Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Take the musical numbers from the Trolls animated movies and divide them by a Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” sensibility and add an earnest Will Ferrell plus Dan Stevens’ dodgy Russian accent (but impressive willingness to go all in) and what you have equals Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, a new comedy on Netflix.

I feel like Ferrell, who stars here and has a writing credit, probably really likes the annual Eurovision Song Contest and wants to find some way of introducing its glorious pop-song ABBA-ness to an American audience. And that actually sounds like a great idea. The competition — which I have never watched but has always sounded to me like the best possible mash-up of American Idol and the Olympics — has been available in America only recently. I hope when it comes back (this year’s contest was canceled), Americans can view it with ease; it feels like exactly the kind of all-ages-friendly bowl of cheese dip that we’re all going to need in our lives. I watched a highlights reel from the 2019 finale and I am sold on this whole deal, don’t change one sparkly bit of it. (It looks like full versions of some years’ final shows are also available on eurovision.tv and now that I know that I suspect my productivity will nosedive.)

So, getting Americans interested in the Eurovision Song Contest? Worthy goal. But are enough people really sufficiently aware of the Eurovision Song Contest that, for example, the many Eurovision-related cameos (which I could identify as cameos because of the way the movie shot and introduced them, not because I knew who anybody was) resonate or that specific jokes about Eurovision register?

Without that layer, what you have is Will Ferrell as Lars Erickssong, a very middle-aged man living in a small town in Iceland who has spent most of his life trying to get a song in the Eurovision competition. He is so focused on this that he has never even pursued a romance with obviously-hot-for-him Sigrit (Rachel McAdams), his friend since childhood and his partner in the band Fire Saga. Sigrit is happy to follow Lars in his dreams, though she writes her own songs and does wish they’d maybe also find time to have a baby.

Due to a series of horrible (but lucky for Lars and Sigrit) events, Fire Saga finds itself as Iceland’s Eurovision competitor. Russia’s competitor Alexander Lemtov (Dan Stevens) and his friend Mita (Melissanthi Mahut), Greece’s competitor, have a better shot at winning the competition than Fire Saga and yet the duo seems to enjoy messing with the team dynamic of Fire Saga, which, with its special effects and iffy wardrobe choices, seems to be doing just fine sabotaging itself.

At two hours and three minutes, Fire Saga is at least 35 minutes too long. At times the movie feels more like a collection of extra material for a Saturday Night Live Eurovision sketch than a tightly plotted narrative. It is at its best when the too-old Lars is trying to sell a Viking power ballad or the enjoyably dippy Sigrit is talking to elves — or when it’s just showing us Eurovision. More Eurovision, would have been my studio note. A song-mash-up featuring real-life Eurovision people is charming and irresistible and joyfully silly in the best sense.

In yet another example of grading on a serious curve, this movie is acceptable entertainment because (if you have Netflix) you don’t have to pay any extra money to watch it and because you can feel when it’s slowing down and time your snack runs and phone-checking accordingly. B-

Rated PG-13 for crude sexual material including full nude sculpture, some comic violent images and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by David Dobkin with a screenplay by Will Ferrell and Andrew Steele, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is somehow two hours and three minutes long and is available on Netflix.

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Dave Bautista is another tough guy befriending a kid (see also: The Rock, John Cena, Arnold Schwarzenegger) in My Spy, a movie once bound for theaters but now on Amazon Prime.

JJ (Bautista) is a tough guy CIA agent who is finding the light touch required for successful spy-ery more difficult than the straightforward butt-kicking of being an Army Ranger. You’re actually not supposed to kill everybody and walk away from the explosions without looking back, explains his boss (Ken Jeong), and thus JJ and his fan-girl tech person Bobbi (Kristen Schaal) are given the low-priority assignment of keeping an eye on Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), the widow of a former arms dealer. Her brother-in-law, Marquez (Greg Bryk), is still active in the selling-nukes-to-bad-guys game so JJ and Bobbi watch Kate and her daughter Sophie (Chloe Coleman), who are attempting to adjust after a recent move to Chicago.

While Kate seems more like a harried nurse and single mom than a woman who has any knowledge of her late husband’s business, Sophie, who is 9, has some solid stealthiness skills. She sneaks up on JJ and Bobbi and records enough of a conversation between the two of them that she can blow their cover. Instead of telling her mom, though, she decides to blackmail JJ into doing things for her, such as taking her to an ice skating rink and teaching her spy stuff. When her mom first sees Sophie with JJ, Kate gives JJ a swift knee to the sensitive spy equipment but Sophie explains that JJ is their new upstairs neighbor and helped her with some bullies. Seeing the possibilities in JJ beyond just his abilities to rent ice skates and teach her to defeat a lie detector, Sophie arranges for JJ and Kate to bump into each other a few times until Kate asks JJ out.

This movie is rated PG-13 and my guess is that this is largely due to the early sequence of JJ killing a couple dozen henchmen, including one whose head goes flying. Common Sense Media pegs it at ages 10 and up and while I might not go that young I think “lightweight family action comedy” is what this movie is for families where the youngest viewers are middle school and up.

And as that, it’s fine. Bautista has the “gruff guy with a good heart” thing ready to go. He maybe isn’t quite as winning as Dwayne Johnson but he’s probably as good, in his own way, as John Cena. His interactions with Coleman’s Sophie feel right for each character — the movie lets Sophie seem enough like a human child that you can just sort of go with the plot, no matter how silly it gets.

I’m not sure how I would have responded to this movie in a theater; the faults of something like this seem to stand out when a movie is on a big screen and has required you to show up at a place on time and pay for popcorn. But as an at-home offering, the low barrier to viewing matches the “light chuckle” level of comedy just fine. B-

Rated PG-13 for action/violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Peter Segal with a screenplay by Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, My Spy is an hour and 39 minutes long and distributed by Amazon Studios. It is available on Amazon Prime.

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

U.S. Army soldiers operating in a remote corner of Afghanistan find themselves under attack in The Outpost, which is based on a true story told, among other places, in a book called The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor written by CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The movie takes place at what is eventually called Camp Keating, after Capt. Benjamin Keating (Orlando Bloom), the outpost’s commander as the movie opens. It doesn’t take military expertise to understand that this outpost is a bad scene — it is surrounded on three sides by mountains, putting the outpost and its personnel at the bottom of a bowl. Taliban soldiers can easily find a position on the mountains from which they can take easy shots at fighters throughout the camp. And they do, nearly every day, we’re told. For a while, the tension of bullets (and later mortars) entering the camp at any moment relaxes only at night because the Taliban fighters don’t have night vision.

We meet many of the soldiers who man this outpost, attempting to build relationships with the local population. What feels like oodles of people are introduced with on-screen IDs and we learn bits of information about lives back home. Ultimately, the men we probably spend the most time with are Specialist Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones), Lt. Andrew Bundermann (Taylor John Smith) and Staff Sgt. Clint Romesha (Scott Eastwood). The camp has a series of commanding captains, whom we also meet, each of whom has a different leadership style that presents a different set of challenges; their introductions serve as sort of chapters to the story as the movie builds to what we’re told from the beginning is definitely coming: the big one. That is how the soldiers refer to the inevitable attack by overwhelming numbers of Taliban using the advantage of the mountains to attempt to overrun the camp.

By the end of The Outpost, I completely understood all the storytelling decisions made in this story, which runs a little more than two hours and begins the most intense action (the predicted “big one”) a little more than an hour in. I feel like there was a version of this movie that could have slid in at fewer than 90 minutes and, similar to Tom Hanks’ recent Greyhound (which The Outpost sort of reminded me of), confined itself to the core of the fight. But Greyhound’s source material is a novel based on World War II events and this is a true story featuring soldiers who are real people, alive and deceased, with still living parents and spouses and children, and I understand why the movie puts such emphasis on having the audience learn everybody’s name and get at least a slice of backstory even when it feels like information overload.

The movie also stays away from having an overt point of view about the war and the larger politics involved. Instead, its criticism is pointed at military decisions made in reference to the outpost from its very existence in this (as the movie describes at the end) “obviously indefensible” location to various bad-call requests and decisions made by military officialdom elsewhere. The story’s focus is on the men, their bravery in their defense of each other and their ability to think on their feet and adapt when what seems like an unwinnable fight begins. B

Rated R for war violence and grisly images, pervasive language, and sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Rob Lurie with a screenplay by Eric Johnson, The Outpost is two hours and three minutes long and distributed by Screen Media Ventures. The movie is available for rent.

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Tom Hanks is the captain of a Navy destroyer escorting ships across the Atlantic during World War II in Greyhound, a sleek, no-time-wasted naval action movie on Apple TV+.

It’s 1942 and Navy Commander Ernest Krause (Hanks) is the captain of a ship codenamed Greyhound that, along with destroyers from the U.K. and Canada, is escorting a convoy across the ocean. Other than a brief flashback featuring Elisabeth Shue (which mostly explains that this is Krause’s first command and why he brought a pair of fancy slippers to war), the movie takes place over a 50-hour period when the convoy is outside the reach of Allied air support and is therefore particularly vulnerable to German U-boats. The destroyers are armed with a variety of submarine-sinking weaponry and more maneuverable than the convoy’s troop transporters, merchant ships and oil tankers.

In Krause’s first confrontation with a U-boat, he shows himself to be unconventional in his thinking but effective. Soon, Krause, his second-in-command Charlie Cole (Stephan Graham) and the captains of the other destroyers figure out that they are being followed by a “wolf pack” of U-boats that aren’t attacking the destroyers directly but sort of picking off boats here and there. As the hours wear on (and the Greyhound’s armaments are diminished), Krause subsists on coffee and quiet Tom Hanks worry as he tries to outlast the U-boats on the convoy’s race to the next air cover spot.

When it becomes clear that the destroyers will need help protecting the convoy, Krause asks Cole to plot the quickest path to a spot where airplanes can meet them, which Cole and his team do with, like, rulers and protractors and math. Greyhound is also full of a lot of “right full rudder all ahead two-thirds” type dialogue that is also presented in such a way that you can get what’s going on even if you can’t directly translate every naval command. Greyhound does a good job of conveying “people solving problems” and “people solving problems creatively” even if you don’t fully understand all the mechanics of what they are doing.

This movie, smartly, doesn’t waste time on any “nature of war” ruminations or even all that much filling in the elements of Krause as a person. (Or, perhaps the movie did all the adding dimension it ever planned to do with Krause by hiring Hanks; “a Tom Hanks-y character” is what we get and kinda all we need.) Greyhound, like the convoy’s destroyers, is at battle stations and focused on the immediate fight.

And that works. I think the moments when the movie tries to add a little something extra (the Shue scene, a bit of too-much-ness with radio transmissions from a German sub captain who’s all “we’re coming for you” and even throws out some wolf howls) are the least successful. Just show us a surfacing sub and a torpedo wake and a worried Hanks urgently but calmly ordering “left full rudder” and the movie is able to generate a perfect amount of tension and suspense. B

Rated PG-13 for war-related action/violence and brief strong language, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Aaron Schneider with a screenplay by Tom Hanks (based on the C.S. Forester book The Good Shepherd), Greyhound is an hour and 31 minutes long and available on Apple TV+.

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti become stuck in “one of those infinite time loop situations that you might have heard about,” as Samberg’s character explains, in Palm Springs, an enjoyably goofy rom-com.

Sarah (Milioti) is less than delighted about doing her maid of honor duties at her younger sister Tala’s (Camila Mendes) wedding in Palm Springs. But then a charmingly doofy Nyles (Samberg) shows up. They have some laughs, make out a bit — and then Nyles is shot with an arrow. He freaks out and runs away, a confused Sarah follows the wounded Nyles into a cave and suddenly she is sucked into a glowy light and — wham, she’s back in bed the morning before the wedding.

She finds Nyles and he explains: they’re stuck in a time loop, one he’s been in for an extremely long time (at one point, she asks him what he does for work and he seems to have genuinely forgotten). No matter what happens during the day, once he passes out (or dies), Nyles wakes up back in his hotel room and the day resets. Sarah takes some convincing. She drives nonstop to Texas, she attempts to balance the karmic scales (with a “selfless” act that’s actually sorta mean) and she drives into an oncoming truck (Nyles suggests unbuckling so she dies fast; the day resets but pain is real, he says). Eventually, she comes to terms with the situation and she begins to hang with Nyles, enjoying his existence of day-drinking and burritos. For Nyles, Sarah’s presence starts to give his life stakes and something to look forward to; for Sarah, her feelings toward Nyles start to push her to find a way out of the loop.

This movie hangs on Milioti and Samberg — are they enjoyable to watch individually and as a couple? The answer is yes and thus the movie works; it’s no more complicated than that. All the time stuff hangs together well enough to serve as a platform for their stories and their relationship. One could argue that it even sort of works as a metaphor for the movie’s take on love — everybody lives in their own time loop but you can choose to spend yours with somebody, which will change what you get out of life. But, it also doesn’t need to be that deep. If you just want a story about likeable goofuses plopped in sunny weirdness and their quirky romance, Palm Springs supplies that with laughs and moments of sweetness. B+

Rated R for sexual content, language throughout, drug use and some violence, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Max Barbakow with a screenplay by Andy Siara, Palm Springs is an hour and 30 minutes long and available on Hulu.

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Charlize Theron is an immortal warrior in Netflix’s The Old Guard.

Andy (Theron) leads a small team — Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) — of sorta-immortal fighters. Andy has been around for millennia, Booker “died” the first time fighting in the Napoleonic wars, and Joe and Nicky fell in love after killing each other during the Crusades. Fighting in battles big and small throughout history, these immortals heal and come back to life every time they’re “killed” — though, we’re told, eventually their time will be up.

Mostly they’ve stayed hidden but a man named Copely (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an ex-CIA agent, has figured out their abilities and sets them up for capture. His intentions aren’t so terrible, maybe, if you don’t think about it too hard: he wants to bring them to petulant hoodie-wearing biotech bazillionaire Merrick (Harry Melling) for study so that their regenerative abilities can be used to heal disease and injury. But Merrick is clearly evil so what are the odds this experiment will just be a peaceful gift to humanity, as Copley intends?

As the group is on the run from Merrick, they get a psychic alert that there is a new immortal: Nile (KiKi Layne), a U.S. Marine recently killed in Afghanistan. Or she appeared “killed” but then healed — freaking out her squad mates. Andy sets off to find her and explain her weird new powers to her before the U.S. government or anybody else can ship her off to a lab.

In addition to the problem of Copley and his motivations (he is presented as a basically good, smart guy, though his initial actions undermine this), The Old Guard has, for me, a structural problem: the “Episode 1” trap. This movie feels so intent on setting up a series of movies that it piles up exposition and slows down the action. The Old Guard does a lot of filling us in — about characters or plot points that are clearly meant to pay off in the future — that doesn’t necessarily add to a fuller understanding of this story and that is a drag on the progress of this movie.

Near the movie’s end, when we get well-choreographed action and characters making decisions, I could see what this movie was and I enjoyed the world this had all built. But all the “TV pilot” business weighed the movie down.

These problems aren’t, however, fatal. I like the characters set up here. Much like in ABC’s Stumptown, another property based, as this is, on a Greg Rucka comic, The Old Guard has a good handle on how to create well-rounded female characters who feel like real people, not just one-dimensional Strong Ladies. The romance between Nicky and Joe adds much needed joy and humanity to the story. (They are a romantic-as-heck couple and it’s a treat to have something so swoony tucked inside an action movie.) Their scenes and scenes of Nile figuring out her new “eternal” status are good examples of the movie folding in heart and lightness without resorting to quippiness. (KiKi Layne, who I liked in If Beale Street Could Talk, holds her own next to Theron here.)

Did I immediately add The Old Guard graphic novel to my library request list? Of course. And the movie’s final moments set up a next chapter that I am eagerly awaiting. I just wish this movie could have been a little tighter and able to stand on its own. B

Rated R for sequences of graphic violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood with a screenplay by Greg Rucka (who created the comic book with Leandro Fernandez), The Old Guard is two hours and five minutes long and is available on Netflix.