"Incredibles 2" Review

Pixar's sixth release, 2004's The Incredibles, was their last unqualified great movie. They followed it with the massive stumble that was Cars and their subsequent output has wildly varied in quality from uneven (Up, Ratatouille, WALL-E), overrated (Inside Out, Toy Story 3) to downright mediocre, unnecessary and awful (Cars sequels, Finding Dory, The Good Dinosaur, Monsters University). For some reason Pixar has lost its way in telling focused, coherent stories - I blame the tragic passing of story guy Joe Ranft in 2005 (note the date) which gutted their story sense - and this inability to focus ultimately turns Incredibles 2 into a case of "We waited 14 years for this?"

Picking up literally where the first movie ended with the Underminer's appearance, we witness the Parr family unsuccessfully attempt to thwart his bank heist and minimize destruction. While things would've been much worse without their intervention, it only reinforces the opinions that led to Supers being outlawed in the first place. Even worse, the debacle leads to the government department of Super Relocation to be shut down, meaning the Parrs, whose house was destroyed in the climax of the first film, only have two weeks left in the motel before they're on the street.

Fortunately, benefactors appear in the form of Winston and Evelyn Deavor (voiced by Bob Odenkirk in full Saul Goodman mode and Catherine Keener), siblings whose DEVTECH company they inherited from their deceased parents. She's the Steve Wozniak tech genius and he's the Steve Jobs salesman who has a scheme to bring Supers back to respectability by putting Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) out front in a campaign to restore respectability. This bruises Mr. Incredible's (Craig T. Nelson) macho ego, but he's got too long a track record of collateral damage in his heroics, so he's benched with Mr. Mom duty, watching the kids, including the multi-powered Jack-Jack, in a big Sixties Space Age-styled mansion loaned by the Deavors.

With Helen out of town on her mission tracking a villain named the Screenslaver, who can hypnotize people with a pattern on any display screen, the movie wanders from Bob bumbling as a caretaker (because men, amirite?), daughter Violet's (Sarah Vowell) boy troubles caused by her date's mind being erased Men In Black style, Dash's (Huck Milner) problems with new math, Jack-Jack's random power set, a new bunch of Supers recruited by the Deavors, and so forth.

Though only a few minutes longer than its predecessor, Incredibles 2 feels simultaneously padded out and overstuffed. I saw a review that described it as feeling like a compilation of plots from an Incredibles TV series and that's spot on. The disjointed story problems appear from the very first moment as we're introduced to the mind-wiped boy scene, then jumping back to the Underminer battle followed by the family being cut loose by the government and Bob's mentioning he may've seen Violet unmasked. Why not just have the mind-wipe scene after the boy is mentioned? It wouldn't change how subsequent details play out. When the inevitable twist appears, it's such a non-surprise as to be surprising how weak the reveal is and how little sense the Screenslaver's plan makes.

Equally problematic is the decision to make Bob a passive bystander to what's happening. In the first movie, he and Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson) were sneaking out and listening to the police scanner for action. When recruited by Syndrome's assistant, he snuck off behind Helen's back to get a new supersuit and to get back into shape. Even though the events of this movie are only days after the first one's, he's got none of the old mojo and rapidly devolves into a sleep-deprived, emasculated mess. Frozone barely factors much either.

Brad Bird's track record took a savage bruising with the shockingly cynical flop Tomorrowland and one can't help wonder if the damage of that experience combined with being forced to slink back to sequelize so long afterwards - though it was 11, 12 and 13 years respectively between Monsters, Toy Story and Finding Nemo sequels - on top of Bird being 46 then and 60 now has led to the lackluster consistency of Incredibles 2.

On the plus side, the rendering of CGI has made the requisite leaps forward, the action scenes are all crisp and dynamic with great uses of power and the Jack-Jack stuff is a hoot, particularly his initial faceoff with a raccoon (really!), though anyone who saw the Jack-Jack Attack short on the first Incredibles DVD will experience deja vu.

Despite suspicions, I don't think the disappointing Incredibles 2 is as much a matter of Disney's alleged demands for social justice agendas to be inserted, but more like Bird's uninspired storytelling, muddled themes, and Pixar's general slumping into a lazy sequel factory. Joe Ranft, oh how we miss you!

Score: 6/10. Rent the Blu-ray.

"Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story" Review

Most people these days only know Hedy Lamarr from the running gag involving Harvey Korman's Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles. I knew her because a stunning vector drawing of her graced the cover of my CorelDraw 8 package in the late-1990s:



As a nerd, I was also aware of an even less-known fact about her: She was an inventor who came up with the underlying technology upon which most of modern wireless stuff like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi rests.

Her career as a Hollywood starlet, her tinkering endeavors, and generally sad life (she married six times, never seemingly happy) is recapped in Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, currently on Netflix. It traces her life as a precocious teenager born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Austria - the scandalous film Ecstasy, which featured her nude, followed her everywhere - to her coming to America ahead of WWII, her struggles being taken seriously due to being a stunning beauty (she's hot by modern standards) and eventually her invention during the war effort for which she was denied a fortune in royalties and struggled for money in her later years.

Interviews with her children and film historians are augmented by a 1990 phone interview she'd done at age 75 that had been forgotten for a quarter century. Remarkably candid, she doesn't blame anyone in particular for how her life went and it's to the filmmakers credit that they don't focus on the obvious sexism which probably lurked behind her inventions not being taken seriously. (Admit it, though: If someone like Nina Dobrev showed up today at the Pentagon with some radical weapon idea she'd invented with an avant garde musician - as Lamarr had - no one would take her seriously either.)

While it feels a bit elongated and sketchy at 90 minutes - it should've been a tight 60 minutes - it's still an interesting portrait of a woman whose legacy in science turned out to be more enduring than her time on the screen.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable. (Netflix has it now.)

"Ocean's 8" Review

An overheated topic in movies these days is the gender flip - retelling old stories with female casts (never replacing women with men, mind you) - which has piled culture war drama on top of the underlying creative laziness of Hollywood. While trying to appeal to the female audience with traditional boys movies has a reasonable business rationale, it has come with some nasty militant feminists undertones of "men need to learn that they are inferior and to be erased" and reflexive attacks upon anyone not toeing the PC line that these flipped movies are just wonderful, ascribing sexist and racist attitudes to the critics in the attempt to inoculate bad movies from criticism.

2016's Lady Ghostbusters debacle was a prime example as the film's trailers hinted at the impending disaster to come and rather than power through, the filmmakers and media enablers decided to attack the audience as sexist trolls who hate women and are just toxic masculinity patriarchy manbabies blah-blah-woof-woof. It's not that previously successful and talented actors and filmmakers made a bad movie; no, the audience was WRONG and must be punished for their refusal to appreciate the Empress's new dresses. The past months' rage over Star Wars: The Last Jedi where Star Wars fans have been deemed "toxic" and in need of purging have only further poisoned the atmosphere.

So into this fraught environment comes Ocean's 8, an all-female spinoff of the George Clooney-topped Ocean's 11-13 series helmed by Steven Soderbergh which came out in 2001, 2004, and 2007, respectively. Considering the movie started shooting in late-2016, it's been in the works long before the culture war was joined in earnest, so it's safer to presume that this was just a chance to see if gathering a bunch of likeable stars to engage in breezy capering and for the most part it delivers just enough on basic expectations to make it worthwhile.

Sandra Bullock stars as Debbie Ocean, Danny's sister, who opens the film being paroled from prison after nearly a six year stint after pledging to the parole board that she just wants to have a quiet normal life, work a job, pay her taxes. Right. In actuality she has been plotting a massive jewel heist in the form of a Cartier necklace with $150 million and in order to pull off her ridiculously convoluted plan, she has to recruit some old pals: Cate Blanchett (the sidekick/talent wrangler), Sarah Paulson (the fence whose suburban family thinks she's eBaying all the stuff in the garage), Mindy Kaling (jewlry expert), Rihanna (stoner hacker), Awkwafina (pickpocket), Helena Bonham Carter (washed-up fashion designer) tasked with dressing the mule and inadvertent #8 in the scheme, Anne Hathaway as a ditzy actress.

If there is a basic problem with Ocean's 8 it's that everything goes too smoothly and there is no obvious nemesis like Andy Garcia and Al Pacino served as in the Clooney-Pitt-Damon movies. A fellow with whom Bullock has a legitimate beef with is a secondary target in her scheme, but his being looped in requires the same stratospheric suspension of disbelief every other detail in the plot requires, if not more. EVERYTHING goes according to plan with every single player able to get to the precise position they need to be. There is a clairvoyant ability to know exactly where and how people will react and the few minor hiccups that occur are resolved in a manner that's super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Everyone performs well enough considering their sketchy characters, though Bullock seems too restrained and dour. Blanchett is clearly having a blast as she did in Thor Ragnarok, but the MVP is Hathaway who deftly does ditzy though ultimately turns out not as dumb as expected. Hey, if Clooney et al can get paid for sliding through a heist film, why not let the ladies have some?

There's a weirdly tacked-on feeling third (or fourth) act which I suppose was supposed to add some tension, but turns out to be almost another part of the plan based on the investigator's (James Corden) past encounters with the Ocean family, but by then we're in the outro portion of the film and who cares?

While inconsequential to the max and too slick for its own good at times, Ocean's 8 delivers fully on its modest expectations as long as you don't think too hard about it. If you like the cast, you'll like the movie, but it won't change your life.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Death Wish (2018)" Review

High on the list of examples of remakes/reboots/reimaginings no one really needed is this remake of the notorious 1974 Charles Bronson vehicle Death Wish. The original tapped into the very real nightmare of Seventies New York City - Taxi Driver is almost a documentary of what the city was like before Giuliani cleaned up the place -  and vigilantism seemed almost necessary to fight back the tide of crime and predators. But that was then and this is not then and 2018's Death Wish relocates the story from Manhattan to the Murder Capital of America, but does so in an uncompelling and illogical manner.

Bruce Willis stars as a Chicago ER surgeon married to Elisabeth Shue with a spunky daughter (Camila Morrone). Life is wonderful until a valet decides to snap a photo of their SUV's GPS system to get their home address because reasons, namely to send three masked thugs to the home to rob the place while wife and kid are there alone. Mom ends up dead and daughter ends up in a coma. Frustrated by the lack of progress in the case, Willis picks up a gun that conveniently falls out of a patient's clothes in the ER, trains himself to shoot, and then becomes the "Grim Reaper", a vigilante that captures the public's imagination. As the trailer and obviousness give away, he eventually hunts down the killers. The end.

While I loves me some good man-on-a-mission-to-kill-everyone-between-him-and-someone revenge flicks like the John Wick series and Denzel Washington's Man On Fire (haven't seen the new Equalizer movies yet), Death Wish simply doesn't have any energy to it, primarily due to yet another lazy, smirky performance from the clearly-hating-his-job-and-needing-to-retire Willis. He simply doesn't deliver the angst and rage someone in his position would be feeling. I couldn't help but look at Vincent D'onofrio, playing his slightly loserish brother, and imagine how he'd spark up the role properly.

I normally hate when critics review the movie they wish they'd seen instead of what was on the screen, but I'm making the exception to call out the basic setup of this movie. It just strains credibility that burglars would be conducting a home invasion and despite one goon creeping on the daughter, not explicitly sexually assaulting her. With the Chicago setting, wouldn't a more relevant version have focused on a lower or middle-class black family beset upon by the very real predators that have made the Windy City the current Murder City and the father's quest for justice in an environment where "no snitching" enables the criminals who terrorize everyone? (While Denzel is busy with his own murderthon franchise, there are plenty of other compelling options like Sterling K. Brown.)


Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Thoroughbreds" Review

To get a feel for why a lot of people disbelieve movie critics, take a look at the quotes in the poster above. I know Heathers and American Psycho quite well and I also know wickedly funny and Thoroughbreds is none of the above. Oh, the trailer below is typical false advertising as well, implying a much more crackling movie.

Former besties Amanda (Olivia Cooke, she was Artemus in Ready Player One) and Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy, she was the final girl in Split) are reunited under odd circumstances when the latter is hired to tutor the former in the mansion Lily lives in with her mother and a-hole stepfather. It takes some time to get enough crumbs to start assembling the cookie of these girls' pasts, but we eventually learn that Amanda is an emotionless sociopath who killed her horse in a botched attempt of euthanization and Lily was expelled from her previous elite private school for plagiarism.

As they drift along in what the movie imagines to be artsy hip storytelling, the focus settles on Lily's desire to kill her a-hole stepdad who, other than being a pretentious self-centered jerk, doesn't seem to be in dire need of offing. He's not physically beating her mother or putting the creepy moves on his cherry bomb step-daughter. His capital crime seems to be using the rowing machine too often. Yes, the travails of upper-crust youth these days.

They attempt to contract out the hit to a small-time drug dealer (Anton Yelchin in his final performance; he died two weeks after the film wrapped), but stuff nonsense hijinks TWISTY ENDING yawn.

The original stage play intentions of writer-director Cory Finley's thin script come through despite the slick ivory cinematography of Lyle Vincent. There is nothing relatable about the leads despite OK performances. They're a pair of pampered teens with rich white people problems which aren't really problems. (That they don't even bother mixing in boy troubles or some obligatory teen lesbian hints really shows how empty things are.)

I don't know where the ludicrous idea entered the heads of the critics who gave Thoroughbreds an 86% RT score came from - probably next door to where It Follows 95% score came from - but perhaps they should be put down for being lame as well.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.