patrick dempsey

Thanksgiving (2023)

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Thanksgiving is, unfortunately, unlikely to be remembered very fondly in the years to come. I was enticed to the theater after reading a review that compared it to Scream, which was like catnip to me. And while I suppose I can see what that critic was alluding to, I’m not as warm to its charms. 

The film starts off with a strong opening: Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman), proprietor of Right Mart stores, is convinced by his new wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche) to open his store on Thanksgiving evening with Black Friday deals. This means that Mitch Collins (Ty Olsson) must leave his family Thanksgiving with his beloved wife Amanda (Gina Gershon) to open the store when another manager calls in sick. Over at the Right Mart, the crowd has gotten quite rowdy, and their agitation only increases when Thomas’s daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) succumbs to peer pressure and lets herself and her friends in through a side entrance. When dipshit jock Evan (Tomaso Sanelli) taunts a teen from a rival high school through the glass of the store, things reach a tipping point, and even the presence of local sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) can’t prevent the shoppers from surmounting a barricade and pressing against the glass doors of the store until they break, causing a stampede that crushes and maims many people, with poor Amanda, who had come to the store to bring a late Thanksgiving dinner to her husband, being crushed to death. 

This opening sequence is the best thing about the movie, with frenetic action, rising tension, and spectacular violence, all in pursuit of a free waffle maker that is promised as a prize to the first hundred customers. From there the film becomes a little rote, and it’s not helped by the total non-presence of teen characters. Jessica is our viewpoint character and thus we never feel any real tension regarding whether she will make it out, and she’s the most undeveloped final girl that I think I have ever seen, just sleepwalking through this movie with only the thinnest of characterizations (a dead mom). Her best friend Gabby (Addison Rae) is virtually indistinguishable from her in motive and action, with the only real difference between them being that Gabby is dating the aforementioned Evan. Evan himself is sketched out more clearly, but he has not a single redeeming characteristic, as he filmed the Right Mart riot and posted it online for the viral fame while later denying that he had done so; he also bullies a smaller student into performing his classwork and then breaks his word to pay him for doing so, and he mocks Jessica’s new boyfriend Ryan (Milo Manheim) behind his back but accepts gifts from him without reservation. Rounding out our little gang of shits are two more likable members, Evan’s teammate Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) and his girlfriend, Yulia (Jenna Warren). The issue is that we never really care about any of these people; even Jessica, with whom we are supposed to sympathize as the lead, is completely forgettable. 

I’m not making the argument that we need to care about any of the characters in a slasher for it to be effective. Most slashers released in the wake of Halloween (which did have a relatable and likable main character in Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode) didn’t realize that part of that film’s capturing of lightning in a bottle was in the fact that we cared about Laurie and her friends. A Nightmare on Elm Street also understood this, making Nancy Thompson (and to a lesser extent Kristen and Alice) very relatable; even Child’s Play and its sequel wouldn’t be as memorable without Andy or Kyle. The characters in the Friday the 13th series are largely indistinguishable and interchangeable, which is why any discussion of characters from that series takes the form of “the one played by Kevin Bacon” and “the one played by Crispin Glover,” with the only character name most people remember being “Tommy Jarvis.” Still, most slashers don’t bother with that level of character work and are still fun, but this overall shallow dimensionality of the players here is to the film’s detriment. I mean, we’re on to the second page of this review already, and I haven’t even mentioned the killer or his schtick, that’s how thinly this whole thing is drawn. 

The slasher here is called “The Pilgrim,” and wears a mask of John Carver, who is credited with the composition of the Mayflower Compact and who is a local hero in the Plymouth setting. I suppose that the Scream connection comes in that the killer is adept at using the phone (and by extension, social media) to scare the local teens and convince them to do what he wants as he seeks vengeance on those who participated in the Black Friday Massacre the year prior. The mask is almost too silly to be truly scary, and the inconsistency in the Pilgrim’s spree undermines what could push this into being a successful horror comedy. Several kills are clearly based on Thanksgiving traditions, like when he stabs one of the teens through their ears with corn-on-the-cob holders, or when he gruesomely cooks a person alive to serve as the turkey-like centerpiece of the final act unmasking. Other kills are consistent with the Pilgrim’s message, but don’t have much to do with the holiday. In fact, his first kill is of a waitress at the local diner who was one of the first in line at the store and was the one whose cart got caught on Gina Gershon’s hair and pulled away part of her scalp. The waitress runs for her life and almost makes it but is chased down and struck by her own car, which launches her into a dumpster, its swinging lid coming down so hard it severs her in half at the waist. The lower half of her body is left on a Right Mart sign that advertises “half off.” It’s not as funny as it thinks it is (not even getting into the fact that the killer couldn’t possibly have planned for that scenario to play out that way), but it feels like the movie should have chosen whether it was going to go all-in on Thanksgiving themed murders or excised them and instead just gone for puns. Failing that—and I thought this was where the film was going—there should be two killers. One of the great failings of the Scream franchise is that it has never made a film where the two Ghostfaces are operating at cross-purposes or are unaware of the other. Given that Spyglass is being spineless in their eviction of Melissa Barrera from the series over her comments regarding the Palestinian genocide (and that Jenna Ortega was announced to have left the project the following day, with most of the internet believing that she walked in support of Barrera, although we can’t know for sure), that series is effectively dead, and if it continues, it’s dead to me. There’s a scene here in Thanksgiving where it makes it almost obvious that there are two killers, with two separate murders that are too far apart from one another to have happened in the time that we are shown it to have occurred, and yet this isn’t part of the resolution.

Where the film does succeed, outside of the first act, is in the ingenuity of its kills and its variety of red herrings. With regards to the latter, there’s no shortage of potential killers; Ty Olsson’s bereaved widower with a grudge against the Wrights is a front-runner, joined by Jessica’s ex-boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), a promising baseball player whose career is waylaid when his pitching arm is broken during the Right Mart stampede, and there’s even a newly appointed deputy that some of the townsfolk are mysteriously hostile toward for never-explained reasons. The best kill in the film, however, isn’t even at the hands of the Pilgrim, at least not directly. Several characters are participants in the town’s local Thanksgiving parade, specifically riding a float in the shape of a boat. When the Pilgrim disrupts the parade, leading the truck towing the float to stop short, sending the bowsprit of the ship straight through his head, much to the horror of his two elementary-aged granddaughters who were in the vehicle with him. It’s the film’s best joke, too, and it needed to land several more in order to really pull off a sufficiently campy tone. I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone, but director Eli Roth prioritizes shock value over comedic timing, and the film suffers for it. Stronger performances from the teen characters or characterization invested in making them more interesting, better and more frequent jabs at the genre and comedy in general, and a little more consistency throughout would have made this film more like a valid cinematic release and not like a misplaced episode of Hulu’s Into the Dark. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016)

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The opening gag of Bridget Jones’s Baby is the entire movie in a microcosm. Alone on her birthday, Rene Zellweger’s now middle aged romcom anti-hero opens this years-late sequel on the exact note where she started the first film in the series: blowing out a single candle on a cupcake & lip-syncing to Celine Dion’s “All By Myself” in an amusingly over-the-top moment of self-pity. She asks her series-sparking diary “How in the hell did I end up here again?” in voice-over and as an audience I can’t help but breathe a much-needed sigh of relief. Even with all of the uncomfortable weight-cataloging & desperation to land a husband, 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary holds up nicely as a smart, darkly funny romcom that modernizes & subverts the Jane Austen classic Pride & Prejudice for the hard-loving, hard-drinking thirty-somethings of its era. As a protagonist, Bridget Jones is a little dopey & off-kilter, but personifies for her audience the Inner Idiot we all feel like we come off as whenever we’re anxious in public. 2004’s follow-up, the inexplicably titled Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason, completely misinterprets the character’s appeal and makes her out to be an Actual Idiot in one of the most insultingly vapid romcoms I can ever remember seeing. That’s why it’s such a relief, over a decade later, to see Bridget Jones return to square one: drunk, alone, and once again personifying our collective Inner Idiot in a recognizably human way. It’s even more of a relief when this familiar beat is interrupted by Bridget switching the track to a modern pop song and deciding to celebrate her current middle age state instead of moping about her apartment, a welcome taste of what’s to come.

As necessary as Bridget Jones’s Baby was in undoing the damage wrought by Edge of Reason, it doesn’t find much else purpose for its existence besides transporting its protagonist to a modern context. The movie’s plot is centered on a simple “Who’s the father?” mystery as Bridget finds herself pregnant & caught between two potential lovers: Colin Firth’s eternally uptight Mr. Darcy from the first two films & the out of nowhere addition of an American billionaire played by 80s TV heartthrob Patrick Dempsey. I suppose as an audience we’re supposed to fret over which beau she (and her titular baby) will end the film with, but it’s difficult to care too much about that dilemma (especially since Mr. Darcy has been a kind of recurring inevitability since film one). The true conflict here is in watching Bridget navigate the 2010s, now a total outsider to the youth culture she drank her way through exiting in her original appearance. Surrounded by *shudder* millennials, Bridget weighs in on the cultural evils of music festivals, man buns, “ironic” beards, brand managers, “vegan condoms,” and (in an extended featured cameo) Ed Sheeran. I despised the trailer for this film for its regressive fretting over the fear of dying “alone” as a single mother, but the movie is much less concerned with the baby of its title than it is with ribbing a young, inauthentically hip culture it’s getting too old to understand. Bridget Jones is an awkward & as dopey as ever, but as a relic of the past she’s become a kind of Gen-X anti-hero tasked with cutting through the bullshit of modern culture in the name of middle aged women everywhere. That’s a huge step up from her blithering idiot persona who “hilariously” doesn’t know how to snow ski or navigate Thailand’s prison system in the miserable Edge of Reason.

There’s a comfort in familiarity to romcoms as a genre that Bridget Jones’s Baby delivers expertly. Rescuing its protagonist from the Idiot Plot screenwriting hell of Edge of Reason, this damage control sequel makes everything pleasantly familiar again. Bridget is back in her proper apartment, surrounded by her same cast of friends (including the always-welcome Shirley Henderson), and back to worrying about her same self-defeating anxieties over romance, her career, and her body. This return to normalcy is the cinematic equivalent of an electric blanket in a cold snap, to the point where any developments in Bridget’s romantic or professional life almost don’t matter at all. At its very last opportunity, Bridget Jones’s Baby introduces a plot twist that leaves the door open for a sequel that sounds pleasant, but unnecessary. Now that the damage from Edge of Reason has been undone there isn’t much a fourth Bridget Jones movie could possibly offer besides more comforting familiarity. At least that’s far from the worst thing a movie could accomplish. I’ll admit I was even tickled in this sequel by seeing Emma Thompson seemingly reprise her irreverent natal physician from Junior as Bridget’s smartass doctor. It didn’t really improve or even alter what I’d already seen her do before, but it was still a familiar, comforting reminder of a past pleasure. Bridget may despondently ask, “How in the hell did I end up here again?,” at the start of this movie, but her audience couldn’t possibly want to be anywhere else. Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t attempt to disrupt or subvert the romcom formula like recent bomb-throwers Wetlands, Obvious Child, Sleeping With Other People, Appropriate Behavior, etc., but it does feel essentially redemptive for restoring a beloved character who deserved so much better in her previous outing to a comfortably familiar place.

-Brandon Ledet