Category Archives: Sucks ass

These movies are to be avoided at all costs. The only good thing about them is probably our review.

Like A Boss

Mia (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel (Rose Byrne) are best friends since middle school. They started a beauty company together in a garage and grew it into a beautiful storefront location. Mia is the creative one, hands-on with customers and bursting with ideas, but there’s no structure to her process and it can’t be rushed or quantified. Mel takes care of the books and the logistics. She makes sure things run smoothly so that Mia can continue to create. But they’ve yet to recoup their costs from the storefront opening and they’re running quite a deficit. Mel doesn’t like to be the bearer of bad news and Mia doesn’t like to hear it, so Mel’s been carrying that burden alone and is relieved to hear that beauty giant Claire Luna is considering investing in their company. It sounds like the lifeline they’ll need to survive.

But while Mel is relieved and excited by the offer, Mia disdains it. They started their own company so they’d never have to work for anyone else again, and Claire Luna (Salma Hayek) has been pretty clear that her influx of cash comes with plenty of strings. In fact, when Mia and Mel reluctantly accept having not much of a choice, we the audience know something they don’t: Claire intends to sow discord among them to ultimately break them up so she’ll have controlling share. She’s pretty ruthless.

She’s also the only thing worth watching in this hot mess, although not necessarily in a good way. Hayek’s character is so baffling she’s hard to look away from, her complete lack of grounding or humanity make her unpredictable but also uninteresting. Which is still better than Haddish, who is too much, and Byrne, who is far, far too little. I have confirmed that this was in fact intended as a comedy, possibly because there is no genre for “just a group of people doing stuff of no particular value to no discernible effect.” There are better movies about business partners. There are better movies about friendship. Heck, there are better movies about eating something way too spicy.

Like A Boss cannot live up to its own title. It’s a bottom of the barrel comedy and director Miguel Arteta couldn’t find a joke if his mummy put it in a brown paper back with his name on it.

Dangerous Lies (Windfall)

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Katie (Camila Mendes) is supposed to be in grad school but her young marriage to Adam (Jessie T. Usher) has meant some financial hardships so instead she’s working as a care-giver to Leonard (Elliott Gould). Though Katie and Leonard have only known each other a few months, they’ve become fast friends, thanks in part to his isolation and lack of friends and family. He’d love to help her out with some money but she refuses, so instead Leonard hires Adam to do some yard work for him. It might have been a lovely arrangement had Leonard not wound up dead. Though not in particular ill health, he was an old man and it’s not a particularly suspicious death – until a lawyer shows up with a will awarding Leonard’s large home to Katie.

Katie and Adam move in eagerly, happy to put their struggles behind them, but the house is a gift that just keeps on giving: cash and other valuables are slowly uncovered, and Katie and Adam nervously keep them secret. But their windfall is enough to raise an alarm; Katie’s boss is hounding them, and so is a detective, and even a particularly aggressive real estate agent. But Katie and Adam haven’t technically done anything wrong, have they?

Well, they do make some extremely dumb decisions. It IS life changing money we’re talking about. And it’s not exactly stealing if there isn’t exactly a victim. Right?

Dangerous Lies (terrible title) is one of those movies that will be instantly forgettable but it’s technically competent and the performances are fairly good (poor Gould is not at his best, reciting lines rather than acting). But if you’re looking for mindless escapism, this is just good enough. It’s nicely paced, and even if the twists aren’t quite surprising, at least they’re fairly frequent. It feels like writer David Golden watched Knives Out and thought “I could do that” but it turned out that no, he couldn’t. It’s a mediocre offering at best, but it’s new content available on Netflix, and sometimes that’s just good enough.

My Spy

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My Spy is about as good a movie as JJ is a spy. Which is to say: not at all. In fact, when JJ (Dave Bautista) is assigned to surveil a mother and daughter with techie Bobbi (Kristen Schaal), they are almost immediately made by Sophie (Chloe Coleman), their 9 year old target. Not just made, but caught on tape contemplating her murder. And instead of admitting the mission has been compromised, JJ then proceeds to allow himself to be blackmailed by said little girl into teaching her spycraft, dating mom Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), and generally posing as the daddy figure she so craves. But he’s understandably loathe to admit defeat because already this assignment was more of a punishment than a true mission. He’s a terrible spy, a lousy dresser, and an awful dancer.

Dave Bautista has no business being a leading man. I can’t help but think the director and/or producers agree since the script often sounds like it was written with Dwayne Johnson in mind, but The Rock is a legit movie star and can spot stinkers more easily that the Bautistas and the John Cenas, who are, frankly, lucky to get any work at all. Well, maybe I’m being a little hard on them. I think Bautista is actually very well cast in the Guardians movies. [Insert silence here, where I’m not saying anything at all since I truly do not have a single nice word to say about Cena]. But even Johnson started off doing things like The Tooth Fairy as he proved to Hollywood that he had what it takes. But he does. He knows his limits, he’s not trying to elbow his way into a Shakespeare adaptation. He chooses roles where his smile and his eyebrow arch are assets, where his muscles are a plot point, where he can ooze charisma and strength in equal measure and coast off the fumes.

Dave Bautista has no charisma, no discernible personality, but I think both he and Cena are trying to coast of Johnson’s fumes. The Rock has proved himself such a Hollywood hit machine that it of course would love to replicate his success, and it eyeballed the heck out of the WWE to see if anyone else would fit the bill. But Dwayne Johnson is a genetic and a talent anomaly. You can’t simply replace him with a similarly oversized man and hope for the best. Bautista is simply a large and lumbering plus-sized blow up doll, and director Peter Segal is too timid to maneuver him into position. A mannequin with its lines taped to its chest would have more character than Bautista does.

John Cena recently tried leading man status on for size in Playing with Fire, which was so bad it made me furious. My Spy isn’t good. Everyone involved recognized this; it was delayed 3 times even before anyone had ever heard of coronavirus. But with the pandemic as a convenient excuse, they’ve quietly released it directly to Amazon Prime, which means if you’re a member, you can watch it for free. And free is the only way this math works out at all. Free means you can give it a try. Free means you can shut it off after 10 minutes without feeling guilty. And, in these trying times of isolation boredom and our desperate need for content, this might do, especially since it is a rare family-friendly, non-animated film. This won’t be anyone’s favourite film, but you can only play so many rounds of go-fish.

Once Upon A Time In London

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Do you like the idea of a gangster movie, but find them too exciting, too violent, too sensational? Have I got the movie for you.

It’s based on real-life rival mobsters in London and my #1 takeaway from the film is: organized crime in London is boring as shit.

Jack “Spot” Comer (Terry Stone) and Billy Hill (Leo Gregory) are whiny little school yard boys. Comer elbowed out whoever was there before him and he can’t fucking believe that his own little protegee Billy Hill would do the same to him. So they piss and moan and act like bookmaking and racketeering are a god-given rights.

Old-timey Brit gangsters never had the benefit of seeing a Quentin Tarantino film. Or a Guy Ritchie one. So they basically have 2 moves: punching, and stabbing. Neither ever kills, so there’s just a lot of walking wounded, with dirty bandages on display (the NHS must not have been set up yet). They just keep beating each other up like they’re little kids, and they always live to bore me another day. It’s cruel.

Meanwhile, the newspapers treat the mob bosses like they’re celebrities. Everyone knows the deal and I guess there weren’t any police officers or laws to get in their way. No one seemed to really enjoy the lives they made; there wasn’t a lot of extravagance on display or good times to be had. Everyone was too busy getting blood stains out of white undershirts I guess.

The montages are brutal, the violence is half-baked, the power struggle is muted and uninteresting, and perhaps worst of all: the pauses. When gangsters aren’t punching their way down the street, they’re thinking deep thoughts. We aren’t privy to them but gosh the camera loves to dwell on quiet introspection. One such scene, taking place in a courtroom, feels like it goes on forever. Will it ever end? Not soon enough.

Real life isn’t all mink coats and gold chains and horse heads in bed. Sometimes it’s downright boring, just two blokes applying for the same job, even if that job is extortion. But the thing is, we can choose not to make movies out of uninteresting situations. Assuming you have stamps, please send director Simon Rumley a postcard saying just that.

Call of the Wild

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This is the story of Buck, a behemoth St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd mix, a sweet pup enjoying a life of dog luxury in California when he’s dognapped all the way up to the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush. First he’s conscripted into a dogsled team for a mail delivery service, running across Canada’s northern frozen tundras until the telegraph makes his work obsolete. Next he becomes companion to John Thornton (Harrison Ford) who takes him out to the Arctic Circle where Buck can rediscover his primal roots.

Devoted fans of the 1903 Jack London novel will notice that neither Buck nor his dog colleagues closely resemble their characters in the book. In fact, the other sled dogs are also largely mutts, not the traditional Husky, and their personalities seem based upon the seven dwarfs. I’m not sentimental about the book so I don’t really mind the liberties taken with the literature so much as I mind the liberties taken with dogs. Because for a movie about a dog, and several of his doggie friends, there are no actual dogs in the movie. They’re all CG. And not only are they computer-generated, their expressions, especially Buck’s, are hyper real. Cartoonish. So they look out of place and they make it harder for me to relate to their characters. Buck and his pals get into some real danger. And of course, even out in the wilds, man is always any animal’s greatest threat. It’s likely too scary for very young kids, and yet it didn’t move me half as much as you’d expect from a bleeding heart with a recently deceased, dearly beloved dog. Because Buck’s movements and responses never feel real.

I have a slightly smaller pack now, but even with three dogs I’m very familiar with their methods of communication. If you live with a dog or a cat, and many times even a smaller pet, a bunny or a bird, then you’re likely pretty good at reading their expressions. You know what a tentative paw means, or a head tilt, or a lowered tail. You don’t need some ridiculous CGI eyebrows giving you Scooby Doo vibes. The constant reminder that these dogs aren’t real dilutes the story’s warmth and reduces our interest and empathy.

Ford is pretty solid, especially since he was almost always completely alone, perhaps acting only opposite a tennis ball on a stick that he had to imagine was man’s best friend. There’s a good story under all the effects, I think, but much like Tammy Faye Bakker, the message is lost, and the only story reported is the bad makeup.

Rising High

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Sean called this movie Raising Hell for the first third of it or so, until we paused it and the Netflix screen helpfully cleared things up. Not that it helps to know the title, unless it helps you avoid it. And frankly, Rising High might have been improved with a little more hell raising.

It’s about con men after all. Greedy men who are money hungry and obese with ambition. Viktor (David Kross) is allergic to the poverty he experienced in childhood and is willing to do nearly anything to avoid it. He’s got the motivation and the slick good looks, and he runs into a guy, Gerry (Frederick Lau), who’s got the dirty connections. Once they bring in Nicole (Janina Uhse), a banker who values cash over morals, they’ve got themselves a perfect set-up. They screw over people like it’s going out of business. You only rise that high by stepping over other people. Generally, you have to be both skeevy AND charming to do those things. Just ask Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s cornered the market on playing skeevy yet charming. Before the fall (and there’s ALWAYS a fall guys), there’s usually a certain amount of gleeful over-indulgence. Viktor and Gerry go through the motions of course: coke, hookers, parties. All of it empty and unsatisfying naturally. And it’s not even fun to watch. Mostly because the movie’s just going through the motions too, copy-catting better films in the genre, nothing new to contribute and nothing charismatic in the copy.

This is a German film that’s as joyless as it is pointless. I was so bored that I spent most of the movie playing Dragon Squirrel. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it, it’s not the latest Angry Birds or Candy Crush or anything like that. Dragon is my shih-tzu Bronx’s favourite toy, though it’s really just the ripped open empty carcass of a stuffed blue and pink dragon at this point. Squirrel is the last of Fudgie’s (my Yorkie) trio of squeakie toy squirrels, also his favourite toy. The game involves me trying to steal their favourite toy, the dogs playing varying degrees of effective defense, and then some pretty epic tug of war once I have the toy in hand, me gripping the toy’s little ears, and the dogs clamping teeth down on their tails. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Usually I have a limit as to how much Dragon Squirrel I can play, and usually we make the squeaky Squirrel “disappear” about 10 minutes into any given film or series. This particular game of Dragon Squirrel lasted 94 minutes, uncoincidentally the exact run-time of Rising High. Because Rising High never rose above a whimper, never had even a tiny fragment of my attention despite the fact that Dragon Squirrel has now been played so many times the dragon no longer has a single tuft of stuffing left. The movie never gives you a reason to care for the characters, it never justifies its existence, and it never apologizes for being a weak copy of something better. I would have been more firmly engrossed by rewatching Catch Me If You Can for the 100th time, or even by rewatching Wolf Of Wall Street, which I don’t even like. So assuming you don’t have a rousing game of Dragon Squirrel to distract you, I’m going to go ahead and recommend you skip this one.

Roped

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Roped just recently popped on Netflix and what you need to know about it is this: it’s like Footloose, but for people who don’t like movies.

You see, the rodeo has come to the wrong town, a small but self-identified “progressive” town in which Councilman Robert Peterson (Casper Van Dien), a staunch vegetarian and animal rights activist, basically convinces the townspeople to run the rodeo out. But he doesn’t count on his teenage daughter Tracy (Lorynn York) undermining his efforts. First it’s a small rebellion at the local diner where Tracy openly orders a cheeseburger. Next she goes to the fair grounds and – if you’re under 16, you’d better not look at this next part, it gets ugly – she Instagrams some sheep (no, that’s not a euphemism). And you know what they say: it’s a slippery slope between cell phone snaps and murder. And wouldn’t you know it, Tracy falls in love with a rodeo cowboy named Colton (Josh Swickard). The worst has happened. He immediately infects her with his side of the story. Her father forbids the relationship of course, because the town is into animal rights, not women’s rights.

But just like Romeo and Juliet, their forbidden teenage love eventually inspires the two warring sides to consider each other’s positions – but only after tragedy.

Roped is a very cheaply made and flimsy feeling film in the Hallmark style of romance over substance. Which, frankly, might be what you’re looking for this quarantine. It’s undemanding, harmless, and wholesome. It’s not a good movie, but I bet it pairs well with a big glass of fruity wine with an ice cube or two floating in it. Cheers.

To learn more about this movie and others like it, find us here.

The Healer

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I have been avoiding writing this review all weekend, and it was a long weekend. Which is kind of meaningless now since February 26th. It’s all been one looooong weekend. I didn’t even mean to watch this movie but Netflix crowned it #1 in Canada so I thought I’d better hop on the snow mobile (which is the Canadian expression for jumping on the bandwagon).

Anyway, it’s super bad.

It’s about a guy, Alec (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who is both a womanizer and a gambler and he’s in quite a bit of a pickle over both of those things, but I’d hazard a guess that the Russian mobsters are the most menacing. So let’s call it convenient when a long lost uncle he’s never met (Jonathan Pryce, bewilderingly) shows up out of nowhere and offers him escape. If Alec agrees to spend one year living in tiny fishing village Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, the uncle he’s never met before will pay off all his debts, solve all of his problems. Alec isn’t super keen but is also out of options, so he hops a plane to Halifax and hopes for the best.

Once in Canada, this same uncle has a home already waiting for him, and a car, so all that’s left is to set up shop with the only skill he has, fixing electronics. But the next day he finds that the villagers have misinterpreted his intentions and they’re visiting in droves hoping ‘The Healer’ can repair not their VCRs but their ailments.

This movie is insulting on many levels, not least of which is the entire Atlantic ocean’s worth of suspension of disbelief you’ll need to swallow any of it. And then you’ll be insulted on behalf of Maritimers who are quite reasonable people and would make use of our excellent universal health care rather than lining up at a strange handyman’s house, begging for him to lay hands on them, unwilling to believe it’s a misunderstanding, furious that he won’t at least try.

It’s crazy and disappointing on many other levels as well. I’m not sure why good, salt of the earth, church-going people would gobble up what’s tantamount to witchcraft. I can’t imagine why parents would leave their seriously ill child with a strange man who has a strange reputation, unsupervised, for an entire weekend. Or why anyone would use sexual orientation as a shield. Or how anyone would so grossly misinterpret the lyrics and meaning of George Michael’s Faith.

But most of all, I can’t understand the motivation behind dedicating this seemingly random movie to the memory of Paul Newman. The director assures us it’s because Newman worked tirelessly and charitably for kids sick with cancer. And this movie…suggests that the cure may be in the hands of a sexaholic with a charming British accent who apparently is just withholding it from all but Nova Scotians…because why? It’s a dangerous message to put out there: it’s not science, it’s not religion, it’s just plain old fashioned magic, and if you don’t know a magician, you’re just shit out of luck.

Dolittle

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I suppose it might entertain very young children.

I have meditated on that single sentence above for minutes and even hours, wondering if I should leave it at that. Explaining the why and the how of this movie’s failure is baffling at best yet won’t even make for entertaining reading.

The story is weak yet convoluted. A physician/veterinarian (we have such a combo in our own family: Sean’s sister), Dr. Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) has sequestered himself behind the doors of his menagerie, gone full hermit since the death of his beloved wife. Luckily he has the unique ability to speak to animals in their native language, so he isn’t entirely alone, but his existence is notably and emphatically human-free. Until, that is, the day when not one but two children come calling.

The first is a boy who has accidentally shot a squirrel who needs immediate medical attention. The second is a girl sent from Queen Victoria’s palate where the Queen lays gravely ill, also requiring immediate medical attention. Dr. Dolittle, unhappy to be disturbed either way, treats the squirrel but needs convincing to attend to the Queen. In the Queen’s bedchambers he learns that she’s been poisoned and the antidote exists only on a faraway island. Dolittle, the boy Stubbins, and a bunch of animals of varying degrees of helpfulness, set sail on an epic adventure to find said cure.

They’re pursued by a villain with questionable motives, they subject us to a minutes-long fart joke (will small children even understand that Dolittle is rooting through a dragon’s anus with a leek, relieving it of all the undigested armor of the valiant knights she’s eaten for breakfast?).

I think the journey’s purpose is that Dolittle must learn he can grieve his wife without shutting himself off from the rest of humanity. They don’t exactly earn this, nor do they try very hard to express it.

The best and maybe only good part is an anxious ostrich voiced by Kumail Nanjiani. The worst part is, sadly, RDJ himself. He’s doing an indiscernible accent through which most of his dialogue is lost. He goes full nut when perhaps only half nut would have sufficed. His tone rarely matches that of the story. The poor guy has spent too many years acting in front of a green screen. I think for his first post-Ironman role he needed something a little more grounded but instead he went full fanciful and feels lost forever. Who can rescue his career now?

But Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t the only high-profile actor duped into signing on: Jim Broadbent, Michael Sheen, and Antonio Banderas all appear. Plus Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, Tom Holland, John Cena, Octavia Spencer, Craig Robinson, Ralph Fiennes, Marion Cotillard, and Jason Mantzoukas all lend their voice. And yet even standing on all these famous and famously talented shoulders, the film still cannot keep its head above water. Like an ostrich learning the hard way that he can neither fly nor swim, the movie simply adopts a dead man’s float and hopes a film goer or two might take a poke at its bloated corpse.

Summer Night

6 Replies

Mere hours ago I wondered to myself what “the kid” from Boyhood was up to. I vaguely remembered seeing him in one other thing, maybe, and then all of a sudden this movie pops up on my Netflix recommendations, and there he is. Ellar Coltrane. So yes, he has continued to have a career after that one seminal experience. By the looks of him he’s had more movie roles than he’s had hot showers, but who knows, I guess “unkempt” is a look, more or less, and “shampoo” could be an allergy. I suppose.

Anyway, he’s just one of many 20-somethings in this film. Others are played by Lana Condor, Analeigh Tipton, and Victoria Justice. In a 24 hour period, they mostly mope about, wondering what they’ll do with themselves, bemoaning the state of their relationships while also avoiding their relationships, and just generally succumbing to small town ennui. Until night beckons, and they all turn up at a bar which may actually be the bar. As in: one and only, but not particularly happening. The bar’s about one third full, and not only does everyone there know each other, most of them are playing in one of several bands featured on this night, and yes, we’ll hear quite extensively from all of them. Not to worry, this still leaves plenty of room for exes to side-eye each other, and future exes to eye-fuck each other.

This is Generation Z, so they are named Harmony and Corin and Jameson, and nobody ever shortens it or gives him a nickname, it’s just Jameson every time because if his mama went to all that trouble to give him a name that’s as special as he is, his buds are all going to respect it.

They’re young and they think they’re the first people to ever have these problems, and they seem so important when nothing has really ever happened to you yet. I don’t think all young people are vapid and clueless, but they are in this movie, and it was nearly unbearable.

I haven’t been this bored by a movie in a long time. First, there were entirely too many characters, and it’s impossible to keep track of who is who. Don’t even bother trying because their problems are interchangeable and their identities are non-existent. It’s impossible to care for people you know nothing about and it is far too easy to be annoyed by people who wear “don’t care” as a badge of honour.

Between director Joseph Cross and writer Jordan Jolliff, there’s a lot of Richard Linklater wannabe-ism going on but you can’t really call this a coming of age when it’s mostly just a lot of treading water while having remarkable unprofound conversation. This movie has no spark, no joy, no life. Forgettable characters go about their banal little lives and no one gives us a reason to take notice.