THE CINEMASOCHIST: The Hangover Part II (2011)

The Cinemasochist takes a look at movies that have been notoriously rejected by the mass populace, and tells you if you might perchance be missing a classic. Or not. 



Given that nobody was really expecting The Hangover to be anything more than a modest success, plans for a sequel were not firmly in place all along.  But after it ran away with the box office and shot its formerly-second-banana cast into stardom, a followup was inevitable.  And so everyone involved in The Hangover Part II seems uncomfortably obligated to be there.

Paychecks must have been formidable, since there was no sequel clause in anyone's contract and the cast, many of whom have since become big names (Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Ken Jeong), has reunited nonetheless.  I have a feeling that what happened with the film was that the producers decided to forgo any new direction to take the characters in, and follow the old Hollywood principle: if there's no story to continue, replicate it.

This principle usually works better with horror films than with any other genres.  A series like Final Destination can continue forever with the same formula, so long as it keeps coming up with creative ways for its characters to die.  It doesn't work so well with comedy, which relies heavily on spontaneity and novelty.  Therefore, when the events of The Hangover are essentially repeated in The Hangover Part II, there are very few laughs to be had.  The first Hangover was an exciting, consistently surprising comedy that moved with cruel logic, and took delight in hurling its harried characters through each twist and turn.  When the sequel follows pretty much the same path, the surprises are gone, there is little at stake and the characters seem ready to give up.

Some time after the events of the first film, there's another wedding to prepare for.  This time it's mild-mannered dentist Stu (Helms) who's getting married, to the lovely Lauren (Jamie Chung).  Lauren is Thai, which means the wedding will be in Bangkok, which is music to the ears of Phil (Cooper), who insists on throwing a bachelor party, much to Stu's chagrin.  Along with the pitiable Alan (Galifianakis) and Lauren's genius 16-year-old brother Teddy (Mason Lee), the boys settle for a beer on the beach instead... and then wake up the next morning in a run-down hotel with Teddy missing and only his severed finger remaining.

As in the first film Phil, Stu, and Alan follow what few clues they have to put their night together and find Teddy.  Their quest follows the arc of the first film very closely.  Phil takes the alpha male role.  Stu finds himself with a facial deformity that will be tough to ignore come wedding time.  Alan runs his mouth.  They inexplicably meet up with the mob boss Mr. Chow (Jeong) from the first film.  The film is so desperate to replicate its predecessor that even Mike Tyson returns as himself.

What happens in the film may be played for laughs, but what was fresh in the earlier film is now stale.  Watching this sequel is like having the first film explained to you by someone who doesn't know how to tell a joke.  The characters go through a lot of slapstick-level pain, but the laughs aren't there.  Even Galifianakis, the major discovery of the first film, seems to have given up.  Soon into this film, we feel about Alan the same way that most of the other characters do: annoyed.

The star power involved in the film is good for a few amusing moments.  Nick Cassavetes has fun as a tattoo artist, as does Paul Giamatti as a crime lord.  Tyson's cameo gets a good laugh, and is one of the few unexpected moments in the movie.

The movie was written by Craig Mazin, a good comedy writer whose Superhero Movie was surprisingly clever (and not part of the Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer "Movie" series).  His co-writers are director Todd Phillips and frequent collaborator Scot Armstrong, who are usually ept at character comedy, having made Road Trip, the overrated but amusing Old School, and the entertaining semi-spoof Starsky & Hutch.  These are sound comic minds who were obviously told early in the process that The Hangover worked, and they should just do that again.  And that's what they did.

* out of ****

Is it really that bad?: Yes.

Pain Level: Moderate to sharp.  Urge to fast-forward strong throughout.

BATTLESHIP: Hit. Miss. Hit.

There are those who will shrug off Battleship as ridiculous because it's based on a board game.  I will remind them that good movies have been based on flimsier premises.  Val Lewton commissioned a series of horror films in the 1940s with only titles, and depended on real filmmakers to fill in the rest; we ended up with the heartfelt (and Bronte-based) I Walked with a Zombie, the chilling Cat People, and the clever The Body Snatcher.  At a time when the movie business is almost completely premise-based, it's good to see one with only the most minuscule of selling points which depends on good directing, good acting, and good writing to succeed.

Much of what makes Battleship surprisingly entertaining is that it has a real director: Peter Berg, not a graduate of commercials or a Michael Bay clone but a good filmmaker, a former actor who has made real films (Friday Night Lights) as well as rousing action-adventures (The Rundown).  Berg doesn't take his paycheck and leave, but delivers.

The battle in question is between the U.S. Navy and aliens.  Following a signal sent into space five years earlier, several alien warships from a similar planet travel to earth to put the flag in.  "This could be like Columbus and the Indians... except we're the Indians," says the astronomer Cal (Hamish Linklater), paraphrasing the hypothesis expressed more eloquently by Stephen Hawking (and earlier by Jake Johannsen).  They put up a forcefield around the Hawaiian islands and set themselves up to send a signal to the rest of the warships to come.  Humanity's only hope is a set of ships inside the forcefield that may be able to take them down.  There's your gameboard right there.

The battle scenes are effective.  Unlike the Transformers movies, which Battleship will inevitably be lumped in with, we are always sure what's going on where.  And the movie actually incorporates the hit-miss grid of the board game in a way that is not stupid or forced, but actually seems kind of plausible.

It also helps that there are human beings behind the battleships.  Though the story strictly follows formula, the performances are good and the characters believable.  Taylor Kitsch plays Alex Hopper, a former layabout who was pressured by his straight-arrow brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard) to join him in the Navy.  Alex proves to be a capable soldier but still a stubborn pighead, and it doesn't help that he's in love with Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), the daughter of his commanding officer (Liam Neeson).  The human story is predictable but still helps give a backbone to all of the action, and a very funny prologue involving a bar, a convenience store, and a burrito acquaints us with the characters quite well.

Kitsch's performance does not display a great range, but he's a likable lead.  Tadanobu Asano is also very good as a Japanese soldier who feuds with Alex, paving the way for the two to grudgingly make nice when the aliens touch down, and later to damn well respect each other. (I had to check to be sure that this was the same Asano who played the amoral blond-haired slit-mouthed maniac in Ichi the Killer.  He seems far too nice to be the same person, but he is.)  Though featured prominently in trailers, Neeson is barely in the film.  This is a relief; between fighting off a pack of wolves in The Grey and bludgeoning dozens of henchmen singlehandedly in Taken 2, he needs a rest.  Of Rihanna's performance, the best to be said is that it will not likely harm her music career.

The writing is where the movie comes up short.  The script by Jon and Eric Hoeber, who wrote the dismal RED, is consistently funny but weak in plot.  The aliens are refreshingly humanlike (as would be expected on an earthlike planet), but it's never quite clear why the aliens do what they do.  For instance, why do they send machines out to commit mass destruction but will not personally harm another creature?  On several occasions one of them will look a person in the eye and leave them unharmed; meanwhile, they cause car crashes, destroy bridges, and hurl missiles on a whim.  What's their logic?

One of the key pieces of machinery the aliens possess is a ball of rotating blades which they send around to destroy ships and large structures.  It's an interesting invention, but it renders much of the hit-and-miss missile-firing action pointless.  They may have just used their death spheres to begin with and saved the trouble.

The land-bound sub-plot involving Samantha, Cal the astronomer, and a depressed disabled veteran (Gregory D. Gadson) who's getting used to his titanium legs doesn't contribute much to the story.  It proves itself worthy by introducing us to Gadson, who really is an Iraq war veteran and really did lose his legs.  But never mind that; he has a commanding screen presence.  This is his first movie and will not be his last.

Of course, Battleship comes complete with an undying and unquestioning reverence for the U.S. Armed Forces, and why shouldn't it?  A movie based on a toy isn't equipped to be nuanced.  But Berg and his writers find a way to avoid pandering, in a climactic battle sequence that pays tribute to the Navy in a clever and unexpected way.

Though Battleship is far from an airtight action film, I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised.  Occasionally a movie with only the most limited ambitions can be more satisfying than a movie that sets the highest bar and fails to reach it (Prometheus, that's you).  Though Berg and the screenwriters leave quite a few holes in their struggle to fill in the gaps of a plotless, characterless game, they have made a real movie out of it.  I was happier walking out of Battleship than I was going in, and that's enough.

** 1/2 out of ****

NOTE: I was warned that there was one scene after the credits of Battleship, and so I stuck around to see the most boring, pointless scene in the film.  It contains no surprises or pleasures.  When the credits roll, you may leave.

TIM AND ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (2012)

It is no small miracle that Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim found each other.  I have a feeling that without each other, they would be alone in this world.  The stars and creators of Adult Swim's "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!", they revel in a type of humor that I must confess is usually beyond my understanding, which is saying a lot.  But as with Andy Kaufman and many misunderstood comedians, you get the feeling that they're making each other laugh, and sometimes that's enough.  That they were each able to find another person with the same sense of humor boggles the mind.

The word surrealist doesn't quite scratch the surface of their style.  Unlike Tom Green, the last mainstream comedian to try to make a surrealist film, they don't seek merely to push the envelope; they are more pointed than that.  True, they do throw a heap of gags at the wall and only a few do stick, but Tim and Eric are not desperate.  Critics might say they're trying too hard, but that is missing the point: they're playing the parts of people who are trying too hard.  Their character is the class clown who has no idea how to make you laugh, but gives it a go anyway.  It's inane, but that he tried in the first place is funny in itself.

What to call it?  Lame-ism?  Unfunny chic?  The funniest bits of Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie are structured like an office team-building video where the boss tries to show you his "lighter side" while still insisting you get that report in on time.  Though not always at the top of their game, Tim and Eric have a spot-on sense of what it sounds like when boring people try to be entertaining.  This sense is present even in their IMDb bios, which I believe they wrote themselves, claiming that their victory in the 2008 Webby awards was "based on excellence in the following criteria: Concept & Writing, Quality of Craft, Integration, Overall Experience." Oh, and Tim "was stabbed twice in the upper back while protecting an elderly woman from her son who was under the influence of hard drugs."

On a laugh-ratio level, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie has far more misses than hits.  Strung together with only the loosest of plots, it follows Tim and Eric after they've supposedly made the highest-budgeted movie of all time.  More specifically, they took a studio's billion-dollar investment, blew it on themselves, and turned in a five-minute piece of trash starring a Johnny Depp impersonator.  The studio heads (Robert Loggia and William Atherton, good sports) threaten to kill them if they can't pay back the money, so they decide to rehabilitate a failing southwestern mall so they can make the billion dollars back.

Will Ferrell is very funny as the eccentric hustler who sells them the mall.  Twink Caplan is charming as a store owner who immediately captures Eric's attention.  As a preposterous holistic healer, Ray Wise need only appear and smile to get the biggest laugh in the movie.  I enjoyed the prologue featuring Jeff Goldblum (as "Chef Goldblum"), satirizing the discomfort of 3-D movies.  Several bits which satirize self-help and promotional videos are side-splitting.

Other gags don't go so well.  John C. Reilly (who's hilarious on Adult Swim as Tim and Eric's "Dr. Steve Brule") appears as a particularly disgusting character without any redeeming qualities, or laughs.  A sub-plot about Tim stealing the son of one of the store owners gets no laughs and goes nowhere.  Even Zach Galifianakis is more bizarre than funny as a Hollywood guru, and the usually-reliable Will Forte relies too heavily on foul language for laughs as the proprietor of the mall's sword shop.  Scenes which resort to graphic potty humor are the only ones which seem desperate and out of place.

I didn't laugh at many of the jokes in Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie.  I don't particularly "get" Tim and Eric in general.  But I've seen enough comedies to know that not everyone has to be in on the joke.  When everyone is, you get a watered-down piece of slush like Failure to Launch or Bad Teacher.  At the very least, I can say with confidence that the Tim and Eric movie was probably not screened for any focus groups.  Comedy usually represents what one person thinks is funny, or in this case, what two people think is funny.  Tim and Eric made the movie that was funny to them, and no one stood in their way.

** out of ****

PROMETHEUS (2012): Man's origin leads to man's end

Despite how it was originally heralded, Ridley Scott's Prometheus is not really a prequel to Alien, nor is it terribly similar in concept.  Although both are set in the vacuum of space and mine considerable mileage out of the vast emptiness of the universe and the solitude of being one of a few people on an entire planet (and the titular creatures do make an appearance), Prometheus has far greater ambitions.

It seeks to explore a literal confrontation between man and god.  Its themes are similar to Altered States, a film in which a scientist took psychotropic drugs which gave him a vision of man's collective memory of his origin, and found that evolution was a little bit messier than he imagined.  Here, scientists travel to a distant planet to find what may be the engineers of mankind.  What they find is also messier than they expected.

A team of explorers is commissioned by Weyland Industries to travel to a distant planet which, according to numerous identical ancient cave paintings, is thought to be the home of those who set life on earth into motion.  While the boss, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) is mainly interested in the exploration, scientists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) want to make contact with our makers and find out just why we exist.

The answer isn't easy for anyone to take.  In fact, the only one who may have all the answers is David (Michael Fassbender), an android who's spent a long time studying what it's like to be human.  Having already met his maker, he has already faced what the others haven't.  And he may have plans for them.

The android David is the most complex, fascinating character in the film, and Fassbender gives a commanding performance.  When he is absent, the movie suffers.  The human characters, though well performed, are far less appealing: I just couldn't find it in me to care about Elizabeth and Charlie and their relationship, about Elizabeth's ambitions, about the flashbacks with her father (Patrick Wilson).  Theron is fun to watch as the no-nonsense businesswoman who could be mistaken for a robot herself, and the rest of the crew (including Idris Elba and Benedict Wong) are an amiable bunch of working-class schmoes.  Guy Pearce appears in full caked-on old man makeup as the 92-year-old chairman of the company.  Since Pearce looks notoriously unconvincing, and never appears in the film as a young man, the filmmakers might have cast an actual old man and saved a lot of trouble.  I hear that Christopher Lee is still working. (Okay, so a viral video was released with a fake TED talk from the Pearce character as a young man.  But was it still worth it?)

True to its sci-fi nature, Prometheus raises some interesting questions.  What if we could essentially meet God?  How does God feel about us?  Proud?  Ashamed?  Indifferent?  Might our creators feel the same way toward us as we do toward the things we create?  The movie has a great scene in which David poses this question to Charlie.  He doesn't have an answer.

The problem is that once Scott and writers Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof pose such questions, it seems they don't know what to do with the rest of the film.  While the first half of the film is mysterious, spooky, and thought-provoking, the second half turns into a simplistic yawn.  Once the cards are on the table, the movie goes on autopilot.  The emergence of a proto-version of the Alien creature is well-designed (H.R. Giger was brought in to "devolve" his creation a bit), but the scene surrounding it is brief, hackneyed, and suspenseless.  Fassbender is relegated to the sidelines and the movie focuses on Rapace and her less interesting arc.  A character whom we thought was dead--and did not particularly miss--makes an unnecessary late return, and only gobs up the later scenes in the film.  The climax essentially boils down to stop-bad-guy-from-doing-bad-thing, and is a cookie-cutter action scene that is unworthy of the big ideas that Prometheus presents.

The movie ends on a preposterous note of light and hope, setting up the obligatory sequel and casually ignoring that most of what preceded it was a fable about the doom of mankind.  Scott and crew appear to have learned the wrong lesson from the film.  It leaves its characters still proudly in search of meaning in the universe, when the movie has given them only ugliness.  You know it's a bad moment in a sci-fi film when you want to say to the explorers, "Nothing to see here--just go home and mind your own business from now on."

** 1/2 out of ****

THE WICKER TREE (2012): Cowboys for Christ take on heretics from the Highlands

 

The Wicker Man remains one of the most sublime mystery-thrillers ever made, and director Robin Hardy has long been promising a sequel, even before we were treated to the abysmal 2006 remake via Neil LaBute.  Now it has arrived in the form of The Wicker Tree, and, sad to say, it is a big letdown.  Though it boasts the same director as the original, it's a dull, ham-fisted, thrill-less retread with lousy performances and no surprises.  I might even go so far as to say that the LaBute film is better.  At least that one had Nicolas Cage chomping on scenery, Ellen Burstyn decked out as Braveheart, and a fresh take on the story which brought it into modern-day gender politics rather than religious fervor.

The new film follows pretty much the same arc as the original.  Pop singer Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol), once a boot-stompin' beer-drinkin' man-crazy "Redneck Woman"-style country singer, has found Jesus, reformed her ways and committed herself to chastity until marriage.  She takes off for Scotland along with her similarly chaste boyfriend Steve (Henry Garrett) to preach the Word, and finds herself in a small secluded town where the townspeople take to her very nicely.  Too nicely.  And their oddly pagan springtime celebration is coming up soon...

No points for guessing what the town is up to.  The two lead characters certainly don't.  One reason why the original worked so well was that its main character (a policeman played by Edward Woodward) was no dummy, but was closed-minded, boorish, and curious enough to get into the plot over his head anyway.  Beth and Steve, contrarily, are two dim bulbs who make every wrong move even when everything is spelled out for them.  The original film was about how religion blinds smart people to the truth; this film is about naive people who do stupid things.

For a film whose predecessor was constantly surprising, The Wicker Tree has considerably little suspense and no surprises at all.  The film has no thematic element that wasn't explored in the original, nor any particular plot point that differs.  The only thing new about the film is the character of a local prostitute (Honeysuckle Weeks--yes, it's her real name) who falls in love with Steve, I think, or at least feels sympathy for him and tries to help him, I think.  Her "warnings" to him, suitable for sloppy horror films like this one, are needlessly ambiguous when she might have just come out and told him what the danger was.

The one redeeming aspect of the film is the return of Christopher Lee, who played a cult leader in the original and appears briefly here as the same character.  His cameo has almost nothing to do with the story, but look at him.  Pushing 90, he looks great and can still act.  Even with a two-minute appearance his presence is deeply felt.  For the rest of the movie we are dearly missing him, as well as Nicolas Cage, and the angry bees.

* out of ****