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.

A LEGO UP

Opening this weekend:

 

Whenever the subject of Legos comes up, as it does more and more frequently in popular movie reviewing, I feel the need to mention that I never had Legos as a kid, or particularly wanted them. Nor have I played with them as an adult. Even so, I've enjoyed all of the Lego movies I've seen.

2017's The Lego Batman Movie was my favorite, an on-the-money spoof of torturous, "dark" superhero flicks. But 2014's original The Lego Movie was a charming, funny, unpretentious meditation on conformity versus individualism.

Now we get the sequel to that film, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, directed by Mike Mitchell from a script by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Matthew Fogel, and set, appropriately, five years after the events of The Lego Movie. The locale, once again, is the vast Lego metropolis of Bricksburg. The name has since been changed to "Apocalypseburg," however, after an invasion of cutesy but lethal aliens has reduced the town to dystopian wreckage. Even so, our hero Emmet (Chris Pratt) remains as upbeat and cheerful as ever.

When aliens abduct Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), Lego Batman (Will Arnett), and several of Emmet's other friends, taking them to the distant "Systar System," Emmet follows, intent on rescuing them. Along the way, he meets Rex (also Pratt), a tough guy space mercenary—with a crew of dinosaurs!—who helps him summon reserves of gritty resolve.

This is only the beginning of the plot's twists and turns. Like its predecessor, Lego Movie 2 is a dense and complex piece of storytelling. It's almost—though maybe not quite—as seamlessly thought through as the original, yet it flies along with effortless speed and precision.

As before, much of the comedy derives from the limited range of motion available to Lego figures, and there were gags that went over my head. I don't know why, for instance, sequences of numbers appear onscreen when the characters are building some new contraption, but I'm guessing this involves the technical side of Lego-building. There are also endless, and amusing, references to pop culture classics starting with Planet of the Apes and 2001 and carrying on through Jurassic Park and the Lord of the Rings movies up to the most topical industry gossip, and even a quick nod to RBG.

The voice cast also helps, from Pratt's openhearted sweetness as Emmet and his jaunty Kurt Russell-like swagger as Rex, to the tough but soulful heroine of Banks to Arnett's growl as Batman. Most hilarious here is Tiffany Haddish as Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi of the Systar System; her blossoming romance with Batman made me feel protective of both characters.

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column online at Phoenix Magazine, with reviews of What Men Want and The Isle, plus a preview of the Greater Phoenix Jewish Film Festival. Also, check out my review of the Broadway version of Disney's Aladdin, playing through February 17 at Gammage Auditorium.

RIP to brilliant, funny Albert Finney, passed on at 82.

IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE

Opening today:

Hidden Figures—We tend to think of NASA as part of the “New Frontier” and “Camelot” and the general unembarrassed optimistic idealism we associate, accurately or not, with the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. So it’s a slight jolt to realize that the space program, at least in its early days (then NACA, or the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics), was segregated.

It was, of course, decades before there were female or nonwhite astronauts, but in at least one facility, the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the segregation was overt. A pool of female African-American “computers”—the term was applied to humans who performed complicated mathematical functions in those days—was relegated to a separate building and separate restrooms on the Langley campus until at least 1958.

This drama focuses on Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who, among many other career achievements, calculated flight trajectories for John Glenn’s first orbital Mercury mission in 1962. It also depicts Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), the de facto supervisor of the department, and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), who became an aerospace engineer.

The director, St. Vincent’s Theodore Melfi, working from a script he wrote with Allison Schroeder (based, in turn, on Margot Lee Shetterley’s nonfiction book) seems to have compressed and conflated the chronology of events here for dramatic convenience, but he gets across the essentials of this remarkable story, another in the seemingly bottomless supply of belatedly-told instances of American achievement by women and minorities, in the face of outrageous intolerance. The style is standard inspirational uplift, and the characterizations aren’t deep, but the cast—the three leads and also Kevin Costner as the Langley big boss—are vibrant enough to fill in the blanks.

The bright primary-color cinematography and the midcentury period detail are parts of what make this cinematically inconsequential movie so pleasant. Another part, I confess, is the glamour of the lead actresses—I know we’re supposed to be celebrating their intellectual and social triumphs, but as they scurry around in their pencil skirts and glasses, they also show a lot of nerd chic.

A Monster Calls—English adolescent Conor (Lewis MacDougall) lives in a lovely old country house with his adored, cancer-afflicted young mother (Felicity Jones). One night, after he and his mom have watched King Kong together, Conor receives a visit at his bedroom window from a monster; an enormous anthropomorphic tree, something like the green man of myth, who speaks in the rumbling tones of Liam Neeson.

Over the course of the film, The Monster tells Conor three odd stories of elusive meaning, something like Sufi parables, insisting that when he is done with his three, Conor must tell him a fourth story. Eventually he tells The Monster his story and, as with the end of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his own agonized, guilty secret is revealed.

This film, directed by J.A. Bayona, is based on the much-honored 2011 children’s novel by Patrick Ness, which was based, in turn, on an idea and some notes by the late writer Siobhan Dowd. It’s a poignant, handsomely-made piece of work, with beautiful animated sequences (illustrating The Monster’s stories) and fine acting, not only by MacDougall and Jones but by Toby Kebbell as Conor’s absentee dad and Sigourney Weaver as his stern, terrified grandmother. It’s also nice to see Geraldine Chaplin, in a small but effective role as an authority figure at Conor’s school.

Above all, it has a memorable presence in the great creaking, rustling, uprooted Monster. The special effects depicting him are lovely, and it’s nice to hear that urgently authoritative Neeson voice used for something other than threatening bad guys in lurid action movies.