Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Dominic Toretto family family family car vroom boom in Fast X, a scene-setting part-one situation.

Which I knew going in. I’ve read that Fast X is the second (or maybe third, according to Vulture) to last of the Fast & Furious central-storyline movies. The result, though, is that the characters largely spend the movies segregated off in their own locations and quests building toward a cliffhanger.

But first the movie goes back to Fast Five, the entry where the gang meets The Rock and eventually steals a vault by dragging it out of a building, to do a little retcon-ing. I don’t remember all the particulars of that movie but Fast X is all “what if Fast Five’s bad guy had a son and what if that son was Jason Momoa?” After Fast Five bad guy (played by Joaquim de Almeida) bites it, his son Dante (Momoa) is left to seek revenge.

Er, eventually.

Ten years later, Dom (Vin Diesel) and the gang are barbecuing it up in Los Angeles, listening to an underused Rita Moreno, playing Toretto grandma, yada yada about family. Later that night Cipher (Charlize Theron) appears at Dom and wife Letty’s (Michelle Rodriguez) door. Cipher, an annoying villain from a few of the previous movies, has been out-villianed by Dante and now she’s on the run from her own henchmen. Trouble’s a-coming, Cipher tells Dom before he calls “The Agency” (a law enforcement group of some kind?) on her. Also, it’s likely the mission Dom’s crew — Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridge), Han (Sung Kang) and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) — are on is not for The Agency, as they believe, but an elaborate trap. Somehow, Dom and Letty bend time to get to Rome like immediately (with a Dom muscle car — does he just have them stashed all over the world?) to try to warn the gang. The truck the gang steals is not full of some supercomputer thing as they’ve been told but a giant, hilarious-looking Acme-style bomb that eventually goes rolling through the streets of Rome, getting everyone involved labeled as terrorists. Letty ends up sent to a secret Agency prison, the Roman+ gang sorta wanders around Europe providing exposition and Dom heads to Rio (the setting of the Fast Five stuff) to look for Dante and provide the movie with a scene of street racing, which is the whole franchise’s origin.

Along the way, various members of the Fast family have cameo conversations with fun franchise regulars, like Helen Mirren as Queenie Shaw and her son Deckard (Jason Statham). We also get newbie Tess (Brie Larson), daughter of Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), and Isabel (Daniela Melchior), sister of the late mom of Dom’s son, little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry), who is now old enough to be kidnappable and participate in action scenes and stuff. B, as they call him, spends some of the movie with his aunt Mia (Jordana Brewster) and some of the movie with the latest Toretto, Dom’s brother Jakob (John Cena — who gets to be a little goofier than I remember him being in the last movie).

These cameos underline a central problem with these movies, which is that everybody has more of a personality than Dom. Diesel’s gravelly voice family talk is the whole character now. He doesn’t even have a lot of menace anymore. Letty and Mia, OG characters who have also had less and less to do as the movies have gone on, are not particularly lighting the screen on fire but Letty does get some fun scenes with Cipher — ones that made me appreciate Theron’s presence. Then you have Statham, whose straight-faced over-the-top tough guy shtick just, like, sparkles. Or the very nice Cena. Or Momoa, who absolutely understood the assignment. In the trailers, there’s a shot of Dante in a silky purple shirt with some kind of shark-tooth-y looking necklace, his hair in what I’m pretty sure is a scrunchy, his fingernails painted purple and his sunglasses sporting a chain of the “grandma librarian” variety. It is perfect. It really sums up his approach to Dante, which is, like, theatrically yet psychopathically bonkers with almost cutesy flair. It’s fun but it does highlight how little fun Dom has become.

But, look, Dom turns a couple of helicopters into nunchucks with his muscle car and sorta plays the Claw arcade game with a crane to knock that Wile. E. Coyote bomb into a river. How much can you really complain about lackluster acting and character development when it is so clearly Not The Point of this? I might not care about Dom’s family and his kid and all the forgettable dialogue about these things, and this movie might have no idea what to do with all its characters at this point, but when it’s on, doing ridiculous stuff with muscle cars and acting like “jumping” is basically the power of flight, it delivers a good time. B-

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, language and some suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Louis Leterrier with a screenplay by Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin, Fast X is two hours and 21 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Fast X

Jennifer Lopez is, as the internet says, mother in The Mother, a line I’ll bet at least 60 percent of movie reviewers use when discussing this movie.

Partly because it’s true, partly because it’s right there and partly because Lopez’s character in this violent — but, aw, sweet! — Netflix movie is, as far as I can tell, just called Mother or maybe, as IMDb calls her, The Mother.

We first meet her when she is attempting to inform on some bad dudes to the FBI, who are doing a remarkably incompetent job of getting information out of this totally willing witness. Only Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick) seems to be listening at all when she assures them that Adrian (Joseph Fiennes), bad dude No. 1, knows where they are and is on his way to kill him. No, he’s not, we’re perfectly safe, bluster bluster, says one of the other agents, right before he’s shot in the head.

But Lopez isn’t the sort of informant who just sits back and lets herself be assassinated. Despite being real pregnant, she saves Cruise when he is shot using, like, superglue and she manufactures an explosive from household products that seems to take out Adrian when he finally corners her. He stabs her in the belly before she blows him up but she makes it to the hospital and delivers a healthy baby girl.

Though Lopez is eager to hold her infant daughter, Edie Falco playing a no-nonsense FBI higher-up is all “not so fast, lady.” Because Adrian’s body was not recovered from the burning bathroom where Lopez left him and because Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal), bad dude No. 2, is also after her, the only way Lopez can keep her daughter safe is to give her up. Lopez gets the recovering Cruise to promise that he’ll make sure her daughter is adopted by good people, send her a photo of her daughter every year on her birthday and let Lopez know if her daughter is ever in trouble.

A dozen years later, Lopez’s character has made a Spartan life for herself on the outskirts of a small Alaskan town where the general store shop owner is a war buddy and where she spends her days hunting caribou for food and doing other survivalist off-the-grid activities. Then she gets a non-birthday bit of communication from Cruise, leading her to head to Ohio where her now 12-year-old daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez) lives with her adoptive mom (Yvonne Senat Jones), who gets to be an anguished protective mother as well, and a dad (Michael Karl Richards) whose face is I think always out of focus? Whatever, dads are not the point of The Mother, where either Hector or Adrian might be Zoe’s father but Lopez doesn’t want either anywhere near Zoe.

It seems the bad dudes have, however, found evidence of Zoe’s existence and whereabouts, which is why Cruise reached out. Quickly, Lopez kicks into protector mode, doing everything she can to fight the men who come to kidnap Zoe and to retrieve her when a surviving henchman manages to whisk Zoe away.

Eventually, Lopez takes the lead in hiding Zoe, even teaching her a little self-defense. What passes for humor and personality in this mostly laughs-free, character-minimalist movie comes as Zoe tweens about eating “Bambi’s mom” and hating Lopez —all with a very “gah [eyeroll], Mom” energy.

To lean further on dated slang for description, The Mother lands somewhere on the scale between “meh” and “cromulent.” This sure is a movie that exists — one might say of The Mother. It doesn’t have the Jennifer Lopez legit badassness of Out of Sight or the cheesy hysterics of Enough but it is, you know, a thing your eyes can watch. It’s fine, is I guess what I’m saying. It lacks the energy that would make it “heck yeah!” action fun but it has a whole subplot involving a Lopez and a mother wolf and the silly self-seriousness of that isn’t terrible. B-

Rated R for violence, some language and brief drug use, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Niki Caro with a screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig, The Mother is an hour and 55 minutes long and available on Netflix.

Featured photo: The Mother

Peter Quill and the gang return for one last? (probably not) hurrah in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 — not the worst Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, but not nearly as fun as the The Marvels trailer that preceded it.

This outing is largely Rocket’s (voice of Bradley Cooper) story, though he is often separated from the main group, so we don’t get a lot of his cranky raccoon personality or the group dynamic that was such a big part of the first outing. We meet up with the gang hanging out on Knowhere, doing Guardians work and trying to help a depressed and frequently drunk Peter/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), who still hasn’t gotten over the loss of his Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) back in Infinity War.

Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a powerful but stupid creation of the Sentinels (think “golden Elizabeth Debicki” from the second Guardians), shows up to steal away Rocket. The gang — Groot (voice of Vin Diesel), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan) — manages to keep Rocket from being Warlock-napped but he’s grievously injured and attempts to heal him uncover that Rocket is, essentially, password protected. The crew sets off to find the lab where Rocket’s enhancements were engineered to get his system unlocked and make him capable of being healed. This puts them in the path of The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a powerful nutcase whose experiments have resulted in a variety of strange species, from the golden Sentinels (who were trying to steal Rocket for him) to animals like Rocket with tortuously applied extra limbs and abilities to a planet of humanoid animals that have, like, rabbit faces but otherwise mow the lawn and drive 1980s-model sedans and stuff.

The alternate-universe Gamora, who was stuck in the present after Endgame and who is now a professional thief with Sylvester Stallone and crew, joins up with the Guardians gang to head to the High Evolutionary’s base of operations to search for the Rocket password. She may not have the same emotional connection to Peter and the others but she also finds herself fighting to unlock Rocket’s password and protect him from the High Evolutionary henchmen trying to steal him. It seems that Rocket and his abilities to learn and think for himself represents the HE’s most promising technological achievement and he wants Rocket’s brain to help him engineer another super species.

I know that all sounds like a lot of plot, but somehow it isn’t. It’s like rice cakes — seems large but there’s not actually a lot to it when you dig in. This movie has a lot of ideas but not much in the way of fully developed story; it’s more like pieces of “oh, and maybe they could” glued together, kind of the way you do with a project where you don’t have a really clear focus and so you just keep adding “more” until it looks big enough.

I think the writers’ strike and the accompanying A.I. talk probably put this fear out into the ether, but what I felt very quickly while watching this movie was that this was the kind of movie we’re all afraid we’ll get if A.I. starts writing films. Like, it seems Marvel-ish, it has lines that feel like jokes, it has a line up of well known songs for the soundtrack, it has the general vibe of its creator having seen previous Guardians movies. But there is that Uncanny Valley, timing-not-quite-right feel to it — to the quips, to the physical humor, to the emotional beats, to the music. If this movie were a person it would be blinking both not enough and then suddenly too much.

James Gunn, human writer on all the previous Guardians movie (and the loveably goofy Christmas special), is the writer and director here. Why the movie feels like it was more lab grown than organically created, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s trying to do too much? It puts Rocket at the center but still tries to give us Peter’s story and his relationship woes and tell the story of the group and its development, and it seeks to establish this very bonkers villain who either needed to dial it back or just turn the knob all the way up. (As is, the HE is just kind of a forgettable nothing.) And there’s some character development for Mantis that gets worked in even though it feels like the movie doesn’t really have time for it.

What made the first Guardians movie and these characters a delight was the shagginess of them — generally, they’re not the best or the brightest and they are frequently jerks to each other, but they were scruffily likable and had their adventures in a more fantastical space setting than, like, the Iron Man/Captain America top-shelf part of the MCU. While Vol. 3 keeps us in a land of odd creatures and big colors, the charm and the low-fi fun are mostly gone and have been replaced with something too processed to let its characters have memorable moments or its story to really pop. C

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by human person James Gunn, who is I guess bound for DC now, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is two hours and 29 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (PG-13)

A 12-year-old comes home to New York City from a happy summer at camp to learn that her family is moving to the New Jersey suburbs and all the horrors of sixth grade will be experienced with new kids at a new school in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a very sweet, 1970s-set adaptation of Judy Blume’s classic novel.

Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson), only child of Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb Simon (Benny Safdie), likes living in the city, near her beloved grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates). She’s nervous about what this new place and these new kids will be like. On arriving in New Jersey, she’s sort of claimed by neighbor girl Nancy (Elle Graham), also a sixth-grader, who will be in Margaret’s class. Nancy has queen-bee-ed herself to the leader position in a foursome of girls that now includes Margaret as well as Janie (Amari Alexis Price) and Gretchen (Katherine Mallen Kupferer). She demands that this club concern themselves with bras, periods and the boys they like, a list she insists begins and ends with Philip (Zachary Brooks), a boy in their class.

Margaret, though, is quickly charmed by Moose (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong), friend of Nancy’s slightly older brother Evan (Landon Baxter). And, informed by the lady in the department store that she doesn’t really need a bra, Margaret finds that she’s been talked into wearing a very uncomfortable “grow bra.” Please, she prays to/begs of God, please let her chest grow and let her get her period and be normal and regular like everybody else — except of course the only “everybody” who really seems to be in that boat is a girl named Laura (Isol Young), who is living out her own tween hell thanks to Nancy’s unfriendly comments.

Meanwhile, underneath all the “why, God, why?” of being 12, Margaret is dealing with something of a religious struggle after learning some difficult aspects of her family’s history. Barbara never talks with her strict Christian parents — and Margaret has never met them — because they cut Barbara off when she married Herb, who is Jewish. Neither Barbara nor Herb has ever imparted religion on Margaret, saying she can decide for herself when she grows up. But now Margaret has decided that she’d like to decide — trying out synagogue with her grandmother and church with some of her friends and hoping she’ll feel something that will let her know “what she is.” Along the way, she talks to God — pouring out fears and general anxieties about, you know, 12.

I don’t remember how much of this is in the book but in between elements of Margaret’s story we get these little peeks at Barbara’s story and her struggles and changes. She has gone from being a working mother in the city to a stay-at-home mother in the suburbs. She is also dealing with going from being a mother to a kid to being a mother to a tween girl who is gently trying out aspects of teenage-ness and looking for bits of independence. This might be one of those things you notice more depending on where you, the viewer, are personally, age- and life-circumstance-wise, but I enjoyed how the movie gave us Barbara’s struggles and her attempts to find her place in this new environment. McAdams fills in this character so nicely, giving us so much context to who Barbara is with just a facial expression.

To a smaller degree, we also get little glimpses of Sylvia’s life and her changes. With her family no longer nearby in the city, she’s sort of rearranging her identity. Margaret’s independence and her distance mean changes for Sylvia too — eventually leading to an extended trip to Florida — which is just a neat aspect to see examined, even just briefly.

But what this movie really does best, I think, is get to that “please let me be normal” desperation at an age when there really is no “normal.” Fortson is a winning Margaret — selling Margaret as a kid and Margaret as a teen, Margaret as a willing follower and Margaret as someone who knows how to stand up for herself. The character can take you right back to your tween self while the movie offers gentle character studies of multiple generations. B+

Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexual education (or really, the lack of sexual education by these girls who have to rely on a stolen anatomy book and a school health class) and some suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is an hour and 46 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

Featured photo: Guardian of the Galaxy Vol. 3

A teen just can’t not open the obviously evil Book of the Dead, thus releasing demons or whatever and leading to a tsunami of gore, in Evil Dead Rise.

The movie actually starts at an A-frame cabin of devilry out in the woods. After some creepy voice work and R-rated violence, we jump back one day and meet Beth (Lily Sullivan), some kind of tech worker for a rock band. When Beth realizes she is unexpectedly pregnant, she rushes to visit her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). But Ellie has problems of her own: her husband (and the father of her three kids) has taken off, and the building where they live in a someteenth floor apartment is being torn down, necessitating a stressful move. Teens Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and Danny (Morgan Davies) and younger sister Kassie (Nell Fisher) are further traumatized when they’re caught in the building’s parking garage during a large earthquake. The supports shake, the ground cracks — so naturally when Danny spots a hole leading below the unstable structure into an old bank vault, why not climb down? And why not take the veiny, fang-having book he finds down there along with accompanying record albums — hey, the kids love vinyl!

Danny and Bridget argue over what to do with the book; Danny thinks their mom could sell it for big money (to whom?) and Bridget is like “go put it back.” Danny says, sure, tomorrow, after I flip through these pages full of disturbing imagery and play the records full of incantations. Even though Danny did the summoning, it’s Ellie who is the first to become possessed — all cadaver-ish skin and unnerving vocal changes. The last thing she says before the real Ellie is overtaken by the possessor is a plea to Beth to take care of her babies, a task that would be easier if the cell phones weren’t down and the building’s stairs hadn’t collapsed.

This movie is not terribly made — there is a respectable ocean of stage blood and the slightest dusting of evil-demon sass. But its most stand-out images are largely riffs on similar images or scenes from other movies — previous Evil Deads but also The Shining, maybe Fargo. It has that odd time-out-of-time quality that some recent horror movies have, where cars and clothes could have you thinking you’re watching something set in the late 1970s but also there are cell phones. The final fight scene has its charms.

It’s all fine, I guess, if this is your thing, but it doesn’t have any staying power beyond the moment you’re watching the movie. This is not a movie I will be thinking about for weeks. This is likely not a movie I’ll still be thinking about by the time you read this review. There’s a pokiness about the film — even when the “Evil”-ing had begun, I still felt like things hadn’t really gotten going, like the motor hadn’t fully kicked on in this movie. C, maybe a C+ for not really doing anything wrong and for having Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi credited as executive producers.

Rated R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, and some language, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Written and directed by Lee Cronin, Evil Dead Rise is an hour and 37 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by New Line Cinema.

Featured photo: Evil Dead Rise

Renfield (R)

Dracula’s familiar would like to reevaluate his toxic work situation in Renfield, a gore-filled and yet very cute comedy.

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), he of the bug-eating and the “yes, master”-ing, is sick of working for Dracula (Nicolas Cage), a total diva of a boss who makes Renfield bring him people to eat. And, much in the manner of Miranda Priestly demanding very specific coffee from Starbucks, Dracula can be picky about the quality of the humans he’s offered. Dracula is also sort of low on funds after centuries of having to make getaways when his bloodlust is found out, so Renfield has to take care of an injured and slowly recovering Dracula in an abandoned hospital in New Orleans. And to procure these people for which he is shown little appreciation, he has to eat bugs, which give him a shot of Dracula strength.

Perhaps it’s good that Renfield has found a support group for people who are also in toxic relationships. He can listen to other people talk about how hard it is to stand up to the people who have power over them — and he can go find those bullies and drag them to Dracula, which makes Renfield feel like all his murder isn’t, you know, all bad.

But a complainy Dracula sends Renfield out to find a better group of people for his boss to eat — nuns or cheerleaders or something, Dracula says, with much the same energy of a louche aging rock star demanding a better class of groupies. Renfield heads to a club to do just that but ends up in the middle of a gangland hit. Tedward Lobo (Ben Schwartz — just 100 percent doing Jean-Ralphio from Parks and Recreation), son of Lobos gang head Bellafrancesca Lobo (Shohreh Aghdashloo), is there with a bunch of goons to kill Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), a police officer who is determined to bring down the Lobos (who killed her police officer father). Rebecca doesn’t blink when Tedward holds a gun to her head, instantly dazzling Renfield with her strength and bravery. Thusly he finds a bug to eat and helps her defeat the Lobos. Of course the Lobos don’t love this, so they go looking for Renfield just as Renfield starts to make a serious attempt to break away from Dracula, getting his own studio apartment and buying some pastel sweaters from Macy’s.

Renfield is good-naturedly silly — a good-naturedly silly movie where sometimes dudes get their arms torn off. It keeps the vampire lore to a minimum, goes easy on the quippiness (it’s there but it’s not wall to wall) and offers plenty of opportunities for Nicolas Cage to just take center stage and do his thing. And does he! He dives in with enthusiasm and fully commits to every increasingly hammy bit of Dracula-ness. I’ll bet those spiky teeth he has to wear were unpleasant to have in his mouth but he really does make every moment count with his open-mouth hisses and big vampire smiles. Everything about him, from the increasingly slicked back hair to his specific style of imperious whining, is just note-perfect. B-

Rated R for bloody violence, some gore, language throughout and some drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Chris McKay with a screenplay by Ryan Ridley, Renfield is a brisk hour and 33 minutes long and distributed by Universal Studios.

The Pope’s Exorcist (R)

Russell Crowe eagerly tucks into the plate of spicy meat-ah-balls that is his Italian accent in The Pope’s Exorcist, which is based on the real life of the Rev. Gabriele Amorth — have fun with that Wikipedia page.

Crowe’s accent is great in the sense that he seems to be having a great time with it. I mean, does it have a stagey quaility that reinforces my theory that this movie is a low-key comedy? Sure, but the kid with the veiny skin and the devil voice is pretty standard-issue possession movie stuff, why not have a little fun with it.

The Rev. Gabriele Amorth (Crowe) is a noted exorcist in the Catholic Church. He is also, as we witness in his opening exorcism, a guy who appreciates that sometimes what people need isn’t an exorcism but to believe they’re getting an exorcism. As he explains to a skeptical panel of Vatican dudes later, 98 percent of his cases need doctors or therapists. The other two percent are E-vil, much in the style of the Paramount + TV show Evil, which is a giddy delight particularly if you’ve ever spent any time in CCD as a kid.

Meanwhile, it’s the latter half of the 1980s and a widowed mom, Julia (Alex Essoe), moves with her two kids — angry teenager Amy (Laurel Marsden) and traumatized little brother Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) — to a castle/former abbey in Spain that is her late husband’s sole asset of value. The plan is to renovate and flip this property to raise some cash to take back to the U.S. Neither kid is happy about moving to Spain — not Amy, who flips her mom the bird when she’s not ignoring her, and not Henry, who has been silent since he saw his father killed in a car accident. Very quickly, though, they figure out that this ancient church structure in Spain is not a particularly happy place to have moved (once you see it you’ll think that it would have been more shocking if an ancient evil didn’t dwell in its crumbling walls). Naturally, one of the children is quickly possessed and, because it’s more disturbing for younger kids to say sassy things to priests in a deep voice, Henry is the child who wins the demon lottery.

Eventually, Gabriele is sent by the pope (Franco Nero) to Spain to investigate Henry’s situation. There, Gabriele teams up with the Rev. Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), who was told during his initial evaluation of the demon-Henry that he’s the “wrong priest.” It seems that whatever evil entity that has possessed Henry has a plan that involves Gabriele.

As I said, this movie has a strong ribbon of goofiness that runs throughout — from Crowe’s accent to Gabriele’s little Ferrari scooter to the vein-y stage-blood-heavy representation of the demon to Gabriele’s own jokiness. Some of this comedy is intentional, is what I’m saying. The rest of it — eh, I don’t think the movie minds if you find some of its lore cornball, particularly with the very “episode one” way that it ends. The idea that your child would be in the grip of something no one can diagnose and that is clearly killing him is terrifying. But this movie doesn’t really lean much on that, even though it is probably the chilling element of the movie, and as a result the movie isn’t really scary as much as it’s a kind of non-scary gothic horror that at times almost tips into camp. That said, this movie also isn’t quite as goofy as I would have wanted either, which I say as someone who, again, loves the cheeky Evil.

The Pope’s Exorcist doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before but it lets Crowe’s Gabriele have just enough lightness to make it a basically entertaining endeavor. B-

Rated R for violent content, language, sexual references and some nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Julius Avery with a screenplay by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos, The Pope’s Exorcist is an hour and 43 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

Featured photo: Renfield

Middle-aged dudes in the mid 1980s pin their career futures and their hopes for the financial future of Nike on a young NBA rookie named Michael Jordan in Air.

I feel like even the movie is somewhat conscious of the fact that it is not the story of a legendary athlete or even, King Richard style, the struggles of that legendary athlete’s parent but the story of some guys who really wanted to capitalize on the status of a hopefully legendary athlete to boost their basketball shoe line. The movie is more stakes-adjacent than stakes-having.

Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is unimpressed with the meh candidates Nike is looking at to rep their unpopular line of basketball shoes in the coming season. Adidas and Converse are cool and that’s where the big-name players go — the Larry Birds and the Magic Johnsons — including Jordan, whose college career has made him an official One to Watch. Nike marketing guy Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) thinks Sonny should just stick to the brief from company head Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) and use the limited funds given to the basketball division to sponsor three or four lesser lights. But Sonny wants to bet the house on Jordan, even if, as Jordan’s agent David Falk (Chris Messina) tells him, Jordan is almost certain to go with Adidas.

Sonny breaks with the protocol of this type of deal and goes around Falk, traveling to North Carolina to show up at the Jordans’ home. There he meets Michael’s dad, James Jordan (Julius Tennon), and his mom, Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis), who seems to be the true gatekeeper for Michael’s career. She admires Sonny’s persistence just enough to have a brief meeting with him at their house and then later she decides — over her son’s objections — to listen to Nike’s official pitch to Michael Jordan at the company’s Oregon headquarters. (No “Michael Jordan” really appears on screen except as a hazy figure, usually turned away from the camera, who is with his family during business meetings or as the actual guy in historical footage.)

The movie spends not quite enough time with Peter Moore (Matthew Maher), the man who designs the first Air Jordan prototype that the Nike team — which also includes Howard White (Chris Tucker) — hopes to use to convince Michael to pick Nike. His scenes include a fun element of the shoe’s design, which was a purposeful decision to make the shoe more colorful than the NBA technically allowed, with Nike offering to pay the shoe fines, a factor they even planned to work into their marketing. Personally, I found some bits about the artistry of the shoe a fun part of this movie about the making of a hugely culturally significant athletic shoe line. Like, more sneakers in this sneaker movie, would be my preference.

I think we’re maybe supposed to think the heart of this movie is Damon’s ostentatiously schlubby Sonny, with his genuine desire to help Michael Jordan become a legend and his “Gil really needs a sale” energy. And maybe a little bit of our heart is supposed to be with Rob and his sad divorced-dad tale of bribing his daughter with Nikes. I don’t think even the movie believes we’re rooting for Phil Knight, who is giving flaky proto-tech-bro vibes. But come on, with no real Michael Jordan in the picture, the heart of the movie is Davis’ Deloris Jordan, who knows the score when it comes to both her son’s abilities and the way the world is going to want things from him. Casting Davis makes Deloris an easy character to care about — Davis brings weight and substance to the sort of dippy story of, not unlike Tetris, a licensing deal.

Without Davis, I think this movie would feel too lightweight, too lacking in stuff to fill out its nearly two-hour run time. With Davis, the movie feels just substantial enough to justify being in a theater — but just barely. It felt very similar to me to those HBO historical-events movies, particularly to something like The Late Shift, about the Jay Leno-David Letterman Tonight Show story.

If you are moderately interested in this side story from the career of Michael Jordan, Air is moderately interesting. C+

Rated R for language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com, but probably also to signify to grown-up movie goers that this is a grown-up movie where nothing explodes, which is accurate. Directed by Ben Affleck with a screenplay by Alex Convery, Air is one hour and 51 minutes long and distributed by Amazon Studios, which means that it will eventually show up on Prime Video, though it is slated for a longer theatrical release than originally planned, according to Wikipedia.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)

It’s-a him, Mario, in an animated adventure that really just made me feel some nostalgia for OG Nintendo Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Not unlike AppleTV+’s Tetris, which somehow seems like the mashup of the two theatrical releases I watched this week, The Super Mario Bros. Movie made me think more about the video game from which it originated — in my case the console and Game Boy versions of the game in 1990something — than anything happening in the movie itself. I was the most casual of video and arcade game players back in the 20th century so it’s interesting how much both games still were part of the wider culture.

Here, we meet brothers Mario (voice of Chris Pratt) and Luigi (more engagingly voiced by Charlie Day), who have just started a plumbing business and sunk all their money into a pretty great TV ad, chock full of “Mama Mia!” type accents from these two otherwise nonspecific American-accented guys. I mention this only because the ad is sort of charmingly goofy in a way most of the rest of this movie isn’t.

After their first job goes wrong because of an angry dog, they try to “save Brooklyn” by fixing some water main problems in the road. Instead, though, they get sucked into a, let’s say, alternate dimension and, while traveling along a rainbow thing I’m just going to call bifrost, are separated. Luigi is flung into a lava world ruled by Bowser (voice of Jack Black), sort of a large battle-turtle intent on capturing all domains and using what Wikipedia tells me is a Super Star to gain invincibility. Mario lands in Mushroom Kingdom, which is sad because he doesn’t like mushrooms, but it’s a generally brighter happier place even if it too is under threat of invasion by Bowser.

Mushroom Kingdom’s Princess Peach (voice of Anya Taylor-Joy) plans to get the support of King Cranky Kong’s (voice of Fred Armisen) army to face Bowser and his army, which leads to Mario fighting the king’s son Donkey Kong (voice of Seth Rogen) and a fun sorta-friendship between the two, which was one of this movie’s better elements. Mario wants to defeat Bowser to get Luigi back — their brotherly relationship is also a nice element but, as they spend most of the movie apart, we don’t get nearly enough of it.

There is a flatness to this movie — it’s colorful and action-packed, but there just isn’t a lot to grab on to in terms of the story or the characters we spend the most time with. Pratt’s Mario is kind of a nothing despite being at the center of this story. He doesn’t have the personality of, say, Pratt’s Emmet in the Lego movies. His adventure partners Donkey Kong and Luigi bring a little something to their roles— the notes of sweetness and weirdness I think you need to make this kind of thing work — but not enough to give the whole movie life. Princess Peach is also kind of an empty character. I realize this is a cartoon based on a video game, but I feel like the movie just hangs it all on the admittedly eye-catching, gameplay-riffing-on visuals without giving the movie even the, uhm, depth of, like, the Trolls movies or that odd noir Pikachu.

The motivations of Bowser (to marry Princess Peach whether she likes it or not) are a little disturbing and a bunch of adorable creatures are threatened with slaughter but this is otherwise probably a fairly older-elementary-schooler acceptable movie. It’s just not a particularly memorable one. C+

Rated PG for action and mild violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and co-directed by Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack with a screenplay by Matthew Fogel, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is an hour and 32 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: The Super Mario Bros. Movie.