Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Red One...
...the silly but fun holiday action comedy with Dwayne Johnson, J.K. Simmons, Chris Evans and Lucy Liu, now in the multiplexes.
Showing posts with label DWAYNE JOHNSON. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DWAYNE JOHNSON. Show all posts
Monday, November 18, 2024
Thursday, April 12, 2018
BIGLY
It's been a while since an American movie featured a giant white gorilla; probably since 1933's Son of Kong. So...
Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week our honoree has to be George...
...the albino gorilla who gets supersized in Rampage, opening tomorrow.
I missed the screening of this, but I'll probably have to go see it.
Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week our honoree has to be George...
...the albino gorilla who gets supersized in Rampage, opening tomorrow.
I missed the screening of this, but I'll probably have to go see it.
Friday, May 26, 2017
THE SAND AND THE FURY
Opening this weekend:
Baywatch—If memory serves, I had never seen so much as one episode of the TV series Baywatch, which ran for one season on NBC in 1989 and 11 much more successful seasons, all over the world, in syndication thereafter, with various changes of setting and spin-offs. So I recorded and watched a couple of sample episodes from one of the retro cable channels to prepare myself for this movie adaptation.
Man, what an insipid show. The new movie version is, make no mistake, about as dumb and crass as American comedies get, but compared to its source it seems Pulitzer-worthy.
For those who, like me, had managed to remain unfamiliar: Baywatch revolves around a group of lifeguards who keep an eye on the beaches near Malibu Pier. Over the course of more than 200 episodes, the lifeguards got caught up in all manner of adventures which extended well beyond the traditional duties of rescuing swimmers in distress and blowing their whistles at roughhousing kids.
No, the Baywatch gang was routinely involved in disasters, criminal investigations and international intrigues, and were instrumental in cracking the cases. The real meat of the series, however, seems to have been lengthy montages of the pneumatic cast running the beaches, or riding jet skis in formation.
In the movie (shot in Florida despite the L.A. setting), Dwayne Johnson takes over the role of top dog Baywatcher Mitch Buchannon from David Hasselhoff. Zac Efron, sporting a startlingly mesomorphic torso, takes over for David Charvet as Matt Brody, here a scandal-plagued Olympic champ turned lifeguard trainee, and Kelly Rohrbach steps into Pamela Anderson's red one-piece as the slow-motion blonde C. J. There are a variety of supporting players, like Ilfenesh Hadera and Alexandra Daddario, who look great in bathing suits, and, as a surrogate for the rest of us, Jon Bass as Ronnie, a tech whiz and aspiring lifeguard of more ordinary physique.
It's rated R, thus allowing director Seth Gordon and the writers, of which seven are credited, to deploy raunchy set-piece gags in the Hangover style. Other than that, about all they can do is make poor Efron keep repeating the same joke about how hey, this seems like a job for the police, not lifeguards, even though it isn't exactly a riot the first time.
A drug-smuggling club owner, who wants to privatize the beach, is played by the stunning Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra, but she and her henchman fail to come to life as either serious or comic villains. The movie works, to the extent it does, thanks to the charm of the leads. Johnson comes across the best, shrewdly playing Mitch with a gee-whiz earnestness that's Hoff-worthy.
So this Baywatch is sort of cute, silly and sometimes inept as it is. But it should be noted that this type of lowbrow spoof can be done much better, and indeed has been: Son of the Beach, a Baywatch send-up created by and starring Timothy Stack, ran on FX for two seasons, from 2000 to 2002. If the old Baywatch makes the new Baywatch look like Arthur Miller, the new Baywatch makes Son of the Beach look like Rabelais or Chaucer. Its jokes were crude and often tasteless, but they were also remarkably dense and complex. Almost every line was a double-entendre of some sort, and they interconnected in ways that can fairly be called brilliant. Any half-hour of that show had more, and wittier, laughs than all of Baywatch.
Baywatch—If memory serves, I had never seen so much as one episode of the TV series Baywatch, which ran for one season on NBC in 1989 and 11 much more successful seasons, all over the world, in syndication thereafter, with various changes of setting and spin-offs. So I recorded and watched a couple of sample episodes from one of the retro cable channels to prepare myself for this movie adaptation.
Man, what an insipid show. The new movie version is, make no mistake, about as dumb and crass as American comedies get, but compared to its source it seems Pulitzer-worthy.
For those who, like me, had managed to remain unfamiliar: Baywatch revolves around a group of lifeguards who keep an eye on the beaches near Malibu Pier. Over the course of more than 200 episodes, the lifeguards got caught up in all manner of adventures which extended well beyond the traditional duties of rescuing swimmers in distress and blowing their whistles at roughhousing kids.
No, the Baywatch gang was routinely involved in disasters, criminal investigations and international intrigues, and were instrumental in cracking the cases. The real meat of the series, however, seems to have been lengthy montages of the pneumatic cast running the beaches, or riding jet skis in formation.
In the movie (shot in Florida despite the L.A. setting), Dwayne Johnson takes over the role of top dog Baywatcher Mitch Buchannon from David Hasselhoff. Zac Efron, sporting a startlingly mesomorphic torso, takes over for David Charvet as Matt Brody, here a scandal-plagued Olympic champ turned lifeguard trainee, and Kelly Rohrbach steps into Pamela Anderson's red one-piece as the slow-motion blonde C. J. There are a variety of supporting players, like Ilfenesh Hadera and Alexandra Daddario, who look great in bathing suits, and, as a surrogate for the rest of us, Jon Bass as Ronnie, a tech whiz and aspiring lifeguard of more ordinary physique.
It's rated R, thus allowing director Seth Gordon and the writers, of which seven are credited, to deploy raunchy set-piece gags in the Hangover style. Other than that, about all they can do is make poor Efron keep repeating the same joke about how hey, this seems like a job for the police, not lifeguards, even though it isn't exactly a riot the first time.
A drug-smuggling club owner, who wants to privatize the beach, is played by the stunning Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra, but she and her henchman fail to come to life as either serious or comic villains. The movie works, to the extent it does, thanks to the charm of the leads. Johnson comes across the best, shrewdly playing Mitch with a gee-whiz earnestness that's Hoff-worthy.
So this Baywatch is sort of cute, silly and sometimes inept as it is. But it should be noted that this type of lowbrow spoof can be done much better, and indeed has been: Son of the Beach, a Baywatch send-up created by and starring Timothy Stack, ran on FX for two seasons, from 2000 to 2002. If the old Baywatch makes the new Baywatch look like Arthur Miller, the new Baywatch makes Son of the Beach look like Rabelais or Chaucer. Its jokes were crude and often tasteless, but they were also remarkably dense and complex. Almost every line was a double-entendre of some sort, and they interconnected in ways that can fairly be called brilliant. Any half-hour of that show had more, and wittier, laughs than all of Baywatch.
Friday, May 29, 2015
BY DE FAULT
Opening this weekend:
Aloha—In Cameron Crowe’s peculiar new romantic comedy, Bradley Cooper plays Brian, a defense contractor fallen on hard times after being wounded in Afghanistan. Brian gets a minor, foot-back-in-the-door job in Hawaii, facilitating a diplomatic formality with the indigenous people on behalf of a creepy billionaire (Bill Murray) who’s about to launch a satellite with the collaboration of the U.S. Air Force.
The gig throws Brian back in touch with his old girlfriend Tracey (Rachel McAdams), now married to a taciturn pilot (John Krasinski) and raising two kids with him at Hickam Field, but unable to conceal her love for her old flame. It also introduces him to Captain Ng (Emma Stone), his exuberantly forward aide during the proceedings. He’s put off by Ng’s overenthusiastic manner at first, but over time…
Well, you can guess. On the one hand, Aloha is a meet-cute romance set against the paradisiacal backdrop of Hawaii; on another it’s a satire about rich guys buying their way into national (and global) political and military power, and about the vaguely guilt-ridden Faustian flunkies like Brian that help them do it.
We don’t seem intended to take this strand, about Murray and his satellite, very seriously, however. At times the movie feels almost like the contemporary equivalent of an early sixties comedy, with Stone in the Doris Day part and Cooper standing in for James Garner. You expect Arthur Godfrey and Paul Lynde to turn up in the supporting cast.
This movie was at a disadvantage with me from the start—Bradley Cooper’s charm continues to elude me, I’m afraid. He’s been undeniably proficient in several films I’ve seen, and on TV interview shows he comes across like a nice guy, but something about his onscreen manner, some unseemly petulance or neediness, makes me reluctant to see movies in which he stars. His work here is professional, but just about every other member of the cast—like Danny McBride, amusing as a put-upon Colonel, or even Alec Baldwin at his most shamelessly hammy as a splenetic General—has so much more presence that Cooper begins to seem like a dead spot at the movie’s center.
I also resisted Aloha for a long time from a desire not to be played by Cameron Crowe. His cute, preciously hip, knowingly indirect dialogue can work my nerves, and for a while it did here, until…
Well, until it didn’t anymore. By the end of Aloha, despite the silly implausibility of its plot, I had succumbed to it, as I almost always do to Crowe’s films. I wanted to be these people—these attractive, flawed yet decent folks with their charming, flirty, oblique-angled way of conversing. With the exception of the miserable Vanilla Sky, Aloha may be Crowe’s least successful film, but it won me over in the end.
San Andreas—A good disaster movie can be great fun. So, for that matter, can a bad disaster movie. Indeed, the line between a good and a bad disaster movie is tough to define, and depending on your criteria, either adjective can be applied to this California earthquake melodrama. It couldn’t be more preposterous, and it’s fun.
After trashing Hoover Dam as an appetizer, the movie gives us the long-dreaded Big One. The title fault finally splits wide, L.A. buckles like a house of cards, then the crack spreads north toward San Fran. But The Quake hasn’t counted on The Rock: our hero Dwayne Johnson, an L.A.-based rescue-helicopter pilot, heads for the Bay Area with his estranged wife (gorgeous Carla Gugino), because his college-age daughter (Alexandra Daddario) is trapped there.
San Andreas feels like a pure throwback to ‘70s-style mayhem. Starting with Charlton Heston for Johnson, it’s easy to recast every role with a familiar character actor from four decades ago, and even Andrew Lockington’s music sounds like something that John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith might have written back then.
Mostly San Andreas is good for laughs, but it does have a potent demonstration of the power of acting. Paul Giamatti plays a Cal Tech seismologist who looks directly into a TV camera and tells San Franciscans that they must get out right away, and that whiny, strangled, almost apologetic voice of his gives more of a chill than all the apocalyptic special effects the movie has to offer.
The special-effects spectacle isn’t really anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s geographically expansive—we get to see both the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge brought low. Thus the movie may have some extra appeal for Tea Partiers and other reflexive Cali-haters.
Oh, and over the end titles we hear a spooky version of “California Dreamin’” performed by Sia. Nice touch.
After trashing Hoover Dam as an appetizer, the movie gives us the long-dreaded Big One. The title fault finally splits wide, L.A. buckles like a house of cards, then the crack spreads north toward San Fran. But The Quake hasn’t counted on The Rock: our hero Dwayne Johnson, an L.A.-based rescue-helicopter pilot, heads for the Bay Area with his estranged wife (gorgeous Carla Gugino), because his college-age daughter (Alexandra Daddario) is trapped there.
San Andreas feels like a pure throwback to ‘70s-style mayhem. Starting with Charlton Heston for Johnson, it’s easy to recast every role with a familiar character actor from four decades ago, and even Andrew Lockington’s music sounds like something that John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith might have written back then.
Mostly San Andreas is good for laughs, but it does have a potent demonstration of the power of acting. Paul Giamatti plays a Cal Tech seismologist who looks directly into a TV camera and tells San Franciscans that they must get out right away, and that whiny, strangled, almost apologetic voice of his gives more of a chill than all the apocalyptic special effects the movie has to offer.
The special-effects spectacle isn’t really anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s geographically expansive—we get to see both the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge brought low. Thus the movie may have some extra appeal for Tea Partiers and other reflexive Cali-haters.
Oh, and over the end titles we hear a spooky version of “California Dreamin’” performed by Sia. Nice touch.
The gig throws Brian back in touch with his old girlfriend Tracey (Rachel McAdams), now married to a taciturn pilot (John Krasinski) and raising two kids with him at Hickam Field, but unable to conceal her love for her old flame. It also introduces him to Captain Ng (Emma Stone), his exuberantly forward aide during the proceedings. He’s put off by Ng’s overenthusiastic manner at first, but over time…
Well, you can guess. On the one hand, Aloha is a meet-cute romance set against the paradisiacal backdrop of Hawaii; on another it’s a satire about rich guys buying their way into national (and global) political and military power, and about the vaguely guilt-ridden Faustian flunkies like Brian that help them do it.
We don’t seem intended to take this strand, about Murray and his satellite, very seriously, however. At times the movie feels almost like the contemporary equivalent of an early sixties comedy, with Stone in the Doris Day part and Cooper standing in for James Garner. You expect Arthur Godfrey and Paul Lynde to turn up in the supporting cast.
This movie was at a disadvantage with me from the start—Bradley Cooper’s charm continues to elude me, I’m afraid. He’s been undeniably proficient in several films I’ve seen, and on TV interview shows he comes across like a nice guy, but something about his onscreen manner, some unseemly petulance or neediness, makes me reluctant to see movies in which he stars. His work here is professional, but just about every other member of the cast—like Danny McBride, amusing as a put-upon Colonel, or even Alec Baldwin at his most shamelessly hammy as a splenetic General—has so much more presence that Cooper begins to seem like a dead spot at the movie’s center.
I also resisted Aloha for a long time from a desire not to be played by Cameron Crowe. His cute, preciously hip, knowingly indirect dialogue can work my nerves, and for a while it did here, until…
Well, until it didn’t anymore. By the end of Aloha, despite the silly implausibility of its plot, I had succumbed to it, as I almost always do to Crowe’s films. I wanted to be these people—these attractive, flawed yet decent folks with their charming, flirty, oblique-angled way of conversing. With the exception of the miserable Vanilla Sky, Aloha may be Crowe’s least successful film, but it won me over in the end.
Friday, April 3, 2015
SPEED KILLS
Opening this weekend:
Furious Seven—My mother always hated car chase movies. She used to take me to the live-action Disney comedies of the early ‘70s irritably, under protest, because they routinely ended with a wacky car chase. A few years later, she was appalled when one of my nephews became an avid fan of The Dukes of Hazzard, and insisted on getting in the car through the open window.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed many a movie car chase, but at some deep psychological level I’ve always felt a little guilt over this, knowing that my Mom wouldn’t approve. That feeling was magnified while I watched this seventh entry in the Fast and the Furious series. The accident that killed star Paul Walker in 2013 wasn’t part of the film’s production (nor was Walker driving). But it was speed-related, and it’s hard to overcome the sense that movies like this franchise—the implicit message of which is that it’s impossible to be seriously injured in a car crash—may contribute to mishaps like this.
In a showpiece scene of Furious 7 [spoiler alert!], Vin Diesel and Walker drive a high-performance car out of the upper-floor window of a high-rise building. They sail through the air into the windows of the neighboring high-rise, then across that building and out the far side, through the air again into a third high-rise. When Diesel begins barreling toward the windows, Walker yells “Cars can’t fly! Cars can’t fly!” but there’s no sign that director James Wan agrees. This and other scenes inevitably have a macabre extra resonance.
The story has Diesel’s street racing gang turned government agents stalked by vengeful Brit special forces rogue Jason Statham. Djimon Hounsou is another heavy, Dwayne Johnson is the lead G-man, Michelle Rodriguez is back with her beguiling Snoopy-vulture scowl, and Kurt Russell saunters in for a few entertaining scenes as a shifty covert ops honcho. All of the actors, starting with the always-endearing Diesel, are agreeable, and the dialogue is so self-consciously macho, the action so cartoonishly overscaled that it’s hard to resist the idea that the whole thing is a put-on, and start enjoying the silliness.
But every time a vehicle plummeted off a cliff in the Caucasus only to have its passengers emerge looking better than I do after a good night’s sleep, every time somebody leapt from one vehicle to another with barely a bruise, every time a car jumped from a parking garage and delivered a duffel bag to a helicopter in flight, some party-pooper part of me couldn’t help but think, this sort of vehicular fantasy, seductive even for a non-gearhead like me, isn’t harmless. The mindset it creates may have contributed to the death of one of this movie’s own stars.
Furious 7 is overlong, like many action blockbusters, but I can’t claim that I wasn’t diverted by some of the movie’s preposterous excesses. But it still may qualify as one of the stupider, more irresponsible movies I’ve ever seen, and when it made me smile, I thought I could sense my Mom scowling at me.
Furious Seven—My mother always hated car chase movies. She used to take me to the live-action Disney comedies of the early ‘70s irritably, under protest, because they routinely ended with a wacky car chase. A few years later, she was appalled when one of my nephews became an avid fan of The Dukes of Hazzard, and insisted on getting in the car through the open window.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed many a movie car chase, but at some deep psychological level I’ve always felt a little guilt over this, knowing that my Mom wouldn’t approve. That feeling was magnified while I watched this seventh entry in the Fast and the Furious series. The accident that killed star Paul Walker in 2013 wasn’t part of the film’s production (nor was Walker driving). But it was speed-related, and it’s hard to overcome the sense that movies like this franchise—the implicit message of which is that it’s impossible to be seriously injured in a car crash—may contribute to mishaps like this.
In a showpiece scene of Furious 7 [spoiler alert!], Vin Diesel and Walker drive a high-performance car out of the upper-floor window of a high-rise building. They sail through the air into the windows of the neighboring high-rise, then across that building and out the far side, through the air again into a third high-rise. When Diesel begins barreling toward the windows, Walker yells “Cars can’t fly! Cars can’t fly!” but there’s no sign that director James Wan agrees. This and other scenes inevitably have a macabre extra resonance.
The story has Diesel’s street racing gang turned government agents stalked by vengeful Brit special forces rogue Jason Statham. Djimon Hounsou is another heavy, Dwayne Johnson is the lead G-man, Michelle Rodriguez is back with her beguiling Snoopy-vulture scowl, and Kurt Russell saunters in for a few entertaining scenes as a shifty covert ops honcho. All of the actors, starting with the always-endearing Diesel, are agreeable, and the dialogue is so self-consciously macho, the action so cartoonishly overscaled that it’s hard to resist the idea that the whole thing is a put-on, and start enjoying the silliness.
But every time a vehicle plummeted off a cliff in the Caucasus only to have its passengers emerge looking better than I do after a good night’s sleep, every time somebody leapt from one vehicle to another with barely a bruise, every time a car jumped from a parking garage and delivered a duffel bag to a helicopter in flight, some party-pooper part of me couldn’t help but think, this sort of vehicular fantasy, seductive even for a non-gearhead like me, isn’t harmless. The mindset it creates may have contributed to the death of one of this movie’s own stars.
Furious 7 is overlong, like many action blockbusters, but I can’t claim that I wasn’t diverted by some of the movie’s preposterous excesses. But it still may qualify as one of the stupider, more irresponsible movies I’ve ever seen, and when it made me smile, I thought I could sense my Mom scowling at me.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
FLEECED RESISTANCE
With the new movie version of Hercules now in theaters…
Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s acknowledge a monster from an earlier Hercules movie, this cool dragon from the enjoyable 1958 Italian spectacle starring Steve Reeves…
The beast, which rather resembles a cranky ceratosaurus, is roused from what appears to have been a pretty long slumber beneath the Golden Fleece—he’s covered with leaves which scatter when he gets up—when Jason climbs up to filch it.
You can get a glimpse of him in action here.
Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s acknowledge a monster from an earlier Hercules movie, this cool dragon from the enjoyable 1958 Italian spectacle starring Steve Reeves…
The beast, which rather resembles a cranky ceratosaurus, is roused from what appears to have been a pretty long slumber beneath the Golden Fleece—he’s covered with leaves which scatter when he gets up—when Jason climbs up to filch it.
You can get a glimpse of him in action here.
Friday, August 16, 2013
CAMELBACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN
Check out the August issue of Phoenix Magazine…
…for my article on the history of camels in Arizona. It’s on page 50, or here, with a sidebar about the discovery of the possible “Walmart Camel” fossils here.
In the course of working on the story I got to meet a very cool camel, named Aladdin, who had been ridden by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the 2002 movie The Scorpion King. As it happened I sort of liked that movie, so let it serve as a deadhead video suggestion for the weekend.
It would be hard to find many movies dumber than The Scorpion King, but it would also, happily, be hard to find many movies that are smarter in the way they go about being dumb. Somehow improbably, the film managed to strike a note of silliness and fun without seeming insulting.
The Scorpion King is set in a vague ancient era, vaguely in Mesopotamia. The title character, Mathyus, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, had been introduced in the opening scenes of the previous year’s The Mummy Returns—the introduction seemed, indeed, to have been the principle reason for that film’s existence. Mathyus is an Akkadian, which students of ancient culture will recognize as the Sumerian people who composed the great ancient epic of Gilgamesh. In this film, however, Akkadians have a reputation not as poets but as assassins, and Mathyus is the greatest of them. He accepts a mission, from a coalition of beleaguered tribes, to kill the evil King Memnon (Steven Brand) because, well, he’s evil.
Memnon has a gorgeous prophetess (Kelly Hu) working for him, reluctantly, and somehow she and Mathyus get hooked up, and Mathyus gains a variety of other ragtag allies in the course of his adventures, among them Grant Heslov and the recently late and lamented Michael Clarke Duncan and Bernard Hill. The resulting banter and antics might put you in mind of a Hope/Crosby “Road” picture, and that’s not all bad.
The highlights of The Scorpion King, of course, are the swashbuckling fight scenes, and in this the movie seems to have benefited, oddly, from its association with Pro Wrestling (Vince McMahon is credited as Executive Producer). The action isn’t hyper-edited in the MTV manner, so the fights have a story arc—you aren’t asked to take the editor’s word for what’s going on. And “The Rock” turned out to be charismatic performer with a touch of self-deprecation. And his camel had a lot of charisma and star power, too.
…for my article on the history of camels in Arizona. It’s on page 50, or here, with a sidebar about the discovery of the possible “Walmart Camel” fossils here.
In the course of working on the story I got to meet a very cool camel, named Aladdin, who had been ridden by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the 2002 movie The Scorpion King. As it happened I sort of liked that movie, so let it serve as a deadhead video suggestion for the weekend.
It would be hard to find many movies dumber than The Scorpion King, but it would also, happily, be hard to find many movies that are smarter in the way they go about being dumb. Somehow improbably, the film managed to strike a note of silliness and fun without seeming insulting.
The Scorpion King is set in a vague ancient era, vaguely in Mesopotamia. The title character, Mathyus, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, had been introduced in the opening scenes of the previous year’s The Mummy Returns—the introduction seemed, indeed, to have been the principle reason for that film’s existence. Mathyus is an Akkadian, which students of ancient culture will recognize as the Sumerian people who composed the great ancient epic of Gilgamesh. In this film, however, Akkadians have a reputation not as poets but as assassins, and Mathyus is the greatest of them. He accepts a mission, from a coalition of beleaguered tribes, to kill the evil King Memnon (Steven Brand) because, well, he’s evil.
Memnon has a gorgeous prophetess (Kelly Hu) working for him, reluctantly, and somehow she and Mathyus get hooked up, and Mathyus gains a variety of other ragtag allies in the course of his adventures, among them Grant Heslov and the recently late and lamented Michael Clarke Duncan and Bernard Hill. The resulting banter and antics might put you in mind of a Hope/Crosby “Road” picture, and that’s not all bad.
The highlights of The Scorpion King, of course, are the swashbuckling fight scenes, and in this the movie seems to have benefited, oddly, from its association with Pro Wrestling (Vince McMahon is credited as Executive Producer). The action isn’t hyper-edited in the MTV manner, so the fights have a story arc—you aren’t asked to take the editor’s word for what’s going on. And “The Rock” turned out to be charismatic performer with a touch of self-deprecation. And his camel had a lot of charisma and star power, too.
Friday, February 10, 2012
CLEANUP ON ISLE 2
The sequel to 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D is titled Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. The pun built into the title is the whole of the movie’s verbal cleverness—it’s been a while since you’ve seen a movie, even a kids’ movie, with dialogue this corny & insipid. Fortunately, there are visual pleasures to make up for it.
Big, beefy Brendan Fraser being unavailable this time, the big beefy duties went to Dwayne Johnson, here the stepfather of the sullen kid (Josh Hutcherson), from the first film. The two of them end up stranded, along with a comic-relief helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman) & his cute daughter (Vanessa Hudgens), on an island of wonders somewhere near Palau, hidden behind a permanent waterspout. The boy’s adventurous grandfather is already there, played by Michael Caine—or, to put it more accurately, Michael Caine was paid to smile good-naturedly & speak the role’s lines.
The island was an inspiration, we are told, not only for Verne’s The Mysterious Island but also for Stevenson’s Treasure Island & apparently both Lilliput & Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels—its residents include elephants the size of terriers & bees the size of ponies. Dumb as all this is, Journey 2 is perfectly watchable.
The CGI effects have a garish appeal, the 3D flourishes better than usual, the action all but nonstop. About the only time things slow down is for Johnson to sing “What a Wonderful World,” pleasantly enough, accompanying himself on the ukulele. There’s also a dreamy slow-motion shot of Hudgens falling through the air toward the jungle that verges on real, as opposed to kitschy, beauty.
So sure, take your kids, but also do them a favor: Before or after, show them (& yourself) the 1961 movie adaptation of Mysterious Island, with added Ray Harryhausen monsters. Beside it, this new film is punier than a Lilliputian elephant.
In theaters, by the way, Journey 2 is preceded by a Warner cartoon, Daffy’s Rhapsody, in which the manic-depressive waterfowl sings to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, all while dodging Elmer Fudd’s bloodlust. Classical music has been good to the Looney Tunes—three of the best Bugs Bunny shorts, The Rabbit of Seville (1949), What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) & Long-Haired Hare (1948), are operatic send-ups—& this new film is probably the best of Warner’s post-Mel Blanc efforts, in no small part because…Blanc actually provides Daffy’s voice! The animation is a setting of a ‘50s-era children’s record by the peerless voice actor, & it’s quite wonderful to hear his irreplaceable tones filling the multiplexes.
Big, beefy Brendan Fraser being unavailable this time, the big beefy duties went to Dwayne Johnson, here the stepfather of the sullen kid (Josh Hutcherson), from the first film. The two of them end up stranded, along with a comic-relief helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman) & his cute daughter (Vanessa Hudgens), on an island of wonders somewhere near Palau, hidden behind a permanent waterspout. The boy’s adventurous grandfather is already there, played by Michael Caine—or, to put it more accurately, Michael Caine was paid to smile good-naturedly & speak the role’s lines.
The island was an inspiration, we are told, not only for Verne’s The Mysterious Island but also for Stevenson’s Treasure Island & apparently both Lilliput & Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels—its residents include elephants the size of terriers & bees the size of ponies. Dumb as all this is, Journey 2 is perfectly watchable.
The CGI effects have a garish appeal, the 3D flourishes better than usual, the action all but nonstop. About the only time things slow down is for Johnson to sing “What a Wonderful World,” pleasantly enough, accompanying himself on the ukulele. There’s also a dreamy slow-motion shot of Hudgens falling through the air toward the jungle that verges on real, as opposed to kitschy, beauty.
So sure, take your kids, but also do them a favor: Before or after, show them (& yourself) the 1961 movie adaptation of Mysterious Island, with added Ray Harryhausen monsters. Beside it, this new film is punier than a Lilliputian elephant.
In theaters, by the way, Journey 2 is preceded by a Warner cartoon, Daffy’s Rhapsody, in which the manic-depressive waterfowl sings to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, all while dodging Elmer Fudd’s bloodlust. Classical music has been good to the Looney Tunes—three of the best Bugs Bunny shorts, The Rabbit of Seville (1949), What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) & Long-Haired Hare (1948), are operatic send-ups—& this new film is probably the best of Warner’s post-Mel Blanc efforts, in no small part because…Blanc actually provides Daffy’s voice! The animation is a setting of a ‘50s-era children’s record by the peerless voice actor, & it’s quite wonderful to hear his irreplaceable tones filling the multiplexes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
