TRUTHS, DARES, AARDVARKS, PHANTOMS

Opening this weekend:

Truth or Dare--A college senior (Lucy Hale), planning to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity on her last spring break, allows herself to be pressured into going to Mexico with her friends instead. Down there, a stranger (Landon Liboiron) invites them to play a game of truth or dare in the ruins of an old church. When they get back to school, the participants in the game start receiving Truth or Dare challenges through creepy psychic visions, and if they fail to either tell the truth or complete the dare, they gruesomely die.

I’ve seen far worse horror movies than Truth or Dare, also promoted under the title Blumhouse's Truth or Dare. Directed by Jason Wadlow, it’s slick and polished, with an attractive cast playing characters that aren’t as abrasive and obnoxious as they often are in movies like this. It helps that they seem to care about each other. Hale is particularly charming as the earnest good-girl heroine.

But it is, unmistakably, very derivative of other flicks of recent years like Final Destination and It Follows, and I found the ending bungled and unsatisfying. I appreciate the way Blumhouse Productions tries to give its young audience honest value on a modest scale, and this movie is not without merit. But it isn't anywhere near as good as Blumhouse's Get Out, or even as last fall's Happy Death Day.

Aardvark--Josh (Zachary Quinto) is a psychologically troubled guy, haunted by the powerful presence, and absence, of his older brother Craig (Jon Hamm), a famous TV actor. Craig pays Josh's bills, but isn't otherwise in touch with him, except through Josh's occasional apparent delusions, in which a homeless woman or a virile cop seem to him to be his brother, buried in a brilliant new characterization.

The real Craig does show up in the life of Josh's lonely therapist Emily (Jenny Slate), and unethically but perhaps understandably they start an affair. Meanwhile Josh meets an attractive young woman named Hannah (Sheila Vand), but is she another hallucination?

And so on. Aardvark is worth watching. It's perfectly well directed by Brian Shoaf, from his own script, which has perfectly speakable, intriguing, at times touching dialogue. The acting is top shelf. The tiny, exquisite Slate continues to show her range; her prim evasiveness is both funny and moving. Hamm is effortlessly convincing as this veteran celebrity, simultaneously sheepish and confident, quietly disappointed in his life. And Quinto brings dignity and humor to Josh, declining to milk the part for overt pathos.

But I sat there hoping, and doubting, that Shoaf would be able to snap Aardvark's ambiguities together into a dramatically coherent whole, and alas, he missed, at least for me. It was a near miss, maybe; the movie has a number of minor emotional payoffs, but they don't add up to a major emotional payoff.

In case you're wondering, I'm happy to report that the title isn't a cheat: There is an aardvark in Aardvark, played by a handsome creature billed as "Amani the Aardvark." The culmination of the aardvark's strand is, indeed, one of the movie's sweetest moments.

Check out my interview, on Phoenix Magazine online, with my pal, Arizona actress turned mystery novelist Cindy Brown, who signs her book The Phantom of the Oz at the Orpheum Theatre next Tuesday, April 17, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., as a benefit for Friends of the Orpheum Theatre.

BEYOND THE SEQUEL

Opening this weekend:

Star Trek: Beyond—This movie felt sort of like Star Trek, and sort of like Star Trek is about as much, I suspect, as I’m ever likely to get from this “rebooted” series. But like the first and second entries—maybe more so—it’s entirely entertaining on its own terms, a lively, action-packed space opera of no particular depth but with a warm, rousing, all-for-one-and-one-for-all spirit.

While on a rescue mission, the Enterprise is invaded by the minions of a scary ogre called Krall (Idris Elba). The ship is torn apart and the crew members are captured or marooned in small groups on a nearby planet. Gradually they regroup and their diverse skills come into play in overcoming their enemies. So do Public Enemy and Beastie Boys.

Chris Pine continues to make a respectable, somehow irked Kirk, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban share a droll interplay as Spock and McCoy, Zoe Saldana brings her usual touch of melancholy to Uhura, John Cho is a stalwart Sulu, and the late Anton Yelchin gives touchingly guileless line readings as Chekhov.

Luckiest here, maybe (and perhaps not surprisingly, since he co-scripted) is Simon Pegg as Scotty. The engineer falls in with a seriously elegant alien warrior, Jaylah (Sofia Boutella) who provides the gang with their means of escape. She could make an excellent addition to the standard cast of characters.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie—If memory serves, I’ve never seen even one episode of Absolutely Fabulous (or AbFab) the beloved, oft-revived 1992 BBC comedy by Jennifer Saunders, though I was aware of its popularity in the UK and its devoted cult in the States. So I suppose that seeing this movie version was, for me, something like seeing Return to Mayberry (1986) for a person who’d never seen an episode of The Andy Griffith Show.

That is, I can’t say if this film comes close to capturing the flavor of the series, if the characters come across like they’re supposed to, if the timing feels right. And no doubt there are gags and references that were lost on me, because of my unfamiliarity both with the show and with the London fashion/showbiz milieu in which it’s set.

But, for whatever it may worth, I can tell you that on its own terms, I found AbFab: The Movie an inconsequential but perfectly pleasant way to squander an hour and a half, and that it made me chuckle out loud several times. Like the show, it follows the adventures of selfish, cadging, drug-and-booze addled PR agent Edina Monsoon (Saunders) and her party girl pal Patsy (Joanna Lumley), trying to cope with a lack of clients, money and career options, as well as the horrified awareness that they’re aging.

The plot involves Edina learning that Kate Moss (well played by Kate Moss; the film teems with celebrities playing themselves) is looking for new PR representation. In an overeager attempt to get her attention at a party, she seemingly causes the supermodel’s death, and instantly becomes a hunted national pariah.

Somehow she and Patsy end up in the south of France, and Patsy ends up in drag as a man, trying to obtain an inheritance for the two of them to live on. Edina’s daughter Saffy (Julia Sawalha), granddaughter Lola (Ideyarna Donaldson-Holness) and bizarre assistant Bubble (Jane Horrocks), among many other characters from the old show, get caught up in the antics as well.

Saunders, who also wrote the script, carries the picture energetically. But she’s ably supported by Lumley, who was my favorite person in the film—always on hand to provide an unexpected growl or snarl when the situation seems to require it. She’s particularly poised and commanding as a man; she could teach the current crop of male movie leads a thing or two, and she earns the twist on Some Like it Hot with which the picture ends.

Ice Age: Collision Course—The saber-toothed squirrel Scrat, engaged as always in trying to secure his beloved, elusive acorn, stumbles into a flying saucer frozen in the ice and launches it into space. He quickly, and hilariously, becomes the cause of such astronomical phenomena as the red spot on Jupiter, Saturn’s rings and the asteroid belt. All this is before the opening title.

He also sets a meteor on a collision course with earth, and the series regulars—Manny the mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano), his wife Ellie (Queen Latifah), Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo), Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary), eye-patched weasel Buck (Simon Pegg, competing with himself this weekend in Star Trek: Beyond), etc—must band together to find some way to avert this apocalypse. In short, this fifth feature installment of the animated series, set earlier in the Quaternary Period, is the most fanciful yet.

That’s not all bad. With his anguished wails against his existential plight, Scrat is a great cartoon character in the Wile E. Coyote tradition, and his episodes here are so speedy and inventive that at times I found myself wishing they were the whole movie. But they aren’t, and the dysfunction-in-the-mammoth-family drama is a drag on the picture.

There is, however, an episode in which Simon Pegg’s Buck gets to sing his own version of Rossini’s “Largo al factotum” while rescuing an egg that’s rather good. One of Buck’s enemies refers to him at one point, by the way, as a “one-eyed weasel,” a phrase that had a non-literal and R-rated meaning when I was in high school. Was this deliberate, I wonder, or sheer chance?