lip service to that idea more than actually exploring it, but the fact that this film actually bothers to have this idea means that this movie is actually Star Trek, and not just JJ Abrams’s Star Wars demo reel wrapped in Star Trek’s clothes. The new additions to the cast are very engaging as are the old standards, and there’s a lot of story here that makes it well worth investing in a visit to the theatre. The end of the film legitimately left me with damp cheeks (for those of you who have already seen it, I’m talking about the photo that nuSpock finds in Spock Prime’s possessions), and I can’t wait to see it again. It’s not a five-star movie, but it has my seal of approval.

Final thought, though: The Franklin is said to be the first ship capable of achieving Warp Four; on Star Trek: Enterprise, the NX-01 Enterprise is said to be the first ship capable of achieving Warp Five, even though the Franklin seems to have come later in the timeline given that her captain’s service record includes participating in the Xindi conflict, which followed shortly after Enterprise’s first few years of service. I’m not saying that this can’t work (the Franklin could actually be older than the Enterprise but Captain Edison took command of her later, like how OG Kirk took over command of the Enterprise from Christopher Pike, took command when Robert April was promoted to Commodore). I’m honestly just pointing this out because if I don’t mention it, someone will call me out on it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

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Several years ago when Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake was first announced, I asked my neighbor and fellow horror fan Drew if he thought it would be worth seeing. In his trademark bombast, he declared that there was no point; the original Halloween had spawned so many imitators and copycats over the ensuing decade that the movie had essentially been remade dozens of times.

I couldn’t help but think about the autumn afternoon that conversation took place while sitting in the theatre watching Roland Emmerich’s latest cinematic outing, Independence Day: Resurgence last week. Why should we revisit the world of Independence Day when there have been so many imitations, parodies, and virtual remakes of that movie in the twenty intervening years between the original and this too-late sequel? Especially given that many of the attempts to recapture ID4’s success were made by that film’s director? After early career success with cult film Universal Soldier and the big-budget sci-fi flick Stargate (which I rather like, although I understand and accept that I’m in the minority on this one), Emmerich hit the film world with comparable force to one of the ID4’s flying saucer beams. The 1996 film was the highest grossing movie of the year, with a box office take of $817.4 million (for comparison, Twister was the second highest grossing film of 1996, raking in $494.4 million, about 60% of ID4’s total), and led Time to declare that science fiction was back in the mainstream. Comparative quality aside, Independence Day was essentially the Star Wars of the nineties: a surprise blockbuster success that catapulted almost everyone involved into another level of Hollywood starpower.

There are those who argue that Independence Day is a dumb movie, including most internet reviewers like (my personal hero) Lindsay Ellis, although even the hardest-hearted nitpicker can admit that there’s nothing wrong with loving a dumb movie. I have an unabashed fondness for ID4 even after all the times that I’ve seen it, and I can’t even find it in my heart to consider it a dumb movie, for all of its flaws. The characterization is generic and bland; as a result, most of the audience investment in the film rides on the charisma of its leads, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, and (especially) Will Smith, even more than the show-stopping effects work that turns DC, LA, and NYC into smoldering ruins. The film is unabashedly patriotic and jingoistic, but in a largely positive way; it’s not pro-America to the extent that non-Americans are portrayed as chaotic evil monsters, as in films in the vein of Emmerich’s later film The Patriot. What I love most about ID4 is that the stakes feel real and tangible, because the world of Independence Day is, for all intents and purposes, our world.

Resurgence’s biggest flaw lies in how it fails to understand the simple appeal of that reality. Because all the reviews that you’ve seen talking about how Resurgence is an awful piece of shit aren’t really accurate: Resurgence is a perfectly serviceable modern science fiction film. That’s faint praise and I know it, but it’s the truth. Resurgence is not a good movie or a bad movie, it’s just a moderate, middle of the road, mediocre film. It’s just as “dumb” as ID4 but without the charm. It’s basically a Syfy Channel original but with actors who can recite dialogue like they’ve met a human being before (minus Brent Spiner) and a budget that accommodates the spectacle that Emmerich wants to put on display. It’s as bland and inoffensive as a film can possibly be, and it would be as quickly forgotten as comparably unmemorable sci-fi time-passers like 2013’s Oblivion and 2014’s The Signal were it not for the fact that it’s a follow-up to a movie that people have intense nostalgic fondness for.

But before I spend any more time deliberating on the differences between the sequel and the original, a brief plot outline: 20 years after the “War of 1996,” the various nations of the planet are largely unified into a single governmental body and with a singular planetary defense force. Doctor Ian Malcolm David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is director of Earth Space Defense, and his father Julius (Judd Hirsch) wrote a self-aggrandizing book and is living off of its profits on an apparently indestructible houseboat. Former President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is tended to by his daughter Patricia (It Follows’s Maika Monroe taking over for Mae “Her?” Whitman, because the latter is “not pretty enough” I guess), who is also a former space jet pilot and current staffer in the White House under President Sela Ward, who may have been given a character name but damned if I can recall it. Dylan Dubrow-Hiller (Jessie Usher replacing Ross Bagley), the stepson of Will Smith’s character in the first film, is the leader of a squadron of “legacy” pilots, including new characters Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth) and Charlie Miller (Travis Tope), who have been busted down to menial work after Morrison endangered Dylan in a practice flight. Also, Charlotte Gainsbourg is in this movie for some reason, as a researcher who thinks that a very simplistic icon that repeats itself in the drawings of people who were psychically connected to the aliens is important before disappearing as soon as the plot no longer needs her. Oh, and Brent Spiner is back as Dr. Okun, only this time he’s a major part of the plot in addition to service as one of the film’s four(!) comic relief characters. The plot follows the new generation (Hemsworth/Monroe/Usher) teaming up with the old (Spiner/Pullman/Goldblum) to destroy a new alien threat, which is the same as the old alien threat but bigger.

One of Emmerich’s trademarks is that his films (that aren’t the least historical historical pictures ever committed to film, like The Patriot and the utter garbage Anonymous) usually open with one character finding out about something, then that information being communicated to several other people before being disseminated to one of our protagonists. Stargate opens with a child in Egypt discovering something that becomes her life’s work, and then James Spader is eventually brought in to translate the hieroglyphics that kickstart the plot. In ID4, a signal is detected and the information is eventually escalated to the point that the president is awoken to be told this information. Often, someone of import will be in the middle of a party and then be called away to answer a phone call. As lazy as it is to repeat this trick over and over again, it’s a decent filmic way of using a gigantic cast of characters in order to convey a sense of scale. That’s part of what helped ID4 feel so global, but here the world of the film feels very small, and we see characters that we already know almost immediately. A lot of this has to do with the film’s world-building, which is another element that alienates this sequel from the original. The appeal of Independence Day is that it took place in our world, whereas Resurgence takes place on an Earth with antigravity helicopters, interplanetary “tugs” that can shuttle to the moon and back in a matter of minutes, a building that you don’t even realize is the rebuilt White House at first, and soldiers carrying around Halo-esque pulse rifles. Everything in the film is futuristic because it’s been reverse-engineered from alien tech; this needn’t inherently detract from the film, but it does mean that the world of Resurgence isn’t ours, and it’s hard to care about the stakes in this film when compared to the original. This entire film could take place on Alderaan or Arrakis for all that it resembles the 2016 we’re all living in. And when we live in a world where 9/11 imagery is used to “sell” the audience destruction on a massive scale in everything from Man of Steel to Transformers, Independence Day’s relatively tasteful and understated destruction and use of practical effects seems dated now, but Resurgence goes too far in the other direction, with the over-the- top devastation looking like outtakes from 2012 that were put back in the box for being too unbelievable.

There’s honestly too much to say about why this film fails as a sequel, so divorcing it from that context and viewing it as a run-of- the-mill sci-fi flick that combines absurd schlock (Judd Hirsch outrunning a tidal wave on a tiny boat is some ‘98 Godzilla shenanigans) with occasional tenderness (Monroe and Pullman pull off some damn fine interfamilial love) is the best way to enjoy it Resurgence, should you want to do so. There are interesting ideas aplenty: post-singularity life forms that exist elsewhere in the universe, an insular nation where a ground war against survivors of a crashed alien ship went on for a decade after the invasion proper was thwarted, and the haunted dreams of post-invasion survivors are all woefully underdeveloped in comparison to subplots that are useless and forgettable, like Charlie’s crush on the Chinese pilot, the tagalong auditor comic relief character, the busload of kids that Judd Hirsch rescues, and pointless rivalry between Dylan and Jake. The attempts to recreate the personal relationships of the first film fall flat, and it would have been better not to try at all.

Overall, Resurgence is too little, too late, and it doesn’t have the heart and charm that the original did to cover its flaws. But it exists now and we all have to live with it, so my advice is to either not bother or try to enjoy it as an Asylum flick that somehow got a big-screen budget.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Nice Guys (2016)

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fourhalfstar

For as long as Shane Black has been writing stylistically strong cult classics in Hollywood (three decades), it’s incredible to think that he only has three feature credits to his name as a director. Black penned two childhood favorites of mine, The Monster Squad & Last Action Hero, along with major commercial successes like Iron Man 3 & the entire Lethal Weapon franchise, but he still stands as a kind of Hollywood underdog story, seemingly struggling to get his due as an auteur. The Nice Guys, a Ryan Gosling/Russell Crowe action comedy that’s currently struggling to earn back its relatively slim $50 million budget, may not be the runaway commercial success Black has been searching for as a director, but it does find him operating beautifully & efficiently on an artistic level. All of the hallmarks that make a Shane Black film distinct — witty dialogue, slapstick violence, children involved in activities way above their age range, stale genre tropes made to feel fresh — are on wild, brilliant display in The Nice Guys. This is the pinnacle achievement of a wickedly funny storyteller that sadly serves as yet another just-short-of-success story in a summer that’s been surprisingly lackluster in ticket sales, but immensely rich in hidden gems.

It’s difficult to discuss The Nice Guys‘s merits without comparing it to other works, as if it were a miracle of Frankensteined genre science. Its young girls braving the nasty waters of 1970s sexuality felt like a shoot-em-up action comedy version of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, something I never thought I’d want to see, but was giddy to experience. Its general aesthetic lies somewhere between Lethal Weapon & Boogie Nights, another unlikely genre mashup resulting from its cartoonishly violent detective work set against a 1970s California porn industry backdrop. Its precocious, smart-mouthed kid detective dynamic plays like Veronica Mars, except with an even younger protagonist & an even more adult/dangerous mystery to unravel. The list of similar titles the film might remind you of is virtually unending: Pulp Fiction, Bored to Death, Taxi Driver, The Big Lebowski, etc., etc., etc. And yet Shane Black juggles all of these pre-existing aesthetics without ever feeling rote or derivative. He understands exactly what genre toys he’s playing with, but retools them all to create his own distinct work with an incredibly strong, idiosyncratic comedic voice. This is a movie made by a passionate nerd who loves watching movies and that affection is immediately obvious in every scene. The call is coming from inside the audience.

Due to The Nice Guys‘s mystery plot structure it’s difficult to describe too much of its basic story without spoiling its rewards. At heart it’s a mismatched partners buddy cop flick where neither of the leads are cops, exactly. Russell Crowe plays a mercenary muscle, a hired goon with heart of severely tarnished gold. He teams with Ryan Gosling, a con-artist private detective who doubles as an alcoholic buffoon, to find a missing teen with ties to California’s thriving porn industry. Our team of in-over-their-heads antiheroes is rounded out by the single father private eye’s young daughter, who is never invited on missions, but often proves herself the most competent member of the crew. I would say this crack team of violent fuckups fall down the rabbit hole of the seedy side of 1970s Los Angeles, but since all sides of 1970s Los Angeles were likely seedy, that descriptor is more than a little redundant. Either way, they’re far from prepared for the political conspiracies, mass murders, life-threatening pollution, and hedonistic porn industry parties that complicate what should prove to be a cut & dry missing person’s case, but snowballs into something much larger.

If I had to assign The Nice Guys an exact genre I’d be tempted to classify it as “sleaze noir,” but that would greatly overlook what largely makes the film feel special: slapstick violence. Shane Black has an adept way of portraying violence that both shocks & amuses. There are certain violent displays in the films that had me gasping in their realistic & sudden brutality and others that had me struggling to breathe between laughs. A lot of what makes The Nice Guys funny is the matter-of-fact dialogue of phrases like, “Dad, there’s like whores here & stuff,” but much of the film’s entertainment value is in its violent physical comedy. Alternating between slapstick cruelty & genuinely devastating displays of brutality is a dangerously fun & wicked mode of entertainment that I’m not sure Black has ever topped before. It’s a solid, accessible base that even leaves room for more surreal inclusions like unicorns, mermaids, and gigantic insects. Seriously. The Nice Guys might be dying at the box office but the packed theater I saw it with last weekend was eating it up, wholly engaged with every weirdly cruel & surreally funny place the film decided to take them. Hopefully someone will take notice & help Shane Black bring more works this weirdly pleasing to the big screen. He’s surely earned a few more leaps of faith.

-Brandon Ledet

Bloodsport (1988)

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Jean-Claude Van Damme stars in his breakout role as Frank Dux (pronounced “Dukes”). Dux is an army captain who was trained in martial arts by a childhood friend’s father. In order to bring honor to his teacher after his son dies, he travels to Hong Kong to fight in an illegal martial arts tournament called the “Kumite.” There are fighters from all over the world, and the tournament itself has a notorious reputation for being brutal and deadly.

Bloodsport is a movie dripping with borderline racism (sometimes extremely blatant) and toxic masculinity. The characters are not much more than stereotypes and poorly written caricatures. And there are numerous plot holes and things left totally unanswered. (How does his childhood friend die? What exactly is it that he does in the army?) But I think the biggest weakness this movie has is it’s totally nonsensical timeline. Event after event after event happens and then Dux says,”I’ll meet you for dinner tonight.”  When does he get trained for this tournament? In the two days before he leaves or sometime while he’s in the army? There’s no clear markers as to when anything happens.

Not to say there isn’t some genuine fun in this movie, such as the fight scenes. Considering that Bloodsport is a movie based around an illegal full contact martial arts tournament, it’s a really good thing that these scenes are entertaining. They’re full of unrealistic blood, definitely physically impossible fighting movies, and gratuitous slow motion, all set to an 80’s-tastic soundtrack.  It’s fighting movie cheese at its peak.

But as the two dimensional love interest Janice asks,”What is there to understand about a bunch of guys who have to prove themselves by beating each other’s brains out?” I don’t really think the movie ever truly answers this question, try as it might. The goals of honor and revenge aren’t fleshed out enough to mean anything, and you’re just left with bloody violence. Bloody violence that’s overblown and entertaining in it’s absolute ridiculousness, but still just pointless violence. And “That’s why they call this thing bloodsport, kid!”

-Alli Hobbs

Keanu (2016)

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fourstar

It’s been a good while since I’ve seen a film in theaters and actually laughed out loud (at least for films that are actually meant to be comedies). I can’t even remember the last time I saw a comedy that would be considered a new release. I guess it would be Krampus, but Krampus is considered to be a horror-comedy and not just a straight up comedy. Recent funny films that have hit theaters would be The Boss, The Brothers Grimsby, and Meet the Blacks, just to name a few. Maybe the movie trailers and reviews didn’t do these films justice, but nothing about these films made me want to make my way to a theater and drop ten bucks to see them. Keanu was a different story. Knowing my love for cats, a friend of mine sent me the movie trailer for Keanu via text message. At first, I thought this was a silly trailer for a fake movie that was part of the Key and Peele sketch comedy show. Well, I just about exploded with joy when I found out that this was going to be a real movie. A real movie that was going to actually be in real movie theaters. A film about an adorable kitten mixed up in a drug cartel that included tunes from music legend George Michael was something I wouldn’t miss for the world. Yes, I definitely shelled out ten bucks for this one.

Keanu has a strong, action-packed start. Two assassins, known throughout the film as the Allentown Brothers (actually played by Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key), massacre a buttload of people in a drug lair housed by a church. A cute little kitten that goes by the name of Iglesias escapes the madness and ends up on the doorstep of Rell (Jordan Peele), who is going through a terrible breakup. Iglesias, renamed Keanu by Rell, brings Rell out of his depression and becomes the most important thing in his life. His world falls apart again when Keanu is kidnapped from his home. With the help of his straight-laced cousin Clarence, Rell sets out to find Keanu. The two end up going undercover as the infamous Allentown Brothers to get Keanu back with the nicknames of Tectonic (Peele) and Shark Tank (Key). Tectonic and Shark Tank join a gang with a leader that goes by the name of Cheddar (Method Man) as part of their plan to get Keanu back. The duo quickly finds themselves teaching teambuilding exercises to gang members and selling drugs to The House Bunny actress Anna Faris, among other things.

What I found to be very interesting about this film was that it was actually very violent and gory. The shooting scenes are brutal but funny at the same time. It’s a strange feeling for sure. Key and Peele really pushed the envelope by having all that violence in a comedy starring a super cute kitten. Also, one part the really stuck out to me was towards the end of the film when Clarence and Rell actually get arrested after taking down a major drug operation. It was so surprising because it was so realistic. Usually when the good guys in movies steal cars and deal drugs to ultimately take down the bad guys, they’re let off the hook and the film concludes to a silly happy ending.  In Keanu, our main comic stars go straight to jail after they save the day because, well, they actually broke a ton of laws throughout the movie.

Peele is by far the star of the show. He was absolutely hilarious consistently throughout the film, and I was laughing during just about every moment he was on the screen. He gets especially funny when he takes on the role of Techtonic. Unlike Key, he doesn’t rely on overacting and ridiculous Dane Cook-like humor to have a funny performance. I know that it sounds like I’m being harsh on Key, and I don’t really mean to be. He did bring a good bit of humor to Keanu, and he starred in one of my favorite scenes in the movie: while on a drug trip, he imagined himself in the video of George Michael’s “Faith,” tight jeans included. Clarence, like myself, is a huge George Michael fan, and there are some insanely hilarious parts in the film (other than the “Faith” drug trip) which involve his love for George Michael that I completely adored. Key’s style of comedy just doesn’t a-Peele to me as much as Peele’s, so I can’t help but compare the two.

Once the film was over, my cheekbones were sore from laughing so much, but then a more serious feeling came over me. I realized that I would probably do the same thing Rell did if my cat was in Keanu’s situation. Keanu’s adorable little kitten meow tugged at all my heart strings, and hopefully, other viewers had the same reaction. Keanu was like an Air Bud for adults. In a world filled with animal abuse and abandonment, it’s nice to see a film that promotes human/animal bonds. Give your fur babies lots of kisses and hugs and catch Keanu before it leaves theaters!

-Britnee Lombas