MST3K, RiffTrax, and Beyond: Cinema Playground Journal 2024: Week 23 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre: Action

Director: Adel El Arbi, Bilall Fallah

Starring: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Jacob Scipio, Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Paola Núñez, Eric Dane, Ioan Gruffudd, Rhea Seehorn, Melanie Liburd, Tasha Smith, Tiffany Haddish, Joe Pantoliano

Every action fan has a favorite buddy cop movie or series. I have fondness for 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, and Rush Hour, myself. And yes, I quite enjoy the Bad Boys movies. The first two are more audacious flicks that push their own extremity to limits that certain audiences might be turned off by (especially the second one), but that's kind of what makes them a kick of over-the-top nonsense. The new wave of Bad Boys movies are more mellow and subdued, which seems to have made them more palatable to critics and general audiences, propelling the third film to series-best reviews, while also becoming the biggest hit of 2020 (which happened by default, but it does carry the title).

The fourth film follows where the last one left off, which sees Will Smith and Martin Lawrence untangle a frame-up of the recently deceased Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano returns in a cameo), only to get swept up in the conspiracy and go on the run. The movie plays out about as you'd expect, with predictable twists and obvious bad guys eventually unveiling themselves. There's also an underdeveloped subplot of Captain Howard's U.S. Marshall daughter out for revenge against Will Smith's son, but it amounts to so little screentime and has so little to do with anything that it might as well not be here. This, like a lot of Ride or Die's story elements, is fairly half-baked, and if the movie dwells on it too long, it starts to become tired. But when it focuses on the action, it gets wired. The movie is full of the reckless disregard for human life that defines the series. We're largely here for the Smith and Lawrence banter and all the guns blazing. Audience members following the series will get more of that, more of them with their AMMO sidekicks from the previous one, and everyone's favorite character, Reggie, finally getting his time to shine in one glorious setpiece. That's all I ever wanted.

The Watchers

⭐️

Genre: Horror, Thriller

Director: Ishana Night Shyamalan

Starring: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan

Oh dear. We have a Night Shyamalan dynasty now. M. Night Shyamalan's daughter, Ishana, makes her directroial debut, and we can only hope her career has more ups than her father's. If The Watchers is any indication, it's going to be mostly the same. Large concepts that never go beyond concepts, padded up with heavy, monotonous melodrama from bored-looking actors, wasting what probably could have been a good movie at some point if there was a collaboration to help meat it up. But auteurism, I guess.

The Watchers has Dakota Fanning getting lost in the woods and coming across a group that lock themselves in a little window box overnight where mysterious creatures just like to look at them overnight. It sounds creepy. It probably could have been if there was anywhere compelling to go with it. The Watchers just fizzles with its lack of any sort of story to go with this idea. It's an undercooked, go-nowhere bleak fairytale full of characters who exist to give stilted exposition while wearing an uncomfortable expression that says "My underpants are on backwards." Shyamalan adds a lot of atmosphere and visual style to lend the film, but there is nothing to pull us into the movie and embrace the high-concept scenario of being cornered in the woods. There is no emotional heft to it, and the characterization is so dead-eyed that the audience will write-off getting invested in it early on. Like her father, Shyamalan isn't entirely void of directorial talent. Also like her father, she needs to learn one lesson that will improve their movies significantly: there is a major difference between milking a concept and telling a story. Big Daddy Shyamalan has gone a quarter of a century without confronting that, but I hope she is more receptive to it.

Netflix & Chill

Hit Man

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Streaming On: Netflix

Genre: Comedy, Romance, Thriller

Director: Richard Linklater

Starring: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Retta

The last time I saw an auteur movie about hitmen on Netflix it was that lame duck of a David Fincher movie. Surely Richard Linklater won't make anything near as bullshit as that, can he? At any rate, Hit Man (they added that space in the title so you don't think it's a sequel to the video game movie franchise and it absolutely doesn't work) sees Glen Powell playing a fake hitman who catfishes potential buyers into incriminating themselves for the police to arrest. One mark is actually a super hot lady, so naturally she's the one he talks out of it instead of leading on. He then begins a sexual relationship with her, who still believes him to be a hitman, which leads to intense complications.

Hit Man boasts being "inspired" by a true story, in that there was actually a guy who played a fake hitman for cops that led to dozens of convictions. A lot of it is embellished, though I hope the attempted murder rate was. I'm concerned with how many people want to hire a hitman in this city within the few months that this movie took place. I'd probably think about moving. The opening half-hour is this extended montage of Powell just catching a bunch of potential clients. It's probably the part of the movie that needs the most trimming, because it's pretty much the same joke told over and over, just with different tones. It really slows the movie out the gate, adds practically nothing, and exhausts the movie's charm early on. After that point, the movie gets more interesting, because the relationship built on lies between Powell and Adria Arjona is interesting. It takes too long to get to the spice of the movie, but the spice does uptick the interest level. I feel like the movie often often bakes with a simple recipe and then overcooks it, as periods of it feel like compounded problems that are waved away with simple outs. The film would often come up with a thriller twist, but solve it with a anticlimactic comedic punchline, as there was more than one scene where I was like "That's a cool twist, I can't wait to see where this goes" and it just dies. It also just throws a lot of complexities into the characterization that don't really go anywhere, like Powell being both this fake hitman and a college professor, which I believe is taken straight from the reality that this was based on, but this movie is already just a fantasy scenario based on the mere idea of this guy, and the more of reality you try and add to it, the more it clutters it up. It leads to a climax that doesn't really feel like a climax. There are still a few lingering questions I had, but the movie just decides it's done.

Those are all my nitpicks, which makes for some hefty reading and probably giving a false impression of the film, which is mostly solid. Hit Man is primarily a saucy romcom with sexy leads where one of them is lying to the other and it's just a ticking time bomb of when the truth hits, and I was swept up in it, for the most part. Powell is great in it and I enjoyed seeing Adria Arjona, because I worship the entire cast of Morbius (except Jared Leto, fuck Jared Leto). Hit Man is a more enjoyable evening watch than most romcoms you'd find on Netflix, though I found it more bloated and clumsy than I would have liked. It struggles to find its own rhythm, and that's a shame, because I was ready to dance with it.

Under Paris

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Streaming On: Netflix

Genre: Thriller

Director: Xavier Gens

Starring: Bérénice Bejo, Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant

It doesn't matter what Netflix store-bought auteur movie came out this weekend. It doesn't change the fact that they also put on a brand new SHARK MOVIE the same werk, so forgive me if I'm much more excited for that. It's been a while since we've had a genuinely good one. Some might say The Shallows, but I'd argue that The Shallows was just a glossy, hyperactive retread of The Reef and isn't even as good. And even if you're fond of the Meg movies, it's probably because you're in love with how stupid they are. The exciting thing about Under Paris is that it is a genuine attempt at a shark thriller that goes for that raw Jaws excitement.

The film sees a breed of Mako shark adapted to freshwater, infesting the flooded catacombs of Paris and preying on those who happen to stumble upon them. Forgiving the preposterous credibility of a freshwater Mako shark, because I'm not trying to project my intellect over a monster movie, Under Paris works hard to maintain tension throughout, genuinely going for excitement over scares. It tends to lose its grip as it goes on and shoots for more extravagance, becoming almost a cartoon, clashing with the grit that it's trying to project. In one scene it can give us the harrowing image of a woman trampled to death in a panic to get out of the water and also give us a goofy ariel shot of the shark jumping out of the water and swallowing someone else whole. The seesaw in its tone does succeed in giving the movie a bit of character, though sometimes its drama doesn't always land. The movie has two human antagonists, one is a copy of the Jaws mayor, who wants to keep the water open because money, and the other is an environmentalist, who goes to sometimes absurd lengths to make sure the deadly shark isn't killed by the evil human beings. They're not great characters, though I did enjoy the protagonist played by Bérénice Bejo (Oscar enthusiests might recall her as Peppy from The Artist). It all leads to a climax that is total carnage, some of which is just amplified by things that are coincidentally happening at the same time and lead to an open-ended conclusion. It's not a well-plotted movie, but I got a kick out of watching it. It does something a lot of shark movies don't and just tries to do a serious shark thriller without a hint of irony or its tongue in its cheek, making something that's not Jaws, just different. It's about time.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

Babes ⭐️⭐️1/2

Challengers ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Dead Don't Hurt ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Dune: Part Two ⭐⭐1/2

Ezra ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Fall Guy ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Garfield Movie ⭐️⭐️1/2

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ⭐️⭐️1/2

I Saw the TV Glow ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

IF ⭐️1/2