Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Nia Vardalos and her My Big Fat Greek Wedding players travel to Greece for a vacation wherein they occasionally shoot some scenes for a movie in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 — at least that’s what seems to be happening here.

Toula Portokalos (Vardalos) and her husband Ian Miller (Jon Corbett) are both dealing with the recent deaths of their respective fathers and their first year of empty-nesterdom with daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris) in her first year of college. Toula’s mother, Maria (Lainie Kazan), also seems to be dealing with memory loss, putting a further strain on the wider family, which is seeing its older generation fade away.

To fulfill a promise to her father and perhaps to recapture some of that family togetherness, Toula decides to go to Greece to find her father’s boyhood friends. She is joined by Ian and Paris as well as Toula’s brother Nick (Louis Mandylor), Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin), Aunt Frieda (Maria Vacratsis) and Aristotle (Elias Kacavas), the young man Frieda and Voula are trying to push Paris together with. They meet Victory (Melina Kotselou), the young mayor of Toula’s father’s island village, who has arranged a village reunion to bring residents back to the basically empty town. One of the village’s few residents is Alexandra (Anthi Andreopoulou), an old woman who knew Toula’s father back in the day and who has quasi-adopted Qamar (Stephanie Nur), a Syrian refugee who is secretly dating Christos (Giannis Vasilottos). Their relationship is secret because Christos’s father, Peter (Alexis Georgoulis), insists that Christos only marry a Greek woman.

(Side note: Stephanie Nur, who doesn’t get a whole lot to do here, is also solid in the goofy but low-effort watchable Paramount+ show Special Operations: Lioness. I hope the visibility of these two “meh” endeavors helps to push her into bigger, meatier roles.)

Every scene here has the kind of loose, first-attempt feeling of something that the actors have just discussed. It’s like “in this scene, everybody in the family is asleep and then a goat wanders into the house. Now — action!” The 2002 original My Big Fat Greek Wedding definitely had a “little indie that could” feel to go with its winning charm but this feels rougher, somehow. Vardalos is credited as both the writer and director here but there is much more of a “wacky setup, wacky reaction” almost improv feel to each scene than I remember from the first movie.

And yet.

Somehow, genuine emotion works itself into all the loosely stitched together scenes in this movie. Real stuff about parents getting older and kids finding their life and how family changes over time manages to add sweetness — occasionally, bittersweetness — to this story and these characters we’ve seen age from the baby-faced people we are reminded of in the opening credits to the middle-aged and older people we see in this movie. The movie doesn’t have the same fresh and lived-experience feel that the original does but this quality does give it charm.

And, of course, there’s Andrea Martin — always fun and always leaving you wanting more. C+

Rated PG-13 for suggestive material and some nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Nia Vardalos, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is an hour and 31 minutes and is distributed by Focus Features in theaters.

Featured photo: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3

More sharks eat more people in Meg 2: The Trench, a sequel to 2018’s The Meg.

Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is headed back to the ocean for a deep water exploration and brings along Meiying (Sophia Cai), the now teenage daughter of Suyin (Li Bingbing), the lady scientist who I guess married Jonas after the events of the first movie but sadly died before the events of this movie, probably of reading the script for this sequel. Meiying is eager to be involved with the family business of ocean exploration — her uncle Jiuming (Wu Jing) now runs the research at the Mana One, an oil-platform-like scientific facility near the Mariana Trench. He’s received funding from businesswoman Hillary Driscoll (Sienna Guillory, whom the movie so badly wants to be Parker Posey) and somehow he’s able to justify keeping a megalodon, one of the giant dinosaur sharks from the last movie, as a little pet.

Most of the major characters, and a few that we won’t miss when they get eaten, load into two submarines to head down into the Mariana Trench and explore. They find sharks, sure, but also a far more unexpected creature — man!

That man is represented by Montes (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), the leader of a gang of sketchy dudes who are performing some sort of mining operation in the deep. Attempting to get rid of those goody-goody scientists, Montes detonates the mining explosives and now it becomes a race for everyone to survive the intense pressure, the hungry animals and the violence-perpetrating bad guys in the deep of the ocean and get back to the surface.

In its final third or so, Meg 2 gets very dumb/much better with more man vs. other man vs. trench-creature face-offs, the introduction of a giant octopus and lots of people being eaten, to include in a shot from inside a shark’s mouth when we get to see it chomp down on some vacationers. This, I thought during that shot in particular, this should have been the whole movie — terrible CGI and loathsome characters being eaten. Instead the movie spends a laughable amount of time trying to, like, set up motivations, tell us a little story about corporate greed destroying the environment and let us get to know the characters (inartfully, but still it wastes time on this). I am not here for character development; I am here for big, goofy-looking sharks chomping on people. “More goofy sharks in this goofy shark movie, please” is what I thought for most of the movie. C

Rated PG-13 for action/violence, some bloody images, language and brief suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Ben Wheatley with a screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris, Meg 2: The Trench is one hour and 56 minutes long and is distributed by Warner Bros. It is available for rent or purchase via VOD.

Featured photo: Meg 2: The Trench

Two lifelong besties do the kind of brutal (psychological) violence to each other that only two middle school girls can do in You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, an Adam Sandler family production.

The girl having the titular bat mitzvah in her friend group’s season of bar and bat mitzvahs is Stacy Friedman, played by Sunny Sandler, the younger of Adam Sandler’s two real-life daughters. His older daughter Sadie plays Ronnie Friedman, Stacy’s older sister, and their genuine sibling chemistry — unwavering support while also threatening to murder each other — is one of many endearing elements of this comedy. Stacy and Lydia Rodriguez Katz (Samantha Lorraine) have long been best friends, planning their spectacular “today you are a woman” bat mitzvah parties for years. But then, as can happen in the seventh grade, there are shake-ups in friendships. Lydia becomes friendly with a group of popular girls. She doesn’t seem to think much of it but Stacy becomes both jealous and eager to get herself included, especially since those popular girls hang out with Andy Goldfarb (Dylan Hoffman), the boy who makes the world go slow-mo for Stacy.

At first Stacy and Lydia seem to fit in, but then Stacy has a menstrual product mishap in front of the whole popular-girls-and-cute-boy crowd that Lydia seems to join the populars in laughing at. Horrified, Stacy declares her love for Andy dead — but not so dead that she doesn’t become enraged when she sees Lydia kissing him later. Thus does Stacy shout to Lydia the movie’s title: “You are so not invited to my bat mitzvah.” This seeming break in their friendship does not, however, lead to an end of hostilities between Lydia and Stacy, with Stacy eventually (accidentally) burning it all down over her hurt at what she sees as Lydia’s betrayal.

Adam Sandler plays the Friedman girls’ father, Danny, with his Uncut Gems wife Idina Menzel playing Bree, Danny’s wife and the girls’ mother. Rounding out the Sandler family on screen is Adam Sandler’s real-life wife, Jackie Sandler, who plays Lydia’s mother, Gabi, in the midst of a divorce from Lydia’s father, Eli (Luis Guzmán). With fun small roles — Sarah Sherman as Rabbi Rebecca and Ido Mosseri as DJ Schmuley, the must-have party DJ — the movie has an overall chummy feel. Lots of good-natured yuks and a general sense of good will toward all. Which is sort of your standard Adam Sandler Netflix fare, except for the young-teen-girl on young-teen-girl angst and destruction and love and loyalty. Those elements have some surprising sharp edges that can take you right back to the lunch room and the kids who are too cool and the close friends with whom there’s been a falling out. And even though the movie knows we know how not a big deal in the scheme of one’s whole life the slights and upsets that torment Stacy are — and how ridiculous her response is — the movie doesn’t belittle the bigness of these kids’ emotions.

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is a charmer of a gentle growing-up comedy with just enough “thank God I’ll never be 13 again” tartness to give it some genuine emotional moments. B+

Rated PG-13 for some crude/suggestive material, strong language and brief teen drinking, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Sammi Cohen with a screenplay by Alison Peck and Fiona Rosenbloom, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is an hour and 43 minutes long and is streaming on Netflix.

Featured photo: You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (PG-13)

A recent college grad accidentally forms a symbiotic relationship with superpower-bestowing alien tech in Blue Beetle, a DC Comics movie that isn’t, story-wise at least, necessarily a piece of any particular DC franchise but probably will get absorbed in the new DCU if it does OK, box-office-ally speaking.

I mention this because if you didn’t watch The Flash or can’t remember the whole deal with Black Adam, that’s fine, none of that business is part of this movie.

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña, bringing his floppy-haired goofballness from Cobra Kai) is a recent college graduate who gets several bites into his celebratory taco homecoming dinner before his sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) lays out an assortment of the family’s difficulties: they’ve lost the family business (an auto body shop), dad Alberto (Damian Alcazar) has had a heart attack and the family house — where mom Rocio (Elpidia Carrillo), Nana (Adriana Barraza) and Uncle Rudy (George Lopez) also live — is being sold out from under them. Some of this misfortune seems to be due to the gentrification spearheaded by the Kords, a wealthy family in Palmera City (kind of a Miami-ish/ Los Angeles-y city of gleaming futuristic buildings and neighborhoods of Mexican Americans who are being shoved around by banks and developers).

As it turns out, pricing people out of their communities is only one of many crummy things Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) is up to. She’s building a militarized force of augmented humans with a bit of tech that can snap in to soldiers’ spines and gear them up with weaponry and armor. She’s also digging up alien tech, the Scarab, a blue-beetle-y-looking device that can bond with humans, to make those devices even more powerful. Her niece, Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine), disagrees with this direction of the company and wants the family business to focus less on weaponry, like her father wanted before he disappeared. When she spots the Scarab in Kord labs, she hides it in a takeout box and tries to rush it out of the building. On the way, she runs in to Jaime, who came looking for her after she offered to get him a job (to replace the house-cleaning job he lost by standing up for Jenny to her aunt Victoria). She gives him the box and tells him to rush out. At the urging of his curious family, he opens the box. Several members of the family handle the blue beetle but it’s Jaime that the Scarab chooses to bond with.

That bonding leads to Jaime being covered in armor, shot into space, accidentally slicing a bus in half and slamming back down to Earth, creating a second hole in the roof of the family house.

Before Jaime gets to the “great power, great responsibility” portion of superhero-power-acquirement, Victoria and a bunch of henchmen — led by Scarab-bonding-hopeful Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo) — show up at the family home to attempt to get the Scarab back.

Jaime’s battles are, sure, against racism — he’s told that delivery people use the back when he shows up at Kord headquarters for a job interview, Victoria rather snootily tells him to “ándale” when she fires him and refers to her head scientist as “Dr. Sanchez” (Harvey Guillen) despite his regular reminders that that’s not his name. But the battle Jaime fights is largely one to protect his family — who in turn aid him when he has to face off against Victoria, who has no problem killing him to get the Scarab back. The movie maybe has some wider “the community” ideas but those never really get fleshed out. Nor exactly do the personalities of his family — beyond Rudy’s role as comic relief and Nana’s surprise experience with anti-imperialist revolution. Jaime’s sister Milagro feels like she should be a bigger character than she is; she’s sort of positioned as his closest confidant within the family but the movie’s use of her just sort of peters out.

There are other elements of Blue Beetle that just feel messy — half finished or thrown in without a lot of thought. Jenny’s whole back story — her missing father who was himself a sort of secret-identity superhero — and her relationship with Jaime feels like a bunch of tasks (love interest, sequel setup, narrative shortcut to getting superhero tech to regular people) just shoved into a character who doesn’t really have a lot going on separate from Jaime’s storyline. Something about Sarandon’s portrayal of the villain feels not quite there — like the movie couldn’t decide if she was a cackling fairy tale witch or a more banal hyper-capitalist. The actress herself seems confused and I found a lot of her performance to just feel flat.

Also, it feels like an already overused dig to say that a movie’s dialogue sounds like it was written by A.I. — but wow did this movie’s dialogue feel like what would happen if you smooshed every superhero cliché and dialogue tic into a Blue Beetle mold. The trailer seemed to suggest that this movie came with some sharper humor and less plasticine human interaction, but I think this was largely just because it was giving us George Lopez’s best lines.

Blue Beetle ultimately felt like it had some good ideas and some nice framework for character relationships set up by Jaime’s family but it just wasn’t sure what to focus on. C+

Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, language and some suggestive references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Angel Manuel Soto with a screenplay by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, Blue Beetle is two hours and seven minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Featured photo: Blue Beetle.

The pizza-loving turtles dream of a Ferris Bueller-like high school experience and hope heroics that go viral will help them get it in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, a delightful animated movie.

Delightful movie and delightfully animated — Mutant Mayhem has a sketchbook visual style that can give us the individual scribbles coloring in a moon and can give the turtles the kind of heft that at times almost looks claylike. It’s a nice nod to the characters and their (Dover, N.H.!) comic book beginnings and it makes for a visual experience with a real stickers-on-a-boom-box, skateboard-art energy that fits with the urban setting of the story. And it’s nice that this elevated approach to animation is part of a very kid-friendly tale.

If you’ve seen any TMNT property before, you know the basics: Ooze from a lab made it into the sewers and turned 20-something rat Splinter (voice of Jackie Chan) and baby turtles Leonardo (voice of Nicolas Cantu), Donatello (voice of Micah Abbey), Michelangelo (voice of Shamon Brown Jr.) and Raphael (voice of Brady Noon) into mutants that eventually grow big, can talk and, when Splinter decides they need to learn to defend themselves, learn martial arts. Now teenagers, the turtles live with Splinter, their dad, in the sewer, where he says they must stay to be safe from humanity. But the turtles take lots of side trips on their shopping runs for toilet paper and Cool Ranch Doritos, gazing longingly at a movie-in-the-park screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and wishing they too could go to high school.

When an errant, turtle-thrown ninja star hits the helmet of human teen April O’Neil (voice of Ayo Edebiri), the turtles find themselves going after her scooter, which was stolen while she was distracted with yelling at them. April finally gets a good look at the turtles and, after a bit of screaming, the gang chats over pepperoni pizza. The turtles are shocked that a human accepts them; April points out that she’s probably more inclined to see beyond their exterior weirdness because they helped her get her scooter back. Thus begins a plan: April is trying to track down the villain Superfly (voice of Ice Cube), whose series of crimes have led to a curfew and a canceling of her school’s prom. If the turtles help her take down this criminal and she records it, they will all become heroes and the turtles will find the danke schoen of their dreams — at least, this is the plan.

Turns out Superfly is a literal fly — a mutant housefly at the head of a gang of mutants (bat, frog, rhino, cockroach, Seth Rogen-voiced warthog, etc.) from the same lab that made the turtles’ ooze. This makes the turtles’ job to defeat the bad guys and go viral saving the day a lot more complicated than they’d planned.

Superfly and Splinter both have a deep distrust of humanity and a desire to keep their found families safe — this element adds just enough depth to the overall story to give older audience members something to hang on to (in addition to the previously mentioned truly delightful animation). But overall this movie feels very kid-accessible, in the best way. April O’Neil isn’t a polished newsperson — she’s a writer for her high school paper with a sole unfortunate stint on her school’s TV network that she’s trying to live down. She has her own insecurities and awkwardness but she can also execute a good “eye roll, teenage boys” when the turtles are getting a little too high on their own supposed crime-fighting awesomeness. And the turtles do have a very young teenagerness to them, all full of bravado, big if vague dreams, emotions they don’t quite have a handle on and general kid-like goofiness. Yes, their adventures do eventually take them to a superhero-standard “save the city” place but a lot of their goals involve basic acceptance — Michaelangelo’s desire to join the high school comedy improv club, for example.

Some of the mutant-on-mutant violence might be scary for some of the youngest kids — as might some of the human-on-mutant violence (there is a secondary team of villains who are humans and led by a character voiced by Maya Rudolph). But my mid-elementary-school-age-and-up kids seemed to get into this movie’s bouncy humor and action, lots of big laughs from them and plenty of laughs from the adults in the audience. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem has an overall enjoyable scrappy sensibility. B+

Rated PG for sequences of violence and action, language and impolite material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears with a screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Jeff Rowe and Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is an hour and 39 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Featured photo: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson and Tiffany Haddish all board Haunted Mansion, a particularly strong ride-to-movie translation.

This is basically the ride — all wacky paintings and expanding rooms and floating candelabras — with the story serving as the car on a track that takes us from the murderous ghost bride to the head (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the crystal ball.

Doctor Gabbie (Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon) move to an old house outside of New Orleans to make a fresh start after some unspecified difficulty in New York. Sure, the house is a fixer-way-upper, but, Gabbie tries to reassure Travis as spooky things happen behind her, a vanilla-scented Yankee Candle and a little work and this mansion will feel like home. And then a spooky thing appears behind Travis and Gabbie says oh heck no, grabs him and runs out of the house.

When Father Kent (Wilson), an alleged priest with a real “surfside cabana bartender” vibe (i.e. an Owen Wilson vibe) seeks out New Orleans tour guide Ben (Stanfield), we pretty quickly figure out that just running out of the house did not solve Travis and Gabbie’s issues with ghosts. Before he was the depressed leader of a historic walking tour, Ben was an astrophysicist working on a camera that could capture “ghost particles,” which for the purposes of this movie pretty much just means “ghosts.” Kent offers Ben a nice payday to go to Gabbie’s house and photograph the spooky stuff floating through her would-be bed and breakfast. Ben thinks this whole endeavor is goofy — so goofy that he goes ahead with it, making “click” noises at the appropriate time, even though his camera is out of batteries — but he shows up and takes the money. And then he leaves and puts it all behind him.

So he thinks.

As Gabbie and Father Kent know and Ben quickly learns, the house’s ghosts are, as Gabbie describes, like bedbugs — once you step in the house they cling to you and you can’t get rid of them. Ben, having actually captured a photo of a ghost in his own living room, decides to take photographing them seriously. Eventually psychic medium Harriet (Haddish) and historian Bruce (Danny DeVito) also end up at the house, making for a Scooby Gang that decides to investigate the house’s history in an attempt to rid it of its most malevolent of spirits.

Along the way, there’s some stuff about grief, there are some indications that some ghosts are more well-intentioned than others and there are a fair amount of “ghosts do the darnedest things” visual gags that are more ghosty visual cleverness and/or jump scares than actual horrors. Which is probably why my 11-year-old was adequately entertained and not scared by the movie (though she wasn’t a fan of the more “feelings”-centered moments).

“Adequately entertaining” is probably the most accurate way to describe this movie overall. It is staffed with talented people (including writer Katie Dippold, who also did 2013’s buddy comedy The Heat and 2016’s “Ghostbusters but ladies” — which I enjoyed and which this feels a lot like, tonally). Stanfield brings way more to this movie than it probably deserves but he does help make this movie overall not a chore to watch. Haddish and DeVito sort of sprinkle on their individual brands of funny — the movie isn’t a laugh riot but no one element becomes so “Johnny Depp in later Pirates of the Caribbean movies” that it’s tiresome. It’s light, enough fun to complement the air conditioning that would be the main reason to see this in a theater and many-ages enough that you could entertain a tweens-and-up audience. B-

Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and scary action, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Justin Simien with a screenplay by Katie Dippold, Haunted Mansion is two hours and two minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Featured photo: Haunted Mansion.