Author: Amy Diaz

Four 20-somethings road trip through China in the soft-hearted comedy Joy Ride.

Attorney Audrey (Ashley Park) and artist Lolo (Sherry Cola) have been best friends ever since Audrey’s adoptive parents (Annie Mumolo, David Denman) excitedly approached Lolo’s parents (Debbie Fan, Kenneth Liu) to ask if the girls — the only two Asian girls in their hometown of White Hills — could play together. Thus began a best friendship that lasted through elementary and high school and well after college.

Audrey is up for a big promotion at work, one that hinges on her closing a deal with a Chinese company. She speaks conversational Mandarin, she tells her boss (Timothy Simons) — but really this woman raised by American parents doesn’t speak Chinese. Though Lolo’s genitalia-based art isn’t the image Audrey wants to project professionally, she asks Lolo, a truly fluent Chinese speaker, to join her when she travels to China to act as a translator for Audrey’s meetings. Lolo’s cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), an awkward K-pop megafan, unexpectedly tags along. In China, Kat (Stephanie Hsu), Audrey’s college roommate who has become a big star of Chinese TV, also joins the group.

The foursome spends a night drinking with Chao (Ronny Chieng), the man Audrey is trying to close a deal with. He wants to know more about Audrey and her ties to China. Lolo lies and says Audrey is close with her Chinese birth mom. This leads the gang on a frantic quest to find Audrey’s birth mother, which sends them to a more rural region of China and through a series of unexpected detours due in part to an American drug dealer and a Chinese basketball team stacked with hotties.

For a movie with some impressively explicit sex scenes, Joy Ride is cute and huggable in its whole friendship vibe. Lolo and Kat have a frenemy relationship as dueling best friends of Audrey, who is wound tight and feels that she doesn’t fit in anywhere (not white like “everybody else” in their American home town but not connected to her Chinese heritage like Lolo and Kat). Deadeye is eager to find friendships IRL, having previously only made good buddies via K-pop fan sites. The various discomforts of the group seem like the discomfort of their relative youth, trying to figure out who they each are and what they want. It’s all ultimately very sweet, and while I did at times feel like some of the jokes could use another pass to make their comedy and their observations sharper, I enjoyed spending time with these characters. Park may be the central character but the excellent Hsu and Cola are the standouts.

Joy Ride isn’t perfect but it is a light and fun bit of friendship, road trip comedy. B

Rated R for strong and crude (and unapologetic! and totally giddy!) sexual content, language throughout, drug content and brief graphic nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com (where you can see a crude-but-cute alternate title for this movie). Directed by Adele Lim with a screenplay by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, Joy Ride is an hour and 37 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

Insidious: The Red Door

(PG-13)

The Lambert family returns in Insidious: The Red Door, the fifth Insidious movie, which picks up on events of the second movie.

The third and fourth movies were both prequels — a fact remembered thanks to Wikipedia because even though I’ve seen and liked all of these movies I forgot basically everything about them other than Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson. Quick recap: Father and son Lambert both have the ability to astral project into a demon-y realm called The Further, and sometimes demon-y beings try to follow them back.

It’s been a decade since the second movie and the Lambert family isn’t doing great. We first see Josh Lambert (Wilson) at the funeral for his mother. Renai Lambert (Byrne) and the kids — Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Foster (Andrew Astor) and Kali (Juliana Davies) — are with him but leave in a separate car because Renai and Josh have split up. Josh has a difficult relationship with the moody Dalton, who is headed to college. Renai suggests that Josh drive Dalton to school so they can spend time together.

What we know from the movie’s start that the oldest two Lambert dudes don’t is that Josh and Dalton have been hypnotized to forget the previous Insidious movies. So everything about The Further, their journeys to this place and the demons that plagued them there and followed them into the world has been sort of erased. Sort of. They’ve been left with enough shadows of what happened to feel uneasy and foggy.

Once at school, an art teacher’s assignments have Dalton starting to draw and remember the Further. Dalton makes friends with Chris (Sinclair Daniel), a girl mistakenly assigned to room with him for just long enough that she gets dragged into his whole spooky deal. Meanwhile Josh also has flashes of the Further and its denizens. The more father and son remember, the more the demon-y world starts to bleed into our own.

It takes about two-thirds of the movie for the characters to catch up to where we are at the movie’s start. Wilson is engaging as always and there’s some cute stuff between Dalton and Chris as they investigate Dalton’s growing strangeness, but the movie just takes way too long to ramp up. And then it feels a bit like we race to the finish. I wish the movie could have found some way to better balance that mix of when the characters aren’t and then are up to speed, and bring the whole family, including Byrne, who brings such a good exasperated energy, back together faster. C

Rated PG-13 for violence, terror, frightening images, strong language and suggestive references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Patrick Wilson with a screenplay by Scott Teems, Insidious: The Red Door is an hour and 47 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Screen Gems.

Featured photo: Joy Ride

Harrison Ford breaks out the hat and the whip to take another whirl as the titular archaeologist in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

It’s 1969 and Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones (Ford) is a full-blown “hey kids, turn that music down!” grump who is retiring from his job of teaching antiquities to bored young boomers at a New York City college. He lives in a city apartment alone — he and Marion have split up and the movie also sidelined their Shia LeBeouf son, basically undoing most of the 2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull stuff. On the day of his retirement, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) appears in his class. He doesn’t recognize her at first but she later reminds him that she is the daughter of his old friend Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) — and Indy’s long-estranged goddaughter.

In the movie’s opening scenes, we see Basil and Indy attempt to steal back some stolen antiquities from the Nazis in the waning days of World War II. Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) isn’t interested in the “lance that pierced Christ’s side,” the principal historical item the Nazis have been charged with finding. What he wants is Archimedes’ dial, an advanced mechanism designed by the Greek mathematician from the 200s BC. As we eventually learn, Voller and Shaw both theorize that the dial may have some time manipulation abilities.

Back in the present, Shaw the father has died and Helena is in search of the dial for the archaeology of it all, she tells Indy, but later we learn she’s actually a shady dealer in stolen antiquities.

Voller and a team that is a mix of his own goons and CIA agents are following Helena as he also looks for the dial. The U.S. government is essentially indulging Voller in this dial thing; he’s now a Wernher von Braun type for NASA ― help us get to the moon and we won’t be so picky about any activities during the war.

When Helena asks Indiana to help her with her desire to retrieve the dial, he turns her down, but a shootout and chase has him wanted for murder and worried about the trouble Helena has gotten herself into. As Helena begins her quest to sell the dial, Indiana follows her to Morocco, setting up some familiar chases through Middle Eastern streets, where Helena is being hunted both by a local mobster and by the Nazis. She gets help in her schemes from young teenager Teddy (Ethann Isidore), Helena’s, like, conman intern.

My vague memory is that I liked Kingdom of the Crystal Skull better than a lot of people did. It was the kind of “hey, childhood stuff, fun!” we were just starting to get served up and I think the novelty of it plus the “OK time at the movies for the whole family” quality won me over.

I think Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is probably a better movie but now, after so much everything-old-is-new-again IP, less exciting. And yet, if Crystal Skull was the Star Wars prequels, Dial of Destiny is The Force Awakens. It doesn’t give you a brand new thing in the familiar universe; it basically gives you the original thing again, all the stuff you like and expect, right down the middle, no deviations, but with enough real skill to pull it off. We get Indy, a lady and a kid; multiple chases through exotic locales; the Nazis — Dial of Destiny plays all the hits. We get some fun cameos, some nice callbacks and scenes of Indy and Helena walking into an ancient cave that have a vaguely amusement park ride entrance feel. It’s all perfectly fine, very “Indiana Jones movie.” It also reminded me of that odd spot these franchises — your Indiana Jones and Star Wars — are in in that they are basically adventure movies for all ages (or, you know, a lot of ages; there are Nazis and guns and skeletons), not quite kids’ movies but also not not kids movies. You get the sense that the movie worked to add just enough violence to make it to PG-13 so that grown-ups unaccompanied by kids would still buy tickets.

Harrison Ford is also fine — perhaps he, like the movie itself, is not crackling with energy the way the first set of movies did way back in the 1980s. (I mean, most of us who can remember the 1980s probably aren’t crackling with energy either.) But he gets the job done and reminds you of why you like the character.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny doesn’t dim the luster of the series and is fun enough, even if it is longer and at times adds some unnecessary “hat on a hat” elements to its action. B

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by James Mangold and written by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp and James Mangold, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studio Motion Pictures and is two hours and 34 minutes long.

Featured photo: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Wes Anderson puts a diorama in a music box, festoons it with vintage curios and surrounds it with a model train set in Asteroid City, maybe the most “Wes Anderson movie about Wes Anderson vibes” ever? But I feel like I think that at every Wes Anderson movie lately so who knows.

A 1950s black and white television narrator (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to the stage play and its playwright (Edward Norton) that are the origins of the teleplay that becomes the full Santa Fe sunset color palette of a live-action, er, situation we’re watching in this movie, which is written and directed by Anderson (who has a screenplay credit and shares the “story by” credit with Roman Coppola). Sometimes we’re watching the playwright, sometimes we’re with the actors performing the play but mostly we’re in Asteroid City, the name of the play and the name of its setting. Asteroid City is a small clump of buildings in the southwestern desert. A diner, a bus stop, a gas station and motor inn make up the bulk of the town — as well as a complex astronomical government facility built near the site of an ancient crater caused by an asteroid (which is also still there and available for close-up viewing during the posted hours).

In the 1950s, Auggie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzmann), his teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and his three young daughters — Andromeda (Ella Faris), Pandora (Gracie Faris) and Cassiopeia (Willan Faris) — have come to Asteroid City for Woodrow to accept an award for his science project. But their car has a rather spectacular breakdown causing the family to be stuck there, which leads Auggie to call his father-in-law, Stanley (Tom Hanks), to come and get the girls. Stanley agrees to do so if Auggie will finally, three weeks after the fact, explain to the children that their mother, Stanley’s daughter, has died.

Also arriving for the young scientist event are movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her teen daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) as well as other teen inventors, a bus full of school children and their teacher and a group of singing cowboys who miss their connecting bus. Wes Anderson regulars Tilda Swinton as a scientist and Jeffery Wright as a military general are also in Asteroid City as well as the likes of Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Maya Hawke, Steve Park, Matt Dillion, Steve Carell and Seu Jorge. Most of the assembled show up for the science awards ceremony as well as the nighttime viewing of an astronomical event but then find themselves quarantined by the government when an alien shows up to borrow the city’s asteroid. (The alien is, uhm, quite the thing — from the actor, who I won’t spoil, who plays the alien to its odd The Fantastic Mr. Fox appearance. I’m not sure how I feel about it or a very puppety roadrunner who occasionally wanders through Asteroid City but these are capital C Choices and, I guess, if you’re already doing all of this odd business, might as well really go for it with the alien.)

But maybe more than any of this, the movie is about the vibe — the particular rosey gold of the desert sun, the arts-and-craft-y quality of the distant mushroom cloud from regularly detonated atom bomb tests, the bright pastels of the landscape, the sign on the diner advertising 50-cent ham plates. The dollhouse-like motor inn cabins, the symmetrical quality to even asymmetrically arranged shots, the scenes of Scarlett Johansson as a 1950s actress that almost look like movie stills. There’s grief and optimism and sadness and shy bits of romance packed around the rotary phones and film cameras and Pontiacs. It’s all just sort of lovely to be in even if I also felt like I wasn’t watching a story so much as being told about a story. Like a particularly lovely macaron, it’s surprising at times that all this prettiness is a very fragile confection made of quite a bit of air. B

Rated PG-13 on appeal for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Wes Anderson with a screenplay by Wes Anderson, Asteroid City is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Focus Features.

No Hard Feelings (R)

You ask “what would it look like if a 1980s sex comedy was also really bleak” and I answer No Hard Feelings, an alleged comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Maddie Barker (Lawrence) is just barely getting by in Montauk, one of those fancy Long Island places where the real estate market is set by the millionaires and billionaires who summer there while the principal employment for the actual locals is tourism-based. Maddie is behind in paying the taxes on the house her mother left her and doesn’t know how she’ll catch up once her car — which she uses for her second job as an Uber driver — is repo-ed. Tips from her bartending job aren’t enough to pay all the bills, so Maddie desperately scans the used car listings for anything that will keep her earning. What she finds is an odd listing for a Buick. The “price” of the car is to date Percy Becker (Andrew Barth Feldman), a Princeton-bound 19-year-old. Percy’s extremely wealthy parents, Allison (Laura Benanti) and Laird (Matthew Broderick), are worried that their sheltered, quiet, loner son will sink in school if he doesn’t arrive with some life experience. They tell Maddie they will give her the Buick if she befriends and “dates” (in all aspects of the word) Percy to help get him out of his shell.

Maddie dives into the assignment, showing up at Percy’s volunteer job at the local animal shelter to try to sexy-talk him into going back to her house. He mistakes it for a stranger-danger kidnapping and maces her. She manages to get him to ask her on a date where he, unlike her usual hookups, is more interested in getting to know her than rushing into bed. Despite their age difference — Maddie is 32 to Percy’s 19 — Percy warms to the idea of a real relationship with Maddie. And though she hates the rich Montauk crowd and finds Percy’s helplessness aggravating, Maddie starts to feel some kind of genuine friendship for him as well.

No Hard Feelings feels like it could have been a spiritual descendant to your Can’t Buy Me Love-type 1980s capitalism-based rom-com. And for a while I thought maybe I could just go with it sort of like I would with an Overboard, where an on-the-page icky premise can lean into zaniness or a fairy tale-like quality. But this movie is oddly jarring, frequently juxtaposing the “wacky antics” of this kind of comedy with the actual grim reality of a kid whose parents feel they need to/have the right to buy him a girlfriend or of a woman who feels she has to hang on to the family house at all costs. Jennifer Lawrence doing some fairly solid physical comedy melts into a scene where an emotionally traumatized Percy (his high school years were rough, we’re told) seems clinically depressed. “Ha ha yikes” is the frequent mood of this movie.

The movie also gives us quite a bit of the real hopelessness of Montauk economics, not just Maddie’s struggles to stay solvent in a town being taken over by the ultra-rich but her pregnant friend Sara (Natalie Morales) and Sara’s husband Jim (Scott MacArthur) trying to figure out how to get by once their baby comes. She’s a teacher who waitresses in the summer, he owns a business involving some kind of boating-related tourism, and yet they can’t afford to move out of his parents’ house. Their scenes with Maddie provide lightness — and often then go grim.

If this movie has a bright spot — not something I’d go so far as to call a saving grace but a bright spot — it’s that it serves as a reminder that Lawrence is good at broad comedy. This is not a movie I’d put on her highlights reel but maybe this forgettable misfire will get her a stronger comedy that can take advantage of her skills. C-

Rated R for sexual content, language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use, according to filmratings.com. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky with a screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips, No Hard Feelings is an hour and 43 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

Featured photo: Asteroid City

Beings made of Fire, Water, Earth and Air live and work together, sometimes uncomfortably, in Element City, the New World New York City of Elemental, Pixar’s newest animated movie.

Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is the young adult daughter of Cinder (voice of Shila Ommi) and Bernie (voice of Ronnie Del Carmen), immigrants to Element City from Fireland. These flame people (literal burning, flickering flames in a humanoid shape) are part of the most recent of Element City’s many waves of newcomers, which is why their Fire-language names get Ellis Island-ed into Cinder and Bernie and why there is a kind of fear and prejudice against them. None of the Earth or Water residents of Element City wanted to rent an apartment to a pregnant Cinder and Bernie when they first arrived, which is how they ended up in a dilapidated (but not flammable) brick-looking building. Over the years, they fixed it up and opened a market on the bottom floor offering authentic Fireland food. The business thrives, and from a young age Ember is told one day it will be hers. As she has gotten older, Bernie seems eager to hand the market over, if only Ember can prove that she won’t let her flame-y temper get the better of her (and occasionally incinerate some of the stock).

During a big sale, Ember is told to take the lead but finds she has to rush to the basement to do a little private exploding when her frustration with customers gets too much. She inadvertently shakes loose some rickety plumbing, causing a leak of water which includes the Water-person Wade (voice of Mamoudou Athie), a city building inspector. He was sucked into the pipe while inspecting a leak and tearfully tells Ember he will have to write many citations — 30, as it turns out — for all the non-permitted work done to the place, which will result in the business being shut down. After he leaves, Ember chases him down trying to get him to reconsider, a chase that leads her where she never goes — outside her Fire Town neighborhood and into the wider Element City. Ember and Wade spend a day trying to track down supervisors who can possibly override the citations, a day that finds Ember experiencing new things outside of Fire Town and Wade becoming besotted with Ember.

Eventually we learn that while Ember feels her life has been plotted out for her and that to be a good daughter she must take on the store, Wade feels sort of aimless, floating through jobs and regretting all the things he and his father didn’t say to each other before his father died. We also learn that while Ember is a wiz at making market deliveries, her true skills lie in turning sand and glass shards into intricate and artistic new works of tempered glass.

Who is the villain, my kids wanted to know before we saw this movie. As it turns out, xenophobia, the intergenerational pressures of immigrant families and municipal infrastructure neglect are this movie’s “villains.” My elementary schooler’s response? Phrases like “is this movie over yet?” and “can I go to the bathroom again?” At its core, this is a love story between two, like, 20-somethings I guess. It’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding but made in cartoon form (and without Andrea Martin), which makes me question its appeal to any kid audience and not just my kids who want someone being at least naughty as well as a bit of action.

This movie’s intergenerational dynamics also had me thinking about last year’s Pixar movie Turning Red, an infinitely better take on the idea of parental expectations in a family with immigrant roots. In that movie, as with this movie, the central daughter is chafing under the expectations of a parent and trying to balance her own desires with her sense of obligation to her family. In Turning Red, though, the central character is a young teen whose antagonist is frequently her mother in a very relatable way to pretty much any girl and mother. (Sure, they both turned into giant red pandas, but their whole dynamic still felt both very specific to those characters and very familiar to all mothers and daughters.) Here, the character saying “why can’t I just be a good daughter” feels older, more removed from the kids in the audience and less likely to have the adults in the audience saying “yes, that fire-person is me!” the way I felt I’d totally been that giant red panda.

What’s particularly disappointing about the core “is this movie over yet?”-ness of this movie is that the ideas about the Fire, Water, Air and Earth people are interesting — how they move through the world, how they interact with each other — and well-portrayed visually. There are cute bits (a lot of them in the trailer) about, for example, Wade’s family’s swank apartment being essentially a giant swimming pool or Bernie’s food being temperature-hot (and treated as though it was spicy-hot). But these little moments and visual elements are high-quality garnishes without a substantial main dish. C+

Rated PG for some peril, thematic elements and brief language, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Peter Sohn with a screenplay by John Hoberg & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh, Elemental is an hour and 49 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios.

The Flash (PG-13)

The DC Extended Universe hurls Easter eggs at you for two and a half hours in The Flash, the first stand-alone (-ish) outing by Ezra Miller’s titular superhero.

The pelting with, just, stuff — canon, all the canons, but also facts and names and little callbacks — is relentless. And once again we dive into a multiverse, the mention of which caused me to sigh a weary sigh. I don’t inherently hate the multiverse as a story concept but I just feel like it’s one of those things that has been so much a part of the movie soup lately, particularly in our two competing comic book-based cinematic universes. At one point a character explains the multiverse and the consequences of time travel by essentially referencing (and contradicting) a similar bit of explanation in a Marvel film. I think the moment is meant to be cute but it induces a bit of that soul-crushing feeling you get when you come across a giant pile of unwashed laundry or a sink full of dirty dishes at the end of the day. “Ugh, more of this?”

Barry Allen (Miller), the Justice League superhero known as The Flash, is still out there superheroing, saving babies and a dog from a collapsing hospital with his super speed and the like. He’s also working a job in criminal forensics and trying to help his father, Henry Allen (Ron Livingston), get his conviction for murdering Barry’s mother Nora (Maribel Verdu) overturned. His frustration at the lack of evidence that will exonerate his father sends him running, running so fast that he repeats the Speed Force he used to help save the day at the end of the Snyder Cut of the Justice League. In that movie, the Speed Force helped him go back in time a few seconds; this time he goes back in time a full day. He realizes that he may be able to go back even farther, far enough perhaps to prevent the murder of his mother. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) tells him not to mess with time, but Barry can’t resist.

He tweaks the past just enough that his mom won’t need to send his dad to the store at the moment when someone breaks in and stabs her. And it works — he sees, in a kind of reconstructed flow of time, his mom living to celebrate more birthdays and other key life moments. Before he can make it all the way back to his present day, though, a spikey monster appears and knocks him into a point sometime after when his mother would have been killed but before Barry’s present. He goes into his house to find his mother, alive and well, and his father, not in prison, and enjoys a meal with them before he sees himself, some five or so years younger, walking to the house. He goes outside to waylay Young Barry and the two begin to strategize together about how to get Original Barry home to his time.

An attempt to give Young Barry The Flash powers accidentally strips Original Barry of his — and just as General Zod (Michael Shannon) shows up looking for a citizen of Krypton. Thus does Barry turn where he always turns, to Bruce Wayne. But instead of the Batffleck, Barry goes to Wayne Manor and finds an older Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton), who had long ago put away the Bat suit.

Yada yada butterfly effect yada yada multiverse — some spaghetti is involved in alt-Bruce’s exposition about what has likely happened. And, look, it was cute when Spider-Man: No Way Home or even the recent Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse riffed on all the Spider-Men worlds and characters we’ve seen over the last few decades. This movie essentially does that too, going back even further into DC’s past. There are moments when this works, but never quite so well as that “gathering of Spider-Men” in No Way Home where there were some emotional things happening. Here, it feels more, well, thrown at us — hey, remember this thing? Remember the Tim Burton Batman theme song? Remember Man of Steel?

When the movie isn’t putting all its weight on this load-bearing nostalgia, it’s leaning entirely on Miller, wringing every last comedy drop out of Original Barry being annoyed by Goofy, Happy Younger Barry. And then the movie tries to use the Lessons Learned (sorta) by both as the emotional core of the journey and it didn’t feel entirely earned.

The trailer gives it away so I feel comfortable talking about one of this movie’s bright spots: Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), Supergirl who in the Young Barry universe was held prisoner in Russia. As nifty as it is to see the Keaton-era Bat-stuff, I think this new addition to the DC world is my favorite part of this movie. Her terrible treatment means she’s not as hopeful about humanity as Superman(s) but she still has a sense of duty (she was meant to take care of young Kal-El) and a general Super-ness about her. Don’t get me wrong, she gets like an inch of development but for a franchise that generally does not do great by its female characters, the little bit we see of Kara is promising.

I feel like to some extent, if this is your thing, you rushed out and saw this movie, maybe the Thursday night it came out, and have read all the discourse and “Easter Eggs you missed” stuff online and you liked it or have beef with it but either way watching it is sort of your fan obligation. It’s the DCEU (or whatever it becomes as these films transform into new people’s vision) and it’s something you’re going to do regardless of how good any one movie is or isn’t. (The way Marvel fans do with Marvel output, the way Sex and the City fans can’t help but watch And Just Like That.) But for the casual superhero fan or someone just looking for a good popcorn movie, The Flash feels like more work than entertainment. C

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some strong language and partial nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Andy Muschietti with a screenplay by Christina Hodson and Joby Harold, The Flash is two hours and 24 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Featured photo: Elemental

The animal-y Transformers Maximals make their appearance in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts — collect them all, on sale now at a store near you!

Once upon a time, the gorillabot Optimus Primal (voice of Ron Perlman) became leader of a group of other animal bots who escaped a world about to be eaten by Unicron (voice of Colman Domingo), a Death Starry-looking being who is a little bit Sauron and a little bit Galactus. Though he is able to eat the world the Maximals are living on, Unicron can’t move on to other worlds because his helper Scourge (voice of Peter Dinklage) failed to find the energy key thing that will allow him to wormhole throughout the universe. Optimus Primal and crew took the key while escaping the planet, eventually landing on Earth.

In the present day — which is 1994 New York City — Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is just a guy struggling to help his single mom, Breanna (Luna Lauren Velez), and his sick younger brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez), who is being denied medical care for his sickle cell anemia because his family is behind on his bills. Noah loses out on a security job and decides to turn to a buddy offering him some non-violent criminal work. It’s supposed to be an in-and-out job stealing a Porsche from a parking garage. But the car in question turns out to be Mirage (voice of Pete Davidson), an Autobot. And Noah slides into the car just as Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) is calling all Autobots.

A troubling light beam — that only the Transformers can see — marks the location of a reawakened energy key and the possible calling of Scourge and Unicron.

The key was inadvertently reawakened by Elena (Dominique Fishback), an antiquities expert examining artifacts recently delivered to the museum where she works. She knows the hawk sculpture she’s been given isn’t Egyptian or Nubian as was claimed but she didn’t know the piece’s exterior was going to fall away and reveal a large glowstick crystal inside.

Thus do Autobots, Mirage and Noah and Elena all end up near the key, whose light has called Scourge and some other bad guys that are probably available as action figures and in multi-character sets. Eventually they all fight together to try to stop Scourge from taking the key. Noah thinks they should destroy it to prevent Unicron from eating Earth or any other world but Optimus Prime hopes to use it himself to help the Autobots go to their home world. The gang learns that there is another piece of the key they must find and a Maximal hawkbot called Airazor (voice of Michelle Yeoh) shows up to help them find it.

I was a little surprised to learn that Rise of the Beasts earned a PG-13 rating — it is perhaps the closest live-action analog to those many Transformer cartoons on Netflix that seem to transfix my kids despite seeming to me like a lot of exposition punctuated by very basic fight scenes. The “real” nature of the robots and people (and thus the “realness” of the violence they’re involved in) might put it out of reach for my younger elementary school kids but for interested tweens it’s probably fine. There’s no icky Michael Bay-ish male gaze stuff, and nothing jumps out at me as being super inappropriate for your average double-digit-age kid. Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback are both likable, capable people without having a whole lot of personality beyond that.

“This movie would be fine to take a nap to” is a thought I had while watching it, as was “the Transformer action figures this movie is advertising should be cheaper” (you can find some for $10-ish but $15 and up seems more common). This movie is benign enough that I don’t mind that I’m watching a two-hour-plus commercial for a Mirage action figure — particularly if they could price him at $9.99.

Perhaps the movie anticipated some parental grumpiness and thus to keep the elders amused it throws in a few 1990s hip-hop needle drops that have you thinking “aw, hey, that song” and then drifting off on nostalgia. So, if “benign OK-ness for much of the family” is what this movie was shooting for, it basically hits its mark. Maybe it climbs to a B- if your kids are old enough for this sort of thing and you’re just looking for tolerable family entertainment, a C+ for everybody else.

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Steven Caple Jr. with a screenplay by Joby Harold and Darnell Matayer & Josh Peters and Erich Hoeber & Jon Hoeber, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is two hours and seven minutes long and distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Featured photo: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts