mother! (2017)

If the highest praise I can give mother! is that I wish more films like it got made by big studios nowadays, that shouldn't be taken as quite the endorsement it sounds like. It's a film that a studio (Paramount, in this case) would only permit a tested filmmaker to make, and only with bankable stars on a modest budget. In return, Aronofsky has delivered a vision: not always a good vision, mind you, but a vision of something nonetheless.

Critics have claimed, alternately in praise and in denouncement--that the movie is likely to make audiences angry. They're probably right, although it's hard to tell if they mean the graphic scenes of sudden violence or the unconventional storytelling. I suspect it's mostly the second. The previews seem to court horror audiences, or at least fans of the psycho-horror Aronofsky championed with his drug-addiction epic Requiem for a Dream and his tortured-artist drama Black Swan. Those who've experienced the brilliant gut-punch of a coda of Requiem for a Dream shouldn't find much to be truly shocked about here, though be forewarned: mother! features scenes of violence that aren't commonly seen in a big-studio film, or even an independent horror film.

No, I think what they mean is that audiences would be reluctant to follow the film once it veers off the traditional horror path and into truly surreal territory. It doesn't matter; Aronofsky drags you with him. The film starts safely in genre territory, then gradually removes the safety pins one by one until before we know it, we've tumbled into chaos. The move from home-endangerment horror to allegorical fantasy is almost not noticeable. Almost.

The two main characters, only known as Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and Him (Javier Bardem) move into a quiet but gigantic manse seemingly in the middle of nowhere. He's a famous author with writer's block. She, about 20 years his junior, works tirelessly at rehabilitating the house while trying to cultivate his inspiration.

Then a stranger (Ed Harris) knocks on the door. Before Mother can put in a word, her husband has invited the man inside and to stay for the night. For an explanation, the husband only offers nonsequiturs that seem to make sense to him ("He's a doctor"). Then the stranger's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer, who's fantastic) arrives. Then more.

Aronofsky plays out these early scenes with unbending point-of-view terror. He establishes Mother as the keeper of the house, then slowly strips away her control and puts us in her shoes as he does it. The camera (with effective cinematography by frequent Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique) stays tightly focused on Mother's face as it leads us to experience the limits of her ability to protect her house and herself.

There's something not right about the couple staying in their house. The Bardem character seems to invite their invasion unquestioningly. Mother can demand that they leave, but they don't. In these scenes Aronofsky's exploration of what happens when people just refuse to obey agreed-upon social rules recalls Michael Haneke's similarly surreal and violent Funny Games, which also features a couple set upon by two sociopaths who walk into their house, invited, and then refuse to leave. The invaders prey upon their hosts' politeness, knowing that they will not turn away someone in need.

This caretaking duty, of course, falls squarely upon Mother. In Lawrence's performance of a firm but helpless homemaker, as well as Bardem's flawless portrayal of a man completely oblivious to his wife's struggles, Aronofsky captures the catch-22 of the traditional woman's role: she's charged with taking care of everything, including her husband's ego, and takes the blame for everything that goes wrong. As more and more people come to the house, all of them expect her to conform to their wishes, many of them scoffing or excoriating her when she refuses or fails.

It's around this time that Aronofsky's intentions become clear and the movie charges head-on into its audacious, sometimes loony allegory. I won't reveal what it's an allegory for, though Aronofsky has been forthright in explaining it in interviews, and you don't have to squint to see the Biblical parallels at each step. This Mother becomes the perennial mother whose entire life is given over to pleasing thankless children; each guest is a child who asks for more, and more, and more, until the Mother is both literally and spiritually tapped.

It's somewhere toward the end that Aronofsky's allegory runs out of steam; admittedly, it would be difficult to sustain this intended atmosphere for the full third act of a two-hour movie. In early scenes, even though we can still see the metaphorical identity behind the characters, they remain unquestionably human and recognizable, which is why the early horror scenes work so well. Late in the film, Lawrence and Bardem vanish into the allegory and never quite make it back; once we know that the Mother is a symbol and not a person, it's hard to feel anything for her. Even one revolting act of violence, one that you've no doubt heard about by now, fails to make much of an impression, other than that Aronofsky has jumped the shock shark too early.

I still don't know if I'd recommend mother!. I want to praise it for being a film I haven't seen before, but what does that mean? Only that I've seen too many movies and am desperate for something new. I suppose people should see it for the early scenes and how they frighteningly depict the terror a quiet home invasion. And for the scenes in which Aronofsky casually drags the story off of the traditional tracks while maintaining the lead characters simultaneously as allegorical representations and as real characters.

I think I've described the film as accurately as possible; if it seems intriguing, you might want to see it. But I'll paraphrase what Michael Haneke said about his own Funny Games: if you walk out of the film before it's over, you probably don't need it. That might be true of mother! too.

** 1/2 out of ****

Note: There's a film that mother! reminded me of, which also tackles motherhood and the caretaker role and how it holds up amid a home invasion. It's a French film called Inside, it is even more violent than mother!, and it is terrifying.

30 Nights of Night, Night 1: GERALD'S GAME (2017)

I don’t know when Mike Flanagan became the best horror filmmaker working today. I think it was sometime around Hush, the nerve-ratcheting thriller in which a deaf woman is stalked in her house by a psychopathic hunter, when I first suspected that he was the real deal. His first two features, Absentia and Oculus, were enjoyable in their toying with points of view and using imagery to leap through time. But his next two, Hush and the superior Ouija: Origin of Evil, revealed a director with more than just skill.

Like Hush, Gerald’s Game is about a would-be-submissive woman trapped by a would-be-dominant man in a one-player game of his own making. Jessie (Carla Gugino) and her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) flee to a remote cabin for a romantic getaway intended to reinvigorate their marriage. What surprises Jessie is that Gerald has brought two sets of handcuffs--which he is sure to point out are real and not flimsy sex toys--and intends to spice up their sex life by chaining her to the bedposts. He does. And then he dies of a heart attack right on top of her.

Flanagan has been wanting to film Stephen King’s novel for his whole career, and it shows. Given that it’s mostly a one-character book, and most of the dialogue takes place within Jessie’s head, Flanagan cleverly develops a way to tell the story that is neither too literal nor too meddlesome. Once Jessie is cuffed to the bed alone, she imagines another version of herself escaping easily, as well as her husband springing back to life. The two figures act as the angel and devil on her shoulders throughout the film, and though that sounds trite, it works the way Flanagan does it. It helps that both Gugino and Greenwood are exceptional and their strained relationship is always believable. Gugino in particular is adept at acting against herself, as the surer, more confident version of herself gives guidance to the panicking inmate on how to escape.

I wouldn't dare reveal what happens to Jessie while she's chained to the bed: only that it bridges the practicality of Jessie's situation with a supernatural element in the way that King does best. Flanagan translates the world of the bedroom flawlessly, in a way that makes every corner seem like a new place in and of itself, and the floor at the foot of the bed--which Jessie is unable to see--like a different room altogether. There is one night scene in particular where Flanagan finds a way to simultaneously show us everything and make us doubt what we've seen: a moving camera quietly glides past something, and we wonder if it was what we thought it was. (It was.)

As in the novel, Jessie faces both external and internal hardship, both reflecting the control that the men in her life have exerted over her since she was a child. A flashback, abrupt but necessary, reveals the parallel figure of her father, played with a note of menacing banality by Henry Thomas, who binds her mind in the same way that her husband has bound her hands. Her confrontation of her own possible death leads her to confront her victimhood, which has culminated in Gerald's imposing of his own rape fantasy upon her.

The ending, usually a weak point in King's work, plays a bit awkwardly here, mostly because of an invasive voice-over that the movie had cautiously avoided until this point. But the ending works thematically, as a simultaneous dismissal and confirmation of Jessie's lifelong struggle. She has, to an extent, conquered her fears, but they were all real: not merely in her head, but real, imposed upon her by the men in her life--her father, her husband, and one which shall go unnamed here--who were seeking to pawn them off of themselves. They are, as she says toward the end, not as big as she thought, but they were there.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Sociological Horror in GET OUT (2017) and THE BELKO EXPERIMENT (2017): Why the comedian's horror movie is scarier and the horror auteur's comedy isn't as funny

2017 has seen the release of two major films which use the template of a horror movie to make a satirical point grounded in 21st-century America: Get Out about racism, The Belko Experiment about corporatization. Both are essentially about modern slavery: self-dehumanization in service of a power that sees itself as greater. Get Out, directed by comic actor/writer Jordan Peele, is insightful and stinging. The Belko Experiment, written by Guardians of the Galaxy director and onetime Troma filmmaker James Gunn, is bloodier but less biting. Though the two films essentially share a target--well-meaning, privileged white people whose good spirit easily wears dangerously thin--only Peele's film hits it most of the time, while Gunn's leans too heavily on the nihilism in its premise.



In 20 years or so, Get Out will be taught in schools as a snapshot of what racism meant in the early 2000s, represented not by whips and chains but by grins and handshakes. It's in every little iota of tacit bigotry faced by Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) in the early moments of the film: being asked by the police for his I.D. when he wasn't driving, repeatedly being affirmed that Obama is "the best President of my lifetime," being greeted with "My man!" When his (white) girlfriend Rose Armitage (Alison Williams) brings him home to meet her parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), they greet him warmly. Genial. Smiling. Welcoming.

But something is off, and Peele masterfully tilts the movie's balance just enough to signal it. The Armitages' estate resembles a plantation, just a little bit. Their housemaid (Betty Gabriel) and gardener (Marcus Henderson) are both Black. Dean explains their presence to Chris but also doesn't explain it. Rose's brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) is all too eager to talk about sports.

As the film progresses, Peele builds each microaggression into an atmosphere that is more and more threatening, and when the plot reveals itself (there will be no spoiler here), he has presented a scarily convincing picture of what such seemingly innocuous infractions can add up to. It is oppression disguised as admiration, consumption and assimilation disguised as diversity and unity. A party scene in which Chris meets the Armitages' friends is a cavalcade of every condescending statement an unthinking white person has ever made to a Black person. When the reason for their statements becomes clear, the insidiousness of the "well-meaning" behavior is revealed as well, and becomes all the more terrifying.

Kaluuya brilliantly captures the arc of a character who gradually progresses from grudging tolerance to true terror. Williams finds the right note of unproductive protectiveness, exemplified in an early scene where she thinks she is defending Chris from a traffic cop but may be making things worse. Whitford effortlessly plays friendly and threatening at the same time; look at how he appears to confront Chris about racial concerns, seeking to defuse them rather than answer them. Keener, quiet at first, plays her cards steadily until Missy has Chris exactly where she wants him. (For a similarly horrifying Keener slow-burn performance, check out 2007's An American Crime, a true story about a girl who's held captive in a friend's basement. Whitford also appears, as a much more genuine character.)

The film is all but stolen by two supporting performers. Lakeith Stanfield is unforgettable as the first character seen in the movie, and about his reappearance the less said is the better. As a friend of Chris's, LilRel Howery gives a comic performance that is relieving but not distracting (and may singlehandedly redeem the TSA in the public eye).



Though it's dealt with less overtly, racism is an issue in The Belko Experiment as well, implied in the corporate system that it targets. It is not for nothing that the characters who emerge as the villains are white middleaged men, while many of the unfortunate victims are Latino. It does not have to follow that the white man is always the villain (indeed, the emerging hero of the movie is also white and male), but when desperation sets in, the white men are likeliest to assume that the power gravitates to them.

It's why Tony Goldwyn and John C. McGinley make such effective villains. They're exceptional at playing as if they think they're the good guys. Goldwyn is Barry Norris, the manager of about 80 people at the Bogotá branch of the Belko company, which "facilitates employment of Americans abroad," or something similar that's boring enough to forget immediately, reminiscent of unnecessary middleman companies like Enron. Barry is ex-Special Forces, but seems to specialize in management doublespeak.

Early scenes in the film are effective in their take on the corporate atmosphere, playing like an extension of Office Space. Cheerful conversations between employees are benign and contentless. Viciousness lurks just beneath the veneer of banality, especially in McGinley's Wendell Dukes, a serial sexual harasser who masks his lechery with an ingratiating smile. It's the same smile McGinley memorably wore when he played Bob #1, the easily bamboozled consultant in Office Space. Or maybe he was Bob #2. I don't remember.

When the instigating action of the film occurs, director Greg McLean lets it play out believably, as the characters move from incredulity to realization. A calm, robotic voice suddenly comes over a PA system of which the employees were previously unaware, ordering them to kill two people immediately. If they don't, a small explosive implanted in the back of everyone's head (ostensibly a tracking device) will be detonated in four people.

McLean and Gunn do a fine job of believably stripping away the boredom of the average work day until it dawns on the characters that there actually is a threat. Once the threat is confirmed, Goldwyn naturally assumes that the leadership role will naturally fall to him, naturally. The possibility of committing murder is cleverly substituted with "considering our options." Soon the self-appointed oligarchs are determining who lives and who dies, while resident do-gooder Mike (John Gallagher, Jr., slumming it here after his frightening turn in Hush and complex supporting role in 10 Cloverfield Lane) insists that no one has the right to decide who lives and who dies.

It's an intriguing setup, one that's recognizable to anyone familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment. The fact that real-life (though less head-explodey) psychological trickery has yielded well-known disturbing results does not work in Belko's favor; by comparison, it seems cartoonish. Not content to mine their situation for real tension, McLean and Gunn fall too easily into violence and gruesomeness. By the end the film is a nihilistic exercise not unlike the lesser Saw sequels, with the well-worn horror film lesson that humanity is corrupt and there is no saving anybody.

That's a shame, because Gunn knows how to create interesting characters before the movie wastes them. He introduces two strong Latina women (Adria Arjona and Melonie Diaz) only to dismiss them carelessly. I really liked the two maintenance men, played by Michael Rooker and David Dastmalchian, whose friendship seems tenderer than that of usual co-workers. Rooker, gentler than usual, treats his younger colleague as a son or younger brother, which makes one's untimely demise (I won't say which) an effectively tragic moment.

Still, the movie can't help but sacrifice its more subtle pleasures for unpleasantness. I offer a challenge to the makers of the inevitable Belko II:

1) Fewer people. 80 is too many. We know there'll only be one standing at the end, and dispatching 79 people in less than 90 minutes is difficult. Start with 6 people and whittle them down one by one instead of by the score.

2) Only one person's head explodes, at the beginning. The rest of the tension should come from the threat of the bombs going off.

3) The last survivor should be nonwhite or a woman or both.

Both Belko and Get Out are relatively limited in scope, with their share of social commentary embedded in a simple terror scenario. But only Peele's film spins its fable subtly and surehandedly, while McLean's grows more hamfisted as it goes along. McLean, whose Wolf Creek has a good share of fans (I am not one), has an indubitable talent and will make a great horror film one day. Peele already has.

Get Out: **** out of ****

The Belko Experiment: ** 1/2 out of **** 

SHUT IN (2016)

A variation on Wait Until Dark in which all the characters appear to have undergone lobotomies, Shut In manages a colossal waste of considerable acting talent in a very short (though painfully long) running time. With better writing, it could have been a triumphant return to form for Naomi Watts, who was brilliant in Mulholland Drive and even in Children of the Corn IV, and who might have soared in this kind of role. The movie’s second lead, Charlie Heaton, is fresh off a star-making turn on Netflix’s “Stranger Things.” Featured is Jacob Tremblay, so heartwrenching as the young Jack in Room. And then there's Oliver Platt, one of the quirkiest character actors there is.

These top actors wander through the film like unfortunate Beckett characters who know they must go, but cannot. They're hamstrung by a screenplay that never ventures beyond the bounds of the expected. As good an actress as Watts is, she never convinces us her character is dumb enough to stay locked in a closet when deadly forces (the nature of which, like a good film citizen, I will not reveal) pursue her in her own house. As good an actor as Platt is, he never convinces us he's dumb enough to try to rescue her himself before the police arrive. Assuming that Shut In takes place in a world where The Shining exists, he should think, "I know what happened to Scatman Crothers. I'll wait for some backup."

Mary Portman (Watts) is a child psychologist who has been caring for her catatonic stepson Stephen (Heaton) for six months since an accident left him completely paralyzed. Suddenly she begins to suspect a presence in her house that might be threatening her and the defenseless Stephen. It may have something to do with the deaf patient of hers (Tremblay) who has recently gone missing. With an ice storm coming, she finds herself trapped in her house with Stephen, and possibly with something malevolent.

I won't reveal anything more, not because I don't want to spoil the surprise but because the movie leaves me with nothing else to reveal, really. There's essentially only one more piece to the puzzle, and it's so thuddingly obvious that I kept expecting screenwriter Christina Hodson to have one more rug to pull out. Surely this can't be the climactic twist, I thought. It is. Compare it to M. Night Shyamalan's twist near the end of The Visit, in which the reveal was a genuine surprise, built naturally from what came before it, and framed the climactic third act grippingly. In Shut In the surprise is revealed only because the movie is almost over, and gives no explanation for the odd behavior of certain characters early in the film.

Shut In is reminiscent of The House at the End of the Street, another slapped-together thriller hinged on an underwhelming twist and wielding a lead actress it doesn't deserve (Jennifer Lawrence). It is not as dumb as that movie, but it is almost as dumb, which is dumb enough. Ouija: Origin of Evil, still in theaters, has a sillier name but is a much more inventive and fun thriller. Those looking for a good scare should seek that film instead.

1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 1: 10 RILLINGTON PLACE (1971)

It's odd that 10 Rillington Place, a true-crime thriller that is bloodless but no less brutal than any of its type, isn't widely celebrated alongside Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Night of the Hunter as one of the best portrayals of an honest sociopath on screen. The sociopath, played by a calm, soothing Richard Attenborough, is an ordinary man of extraordinary cruelty named John Christie, who has every appearance of a being a kind and helpful neighbor. What Christie did to his neighbors, Tim and Beryl Evans, is so terrible that it's considered one of Britain's most horrific crimes.

Tim (John Hurt) is a not-so-intelligent working class man who barely makes enough money to support his wife Beryl (Judy Geeson, bright and unsuspecting) and their newborn daughter. When Tim and Beryl learn that they have another baby on the way, Tim enlists the help of Christie, who pretends to have medical experience, to perform an illegal abortion.

What follows is historical record. Christie murdered Beryl during the operation and convinced Tim to help him hide the body. Christie later returned and murdered their baby. Tim was convicted of the murder of his wife and executed. Later the truth was found after Christie killed four more women, including his wife. Tim's conviction was overturned posthumously, and the death penalty was abolished in Britain.

The movie follows the events with disturbing earnestness. Much of the dialogue is taken from the record itself. A scene in which Tim confesses a phony story to the police, coached by Christie, is starkly real and heartbreaking, and recited by Hurt with a rehearsed manner combined with an irrepressible tremor. There is no actor more apt at portraying inner pain than Hurt; it's why he was so believable as the alien popped from his stomach.

The director, Richard Fleischer, takes a documentary-style approach. Scenes are shot straightforwardly; the horror is allowed to linger without relief. Fleischer's prolific and resume is made up mostly of family and adventure films--The Vikings, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Doctor Dolittle, Fantastic Voyage--but amid his high-profile fare are a select few particularly taut thrillers. (He also directed The Boston Strangler, a similarly-toned procedural which is an overlooked prototype of Zodiac.)

This movie was cited as a footnote in Attenborough's career after his death a couple of years ago. It ought to have been more. Attenborough is famous for playing gentle, morally conflicted characters in films like The Great Escape, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, and Jurassic Park, and here that same gentility masks a real, true-life monster.

*** 1/2 out of ****

This Week in Cinemasochism: Kirk Cameron's SAVING CHRISTMAS (2014)

I thought I had this movie pegged.  The poster said it all, I figured: the evangelical former teen idol Kirk Cameron at the center, in a Chuck Norris-like pose, wielding a candy cane like a sword and protecting a snow globe as if it were the baby Jesus himself.  The tagline, "Put Christ back in Christmas," suggests a full-on acceptance of our declaration of War on Christmas, and that Kirk will be there to meet us on the front lines.  Watch out, liberals and atheists, 'cuz evangelicals are coming to kick your ass!

I embarked upon this 80-minute film ready to get served a lesson in the True Meaning of Christmas.  But then the movie dug into its plot, and... well, I was humbled to find that I wasn't in the movie's crosshair at all.  It isn't even a straw-man attack on secularism so that evangelical audiences can cheer on the defeat of those who would insist on "Happy Holidays" in every store.  Though there's lip service paid to the "wet blankets" who don't want Christians to celebrate "too loudly," Cameron surprisingly aims to the right rather than to the left.  It's targeted at people who think Christmas needs to be more pure, more religious, more centered on Jesus.  Kirk positions himself as the liberal reformer, who's here to tell those stiffly stiffersons to lighten up: that all the decorating, singing, celebrating, gift-buying, and ho-ho-ho-ing is perfectly okay!

After a five-minute introduction featuring Cameron himself sitting in front of a Christmas tree musing about what Christmas means to him and sipping from what I'm pretty sure is an empty cup of cocoa, we go to a lavish Christmas party hosted by Kirk's sister (played by his real life sister--Bridgette, not Candace).  Kirk learns from his sister (she's billed only as Kirk's sister) that her husband, Christian White (the symbolism here is about as subtle as a brick), has been struggling with Christmas lately.

Rather than join in the celebration, Christian (played by the film's co-writer/director, Darren Doane) has elected to sit in his car and stew.  Kirk goes out to sit with him to try to bring him out of his Scrooge attitude.  Christian explains that he can't shake his skepticism about Christmas.  How does our celebration of Christmas represent the Christian faith at all?  Wouldn't the more Christian thing be to take all the money we spend on presents and trees and decorations and use it to feed poor children?

A question that leads even the most liberal among us to think: well, yeah, wouldn't it be?  Nah, I guess not, and the prospect of all those starving kids doesn't seem to bother Kirk a lot, since he listens to Christian's fairly legitimate quibbles with an unending smug grin, as if he's just waiting to deliver him a yuletide smackdown.

He never really answers the question about the poor children.  Instead, Kirk deters the conversation to an absolutely befuddling thesis on Jesus's swaddling clothes in the manger, the relevance of which I'm still attempting to grasp.

It's around this point that we realize that the entire movie is going to be made up of Kirk and this guy sitting in a car talking.  Kirk essentially runs through every element of Christmas celebration that has a pagan or secular origin and explains that, see, it's Christian after all.  The Christmas tree hearkens back not to the winter solstice but to the tree of knowledge from Genesis.  The act of material gift giving isn't materialistic at all; it's a representation of God's spirit being made material in the form of Jesus, get it?  And most ridiculously at all, the shape of the presents under the tree really seems to resemble the cityscape of Bethlehem!

Cameron, Doane, and crew must have realized soon into production that their car conversation wasn't enough to sustain a feature film, as most of the actors seem to have been directed to milk every beat for as long as they can.  The movie's barely an hour long if you take out Kirk's long introduction and the interminable final dance number, followed by a "credit cookie" outtake sequence that, if it isn't  hilarious, is at least loose and goofy enough to show that the movie was made by human beings and not robots.

There's little plot to speak of, though the monotony of Cameron's feature-length lecture is broken up slightly by the appearance of two Happenin' Black Dudes who occasionally converse about being restricted from celebrating Christmas.  It culminates in one of them delivering an off-the-cuff beat poem presenting a litany of conspiracy theories; it's here, I think, that the filmmakers mean to downplay the whole "War on Christmas" thing as kinda silly, which is commendable, though if you listen closely, the dialogue seems to equate fears of the Koch Brothers and Citizens United with 9/11 truthers and chem trail watchers.

The movie isn't completely unwatchable; it appears to have been made with a modicum of production value.  Cameron has a completely vapid screen presence, though Doane has a certain lumpy charm as the Scrooge character.  And though the movie is patently offensive, both logically and religiously, it is effective as a crass curiosity: here is, from the country's most prominent right-wing straight-arrow devout Christian, a defense of tacky materialism in the name of Jesus.  It's okay to get gaudy on Christmas; it's a little disingenuous to say the Bible told you to.

* out of ****

P.S. I didn't mention the "Game of Thrones"-style Santa Claus fight scene.  It's not as much fun as it sounds.

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #4: PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2 (2015)

I haven't seen the original Paul Blart: Mall Cop, though the hugely successful film has its defenders, even among critics.  Roger Ebert awarded it three stars and praised it for being "a slapstick comedy with a hero who is a nice guy," and extols star Kevin James as a combination of Jackie Gleason and Nathan Lane.

He's not wrong.  Kevin James is without a doubt a powerful comic presence and his character, Paul Blart, is certainly a nice guy.  But in the case of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, it's the movie around him that's nasty and mean-spirited.  No one in his or her right mind would wish the happenings in this movie on a person as genuine as Paul Blart.  Considering that James created the character and wrote both films alongside Nick Bakay, it looks like he's as much to blame for the movie's failure as he is for its few successes.

This sequel continues an unmistakable mean streak in the oeuvre of Adam Sandler, its producer.  Like Grown Ups 2, it's a celebration of almost caveman-like masculinity, at the expense of anything that deviates from the normative.  It's a shame, because in the slapstick scenes James makes Paul Blart into a meek, overweight Chaplin-type shlub who might have been a formidable comic hero if the movie were as sensitive as he is.

As I've said, Paul Blart is a nice guy.  That doesn't mean he's likable.  He's the kind of guy who waves to you from his front porch every morning when you get the paper, after which you nod and hurry inside before he tries to talk to you.  He's the type who's a little too talkative when he catches you arriving home from work, and doesn't take the visual cues as you slowly back away toward your front door.

It's Paul Blart's niceness that makes us pity him rather than sympathize with him, and it doesn't help that the movie is downright awful to him from moment one.  The first five minutes, honestly, had me gobsmacked.  After a brief recap of the events of the first film, it's revealed that Paul Blart's love interest (Jayma Mays) left him after six days of marriage.  It's okay, he thinks: he still has his daughter (Raini Rodriguez) and his mother (Shirley Knight).  Then his mother is hit by a milk truck.  It's one of those CGI-created "funny" hit-by-car scenes that's for some reason become common in comedies nowadays (Mean Girls, the Scary Movie films, etc.), in which everything seems perfectly pleasant and ho boy!  There goes a truck or a bus or something big.

It is inconceivable that anyone, particularly someone who's been in the business of comedy as long as James has, would think it was okay to begin any comedy this way, never mind a big-studio mainstream family-oriented PG-rated one.  I wonder if audiences were indeed rolling in the aisles as they watched Shirley Knight get bowled over.  I wonder if they're the same people who laughed as Donald Trump mocked the disabled reporter who questioned him.

As soon as Mrs. Blart is run over by the truck, the movie is dead.  No movie can recover from such a disastrous misstep.  The last 90 minutes of the movie could have been the entirety of Horse Feathers and it still would have been awful.

So when Paul Blart goes to Las Vegas to attend a security convention at which he's convinced he will be the keynote speaker, there isn't much reason to care.  His mother's death admittedly isn't written for entirely crass reasons; it's meant to lend a desperation to the character, as he becomes overly protective of his daughter Maya, who is afraid to tell him she wants to go to UCLA rather than New Jersey Community College.  While they're in Vegas, Maya stumbles upon an art heist and is kidnapped, and it's up to Paul to save her.

The bad guy, a slithery, well-dressed Wall Street type named Vincent, is played by Neal McDonough with such straight-faced dedication that he ends up delivering most of the movie's real laughs.  McDonough is one of the best conventional baddies out there, and this movie suggests he's due for a Christopher Walken-like second career as a comic foil.  Other than two no-good-very-bad scenes--one in which he conveniently blurts out the fact that he has an allergy to oatmeal, so that a character can rub some oatmeal in his face later to defeat him, and another in which he and Blart trade a series of silly lines about how crazy they both are--McDonough's performance is flawlessly smug.

Nespa?

Some of the movie's slapstick works.  I found myself laughing at a scene in which Blart is completely unable to incapacitate a villain with a stungun.  A scene in which he fights a giant peacock seems right out of nowhere, but works on a surreal level because of a completely deadpan performance from a nearby lounge pianist who witnesses the whole thing.

When the movie is in slapstick mode, it's considerably easier to take than when it attempts to be a comedy of manners.  The script is generally unkind to women, even beyond Blart's patriarchal attitude toward Maya.  When one woman (Jackie Sandler, Adam's wife) rebuffs the advances of a very drunk security officer (Nicholas Turturro), she is of course painted as a judgmental shrew.  The character who's set up as Blart's love interest, hotel manager Divina (Daniella Alonso), shows absolutely no interest in him nor any chemistry with him, but the movie dictates that she has to fall in love with him anyway... and then, when he turns her down, the movie dictates again that she needs to fall for the head of hotel security (Eduardo Verastegui).

As bad as Paul Blart: Mall Cop is, I'm interested in checking out the first film to see if it does the character right.  I can imagine a good movie being made around Paul Blart, if it's kind-spirited and knows how to treat him.  This isn't it.

* 1/2 out of ****