Category: Film Reviews by Amy

A girl wishes upon a star and the star comes down to hang out in Wish, an underbaked mush of a fairy tale about the eternal struggle between security and liberty that also has the feel of a half-hearted Disney IP origin story.

Asha (voice of Ariana DeBose) is a 17-year-old living back in the once upon a time on the Mediterranean-y island of Rosas, which is ruled by King Magnifico (voice of Chris Pine), who founded the city-state years earlier with his wife Queen Amaya (Angelique Cabral). King Magnifico is a good sorcerer and he designed Rosas as a land where people of all backgrounds could come and live together in peace and safety under his rule — so right away you know he’s a villain. But this would be a real short movie if everyone else realized it, so the people of Rosas just think of him as a benevolent ruler who grants wishes. Every citizen gives Magnifico their wishes when they turn 18 — wishes being represented by a sort of glowy bubble — and he keeps them safe. Regularly, he picks one citizen to have their wish come true, which he accomplishes with his magic. In the meantime, the adult populace is not burdened by these wishes, the content of which they forget.

Asha is interviewing to be his apprentice and help him with his magic-ing. Perhaps she’s a little hopeful that doing this will help her 100-year-old grandfather Sabino (voice of Victor Garber) and her mother Sakina (voice of Natasha Rothwell) get their wishes granted. But when she sees her grandfather’s wish bubble floating around Magnifico’s wish bubble arboretum and asks Magnifico to grant it, he basically says “no job for you” explaining that her grandfather’s vague desire to create something that inspires future generations could lead to revolution or violence.

A dejected Asha later sings a song about wanting more for her people than All Of This and poof, a star appears. The star is a cute little blob of a thing that squeaks around and sprinkles glitter dust, giving animals, like Asha’s pet goat Valentino (voice of Alan Tudyk), the ability to talk and sing another song about how we are all made of star dust. Asha becomes determined to retrieve her family’s wishes — and eventually everybody’s wishes — so people can have the chance to make them come true on their own. As Asha’s friends observe of their 18-year-old buddy Simon (voice of Evan Peters), giving up their wish makes people a little less themselves, less whole.

Meanwhile, the magical light show caused when the star came to Earth has Magnifico worried that someone else is using magic and challenging his rule. He can’t figure out what’s going on with his own good-guy magic so he turns to a book of dark magic and also asking people to fink on each other to try to find this Threat to Rosas. He goes from being a basically benign dictator who is maybe a little too impressed with his own handsomeness to being a megalomaniac who won’t tolerate any dissent because one teen girl asked him a question.

Also, Asha maybe invents animation using the tiny-drawing-on-a-page-corner flipbook method?

We get a lot of information about the Wish — how it makes people feel to give it to Magnifico, how he cares for them, what he does with them when he gets his dark magic, why he is such a helicopter mom about people’s hopes and dreams. There is a general “Magnifico lost his birth family in a land riven with strife,” which is what pushed him to make a cheery dystopia. But there is a sense of “oh and also this” when it comes to story elements rather than a clear, streamlined story with clear motivations for Magnifico. Similarly, the movie is filled with general Disney Easter Eggs that often play as in-jokes and almost appear to maybe sort of build up to something — “and that’s how A became B” — but also don’t really. All the nods to Peter Pan and Bambi etc. (and all the visuals that feel like “remember that cottage from Sleeping Beauty? This isn’t that but hey made you think of it didn’t we?”) feel more like a fast food “100 years of Disney” promotional meal package than a real story. There’s a world in which Disney just creates a montage of discussion of wishes and dreams with clips from its movie library and achieves the same thing (that thing I think being the centrality of wishes and dreams to Disney stories) with more genuine emotion and brevity.

Wish feels like a movie that had some general ideas of what it wanted to do and where it wanted to go but had no clear idea how to get there and so it just filled in the gaps with “default Disney story” stuff. Likewise, the music feels very much like someone shoved Frozen and Moana into a food processor and this is the texture-less paste that came out. The songs here read as extremely first-drafty and forgettable.

All that said, my kids and other kids in a very full theater seemed to be mostly hanging in with this movie — perking up the most when Valentino the goat was in on the action (the line, which also appears in the trailers, that involves him saying he found a secret door with his butt got a big laugh). The talking animals do provide some nice moments of weirdness and I wish (ha) the movie had gone more in on that kind of goofiness than on creating something that feels more like a commemorative coin than a lively new story. C+

Rated PG for thematic elements and mild action, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn with a screenplay by Jennifer Lee & Allison Moore, Wish is an hour and 35 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios.

Trolls Band Together

Poppy, Branch and the crew reunite for a caper winding them through the music of pop boy bands of the last 30+ years in Trolls Band Together, a perfectly cromulent hour and a half of kid entertainment.

Poppy (voice of Anna Kendrick), queen of the Trolls, and Branch (voice of Justin Timberlake), her frequently grumpy boyfriend, prepare for the marriage of Poppy’s good friend Bridget (voice of Zooey Deschanel) and Gristle (voice of Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Bridget and Gristle are both Bergens, who are larger and more monstery than Trolls and used to eat Trolls but now everybody parties together. As Bridget and Gristle say their I-dos, the ceremony is interrupted by John Dory (voice of Eric Andre), Branch’s long-estranged brother. Branch and his four brothers were once members of the boy band BroZone together but broke up after a concert went wrong when they tried to achieve the perfect family harmony. John Dory wants the group back together to give perfection another try as he thinks it will be the only thing that can break the diamond bottle their brother Floyd (voice of Troye Sivan) is being held in. Floyd was trollnapped by Velvet (voice of Amy Schumer) and Veneer (voice of Andrew Rannells), a brother-sister pop duo of plasticy-looking creatures. They are personally talentless but have devised a way of draining Floyd of his talent to make them seem like the superstar vocalists they pretended to be.

As Floyd was Branch’s kindest brother, he decides to join John Dory on his quest, eventually scooping up other brothers Spruce (Daveed Diggs), who now calls himself Bruce and runs a resort with his wife and many children, and Clay (voice of Kid Cudi) to rescue Floyd. Along the way, the gang comes across an old Bergen putt-putt course that is now home to a band of Trolls left behind in Bergen Town all those years ago when Poppy and her father, then-King Peppy (voice of Walt Dohrn), escaped. As has already been spoiled in some of the trailers, one of those Trolls is a fast-talking, quick-hair-braiding, high-energy Troll named Viva (voice of Camila Cabello), Poppy’s long-lost sister. Viva is excited to see Poppy again but does not know about or believe the news that Trolls and Bergens are now friends.

As with other entries in this jukebox sugarfest series, Trolls Band Together pastes together bits of boy band song elements — reaching back to Boyz II Men and New Kids on the Block as well as Timberlake’s own NSYNC, which delivers a new original song for this movie and all the moms seeing it who remember a boy band fandom of their youth. It’s cute, as the music always is in these movies, though this one doesn’t feel quite as tune-packed as previous entries. This movie also feels less about Poppy than previous entries, which focused on Poppy’s leadership or Poppy’s friendship with Branch. Here, she feels more along for the ride.

And that’s all fine. These movies aren’t Pixar-in-its-prime levels of story-telling and visual delight. But they are fast-moving, upbeat, silly and occasionally weird in a way that provides a nice little tart element to all this cotton candy. They are kid-friendly without being actively adult off-putting. B-

Rated PG for some mild rude and suggestive humor, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Walt Dohrn and Tim Heitz with a screenplay by Elizabeth Tippet, Trolls Band Together is an hour and 31 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Wish.

Coriolanis Snow grows from an ambitious teenager into the guy who will one day be Donald Sutherland in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel to the Katniss-era Hunger Gameses based on the book by the same name.

In the movie’s main timeline, Coriolanis (Tom Blyth) is a high school senior or something who is trying to win a big scholarship that will not only cover his university tuition but also get money to his family. The Snows were once a big noise in the Capitol, the ruling city of Panem, the dystopia where all this business is set. But then there was a rebellion and both of Coriolanis’ parents died and now they are sort of shabby gentry with Coriolanis and his big-sister-like cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafter) living with their grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) in an apartment they can’t quite afford. On the day when Coriolanis expects his winning of the Plinth Prize to be announced, the school’s head Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, who seems like he’s really trying) tells the top students that they have one more task before anyone’s getting any scratch. They will all become mentors for competitors in the upcoming Hunger Games, a death match ritual featuring children from the 12 Districts the Capitol rules.

The Hunger Games, now in their 10th year, are not the hot-ticket reality show Super Bowl-like blowout they are in the later movies. Their ratings have declined so much the ruling government seems on the fence about whether they should still have them. Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), a games designer and bio-weapons designer and general nutcase, is really insistent that they continue and I think hopes the mentors will jazz them up a little. Though why exactly is unclear. As viewed in this movie (and actually, in the whole series), the Hunger Games seem like a waste of time (and an easy target for dissenters) for this authoritarian regime that seems to be having enough trouble just keeping itself out of civil war.

Anyway, victory by the competitors in the games will mean victory for the students competing for the Plinth Prize. And “victory” doesn’t necessarily mean being the last gamer standing. It can also mean having a competitor with a compelling story who gets people to tune in. Lucky for Coriolanis, his mentee is Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler, having fun with what she’s given). When Lucy Gray’s name is called during the reaping, she responds with a knowing smile. As she walks to the podium, surrounded by whispers, in a fancy Belle Epoque-y dancing girl dress, she stops to put a snake down a girl’s back and then she sings a defiant little song into the mic. A member of a tribe of traveling musicians, she’s known for twangy folk tunes and boyfriend seducin’. So much more personable than the girl with tuberculosis!

Snow quickly figures out how to play the publicity game element of the Hunger Games, helping to develop some of the elements — donate to your favorite player! — that will become an important part of the Games in the later years. Also giving hints to what the Games will become is a theatrical weatherman named Lucky Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman) who is trying to make this show all it can be.

Dinklage might be the guy doing more Serious Acting than this movie warrants, but Schwartzman seems to be the guy really finding a tone and leaning all the way in with it. His Lucky doesn’t exactly fit with the vibe of the rest of the movie, but he’s definitely the film’s most entertaining element.

This movie falls somewhere between “the dark education of a could-go-either-way Coriolanis Snow” and “a guy who starts off as an ambitious opportunist remains ambitious, sees opportunities.” As the Games progress, Coriolanis’ desire to have Lucy Gray be successful for his own goals turns into actual desire for Lucy Gray. They are, for a while, in love. Or either one or both of them is playing a long con to use the other for their advancement in this morally bankrupt society. Or life is complicated and both things are true. Intellectually, I like that the movie lets you read the story it’s telling in a few different ways. In fact, the more I thought about the way this movie’s character motivations were constructed, the more interesting I found it.

After the fact.

In the moment, sitting in the theater, this made for some very slow, boring storytelling. I know who Snow is going to become and this movie doesn’t really give me a reason to care how he got that way. And I feel like I’m watching the teen soap operaversion of Hunger Games dystopia — it’s all smaller, snottier and more high school. The big scary Panem Capitol and its rulers don’t even seem quite as all-powerful and authoritarian here as in the original movies — they are basically every familiar aristocracy of rich jerks you’ve ever seen anywhere, from Gossip Girl to, like, real life.

I’ll give the movie this: It’s visually interesting in a “huh, neat” kind of way, with its riff on a past that sort of fits with the future we see in the original films. But “huh neat” is not enough to sustain two hours and 37 minutes of movie. C+

Rated PG-13 for strong violent content and disturbing material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Frances Lawrence with a screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt (from the book by Suzanne Collins), The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is two hours and 37 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

The Holdovers (R)

A grumpy classics teacher is forced to babysit the kids left at a Massachusetts boys school for the Christmas holiday in 1970 in The Holdovers, a movie directed by Alexander Payne.

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the most “Paul Giamatti character” of Paul Giamatti characters. A classics professor who eats and sleeps his job, he is a surly tyrant to his students, difficult with the school’s headmaster (Andrew Garman) and just sort of awkward around everyone else.

After handing out a bunch of D and F grades on a test to his students, berating them about their performance and general intelligence and assigning them homework during the break, Paul finds out that he will also be working over vacation. The teacher who had been expected to stay at the school to watch the handful of boys who weren’t going home weaseled out of the assignment and the headmaster, still mad that Paul wouldn’t pass an important donor’s son, makes Paul do it. Not only do the boys have to stay at school but they must all move to barrack-like lodgings in the infirmary because the heat will be off in their normal dorms. And Paul has decided that they need a regular schedule of outdoor exercise (in the Massachusetts winter) and study. And they all have to eat together in the school dining hall, where food is cooked by Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who warns Paul not to expect anything too great because there won’t be any new shipments of ingredients until the new year.

Mary, the head of the dining services, is stuck at the school in a different way — her son Curtis was a student but recently died in Vietnam. She feels like she needs to stay in this place, the last place they were together, at least for this, her first Christmas without him.

Eventually, the handful of boys is whittled down to just one — Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a boy who was told at the last minute by his mother that he needed to stay at school so she and her new husband could have a honeymoon. Deeply resentful and heartbroken about this, Angus is also generally having a hard time. He’s been kicked out of a few previous schools and doesn’t have close friends at this one. He’s mourning the loss of his father and is angry about how his mother has moved on. And Angus and Paul have the natural irritation for each other that two people with a lot of the same qualities can easily have.

Three people trying, sometimes failing, to deal with the stuff life has thrown at them is the core of this movie and these three people forming an unlikely, temporary family unit makes up the bulk of what moves the story along. This very familiar kind of tale plus the very conscious 1970s vibe of the movie (right down to the “film” hisses and pops that kick off the movie’s audio) and the “everything you expect from a Paul Giamatti character” nature of Paul shouldn’t work, it should feel like the most done of “it’s been done” movies. And yet, for me, it all came together. That was a nice, kind movie — was my reaction, which sounds damning but wasn’t. It all coalesces — the core three performances, the little moments each actor gets to show you into the layers of their character, the most sitcom-like humor. The Holdovers was quietly charming and tartly gentle. B+

Rated R for language, some drug use and brief sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Alexander Payne with a screenplay by David Hemingson, The Holdovers is two hours and 13 minutes and is distributed in theaters by Focus Features.

Featured photo: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau team up, much to Ms. Marvel’s teenage-fangirl glee, in The Marvels, a mostly fun adventure movie in spite of some Marvel Cinematic Universe “did you do your homework?”-ing.

I came to this movie slightly more prepared than usual with these Marvel movies that have TV series tie-ins, having seen — and absolutely loved — the Ms. Marvel series all about high schooler Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a comics-making, Avengers-loving Pakistani-American girl from Jersey City. I did not see the Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson)-centric Secret Invasion or WandaVision, where I gather we meet the grown-up Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris). But it’s fine; the movie recaps enough about who everybody is and their relationships to each other — like, for example, that Monica still thinks of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) as Aunt Carol Danvers, best friend of her mother, the late Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), who died during the five years Monica was Blipped away.

Monica has superpowers now and works for Nick Fury at the S.H.I.E.L.D.-in-space-like S.A.B.E.R. Carol/Captain Marvel is still traveling the universe looking to help people, basically alone except for her cat, Goose, who is a tentacle-mouthed Flerken. Kamala is still in Jersey, still in high school, still making comics when she should be doing homework — as her loving and rightfully suspicious mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff) reminds her.

Muneeba, Kamala’s dad Yusuf (Mohan Kapur) and Kamala’s older brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh) are deeply confused when, after a crashing noise upstairs, Captain Marvel comes down from Kamala’s room. At the same time Kamala finds herself floating in space, where Fury, watching from a space station, had expected to see Monica, who is suddenly on the strange planet where we had just seen Carol. It seems that some kind of space-time-portal-thingies have entangled Carol, Kamala and Monica and whenever they use their powers, they change places. This phenomenon has something to do with the bangle (one identical to the one Kamala wears) that Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), our antagonist, has dug up and put on. Dar-Benn, a Kree warrior/leader person, is trying to use the power she gains from the bangle to transport, via wormhole, resources from other planets to her people’s dying homeworld, Hala. From a Skrull planet, she steals the atmosphere. From another planet, she attempts to steal the water. From Earth’s solar system, she intends to steal the sun.

(OK, so — Skrull, Kree, Flerken, Blip? Translation: The first two are warring aliens who appeared in Captain Marvel and other MCU properties, a Flerken is a cat that’s really an alien and the Blip was the whole Thanos thing. And, Thanos? Look, I don’t feel like this is anybody’s MCU entry point but if it is maybe just take notes for post-film Wikipedia-ing. It took catching a bit of Captain Marvel for me to remember “oh, yeah, Hala is a thing we know.” Meanwhile, we are introduced to a brand new planet, Aladna, and an alien people who communicate largely through song and I feel like, if we want to pile on the lore, why not go with new, delightfully weird lore like that?)

Monica and Carol haven’t reconnected since Monica was a child and of course everybody seems a little uneasy about bringing teenage Kamala to intergalactic battles. But the three women eventually realize that their tangled powers mean they need to work together.

The movie has some fun with the powers-tangling concept. The scene that sort of introduces the three superheroines to each other features a prolonged fight with the three swapping places throughout, occasionally pulling bad guys with them, which is how the Khan family ends up fighting Kree and how Goose ends up at the family home, at one point eating some Khan family knick-knacks. It’s choreographed for maximum fun, with the three characters figuring out the rules and what their powers are and who they’re fighting. Later we get a training montage of the three learning how to use the position swaps so they can mount a fight against Dar-Benn.

I also appreciate that the movie pulls the Khans into the adventure, as Kamala’s family was so central to her story. Plus Shroff’s Muneeba is great and I found myself wishing that the movie had given her some superhero-ing of her own. Muneeba’s “you’re not allowed to go on a space adventure” protectiveness also helps to root Kamala’s character in her teenagerness.

The chemistry between the three women is nice too. We don’t get some antagonism-for-the-sake-of-antagonism shoved into the relationships. Instead, we get Carol and Monica reckoning with their past and all three of them learning to work together and value each other’s contributions. It’s a small thing but it keeps the movie relatively light and fun.

The Marvels mostly keeps its head above the Kree/Skrull-ness MCU soup but it does feel like a struggle. The whole business of Dar-Benn’s planet and Captain Marvel’s past feels like it gets in the way of really setting this movie free to be the buddy-adventure it wants to be. B

Rated PG-13 for action/violence and brief language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Nia DaCosta with a screenplay by Nia DaCosta and Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik, The Marvels is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed by Walt Disney Studios in theaters.

Featured photo: The Marvels.

Pain Hustlers (R)

Our medical system is broken is the big takeaway from Pain Hustlers, a fictional tale of pharmaceutical salespeople framed as a documentary.

Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is an exotic dancer working the lunch shift to attempt to make enough money to cover her and her teen daughter Phoebe’s (Chloe Coleman) bills. After losing that job because she has to rush to get Phoebe out of some high school trouble, Liza calls Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a pharmaceutical salesman who offered her a job a day earlier he was unsuccessfully trying to woo a doctor at her club. She shows up with a probably inflated resume and he inflates it further before introducing her to Dr. Jack Neel (Andy Garcia), the head of the drug company that is at the moment circling the drain. Their spray-under-the-tongue fentanyl-based pain medication can’t crack into the market currently dominated by a fentanyl lollipop. Liza gets a one-week tryout — get a doctor to prescribe the spray and she’s got a job with extremely good commissions; fail and she’s out. At the last minute of the work week Liza gets Dr. Nathan Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) to prescribe the drug to one patient — and she gets him on the hook for more prescriptions by signing him on to the company’s speaker program, a thing she created as she pitched him. Pharmaceutical speaker programs are, as Pete explains to us, a common way to thank high-prescribing doctors wherein doctors get money for giving speeches to other doctors and the whole lavish event, with food and booze and drug reps in tight dresses, is paid for by the pharmaceutical company. Though Liza and Pete begin their program on a shoestring, they are able to get Lydell prescribing and then expand their reach to other doctors, first in Florida and then spreading nationwide. Along the way, Liza gets a series of promotions and is able to improve life dramatically for herself and Phoebe — moving from a motel to a waterfront apartment and getting Phoebe into a private school.

Of course, growing a market means that these drugs, meant for cancer patients in extreme pain, need to constantly find new customers and at higher doses, so the company starts pushing doctors to prescribe to other kinds of patients and then offering reps higher commissions on more potent versions. Though Liza desperately needs hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to pay for a brain surgery for Phoebe not covered by their insurance, she starts to worry that they’re not just helping suffering cancer patients but addicting people.

Blunt does a good job at giving us a rounded portrait of a woman who is trying to work her way out of poverty and is neither a saint nor an amoral cutthroat about how she does that. She hungers for respectability and the security but she isn’t willing to live with going beyond the gray area of doing, as Pete says, 67 in a 65. And Blunt and Evans have a nice chemistry as co-conspirators.

Not unlike Hustlers or The Big Short, Pain Hustlers gives you a con, with its entertaining build and its inevitable fall with a bit of bounciness, but it doesn’t completely look away from the idea that it all came at the expense of people who just wanted to not be in pain and live their lives. B-

Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and drug use, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by David Yates with a screenplay by Wells Tower (and based loosely on the New York Times magazine article by Evan Hughes), Pain Hustlers is two hours and two minutes long and distributed by Netflix, where it is streaming.

Five Nights at Freddy’s (PG-13)

The animatronic mascots at an abandoned family restaurant get murderous in Five Nights at Freddy’s, a horror movie based on a video game franchise.
Which I’ve never played — to me this is just a movie with not-bad bones: animatronic mascots forgotten and slowly decaying, abandoned riff on a Charles Entertainment Cheese-like establishment, a night watchman who has just enough trauma and sleep issues that maybe he could be hallucinating.

Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is that security guy, taking an exceptionally terrible job at this obviously haunted/cursed/just sad long-closed restaurant. He will accept basically any employment to remain a viable guardian for his young sister Abby (Piper Rubio), orphaned/abandoned after the dissolution of their family due to the long-ago kidnapping of Mike’s young brother Garrett (Lucas Grant). Having blamed himself for the kidnapping for decades (Garrett went missing on a family camping trip and Mike is certain he must have seen the kidnapper), Mike uses a variety of sleep aids to push him back to the memory of that moment. So he sleeps but never rests and works the night shift while trying to care for his quiet, troubled-seeming sister — a perfect recipe for a guy who isn’t sure what to believe when the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza start to act sentient.
The movie doesn’t really pay off on either the fun or the creepiness of this setup. Instead we get a movie that can’t seem to figure out how dark it wants to be mixed in with a child custody plot and the appearance of Police Officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), whose whole deal makes less sense the more we learn about her. C-

Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images and language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Emma Tammi with a screenplay by Scott Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback & Emma Tammi, Five Nights at Freddy’s is an hour and 50 minutes long and is released by Universal Studios. It’s in theaters and streaming on Peacock.

Old Dads (R)

Bill Burr plays a version of himself as a Gen X-er raising a young son in a millennial and zoomer world in the Netflix comedy Old Dads.

Jack Kelly (Burr) has a son in preschool and another kid on the way with wife Leah (Katie Aselton). He lives in a nice suburban house in Los Angeles and has recently sold the profitable T-shirt business he owned with fellow Xers and longtime friends Mike (Bokeem Woodbine) and Connor (Bobby Cannavale). He has what appears to be a nice life and yet he is filled with a rage at the annoyances of the modern world, most of which he expresses in a “you know what’s wrong with your generation?” rant. His aggravation seems particularly acute in dealing with zoomer Aspen Bell (Miles Robbins), the new head of the T-shirt company where Jack, Mike and Connor still have to work (and behave) to cash in on their equity.

There is comedy to be mined in generational differences and raising a child as a parent in their 40s or 50s versus 20s or 30s — the difference between, for example, how an older parent would relate to a peer-aged teacher versus a younger teacher, or how older and younger parents might approach managing their kids. But the movie goes more for the low-hanging fruit of just mocking the performatively progressive upperclass Angeleno. We don’t really get a Gen X-versus-Millennials showdown or one guy’s experiences as an older parent.

It’s more just an angry audience surrogate ranting at the very online.
A bigger problem for Old Dads is that all of the life-stuff Burr addresses here — raising kids as a person in middle age, overcoming general knee-jerk anger, generational differences, marriage stuff, the times in which we live — is addressed much more sharply, smartly and funnily in Burr’s own standup, a lot of which is also available on Netflix. If you want Burr’s angry-Northeasterner take on all that, done with humility and nuance and self-awareness, seek those shows out. If you’re just looking for a comedy with adults swearing and an occasional moment of sitcom-y “ha, funny,” sure, Old Dads has that. Just not as much of that second part as I would have liked. C+

Rated R for pervasive language, sexual material, nudity and brief drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Bill Burr and co-written by Bill Burr & Ben Tishler, Old Dads is an hour and 44 minutes long and distributed by Netflix, where it is currently streaming.

Expend4bles (R)

Even Jason Statham is not strong enough to carry the lifeless fourth outing of a jokey action series in Expend4bles.

It gives me no pleasure to say that, because I generally like this series and the “action stars of previous decades super-group” philosophy around which it’s built.

Here, Statham’s Lee Christmas is basically the center of the story after Barney (Sylvester Stallone), head of the CIA freelancer group The Expendables, is sidelined during a failed mission to get nuclear whatevers from Libya before bad guy Rahmat (Iko Uwais) can steal them for badder guy Ocelot, a mystery villain Barney battled in the past. Gina (Meghan Fox) takes over running the Expendables show with their CIA handler Marsh (Andy Garcia) taking a more hands-on role as they pursue Rahmat.

Lee, pushed out of the group for a nonsense reason, tries to go it alone to chase Rahmat and Ocelot, turning for some assistance to Decha (Tony Jaa).
In addition to Stallone and Statham, Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture are among the original expendables still in play. Terry Crews, Jet Li and Arnold Schwarzenegger sit this one out along with the last film’s additions, which included Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas and Ronda Rousey. Instead, we get Fox, Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent), Jacob Scipio and Levy Tran who do not have the sparkle of those OG members.

Also missing here is an overall sense of fun. We don’t get any cutesy surprise cameos a la Chuck Norris in the second movie or Harrison Ford in the third — and of course no Bruce Willis, who appeared in the first two. This kind of 1980s/1990s action star wattage was a load-bearing element of those earlier entries and its lack here leaves the movie an overall shakier structure (outside of Jaa, a star who rose in the aughts and who is a nice addition).

Strip those things away and issues that have probably always been there are more keenly felt. Such as, this isn’t the snappiest dialogue ever written and the actors speak it as though this is the first time they’ve ever seen these lines. The story doesn’t, at all, make sense and yet it’s nearly not bonkers enough.

Perhaps new to this movie is how slow everything feels. Sure, there’s punching and kicking and explosions, but it feels like we’re getting these elements delivered in more of a low-flow stream than the non-stop punch-splosion you’d want. C

Rated R for strong/bloody violence throughout, language and sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Scott Waugh with a screenplay by Kurt Wimmer & Tad Daggerhart and Max Adams, Expend4bles is an hour and 43 minutes long and distributed by Lionsgate and is available for rent or purchase via VOD.

Strays (R)

Reggie, a good-natured rube of a small fluffy dog voiced by Will Ferrell, has the sudden realization that his owner is garbage in Strays, a live-action, extremely-R-rated dog adventure comedy.

Reggie (voice of Ferrell, doing peak Elf-ish Ferrell) thinks he’s playing a challenging game of fetch when his dirt-bag human Doug (Will Forte) drives him miles away from their home, throws a ball and then drives away. Reggie retrieves the ball and always manages to return, much to the annoyance of Doug, who never wanted a dog and only kept Reggie in the breakup with his girlfriend to be a jerk. Reggie just wants Doug to acknowledge that he, Reggie, is a good-boy dog.

But during a particularly far-afield game of fetch, Reggie realizes in telling French bulldog Bug (voice of Jamie Foxx), Hunter (voice of Randall Park) and Maggie (voice of Isla Fisher) about Doug that Doug is in fact a terrible owner. Reggie decides to hurt Doug by taking away the one thing that Doug truly cares about in life — one R-rated piece of Doug’s anatomy. Bug, a stray dog, and Hunter and Maggie, dogs with laissez faire owners, decide to travel with Reggie to find Doug and see if Reggie really will, uhm, get him where it hurts.

I had few expectations for this movie beyong hoping that it would be not too boring, maybe even mildly entertaining. And it clears that bar of extremely mild entertainment. Most of the humor is based on dog behavior — eating gross stuff, sniffing other dogs’ bums, humping things — and most of it is fine, not particularly smart but not aggressively off-putting. Pre-existing Will Ferrell-ness helps to make Reggie a character we can project personality. Occasionally the movie has a funny bit (there is a runner about an invisible fence) or a cute cameo and I found myself often thinking “ha” without actually laughing. C+

Rated R for pervasive language, like seriously, and crude and sexual content (also, really and a lot) and drug use, like this is rated R don’t let the dogs fool you, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josh Greenbaum with a screenplay by Dan Perrault, Strays is an hour and 33 minutes long and is distributed by Universal Studios. It is available for rent or purchase and it is streaming on Peacock.

Featured photo: Pain Hustlers.