Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "Spectral"

*Now with 98% less white highlighting! What a hack!

As far as I know this is streaming only, so no box art.

Spectral (2016)

Directed by Nic Mathieu
Produced by Jon Jashni, Thomas Tull
Written by Ian Fried, John Gatins, George Nolfi, Story by Ian Fried

Starring James Badge Dale, Max Martini, Emily Mortimer, Bruce Greenwood

Budget: $70M (supposedly)

The Netflix definition of "original" seems to differ somewhat from my own. Not only was this not produced by the streaming service (it was originally produced by Legendary and Universal, who were unsatisfied with the final cut and sold the rights to the 'Flix), but this movie isn't really an original premise. Of course, I'm not asking for 100% originality in my near-future science fiction (because that's impossible), but maybe cool it on the claims.

Spectral is essentially a B-movie with A-list cast and production design and C-list science, averaging it firmly in B-movie territory. Here's the premise: there's a problem in Moldova, some soldiers and DARPA engineers go to check it out, and then they fight ghosts. Then spoilers:

Except they're not really ghosts. They're molecularly-scanned copies of human beings 3D printed out of Bose-Einstein condensate and controlled by some brains-in-jars.

I spoilered that because I think this movie is good enough for action-sci-fi geeks that it's worth seeing it out. Just a warning, it features some of the worst Hollywood techno-jargon, and not like Primer.

We start off with Kirk Cameron James Badge Dale playing DARPA genius who invented hyperspectral headsets for soldiers. He's called in by General Orland (Greenwood) after soldiers start dying under mysterious circumstances. After a disastrous attempt at rescuing a stranded team, they have to get back to friendly territory while avoiding the "Spectrals" who can one-hit-kill people and aren't hurt by conventional weaponry.

Like I said, a B-movie concept. However, there's plenty of stuff here that clashes with what should be a light action movie: the visual design is really, really good, from the ruined cityscape to the makeshift plasma weaponry at the end. The acting isn't terrible, not on the level of Battle: L.A. There's some moderately clever stuff done by the main characters and the action scenes are cohesive and mildly effective (at first).

And then Dale says he'll reverse the polarity of his camera to turn it into a spotlight and things go downhill from there. If you want me to take your movie seriously, you should put a little more work into the science than "none at all."

The Good
Like I said above, the movie looks good. From the near-future gear to the robo-rottweiler to the weapons facility near the end of the movie it manages to put forward a consistent vision of near-horizon tech. If you're able to forgive significant plot details for the sake of the setting, this might work out.

Similarly, the acting is functional. While that might not sound like high praise it's more than you can sometimes expect. I'm going to draw another parallel to Battle: L.A. and how all the acting in that film was flat as hell, particularly the Survivor Children which populate both films (it's either kids or animals, but it packs a harder punch if you kill children).

For most of the movie I totally bought into the premise of these battlefield ghosts messing things up. The first real fight between the squad and this semi-invisible, incredibly deadly creature feels tense, follows a logical series of events, and even if most of the dead guys were expendable it's still effective watching them poof.

The Bad
Unfortunately, when the movie hit the halfway point things started falling apart. It starts with really lazy science nonsense, some attempts at sentimentality that don't quite scan, and the plot getting ahold of the Spectrals and giving them a power-up for the hell of it. Hell, the logic of what the Spectrals can do kind of breaks apart at roughly the hour mark. It reminds me of those movies with vaporizer weapons that simply knock the hero back instead of dusting him.

While the production is really neat, there are some points with some really obvious ADR without regard to the portrayed tone, volume, or, yes, actual words. This was primarily noticeable during the big science-exposition scene where we get the reveal of what the Spectrals are, which leads into my next spoiler:

The brains-in-jars are actually full nervous systems which are...used to control the Spectrals? But were the nervous systems removed from the original human or from the 3D printed Condensate version? Why do they make a big dumb tornado at the end? Why do they explode? There's just enough information to jog my suspension of disbelief but never enough to settle it back down.

The Rest

I really like Westworld.

I think the most damning thing about the movie is that I don't have anything for this section. It's a shrug of a movie. While the tech stuff is neat and the action is competent, just don't go in expecting anything brilliant.

Oh, the 3D printing stuff reminded me a lot of Westworld.

The Verdict
I thought it was fine, on the level that I actually tried to avoid spoilers. Maybe I would have been more open to the movie if the "reveal" had been revealed to me.

It's probably worth a watch if you're looking for a video-game style story to watch.

Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "Journey to Promethea"

Wonderful.

Journey to Promethea (2010)

Directed by Daniel Garcia
Produced by Daniel Garcia, Michael Thompson
Written by Daniel Garcia

Starring Billy Zane, Scott L. Schwartz, Louis Herthum, Jessica Heap, James DuMont

Budget: $2M (estimated)

After a few days of Sandler-inspired meltdowns, I decided to cleanse my palate with some of the incredibly cheap fantasy fare populating Amazon Prime. In an effort to match Netflix in simple quantity, the retail giant has snatched up as many cheap titles as it could, regardless of quality.

And what a blessing it is.

Allegedly this movie was originally made for TV, which I 100% believe. From the goofy acting to the cheap Ren Faire costumes to the Windows Movie Maker special effects, Journey to Promethea shouts "amateur" from the moment you hear the title (Promethea? Come on) to the final second of the end credits, done in the always-professional Papyrus font.

We start with some narration about the Samillian Tribe, a proud people who were conquered by the evil King Laypach (Zane) and cursed to wander aimlessly for eternity. This consists of walking around a forest with half-hearted looks of defeat on their faces. After a failed rebellion led by the warrior Draden, the man is executed. Before his head is removed, he says his spirit will enter one of the Samillians and lead them to Promethea.

A few years later we meet Magnus, a farm boy. King Billy Zane hears a prophecy that if the descendant of Draden sticks the sword in a magic rock, he'll turn to dust.

Can you spot the cut?

Yeah, this movie follows the Hero's Journey, filtered through the lens of an absolute madman. The director is a computer animator and graphic designer who I am convinced is actually an alien. The best way I can describe this film is that it's an alien's attempt at producing a cookie-cutter epic fantasy movie, from the wise mentor to the princess to the chosen one absurdity...but it's done with such a misunderstanding of why those tropes originally worked that it becomes a hilarious comedy from pretty much the first shot.

Seriously, from the first shot, which is a really, really bad rendered fly-over of a lush waterfall jungle and a textureless castle. Cut to King Billy Zane listening to his jester tell jokes. "What did the ocean say to the sand? Nothing, it just waved" is the first thing out of his mouth.

Daniel Garcia knows that jesters didn't tell literal jokes, right?

Oh nooooo...

Cut to Magnus, who watches his father die and brother get captures by King Billy Zane's soldiers. At the funeral pyre he encounters a magical chicken (yes, really) who turns out to be the...sorcerer Gydro? It's a little-person actor in yellow makeup with the worst three-fingered posthetics you can get and a pitch-adjust on his voice that makes him sound like a smurf. Anyway, this chicken-wizard tells Magnus he's got a destiny, then wanders through the woods for a bit before he finds a princess and tells her about Magnus. She and her band of scantily-dressed handmaidens wander out into the woods to find the guy.

Magnus meets up with Ari (Herthum, who played Dolores's father in Westworld in a hilarious "that guy" moment) who fulfills the part of the Obi-Wan, but he's far closer to Bran from Eragon. They train a bit, get into some fights with King Billy Zane's minions, and the movie lurches forward on a tread of misunderstood cliches.

"Sup."

Really, the story here doesn't matter so much because the individual scenes play more like a series of loosely-connected nonsense. Billy Zane never leaves the throne-room set (I don't think he ever actually stands up), the movie takes place almost entirely in the forest, and the production design is staggeringly inept. At one point we get a close-up of one of the king's soldiers and their chain-mail is represented by grey sweaters.

Hell, the film quality looks like a VHS despite the fact that it was made in 2010. This isn't an exaggeration, there are spots where it looks like everything's been run through a filter, and I was questioning whether it was intentional or not.

This movie is wonderful. I haven't even mentioned one of the Princess's handmaidens trying to seduce Magnus literally in front of the Princess, nor the disfigured prisoner with the Sloth-from-Goonies makeup, nor the jpeg sword-fight effects. Beautiful.

The Wonderful

"Year 31: We are running low on detergent."

Oh man, these effects are brilliant. At one point Magnus has a vision of the magical sword which appears as a static image with the background twisting around it in an obvious Whirl filter. The fire on the chicken-wizard looks like an animated .gif superimposed over the footage. When King Billy Zane turns to dust at the end it's accomplished with the most basic of "disintegrate" filters. In order to make the chicken-wizard sound appropriately inhuman they did a really basic pitch-adjust on his dialogue.

Hell, the costumes are so crisp and clean they look like they were sewn from cloth bought at Jo-Ann Fabrics. Everything is so bright. These people have supposedly been walking through the wilderness for over thirty years and there's not a speck of dirt on them anywhere. All of the swords are the same style of prop and look like plastic. At certain spots we see "wise men" who have the most absurd flesh prosthetics on their faces. Billy Zane is wearing an obviously plastic crown and his harem is the least committed I've ever seen.

The Eragon
Of course, this isn't meant to be taken as an endorsement of the movie. It's definitely something to watch if you want to question Billy Zane's decision making processes. I've sent him a few messages over Twitter asking him whether he had as much fun as it looks while filming, but he hasn't gotten back to me yet. I suspect this is something he wants to forget. After all, he was in Titanic.

By most mechanical and dirty hand, I shall have such revenges on you...

The Verdict
If you want to see a Martian take on our Earth-like epic fantasy movies, give this a shot.

Otherwise, go watch Westworld. It's been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Drama and if it doesn't win we should riot.

Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "The Do-Over"

Sometimes the joke is in the title.

The Do-Over (2016)

Directed by Steven Brill
Produced by Adam Sandler, Allen Covert, Kevin Grady, Ted Sarandos
Written by Kevin Barnett, Chris Pappa

Starring Adam Sandler, David Spade, Paula Patton

Budget: $Corona

Adam Sandler plays a middle-aged womanizer who, with the help of one of his old friends, engages in all sorts of shenanigans in a vacation spot, scams people out of their money, lies about his identity in order to seduce women, executes a variety of bodily function, gay panic, and cultural difference jokes, and ultimately resorts to exaggerated sentimentality to pretend there's some sort of heart to the movie.

This time the vacation spot is Puerto Rico, the women are Paula Patton, Catherine Bell, and Kathryn Hahn, the gay panic is surprisingly subdued (if still present) and the rest is cancer.

No, literally. This movie is about finding the cure for cancer.

We start off on the wrong foot at a 1991 class reunion where they play I'm Too Sexy and Baby Got Back while watching Sean Astin and Natasha Leggero grind on the dance floor. We're introduced to David Spade, a pathetic bank manager who wishes he'd done things differently. In comes Adam Sandler, a supposed FBI agent who offers to liven up his life. After an explosive trip on a rented yacht, the two steal the identities of some recently-deceased, go to Puerto Rico, and engage in all sorts of nonsense as the movie changes genres in between scenes and ultimately loses itself in the shift.

At this point it's become abundantly clear that Sandler pretty much makes movies so he can dick around with his buddies and take free vacations, and who can blame him? The guy consistently draws an audience, and with Netflix behind him he doesn't have to give a damn about the quality so long as he delivers the face-time to pull in those sweet, sweet views. Ultimately The Do-Over is more of the same.

Get it? His name is Max. Like Maxi-Pad. It's a joke!

The plot summary above is exaggerated for the sake, but not by much. Spade's bank manager character gets dragged along by Sandler on a variety of misadventures which are all ultimately at the service of delivering a "magic bullet" cure for cancer for Sandler's kid. Which would work, but it takes the movie (about 110 minutes long) roughly 90 minutes to get there, where it's all delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Focusing on Sandler here would just be to copy and paste my other posts about him, so I'll focus on the others in the film. First off, Spade puts in a passable performance as a mild-mannered bank manager (inside a grocery store so we can get dat sweet product placement), but the writing piles it on just a bit too heavily. There's a fine balance that needs to be maintained so we can both empathize with this guy who's been stepped on his entire life while also feeling like he's not the one who's allowed it all to happen. Considering the introductory scene for Spade's character involves him watching his wife (Leggero) grind on her ex-husband (Astin), then go home with him (with his "permission") it's kind of hard to like this massive push-over.

Skip to his home life where he's helping raise his wife's verbally and physically abusive twin boys (who can't keep straight faces during their line deliveries) and most of my sympathy has crawled into the corner and died.

They take on the identities of two doctors, one of whom was married to Paula Patton who puts on a fine performance, go down to Puerto Rico, and discover that their assumed identities were embroiled in some sort of crime which involves gay bikers, a German assassin called the Gymnast, and Sandler's ex-wife (Hahn) who chases him around so they can have comically loud sex scenes off-camera.

Then we get the whammy. As we're introduced to an increasingly-expansive web of characters Spade goes to investigate a convenient exposition computer and discovers that these doctors had discovered an incredibly effective cancer treatment, were shot down by Big Pharma, and were murdered by people who wanted money. Oh, and Paula Patton was a bad guy.

The Acceptable
There are some fine performances in this. Paula Patton does her best with what she's given, despite the fact that most of her script calls for the sort of wide-eyed innocence which is really easy to mistake for bad acting. Natasha Leggero is doing her standard spoiled girl routine, which is generally at least believable. Nick Swardson has a few scenes which primarily consist of him getting hit by cars which is incredibly satisfying.

Special mention in particular should go to Sean Astin who is unrecognizable as Ted-O. He must have been having a blast.

Shockingly, I actually liked Sandler's first...ten minutes? When he shows up as an FBI agent (a lie) he does a little monologue about growing up without his dad, which is actually delivered with some sincerity in the performance. It reminded me of Click and made me wonder if Sandler doesn't have some serious father issues he pulls from. Maybe he should do that more often.

At least Rob Schneider doesn't show up.

The Rest
This movie is nearly two hours long, and Sandler's character lies throughout, to the point where it's not until the last twenty minutes that we learn exactly what's been going on (after which it's helpfully spelled out with roughly half a dozen flashbacks). In a better movie these clues would have been a little more subtle and less easily interpreted as mistakes in the script, but that's the world we live in. It's a moment of such forced sentimentality that it outstrips pretty much any other attempt Sandler's done to pluck at our heartstrings. There's only so much they can take before they snap.

It's also interesting to see Sandler take advantage of the freedom he's afforded by Netflix concerning content. Early on there's some jokes about Spade peeking on Sandler's mom in the shower (he refers to Spade as her little Macaulay Culkin), there's a fairly visible shot of Luis Guzman's scrotum, and plenty of the mean-spirited references to homosexuality that you've come to expect from this crew.

Unlike Pixels the production on this movie is fairly bland. The direction doesn't do anything special, most of the look comes from Puerto Rico's natural beauty, and the score doesn't really exist beyond the obvious nostalgia picks. There's a single strain of actual score which stood out to me, primarily because it sounded eerily similar to me, to the point where I spent a long while digging into the composer's background. Ultimately it turns out the movie was scored by long-time Sandler collaborator Rupert Gregson-Williams, who's done most of his previous entries. So maybe he just ripped himself off.

Finally, there is a huge missed opportunity here. Throughout there are jokes made about Spade's character wishing he'd invented time travel. Combined with the title, I was desperately hoping that there would be a third-act twist where it turns out he did and that comes into the plot somehow. Alas, it goes wasted.

The Products
I've been surprised by recent Sandler movies as to the lack of obvious product placement, but it returned with a vengeance in this one. Here's a short list of the stuff I noticed, and I wasn't paying particularly close attention:

Corona (multiple), Acer (1/3 of entire screen), Bud Light Party Ball (focal point of scene), "Sun Daze" by Florida Georgia Line, Diet Coke, Amex, Ramen, Hamburger Helper, Zenith, Netflix (excusable, I guess), Jenga, Ferrari, Jameson, Fritos. I'm not against product placement because it does its part in helping a movie get made. But when the center 60% of the screen is taken up by it and the dialogue in the scene revolves around it, that's when I get tired of having low-tier beer shoved at my face.

Not like that's saying much.

The Verdict
While I wouldn't recommend it, at least it's better than Ridiculous 6...

Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some thoughts on "Pixels"

For the record those are voxels, not pixels.
Literally unwatchable.

Pixels (2015)

Directed by Chris Columbus
Produced by Adam Sandler, Chris Columbus, Mark Radcliffe, Allen Covert
Written by Tim Herlihy, Timothy Dowling, Story by Tim Herlihy

Starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad, Brian Cox

Budget: $88M

Adam Sandler's a weird guy to write about because he's obviously talented on some level, but he's grown complacent. It's kind of the same problem that's taken hold of Seth MacFarlane in that he makes enough money that nobody will say no to him. It happened to Stephen King as well, and in every case it's never a good thing.

We start in 1982 with a bunch of kid actors playing Sandler, Gad, Dinklage, and James and none of the child actors are particularly good. Sandler's character is apparently some sort of video game wiz but he fails at beating Dinklage at Donkey Kong, by which I mean he comes in second. Dan Aykroyd shows up for about thirty seconds so his vodka can get pitched later in the movie, and we learn this world video game championship is going to be put into some sort of digital time capsule and shot off into space.

Jump forward. Kevin James is the President of the United States. Adam Sandler is a Nerd Patrol installation guy. A military base in Guam is attacked. Sandler is called to a house where he makes inappropriate passes at an obviously grieving Michelle Monaghan, and already this movie is a piece of trash. Sandler gets called into the White House where James informs him of the base attack, and it turns out aliens intercepted the video game tapes and thought it was a declaration of war.

If this sounds disjointed, it's because Tim Herlihy is a hack.

Sandler teams up with Josh Gad and the Taj Mahal is attacked. Brian Cox and Sean Bean don't like our main characters because they're nerds. After losing the first two battles (Galaga and Arkanoid), the team fights back and wins Centipede. In order to win, they recruit Dinklage, who's been in prison for the past few years. There's a Pac-Man sequence, some really unearned romantic scenes between Sandler and Monaghan, and a big dumb fight at the end where Sandler saves the day and gets the girl, because of course he does.

Where to begin?

Maybe with some more Adam Sandler talk. Since I watched Ridiculous Six last year Sandler's been in the midst of his four-film deal with Netflix, which led to The Do-Over (coming soon to this blog). It seems he's found his new home, because with Netflix he doesn't have to bother with what the critics think or what box office returns are; so long as people keep watching, they'll keep pushing out this content. Which of course means Sandler can continue his streak of not trying while rolling around on his cocaine mountain.

Not that I can really blame him at this point. The man has found a formula that works, and if all it takes is his integrity as an artist, who cares that he's free to sit back and make dumb, candy movies with his buddies?

Because that's essentially what Pixels is. It's candy, and while it might look good, you shouldn't watch too much because it'll kill you.

The Tolerable
Considering 2015 was the last year he did actual studio work, this movie got a competent director in Chris Columbus. The man has an eye for his work, and most of this film is at least shot in a way that wasn't offensive. There are a few good sequences, notably the Centipede fight (though once Sandler and Gad take the spotlight the logic goes out the window) and the final scenes set during the big battle on earth are just chaotic enough to not detract from the look of things.

Hell, even the pixel aliens look good. Even up close it's obvious there was some care put into the appearance of Q*Bert, PacMan, and the others. Every so often in these movies the sheer amount of CGI on screen at once drops the quality, but even when the screen is blaring like an arcade it's not overwhelming.

Finally, the actual actors in this movie put in fine performances. Michelle Monaghan is wasted but she delivers. Peter Dinklage couldn't give two shits about what he's been given and it's obvious he's having the time of his life. Josh Gad, despite the fact he's playing a stereotypical man-child, actually lends some comedic timing to the movie that's sorely lacking from the rest of the cast, even if his lines are the most predictable sort of Sandler fare. Of course, Sandler isn't credited as a writer on this film, but to say he didn't have some influence would be disingenuous.

The Awful
First off, this movie feels really cynical. Sandler's character isn't likeable on pretty much any level. Within the first few minutes of meeting him we see him make several really weird comments towards Monaghan's character which would be grounds for any reasonable person to call Not Best Buy to ask who thought it would be a good idea to employ this guy. For example, we learn that her husband was caught cheating on her with the 19 year old Sinnamon, and his first reaction when he sees her is to comment about how hot she is, when he expected her to be one of those women who was hot in high school but got fat. Later, when she's crying and drinking wine in her closet he joins her and tries to snag a kiss and his first reaction to her rejection is to question whether she would have kissed him if he was a billionaire. Man, I think it's more like she's a Lieutenant Colonel in the US military and you're a 50 year old Not Best Buy Nerd Brigade guy with no skills outside video games.

Hell, until the obligatory second-act reversal he treats her (and most other people) like trash. When he's wandering around the White House (with no security, no clearance, and no real reason to be there) he spends most of his time hurling half-formed insults at people based on their appearances. It's mean-spirited, and coming from someone of Sandler's age it should be embarrassing.

Of course, Monaghan isn't the only woman who's criminally underutilized in this movie. Jane Krakowski is here as the First Lady, and she doesn't do anything other than tickle Kevin James and add the occasional concerned aside to a scene. She has comedic chops and she's there only to serve as the president's arm-lady.

But what's worse is Ashley Benson's character, Lady Lisa. At the start of the movie we see Gad's character obsessing over the character who seems like a very tame Red Sonja knock-off, to the point where he creates flip-books of the two in various domestic situations. During the big fight towards the end Gad is confronted by an alien taking the form of Lady Lisa, who...for some reason transforms from a pixel person to a human? Then she tries to kill Gad, he confesses his love for her, and she switches sides. It takes about that long, too.

Also, she has literally no lines. This isn't a use of the word for the purpose of exaggeration, I mean she literally doesn't speak throughout the movie. At the end she is literally a trophy for Gad (seriously, the movie uses the term trophy). At a certain point you'd think someone would look at the script and wonder what happened.

But enough about the weird boy's club stuff. The logic in this movie breaks down the second it needs to for a cheap laugh. There's a big point made throughout about how the games follow patterns, and analyzing and memorizing the patterns will let you win the game...except for when certain Centipedes or other pixel creatures decide to break their patterns for no reason. There's a "joke" about one of the centipedes going off and doing aerobics in an old woman's apartment. This is immediately after Sandler shouts several times that there's a pattern.

The movie is riddled with these kind of leaps in logic, general mean-spirited humor, and lack of any real clever use of the video game conceit. There is a single joke, where the Tetris pieces fall down and eliminate a skyscraper, and that's it (it's also taken directly from the original short film).

Verdict
I spent most of this movie angry and left it feeling sad. Don't waste your time.

Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "True Memoirs of an International Assassin"

True Memoirs of an International Mall Blart

True Memoirs of an International Assassin (2016)

Directed by Jeff Wadlow
Produced by Justin Begnaud, Raja Collins, Mark Fasano, Todd Garner
Written by Jeff Morris, Jeff Wadlow, Story by Jeff Morris

Starring Kevin James, Zulay Henao, Andy Garcia, Maurice Compte, Kelen Coleman, Andrew Howard, Rob Riggle

Budget: $40M (estimated)

I'm not a big Kevin James fan. I don't dislike him, but I've never found his stand-up very funny and I've certainly never enjoyed the majority of his film roles. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that he's one of Adam Sandler's main collaborators, and he's turned into a hack (who still makes money, but since when is that how you set the bar?). How often can you laugh at a big guy throwing himself around while making a dumb face?

All things considered, this movie surprised me.

We start with an action scene reminiscent of Bourne, with James playing a secret agent as he infiltrates a dock in pursuit of some bad guys. There's some good gunplay and fair fight choreography, and then he gets blown up by a rocket, leaving only a red smear and some limbs.

Cut to James in front of a computer, typing up a spy novel. We see the same scene replay, with some minor revisions as he works to make sure his character escapes the action scene. There's a fairly well done knife fight, a helicopter action scene, and some explosions.

You see, James is playing a writer who's working on an action novel. As he revises his work we see the changes play out, and within the first five minutes I've already doubted whether this should be included in this series.

Because honestly, this movie is not that bad. I was consistently surprised, from the opening to the ending to when I looked up the reviews and saw it had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.

This might be the best movie Kevin James has ever done.

James plays aspiring novelist Sam Larson. He's finishing up a spy novel about a suave, wish-fulfillment secret agent who kills the bad guys and gets the girls. Most of his research is accomplished through the internet and his ex-Mossad analyst buddy Amos (Ron Rifkin). Thanks to a story about a legendary assassin known only as "The Ghost," he finishes up his manuscript and sends it out to publishers. After numerous rejections he meets up with digital publisher Kyle Applebaum (Coleman) who buys the story and publishes it online...

...Under the non-fiction category. It suddenly becomes a best-seller, netting him an appearance on Katie Couric's show, and soon he's confused for the real Ghost, kidnapped, and taken to Venezuela as part of a CIA plot to assassinate the nation's president.

Now, I'll fully admit to this holding some value as wish fulfillment as a story itself. We see Larson utilize his writing research into covert operations to survive as he meets up with other members of the clandestine organizations within the country who all seem to want something from this master assassin who looks like a tubby guy from Queens.

As I said above, I was consistently surprised throughout. This is Kevin James actually acting; the movie doesn't rely on slapstick over story, the supporting cast is treating it seriously (Andy Garcia is having the time of his life and Rob Riggle is far better utilized here than in Greek Wedding 2) and there's very little of the awful humor I've come to expect from James. I guess it's more a sign of how much his collaborations with Adam Sandler have tainted my expectations. The action scenes and gunplay aren't over the top, don't feature dozens of cuts, and the story, while mostly predictable, shows some restraint where I didn't expect. It reminded of Red in more than a few spots, and that was a masterful blend of comedy and spy action.

Of course, it's not perfect. The ending drags on a bit. While there are funny moments, there are some times where it relies on James's size to make you laugh. The story, while fairly coherent, relies a bit too much on twists so the humor becomes lost in the series of similar characters, and certain twists aren't so much twists as obvious foreshadowing.

The...Actually Pretty Tolerable?

"Dylan, your standards for comedy are too high why can't you
just enjoy the movie."

Part of this is probably my own background as a writer, but I like the idea of a novelist using his
research to survive. It never gets to the point where James is absurdly good at outwitting these special agents, and it never stoops so low as to make him an idiot (I'm looking at you, Paul Blart, you hack).

Most important, I actually liked Larson. He's tired of his job. He's got aspirations beyond his day job. He's not mean-spirited in the way that so many of these movies can be. When he's taken advantage of by the publisher, he felt realistically upset that they'd messed up his novel. Most importantly, while there's definitely some aspects of a power fantasy here, James doesn't end up with the attractive woman at the end. Of all the writing decisions in this script, I think I appreciated that one the most.

It also utilized the supporting cast fairly well. Garcia does a great job as the revolutionary leader El Toro, Riggle puts in a fine performance playing the same type of overly-cocksure authority figure as a CIA guy, and Kim Coate's world-weary CIA plant of a president is believably tired of all the nonsense that came with having the government handed to him. Henao does a good job as the no-bullshit DEA agent in the south, and her chemistry with James is pretty good.

The Expectedly Tiresome
While there's some more-clever-than-usual story turns, the overall plot still relies on some of the classic tired tropes. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that an early character turns out to be exactly who you think he is by the end. There's some bizarrely up-front product placement for Zima, of all things, and at times the story tries too hard to be clever and shuffles itself up a bit too much.

Finally, the ending drags a bit. That's not really unusual in this day and age, but it's worth mentioning.

The Unusual
The director of this movie is going to direct X-Force in 2017, which will apparently feature Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. If that doesn't get you hyped, get out of my face.

He's also going to write Masters of the Universe in 2018, which generates significantly less hype.

The Verdict
I actually enjoyed this movie. It's not a brilliant comedy by any means, but I was genuinely surprised when I saw critics universally panned it. It's not insulting. It's not lazy. It has heart to it, and it's obvious the people involved in the production actually gave a damn.

Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "Maradonia: the Shadow Empire"

Buckle your seatbelts.

Maradonia: The Shadow Empire (2016)

Directed by Dr. G. Gerry Tesch
Produced by Dr. G. Gerry Tesch (presumably) and 31 backers on indigogo.com
Written by Gloria Tesch

Starring Gloria Tesch, Mike Rodriguez, Gustavo Perez

Budget: $Divorce, $home foreclosure (yes, really)

Hoo boy, this one requires a bit of backstory.

Gloria Tesch is a self-published author who calls herself the world's youngest novelist. At the age of 13 she (her parents) self-published a series of doorstopper fantasy heartbreakers called the Maradonia Saga. When reception turned out to be less-than-lukewarm she took to the internet with her sockpuppet accounts to post fake positive reviews on Amazon, and to generally turtle-shell her way into denying the fact that she needed to work on her prose.

Not content to insulate herself from criticism, there were plans at one point for a film series and Maradonia theme park. I'm just scratching the surface here, because to highlight the entirety of this madness would require an entire series of posts and I do not care enough to do that.

Instead, I just thought I'd watch the movie, which was crowd-funded through indiegogo and resulted in a divorce and the foreclosure of at least one house.

76 seconds in.

We start with some fly-over shots of landscapes, narration, and some stock battle footage. Oh, and it turns out there's a prophecy about September 11. Yeah, it turns out "when the two silver birds attack the twin brothers" two children will show up in Maradonia and end the reign of the Shadow Empire.

There's a shot of a clip-art CGI dragon flying over a castle, some people riding horses, and some extras in plastic armor. Then there's more backstory overlaid across shots of what I think are medieval reenactors with a loop of "armyshouts.mp3" playing before we get a scene of a kid coming across his dead parents. He looks up to find three women laughing. Then we get some credits, more landscape shots, and more narration by a guy with a standard British accent.

Cut to Maya and Joey, and the first line out of Maya (Tesch) is her complaining about how tired she is. There's some bad ADR chewing sounds as Joey eats an apple. Maya asks whether he thinks things happen for a reason, there's some reference to creatures in a cave with swords, and...you know? I'm just going to cut to the chase.

"This is Professor Epstein.
He's going to be taking over because
I'm going to be
 leaving in a few minutes.

This is a rip-off of Narnia, with two kids going to a fantasy world by the Light King, fighting the Evil Empire, and saving the world.

Here's a link to the full video on youtube, watermark and all.

Art 1001: Remedial Art &
the Nature of Evil?

We get about 5 minutes with the main characters before the movie cuts to a white-haired man and an art teacher talking about oil paintings. One of his students is in the back crying over a painting of a demon in the smoke of the Twin Towers (yes, really) and she demands someone give her answers about where evil comes from. The art professor peaces out, and Professor Epstein decides to read from his "ancient history book" he brought which talks about a war in heaven.

It's your basic creation story about the "Kingdom of Light" and a fallen light-carrier, but instead of Lucifer it's Apollyon, and instead of God it's the Light King, and we're not even 15 minutes in. There's some high-minded narration over stock footage of galaxies and various nebulae, plastic costumes, and plenty of people looking directly at the camera. We see King Apollyon tells his sons to go kill these children, then we cut to Maya and Joey having breakfast before their first day at school.

I'm going to stop taking screenshots now, because I'll end up posting the entire movie.

"The failure to prepare is the
preparation to fail."

Anyway, Maya and Joey go to Maradonia, solve their problems, become leaders, and save the day.

Oh nooooooooo.

What else needs to be said? The acting is absurd, the special effects are worthy of Microsoft Movie Maker, and the costumes look like they've been assembled from discarded High School Theatre props. Here's a score underlining every single scene (it never stops) and when people actually fight the swords make the exact same sound effect with every strike.

On some level I guess there's some admiration for simply putting in the effort, but at what point do you stop and realize that it's not worth your marriage and your house to indulge your daughter? There was sincere talk at one point about opening a Maradonia theme park.

Okay, here's one more image:

Verdict:
If you like watching a train wreck develop over the course of 110 minutes, grab your favorite mind-altering substance and load up this video before it's taken down. There was so much here that went uncovered. I didn't talk about the part where the greenscreen glitched out so it's just a guy in a morphsuit carrying a sword by the crossguard. I didn't cover the fire effects plastered overtop the screen. I didn't talk about the zombies doing the touch-your-fingers-together-then-untwist-your-hands trick.

I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew with this.

Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"

I can't wait for them to learn the
exact same lessons as the first film.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (2016)

Directed by Kirk Jones
Produced by Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson
Written by Nia Verdalos

Starring Nia Verdalos, John Corbett, Lainie Kazan, Michael Constantine, Andrew Martin, Ian Gomez, Elena Kampouris

Budget: $18M

The first My Big Fat Greek Wedding was something of an anomaly in the film landscape. What started as a one-woman play written by Verdalos eventually reached Tom Hanks's radar and exploded to become one of the most successful romantic comedies of all time. Despite it never reaching the top of the box office, it still grossed an insane $368M on a budget of $5M.

In the sequel, Toula is a helicopter parent in a helicopter family. Her daughter is going off to college, Ian is the principal at her school, and the family is as large and loud as ever. This time it's Toula's parents renewing their vows and all the comedy that comes along with it. We get some obvious scenes of Toula reciting Lainie Kazan's lines from the first film to show that she's becoming her mother, and by the end we all learn a valuable lesson that family's great, in moderation.

Comedy!

It becomes immediately apparent that this is a sequel which didn't understand why the first was successful and just goes for the easiest jokes and references to the first. Toula is dressed in exactly the same style as she was at the beginning of the first movie, her father is reciting almost exactly the same speech to her daughter, Paris (Kampouris), and we soon see circumstances have seen fit to remove all the progress Toula made in the last film.

The comedy, when it isn't using the first movie as a crutch, is the easiest lowest-common-denominator you see in these sorts of sequels. Every so often a character will deliver a line that's actually worth a chuckle, but these are fairly rare and feel more like accidents than intentional comedy.

One of the things that made the first work was the heart involved and the sincerity evident in the character interactions. That's been wiped from this movie and replaced by mean-spirited Flanderization reducing each of the characters to their basest tropes and characteristics. Oh, they were a big, loving family in the last movie? Well now they're big, loud, and unable to follow even the basest of social norms. The only real glimmer of this is a scene between Paris and the family matron (Meisler) that makes Paris realize she's not going to be satisfied staying in Chicago, just to placate her mother.

Oh, and of course the finale wedding is the same night as prom, so Paris can have her slow dance with the cute school boy from a similarly large Greek family, presumably for them to break up a few months later after they go to schools at separate ends of the country.

The Big
The movie isn't utterly devoid of charms. There are a few lines which drew laughs from me, primarily from the performances. Gus telling Rob Riggle about Alexander the Great spreading his seed over Spain was unexpected (and ultimately promised a tone that wasn't delivered), and Voula (Martin) telling Toula that "Greek don't creak" stood out against the rest of the flat-lines.

Some of the chemistry from the first movie's still left evident, primarily in Verdalos and Corbett. Their scenes together are fairly convincing, but I think that's mostly because neither of them have become caricatures of themselves from the first film. Kampouris plays a convincingly embarrassed high school student.

The Fat
Joey Fatone has finally grown into his surname.

Most of my criticisms have been outlined above, but the primary one is that nothing in this movie really comes together in the way the first one did. The shadow of the first movie hangs over it enough to make you wonder why you aren't just watching that one.

The What Do You Mean You Don't Eat No Meat?
When asked about another sequel, Verdalos said she hasn't put any writing down, but that she had an idea. I am 100% willing to bet that it will be about Paris getting engaged to a not-Greek, because that's the most obvious follow-up and I don't know that there's a whole lot of effort put into this "series."

Verdict
Watch the first one instead. Let this one vanish into the ether.