FETCH A FALLING STAR

Opening in theaters this weekend:

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie--"They're cute little pups that drive around in cars. I know it sounds weird, but just go with it." So says a character near the beginning of this second PAW Patrol feature, by way of describing the premise.

More specifically: The little pups live in palatial digs in "Adventure City," where each of them specializes in some form or other, vaguely breed-appropriate, of public safety. Chase the German Shepherd is a police dog; Marshall the Dalmatian is a firefighter; Skye the Cockapoo pilots a rescue helicopter; Bulldog Rubble does construction and demo; Zuma the Lab does water rescues, mutt Rocky handles recycling, and Liberty the Dachshund, introduced in 2021's PAW Patrol: The Movie, has a gift for training the members of the Junior Patrollers, a trio of Pomeranians. Ryder is the human boy who leads the gang.

I'll confess that moment-to-moment, I have some trouble keeping them all straight in my mind; the characters don't, for me, have terribly distinct personalities. But to their intended audience, the pups have been beloved figures since the Canadian TV cartoon, developed by Keith Chapman of Bob the Builder fame, was launched on Nickelodeon in 2013.

If you thought it was weird before, wait until you get a load of Mighty Movie. The story takes a sci-fi/fantasy twist this time that puts it more in the realm of a Marvel or Power Rangers flick than a Boy-and-his-Anthropomorphic-Dogs story. Drawn in from space by a mad scientist villain with a magnet, a meteor crash lands in Adventure City, and fragments from it give the pups superpowers. Some of these seemed counterintuitive to me. Marshall, for instance, gains the power to conjure fire from his paws; shouldn't he command water or flame-retardant foam or something?

Anyway, as with the first feature, The Mighty Movie is not an experience to seek out if you don't have a five-year-old who requires it, but it's not disagreeable to sit through if you do get stuck at it. The dialogue has funny, self-aware touches, including another fourth wall gag about the film's transparent merchandising strategy. The voice cast includes some name players, including Serena Williams, Kristen Bell, James Marsden, Chris Rock and most notably Taraji P. Henson as the rather chic, green-haired mad scientist.

Ron Pardo is also back, as Humdinger, Adventure City's narcissistic former mayor. I thought perhaps the first film was using the character to reference a certain real world public figure; my suspicion was strengthened in Mighty Movie when Humdinger, sensing public hostility toward him, remarks "This is why I hate free and fair elections."

Humdinger's entourage of cats seems intended as further evidence of his villainy. A suggestion: In the spirit of inter-species equity and amity, perhaps in the next PAW Patrol movie a heroic kitty should be introduced to the team. Cats have paws too, after all.

TRIUMPH OF THE QUILL

Opening this weekend:

Sonic the Hedgehog 2--This is the sequel to the 2020 screen treatment of the hero from the popular '90s-era video game from Sega. He's a determined-looking little goober with blue fur and quills who can run at supersonic speeds. He doesn't look all that much like a hedgehog to me, but whatever.

I never played the game and had no familiarity with the character, but I did review the first film, which I saw at a drive-in in Glendale in April of 2020; it was the last movie I actually saw at a theatre before the big shut-down began in earnest. If memory serves--the first film didn't exactly tattoo itself on my mind--this new film is better than its predecessor.

By which I mean, it's a little better. Starting with a prologue sequence set on "The Mushroom Planet" (a nod, possibly, to Eleanor Cameron's delightful "Mushroom Planet" books of the '50s and '60s?) to which the rotten Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey) has been exiled, Sonic 2 is noticeably more visually rich and imaginative than the first film. Settings range from Siberia to Hawaii to oceanic temples, and the action ranges from aerial chases to avalanches to battles with giant robots to dance-offs.

Robotnik escapes his "Portobello purgatory" and returns to Earth in cahoots with Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba), a giant extraterrestrial echidna, to pester Sonic (voiced, as before, by Ben Schwartz) about a magical green emerald. Knuckles doesn't look all that much like an echidna to me, but whatever. Our hero's principal ally, this time, is Tails (voiced by Colleen O'Shaughnessey), a fox with two bushy tails that allow him to fly, helicopter style. Tails does, at least, sort of look like a fox.

Along with James Marsden and Tika Sumpter, back from the first film as Sonic's surrogate parents, Shemar Moore, Natasha Rothwell and Adam Pally also pad out the cast. Carrey is at his snarkiest and wackiest, and seems to be having a good time, although he's reportedly announced his retirement.

On its own terms, all that's really wrong with Sonic 2 is that, at 2 hours 2 minutes, it's too long. It didn't seem to me that this was a movie that particularly needed to be three minutes longer than Citizen Kane.

Now streaming...

Lost Angel--This micro-budget indie debut feature by Simon Drake is set in a fictitious south England island community. As it opens, we see our heroine Lisa taking a ferry home. Her sister has died, apparently by suicide, but as Lisa investigates, she finds reason to doubt the official story.

As the plot progresses, it takes a low-key, matter-of-fact turn into the supernatural. After a slow start, weighed down by lachrymose music, the film gradually picks up a nice head of mystery-thriller steam. Drake uses the settings to generate atmosphere without it feeling forced, and the performances take hold, particularly that of the plaintive, quietly focused Sascha Harman as Lisa. By the end, Lost Angel is both gripping and highly touching.

TOME SWEET TOME

Opening today:

The Book of Life—Produced by the great Guillermo del Toro and directed and co-written by Jorge Gutierrez, this computer-animated feature is a tapestry of motifs from Mexican folklore, both pre- and post-Colombian, especially that culture’s version of Halloween, the defiantly festive Day of the Dead. It starts out in a town in the center of Mexico—which is identified at the beginning of the movie as the “Center of the Universe”—and involves a love triangle.

Said triangle’s points are the spirited, big-hearted town beauty, Maria (voiced as an adult by Zoe Saldana) and two local boys, Joaquin (Channing Tatum), a military hero whose fearlessness secretly stems from the talisman of invulnerability he wears, and Manolo (Diego Luna), who descends from a long line of matadors. Manolo has the chops for that profession except that he can’t bring himself to kill a bull.

The outcome of the affair becomes the object of a wager between two gods of the hereafter, and thus The Book of Life turns into a crazy cosmic epic, with characters turned into elegant skeletal versions of themselves as they journey into the underworld. Gutierrez manages the feat of making his story feel plausibly traditional while at the same time making it hinge on modern values like feminism and the abolition of animal cruelty. Also, the movie is full of lovely music, one visual splendor after another, and a really endearing little pig. It’s magnificent.

The Best of Me—Amanda, a sassy rich girl in a small Louisiana town in the early ‘90s, falls in love with Dawson, a hunk from the wrong side of the tracks. Dawson is no bad boy, however—even though he was raised by a violently abusive drug-dealing father (and apparently no mother) he’s somehow grown up into a gallant, studious, flawlessly well-behaved paragon.

But these two aren’t just star-crossed, they’re star-double-crossed. Separated by a tragedy as good-looking teenagers, played by Liana Liberato and Luke Bracey, they’re reunited about twenty years later, having grown into dissimilar but even better-looking adults—Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden, to be specific—only to see circumstances building up to a second tragedy.

This adaptation—seemingly rather loose—of a Nicholas Sparks weeper was directed by the always-interesting Michael Hoffman, of such underrated efforts as Soapdish, the 1999 Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Last Station. His work here shows him no less skillful. He modulates the performances and maintains a swift, dry tone that keeps the banal dialogue and contrived plot carpentry from spiraling into pure camp. Whether that’s to the benefit of the movie’s entertainment value is another question, but it’s impressive.

Marsden can sometimes use his great looks to comic effect; he doesn’t quite get to that here, but he’s still good company, and so is Monaghan. Sean Bridges and Gerald McRaney contribute solid work as Dawson’s scumbag father and curmudgeonly surrogate father, respectively. But the general sobriety and professionalism of their work can’t disguise what The Best of Me is—polished hokum. At best.

RIP to the beautiful, soulful, sexy, funny Elizabeth Pena, passed on way too young at 55, “after a brief illness.” She was at her sexiest and funniest in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and at her most lovable in the terrific John Sayles yarn Lone Star, in which she gets to speak the wonderfully commonsensical final line.

TV note: We’re in the thick of October, so TCM is serving more than its average quotient of monster flicks. This Saturday morning, for instance—check the schedule for local airtimes—we get 1967’s Hammer shocker The Mummy’s Shroud…