Category: Film Reviews by Amy

The puberty alarm goes off and suddenly Riley’s mind is a construction zone with new emotions in Inside Out 2, a less jolly, more complex sequel to the 2015 Pixar movie.

Riley (voice of Kensington Tallman) is 13 and on the cusp of high school. Inside her mind, Joy (voice of Amy Poehler) has learned to let Riley’s emotional experiences have balance — Anger (voice of Lewis Black), Fear (voice of Tony Hale), Disgust (voice of Liza Lapira) and of course Sadness (voice of Phyllis Smith) all have a place in Riley’s life. Joy does tidy things up at the end of the day, sending the less than ideal memories to the back of Riley’s mind, letting Riley’s sense of self (as physically represented by a sort of crystalized snowflake sculpture thing that grows from the roots of the memories kept down below) develop from only positive memories.

Then the puberty alarm goes off and suddenly a wrecking ball crashes through headquarters and the emotional control panel has new colors. A frazzle-headed orange creature pops up and introduces herself as Anxiety (voice of Maya Hawke). Along with her come a small turquoise-colored Envy (voice of Ayo Edebiri), a large shy pink Embarrassment (voice of Paul Walter Hauser) and floppy French Ennui (voice of Adele Exarchopoulos). Anxiety, however, has plans and quickly takes over.

Her plans involve helping Riley to make and solidify friendships with the high school hockey team players, especially team captain Valentina (voice of Lilimar).

While on the way to a three-day hockey camp with her middle school friends, Riley learns that her besties will be going to a different high school. Though a “sadness is a part of life” Joy looks at the camp as a way for Riley to spend as much time with her buddies as possible, Anxiety quickly convinces the gang that Riley needs to use it to make friends with Valentina and secure her place on her high school hockey team so she won’t be friendless and alone next year. Anxiety’s special skill is painting vivid pictures of the things that can go wrong for Riley, so emotions old and new agree to follow Anxiety’s lead, until the original emotions start to argue Anxiety’s actions don’t reflect Riley’s true self. Then Anxiety vacuum tubes them out to “The Vault” to be locked up — “suppressed emotions,” one of them cries.

But of course you can’t keep a plucky Joy down. She rallies the original emotions to find the sense of self that Anxiety jettisoned when it got in the way of her Valentina plan and take it back to headquarters to save Riley.

Ultimately, what they’re saving Riley from is Anxiety’s increasingly aggressive ideas of the things that could go wrong and the resulting beliefs they create in Riley that she’s not good enough. In the movie’s climax, Anxiety creates something of a storm of this blend of real and imagined horrors — which we see as an emotion tornado where Anxiety is both moving so fast she kind of loses her physicality but is also frozen in place. That’s a pretty good visual representation of being in the grip of panic or anxiety — a combination of an increasingly intense feedback loop and of being stuck. The movie also shows Riley — with the help of external friends and internal emotions — working her way out of this feeling. I don’t know that it means anything to younger kids in the audience — the younger members of the crowd in the theater I saw this movie at were antsy by this point — but I do feel like it’s a good teachable moment for teens and tweens. This moment — and a good bit of the movie — does feel more successful as “art saying something about life” than as “entertaining for the littles.”

When I say this movie is less jolly and more complex, I think that’s what I mean. In the first movie, older but still kid Riley was dealing with the sadness of moving away from her friends. This is a life difficulty that I think is easily graspable to a kid, even a younger one. There is something more nuanced about Riley’s fears and hopes and struggles here — she isn’t really losing her friends, she can still see them, but she won’t be with them every day and will be without the social protection a group of buddies brings and so needs to replace that with older kids she must work to impress (versus the buddies who more naturally share her interests). I think the movie does a good job of examining how this feels and how — without veering into Afterschool Special Peer-Pressure territory — your ambitions for certain friends or social acceptance can cause you to act in ways that are against your core beliefs, your sense of self.

In addition to tackling a muddier problem, Inside Out 2 feels less sharp in general probably in part because we’ve seen all this before. The movie’s funniest new addition is probably Bloofy (voice of Ron Funches), a old-school hand-drawn-looking animated dog-thing that is a character from a preschool show that Riley secretly still loves. Bloofy asks questions of a nonexistent audience and has a helpful fanny-pack friend named Pouchy (voice of James Austin Johnson) — all very Dora the Explorer and my kids laughed at both the visual and character absurdities of Bloofy and Pouchy, who always seems to have very Acme-looking dynamite at his disposal.

I asked my daughter, who is not so far from Riley’s age, what she thought of the movie and her response was that the movie itself is decent but that she hated how Anxiety was trying to ruin Riley’s life. Yeah, tell me about it, I thought. It did help to underline to me, though, that while all the Bloofy wackiness and the punny “brain storms” (idea light bulbs hailing from the sky) and the occasional raft ride on a giant broccoli were entertaining enough for the kids, the ideas in this second outing were probably more interesting and thought-provoking for their grownups. B+

Rated PG for some thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Kelsey Mann with a screenplay by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, Inside Out 2 is an hour and 36 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios.

Featured photo: Inside Out 2.

The smallest dollop of Bad Boys schmear is scraped across a very dry two-hour movie in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, a fourth movie in the series that started in 1995.

I could complain about how completely improbable the whole “run-punch-kick action cops” thing is for characters played by 59-year-old Martin Lawrence and 55-year-old Will Smith. But, hey, I can suspend disbelief. My annoyance is more that this pretense that they are physically and personality-wise the same Bad Boys they’ve always been probably leaves a lot of comedy and more clever action possibilities on the table. I feel like the movie missed an opportunity to give us a new Bad Boys adventure instead of just a lesser version of the same Bad Boys adventure. Even more annoying is that I feel like I’m getting very little Bad Boys anything — action, fun, gleeful partner silliness — for my movie ticket dollars. The movie is a millimeter thin with every element.

Let’s start with the first 30-ish minutes, which features the wedding of Detective Mike Lowery (Smith) to Christine (Melanie Liburd) and then, at that wedding, the heart attack of Detective Marcus Burnett (Lawrence). Neither of these things is particularly important to the plot and just handling them in a line of dialogue — “Maybe I’d be on my honeymoon right now if you hadn’t had a heart attack at my wedding reception” — would have gotten us to exactly the same place without dragging us through a lot of dullness.

The meat of the movie, such as this wafer-thin slice of deli ham is, involves bad guy James McGrath (Eric Dane) retroactively framing the now-deceased Capt. Howard (Joe Pantoliano) for being a dirty cop who took millions of dollars from drug cartels. I already, like an hour out from seeing the movie, forget the point of this — something about Howard having been on the trail of the real dirty cops. Mike and Marcus are determined to clear Howard’s good name. They turn to Armando (Jacob Scipio), a drug dealer and the assassin who killed Howard in the last movie, I guess — that movie came out in January 2020, who can even remember January 2020. Armando is also the son Mike didn’t know he had. Now in prison, Armando tells Mike and Marcus he can identify the man calling the shots on the dirty police/drug dealer thing. They get him out of jail but then McGrath and his men attempt to kill Armando.

Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig also return as, like, junior cadet Bad Boys and they have moments when you feel like a better movie could have made them fun.

Fun is overall what this movie lacks. Smith, who in the 1990s was all fun in a big action movie, doesn’t seem to be having any fun here. Lawrence’s vibe feels very “OK, but I’m only doing the one take.” The movie feels almost like a below-average TV procedural both in how stretched and slow everything feels and in how unspectacular the action is. Every now and then the movie would have a fun idea for an action shot — a drone dropping a grenade on a bad guy, a drone shot of a fight on a circular stairwell platform thing over a gator pit — but then it would pull away or insert what felt like unfinished CGI and the effect would be diminished. At one point, Marcus’ son-in-law, Reggie (Dennis Greene), has to defend the Burnett household from more than a dozen armed henchmen. He does this with aplomb, but we see probably as many shots of Mike and Marcus and the gang watching the fight via Ring cam and reacting to it, like kids watching a video game, as we do of the fight itself. Why are we here if not to watch one guy creatively mow down a bunch of henchmen? C

Rated R for strong violence, language throughout and some sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah with a screenplay by Chris Bremner & Will Beall, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is one hour and 55 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

The Garfield Movie (PG)

Garfield and Odie go on an adventure with Garfield’s long-lost cat dad in The Garfield Movie, a perfectly acceptable blend of cartoon antics and, if you’re seeing it in a theater, air conditioning.

Garfield (voice of, sigh, must we, Chris Pratt, but whatever) happily runs up the food delivery app bills living with human Jon (voice of Nicholas Hoult) and dog Odie (voice of Harvey Guillén), who acts as Garfield’s very smart and capable assistant — was that always the relationship? It felt off but it works well enough — which is kind of the assessment for this whole endeavor.

Garfield has lived a happily pampered life with Jon ever since Jon saw sad little kitty Garfield watching him tuck into a pizza from outside an Italian restaurant window. Jon invited Garfield in, Garfield proceeded to eat the whole pizza and a good deal of other food and the two have been together ever since. Garfield’s pre-Jon memories are of being left by his biological cat father in a box in the rain.

Said father, Vic (voice of Samuel L. Jackson), reappears in Garfield’s life by way of a kidnapping. Henchdogs Roland (voice of Brett Goldstein) and Nolan (voice of Bowan Yang) kidnap Garfield and Odie for their boss Jinx (voice of Hannah Waddingham), a cat with a crazy-wall plan to get revenge on Vic. She used to run with Vic in the olden days but during an attempted milk burglary Jinx was caught and she blames Vic. Now she wants him to steal milk for her equal to her original take multiplied by her days in the slammer (the pound, I assume). She is using threats to Garfield’s life as incentive, and her henchdogs force Garfield and Odie to participate in Vic’s big milk theft plan to keep an eye on them.

Vic is not entirely sorry about this as it allows him to spend time with Garfield and perhaps convince him that there’s more to the kitten-in-the-rain situation than Garfield remembers.

But mostly, this movie is animal hijinks, with rubbery action moments — Garfield getting flung and ricocheted to catch a train — that are very cartoon standard. Jon is shown mostly in interstitials trying to find Garfield and Odie and being stuck on hold. The movie is rather flat for how every character is one big characteristic without much depth or personality and the action moves in an extremely predictable flow. There is a wise-guy sarcasm quality that I remember from, say, the olden days cartoon Garfield and Friends that isn’t as pronounced here and that was conveyed by Lorenzo Music’s voice work in a way Chris Pratt doesn’t and maybe can’t.

But the movie is also, you know, fine. You want a non-nightmare-inducing movie that will keep kids reasonably entertained while you enjoy some frosty air conditioning, and The Garfield Movie delivers even if it doesn’t feel particularly Garfield-y to me. B-

Rated PG for action/peril and mild thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Mark Dindal with a screenplay by Paul A. Kaplan & Mark Torgove and Dave Reynolds (based on the characters created by Jim Davis) The Garfield Movie is an hour and 41 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

Featured photo: Bad Boys: Ride or Die

A 1970s late night talk show host really monkey-paws his prayer for ratings on Late Night with the Devil, a fun shaggy horror movie.

We’re told that the movie we’re watching is a combination of the show as it was aired and behind-the-scenes footage for the presumably final episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a nighttime show in the 1970s that could never quite knock Johnny Carson off his perch as the king of late night. Host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) earned his best ratings on the night his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) came on the show shortly before she died of cancer. Since then, he’s been in personal and professional turmoil. We also get some “the 1970s, man, they were wild” footage of riots and upheaval, mixed in with some “news” footage about a satanic cult.

All of which brings us to Halloween night in 1977, which also happens to be the start of sweeps week — which, fond sigh, kids, ask your grandpappies about the stunts and special guest stars TV shows broke out for those ratings-significant periods in the TV year. For Jack’s desperate ratings grab, he’s planned a Halloween show all about the hot topic that is the occult, featuring psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), magician-turned-skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchen (Laura Gordon), her patient Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) and a singer that we’re all pretty sure is going to be bumped for time. June’s book, Conversations with the Devil, is about Lilly, the sole survivor of the satanic cult mentioned in the intro footage, who June claims is possessed by a demon.

The show starts with the kind of borderline corny comedy one associates with this particular time in TV — Jack offers a mostly “meh” comedy monologue, he does some banter with/light ribbing of Ed McMahon-ish sidekick Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri), a band juices up the jokes with musical moments, and it all happens in front of an appropriate stripes-and-mustard-tones set.

Christou is the first guest, offering some clumsy cold reads with messages from people who have crossed over. Right before his time ends, though, he is struck by what is perhaps a “real” supernatural moment — he drops his vaguely Spanish magic-y person accent, he grabs his head in pain and his eyes roll back. The audience seems shocked, Jack isn’t quite sure what’s going on and producer Leo Fiske (Josh Quong Tart) is delighted that this moment of spookiness might attract viewers and attention.

I am here for this vibes-based horror. Rubber bats and goofy costumes in the audience mix with behind-the-scenes sweaty desperation and “it’s all an act” jadedness that help make the setting as regular and “nothing to see here” as it gets — until maybe it isn’t. What if Dick Cavett but sweatier and maybe possessed — it’s sort of a weird concept but it works and is mostly a fun-ride take. (The ending is abrupt and has a “we’ve only got the set for one more day, just go with what we have” not-quite feeling that, honestly, fits with the movie’s mood even if it doesn’t quite satisfy storywise.)

David Dastmalchian is exactly perfect in the lead role. He’s both sorta famous — he’s a real “he’s literally in everything” guy (his IMDb includes Marvel, DC, TV, Oppenheimer) — and not so well-known that he can’t sink into the sad, desperate mess that is Jack Delroy. B

Rated R for violent content, some gore, and language including a sexual reference, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Written and directed by Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes, Late Night with the Devil is an hour and 26 minutes long and distributed by IFC Films. It is available on AMC+ and for rent or purchase.

The First Omen (R)

The “all” in “it’s all for you” is a long ramp-up prequel to the action of the original The Omen in The First Omen, a movie that is a baroque operatic shriek but isn’t quite as fun as that implies.

I found myself thinking a lot about Evil during this movie, the series that just started its fourth and final season. It is airing on Paramount+ and it is a Robert and Michelle King joint (they of the The Good Wife television universe). Evil is a chocolate fudge sundae with extra cherries for a certain kind of dogma-fascinated lapsed Sunday school kid, thoroughly gleeful in its dark goofiness. It is a kick and a half and if you haven’t checked it out, run, don’t walk. This season’s endgame seems to be Antichrist-focused, not unlike this movie — is that a spoiler? If you aren’t aware that demon-children is the territory this movie is playing in, I’m not sure why you would watch it. It’s not a traditional horror in the sense of The Nun movies. It feels to me very much like Evil, very much Catholic school kids misbehaving with apocryphal church lore, but louder and without the sense of humor. (Evil has Andrea Martin in the supporting role of a demon-fighting nun, if you need another reason to check it out.)

Here, we’re following Margaret (Nell Tiger Free, best-known probably as the second Myrcella Baratheon from Game of Thrones), a young American novitiate showing up in early 1970s Rome to work at a Catholic convent/girls’ orphanage and school and take her vows and become a fully fledged nun. She’s been brought over by Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), a mentor since she was a child growing up in her very own nun-run girls’ school/orphanage institution. She was a “bad kid” back then, but Cardinal Lawrence helped put her on the right path, Cardinal Lawrence is the best — I’m sure the movie will prove this to be true!

She is sharing a room with fellow novitiate Luz (Maria Caballero), who has decided to spend her last days pre-veil trying out decolletage and disco. She gets Margaret to join her for a night on the town, and though Margaret is fuzzy the next morning, Luz assures her that nothing too untoward happened.

Margaret is rather fuzzy at her new job too, where she can’t understand why all the other nuns are so mean to Carlita (Nicole Sorace), an admittedly odd child made all the odder by her regular isolation from other kids. Margaret feels protective toward Carlita, and when Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) shows up telling her that Carlita is part of a larger conspiracy, she might not immediately believe him — but she doesn’t completely discount him either.

This movie revs up slowly before barrelling toward a bonkers conclusion, all wheels flying off and motor on fire. Like a wild roller coaster you ride after waiting in a two-hour line, the finale helps you to forget a bit how much the beginning of this endeavor seemed to crawl. Well, the very beginning firmly plants us in the realm of “The Devil,” but then we slow-walk it through a novitiate’s quiet yet unsettling adventures in Rome to get back to that point.

That said, the bulk of the movie is not a lunacy drought. The movie is filled with devil imagery and so much gore, much of it centered around childbirth. The movie even brushes up close to Saying Something about female power, both in the church and in the wider world, which would have been a bit of clever fun in this kind of horror movie (and very Evil).

The movie does have a lot going for it and a lot of that — how the story comes together, how the movie walks the tightrope between terror and ridiculousness — is due to the skill of Free. She is very good at hitting the exact right notes with Margaret, who goes from sincere to scared to worried about her own mental state to determined.

The First Omen doesn’t exactly hit a bull’s-eye for me in either the genuinely scary or delightfully unhinged targets, but it is enough of a near miss for both that I had a decent time. Also, seriously, watch Evil. B- (for The First Omen; the TV show Evil is an A+ with a chef’s kiss).

Rated R for violent content, grisly/disturbing images, and brief graphic nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com, and some real House of the Dragon birthing-body horror stuff that you can not unsee, according to me. Directed by Arkasha Stevenson with a screenplay by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas, The First Omen is two hours long and distributed by 20th Century Studios. The movie is now available for rent or purchase and is streaming on Hulu.

At The SOFAPLEX

The Last Stop in Yuma County (R)

Bank robbers, locals and folks passing through unfortunately intersect at a dusty diner in 1970s-ish Arizona in The Last Stop in Yuma County, a decently fun movie whose whole vibe is “tension plus heat and dirt.”

Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue) is the only one working behind the counter at the diner on the day that the air conditioning goes out and the fuel truck is late to fill up the empty pumps at the gas station across the road where owner Vernon (Faizon Love) has to tell people that they can wait in the diner for the truck or try to make it 100 miles to the next station.

A kitchen knife salesman (Jim Cummings) decides to wait it out, as do an older couple on a road trip (Gene Jones, Robin Bartlett). Charlotte and the knife salesmen are trying to act normal in the stuffy diner because that’s what fellow patrons Beau (Robert Brake) and Travis (Nicholas Logan) have told them to do. The knife salesman had absolutely no chill when he got a glimpse of Beau and Travis’ car and realized it and they fit the description of bank robbers who got away from a robbery earlier that morning. Soon Beau is holding them at gunpoint — as well as everybody else who happens through the diner, whether they know it or not — and waiting for the fuel truck and an escape route to show up. Will that happen before Charlotte’s husband, Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.), the local sheriff, figures out that things are squirrelly at his wife’s diner?

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is basically what the movie is all about, especially as other people enter the picture, such as Charlie’s hapless deputy and a young couple eager to either emulate or steal from the robbers. There is maybe too much waiting and too little shoe, with a climax that is only momentarily exciting. This movie is fine if you happen by it but nothing I’d go out of my way to seek out. C+ Available for rent or purchase.

The Beekeeper (R)

Jason Statham is a beekeeper in the dumb and awesome The Beekeeper.

Adam Clay (Statham) is a beekeeper who protects the hive (a thing he says eleventy billion times here) in both the literal sense and the “government agency with dumb name” sense. Literally, he keeps bees on the property of Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), a nice lady who was nice to him. In the other sense he’s recently retired from The Beekeepers, an outside the normal order of things group of government assassins. So when Eloise takes her own life after being scammed out of every penny she has, Adam and his particular set of skills killer-robot marches through every level of the organization of scammers, blowing stuff up and demolishing every henchman put in front of him. Working a parallel investigation into what happened to Eloise is her daughter, FBI agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who is also awesome and if somebody wants to do an equally dumb spinoff movie about her, I promise to buy tickets.

I didn’t actually see this movie in a theater; I saw it at home on a day I specifically was looking for something fun and stupid to watch, and this movie super fit the bill. It is exactly, 100 percent, completely what you think you will get based on the phrase “Jason Statham in The Beekeeper,” said in that “in a world” voice. It’s all punching, all ka-booming, all threats and violent comebacks to dumb taunts. It is, when you need this sort of thing, perfect. B+ Available for rent or purchase.

Featured photo: Late Night with the Devil

A young girl is stolen from a “place of abundance” and introduced into the harsh world of post-apocalyptic Australia in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a downbeat and fairly unnecessary origin story for the character played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road.

I mean, I assume it’s Australia, because of the accents and the Mad Max of it all.

As we learned in Fury Road, Furiosa (Alyla Browne as a kid, Anya Taylor-Joy as an older angrier girl) grew up in the “green place” in a world (or, at least, an Australia) that was otherwise a war-torn, resource-scarce desert. Due to some technical difficulties at the theater I went to, I missed the first few minutes of the movie and started watching as young girl Furiosa is thrown over the seat of some marauding grungy dude’s motorcycle. Her mother (Charlee Fraser) goes after her, both to save Furiosa and to prevent the three grungy bikers who are stealing her away from telling anybody about their hidden fertile land. With the help of a resourceful Furiosa, her mom is able to eventually kill all the kidnappers before they can tell the secrets of the “place of abundance” as they describe it. But she can’t get to Furiosa before the girl is taken to Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, thoroughly de-handsomed with some fun prosthetics), the biker gang leader. Furiosa won’t give up her homeland’s location, even when he is torturing her mother, but Dementus decides to keep her around, perhaps hoping that one day she might lead him there.

Eventually Dementus hears about another “place of abundance” — the Citadel run by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the skull-face-breathing-mask guy from Fury Road. Dementus decides he and his gang will take it over but his first attempt fails in the face of Joe’s overwhelming force of War Boys. He hatches a craftier scheme to gain control of Gasland, one of the wasteland fortresses and the source of fuel for Joe’s empire. Eventually, Dementus makes a deal with Joe for him (Dementus) to run Gasland in exchange for Joe getting Furiosa as one of his eventual brides. Furiosa is still a kid, mostly non-talking, when this deal is made, and after a few days of watching a childbirth and trying to dodge Joe’s creeper sons (Josh Helman, Nathan Jones) she runs off and hides among the mechanics at the Citadel, posing as a boy.

Years later, when she has grown into Taylor-Joy, Furiosa becomes a worker on a newly crafted War Rig. After a battle with raiders during the initial run, the truck’s driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) realizes: that Furiosa is a badass during a fight, that Furiosa is a girl and that he rather likes this badass girl. They do food-for-fuel runs together, with Furiosa hiding her rage toward Dementus until his growing recklessness puts him in direct conflict with Immortan Joe — and eventually with her.

In Fury Road it was Theron doing the big, interesting performance; here it’s Hemsworth. Not unlike Mad Max, Dementus lost his family — a stuffed animal that belonged to his long-gone children is always strapped somewhere to his person. He seems to cause chaos and suffering not for any particular thrill but because it’s something to do. Likewise, his interest in seizing power seems more like a nonchalant troll than an ambition for leadership. Hemsworth, the actor, seems to enjoy the scruffy unprettiness of his character.

His general rightness for the role unfortunately highlights the “not quite” fit of Taylor-Joy with the Furiosa role. Or maybe it’s the role that’s just not that exciting. Something about the character just doesn’t quite have the same pull as in Fury Road.

Also not quite standing up to the predecessor for me are the visual elements. Though one of Furiosa’s more successful components, they don’t quite smack you in the face the way they did in Fury Road. I do think the fact that we’ve seen this desert wasteland and the mutant-like people who populate it before — all dirt-caked and weird hats and the whole War Boy body paint thing — reduces the wow factor. Also, you know, it’s more sand. The second Dune maybe filled my “the beautiful wasteland of sand dunes” needs for a while.

I said about Fury Road that it was a B movie with first-class movie visuals, and that is true here. The B-movie-ness pokes through constantly and it’s a not unfun aspect of the movie. I don’t know if it’s a sense of humor, exactly, but the movie definitely has a smirky quality that when paired with the stop-motion-y-speedy-closeup thing does give you that overall “schlocky in a good way” vibe. At 90-ish minutes, this would be kind of a bummer romp — all despair and ruin but with hints of camp. At its actual two-hour-and-nearly-30-minute run time, it’s got more of a saga feel, yes, but in the slog sense rather than the “sweeping epic adventure and drama” sense. I feel like this movie, like the cobbled together cars in it, should get me in the audience all revved up and “ha, let’s go, crazy racers!” Instead, I felt more grumpy, more “OK, movie, tick tock, let’s go.” C+

Rated R for sequences of strong violence and grisly images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by George Miller and written by George Miller and Nick Lathouris, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is two hours and 28 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Featured photo: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Apes together strong, sometimes, in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth movie in the reboot series that started with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011.

A title card and a throwback scene to the funeral for Caesar, the Andy Serkis mo-capped chimp leader from the first three movies, reminds us that humans have been pandemic-ed into near oblivion, with most of the remaining people unable to speak and intellectually limited. Now, many (ape?) generations removed from that initial multi-decade struggle, apes live in all kinds of settlements, including, for the chimps we first encounter, as a clan in a small village where they smoke fish and raise eagles. Wikipedia and an appearance mid-movie by the Griffith Observatory suggest that this all takes place in Southern California. Noa (Owen Teague), a chimp who seems like an almost-but-not-quite adult, has to find an eagle egg for his special big boy ceremony the next day. When an encounter with a human stealing fish from the smokehouse leads to the breaking of the egg he had found, Noa sets off that night, in the dark, to find another one. Noa really needs that egg now because his dad, Koro (Neil Sandilands), is the head of the raptor raising operation and Noa doesn’t want to disappoint him.

The nighttime egg hunt leads Noa to cross paths with a raiding party from a different ape community. They don’t see Noa but they do find his horse and send it running so they can follow it and get to Noa’s village.

When Noa returns, the village is on fire, his buddies Anaya (Travis Jeffrey) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) and his mom, Dar (Sara Wiseman), are being herded together and tied up and his dad is trying to rescue the eagles from their nest-house atop a burning tower. Noa helps his dad but then they both have to fight Sylva (Eka Darville), the gorilla who is head of the raiders. This is all for Proximus Caesar, Sylva says before using his cattle prod-like weapon to cause Noa to fall from the tower. Noa wakes up the next morning, buries his father and sets off in search of his stolen clan.

Eventually Noa makes it to the “kingdom” of Proximus (Kevin Durand), who Wikipedia says is a bonobo. Proximus has a large work camp outside some kind of human-made bunker and is kidnapping clans to serve as a workforce to help him pull open the giant doors of the bunker, which he hopes is filled with treasures. Seeing as the bunker is in the cliff next to a beach and he’s had to build a sea wall to keep the beach from being flooded, his “kingdom” isn’t very big. But Proximus lives pretty large, spending most of his time in a ship beached on this part of the coast where he has a dining room, captured-ape servants and a pet human, Trevathan (William H. Macy), who, unlike the feral people we see by a watering hole out in the wild, can talk and read, specifically read Proximus stories about ancient Rome.

By the time Noa makes it to Proximus, he also has a human traveling companion. A woman he first calls Nova (Freya Allen) — a name bestowed by orangutan Raka (Peter Macon), a follower of a sort of religious sect based on the true stories of the original Caesar — began following him on the road. At first he thought she was just scavenging food but later he realizes there’s more to her than appears.

Trailers and the fact that she’s wearing a tank top on the movie poster suggest Nova has a whole deal independent of Noa’s “get the clan back” quest. I know this is exactly the wrong way to watch this movie, but I found myself wondering about the details — how many years are we post-pandemic? Are the humans we see in comical fur-bikini-type get-ups virus-impaired survivors from the before times or newly born-in-the-wild people? Do the apes in various colonies and villages and kingdoms have any communication with each other? Or trade?

I fully admit none of these things matter. But the movie left me wondering these things I think because the onscreen action was all very medium-at-most compelling. Where I found myself thinking “this might be one of the top five movies about war I’ve ever seen” during the War for the Planet of the Apes I didn’t feel as pulled in by this one. Were there no previous, very excellent trilogy, I might feel more excited by this movie. But it did not stand up to the comparison.

That said, Kingdom isn’t bad. It is fine, perfectly cromulent, a decent product. It has “blockbuster-flavored seasoning” sprinkled throughout, with references not just to its previous films but elements that call to mind other cinematic universe-type stories. It doesn’t wow, but it doesn’t offend. There are moments when interesting nuggets poke through. No particular performance stands out; no one gives the sort of startling humanity to their motion captured, CGI-ed characters that Serkis gave to Caesar. But then again, maybe it’s the comparison that makes the perfectly serviceable work of Teague, Macon and Durand seem totally acceptable but unremarkable. B

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence/action, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Wes Ball and written by Josh Friedman, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is two hours and 25 minutes long and distributed in theaters by 20th Century Studios.

Featured photo: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes