The Bronze—Along with Race
and Eddie the Eagle, this is the
third movie in the last month or so about the Olympic Games, and all three are
very different from each other indeed. Diminutive Melissa Rauch, who plays the
squeaky-voiced Bernadette on The Big Bang
Theory, stars in this comedy, which she co-wrote with her husband Winston
Rauch. She plays Hope Annabelle Greggory, who finished her routine in Women’s
Gymnastics at the Olympics in heroic, soul-stirring fashion, fighting through
an ankle injury a la Kerri Strug.
Unlike Strug, however, Hope took the Bronze rather than the
Gold, and the injury effectively ended her career. She returned to Amherst, Ohio (“Sandstone Center of the World”), where more than
ten years later she’s still treated like a privileged celebrity—her own parking
space, free stuff at the mall and the diner, her name on the sign coming into
town. Unemployed, she still lives with, sponges off of, and verbally abuses her
long-suffering widowed postman Dad (Gary Cole). She’s bitter, selfish,
defensive, deceitful and extremely foul-mouthed.
Despite the raunchy, raucous tone, this very plausible story
has a poignant edge, and for a while I thought it was going to sink the movie.
An ongoing shtick on The Big Bang Theory
is the steeliness and bullying threat that regularly burst out of Rauch’s
Bernadette, in contrast to her superficial cuddly sweetness. The Bronze starts out as, more or less,
a whole movie hinged on this gag, and while it’s funny for a while, Hope seems
too mean and unpleasant to hold our interest at feature length.
When her old coach dies, however, Hope receives notice of a
sizable inheritance, if she takes over the training of the promising young
gymnast Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson), who idolizes her. At first, fearful that
her pupil will outdo her and usurp her place in town, Hope blatantly sabotages
her, but eventually…
Well, you see where it’s heading. There’s even a love
interest, in the form of the talented young comic Thomas Middleditch. The good
news is that Rauch shades her characterization from despicable to
sort-of-likable gradually and incrementally, and director Bryan Buckley keeps
the proceedings lewd and crude throughout. As a result, the story’s potential
sentimentality is held at bay, and sure enough, we start to care about, and
develop some hope, for Hope.
Allegiant—As with the high school romantic comedies of a decade
or so ago, the futuristic teen dystopias are starting to run together in my
head. It takes me a minute to be sure that I’m not mixing Divergents with Maze
Runners and Hunger Gamers and Surfers of the 5th Wave.
Assuming I’m not, then this third entry in the series based
on Veronica Roth’s Divergent books—it’s
called The Divergent Series: Allegiant
on the posters—has heroine Tris (big-eyed Shailene Woodley) and her pals
fleeing Chicago, now in a turmoil of summary trials and executions. Beyond the city’s
walls they find a toxic wasteland, beyond which they find a force field, beyond
which they find a futuristic complex in what used to be O’Hare Airport.
Presiding over this is Jeff Daniels as a scientist who’s
been studying Chicago’s
various factions, trying to produce a person who is “genetically pure” instead
of “damaged.” Talk like this tends to make people uneasy, but the guileless
Tris thinks Daniels is a good egg. The hunky Four (Theo James), quickly
pronounced “damaged,” isn’t buying it, however.
That’s just the gist of the plot of Allegiant, which is a good deal more twisted, with schemes and
betrayals and redemptions spilling out everywhere. The dialogue is quite poor,
but luckily it occurs mostly in little pockets, linking together director
Robert Schwentke’s big, lavish action scenes. These are reasonably exciting, in
their mindless way.
Alongside the pretty youth are some vets, like Naomi Watts,
Octavia Spencer and Ray Stevenson. The unctuous Daniels makes a capable if less
elegant replacement for Kate Winslet, whose honking American villainy was the
best aspect of the previous flicks. Or at least the sexiest.
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