A funny thing happened halfway through “Street Kings”; it turned into a parody of itself. It begins promisingly enough as a humorous, streetwise cop drama, and then a certain, um, entertainer appears, and the whole movie is lost in a haze of clichés and overacting. Didn’t “Hot Fuzz” kill movies like this for good? Keanu Reeves stars as Detective Tom Ludlow, a morally ambiguous cop who’s still reeling from the death of his wife. Tom is furious to discover his former partner-turned whistleblower Washington (Terry Crews) is ratting him out to Internal Affairs Captain Biggs (Hugh Laurie), and when he…
Author: David Medsker
Picture David Mamet making a movie, and while he’s making that movie, his second unit director uses the same cast and crew to make a different movie – one that’s similar to a Mamet movie but lacks his trademark rhythm and humor. “Redbelt” is the second unit director’s movie. It has all of the affectations of Mamet’s best work, but comes off more like an impression of Mamet than the real deal. It’s like hiring Kevin Pollak for a movie, then having him play the part as if he were Christopher Walken. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Mike Terry, the noble…
Children’s movies are third rails for movie critics. Dare to give one the lashing it deserves, and you may as well tell people your hobbies include drowning kittens. “Aw, come on, it’s just a kid’s movie” is the usual response, but like every other genre, there are good children’s movies (“Monsters Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” “Fly Away Home”), and there are movies like “Nim’s Island,” which are the reason why W.C. Fields advised people never to work with animals or children. Abigail Breslin stars as the title character, a young girl who lives on a remote island in the South Pacific…
The contrived but cute “Run Fat Boy Run” ambles along innocently enough, and then out of nowhere, the movie leans on gross-out humor and pratfalls that would shame Mr. Bean (and one scene will have Austin Powers calling his lawyer). The movie’s screenwriters, Michael Ian Black and star Simon Pegg, are smarter than this, so the question begs: whose idea was it to put those scenes in the movie? Yes, they get big laughs, but they’re so incongruous with the rest of the movie that they smack of desperation, that the filmmakers didn’t believe that their movie was good enough…
It’s never a good sign when a movie improves the second its top-billed actor, and namesake, leaves the screen, but such is the case with “Drillbit Taylor,” the latest Judd Apatow-shepherded laughfest. Owen Wilson may be the movie’s box office draw, but he proves to be more of a distraction than anything. Indeed, the whole affair reeks of last-minute tampering, something Hollywood continues to do despite the fact that it almost never works. The story begins with awkward teens Wade (Nate Hartley) and Ryan (Troy Gentile) preparing for their freshman year of high school. They’re convinced that they will be…
“Funny Games” is as polarizing a movie as you’re likely to find. Some will sing its praises, and others will hate it with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns. I can actually understand both sides of the argument, as I am split almost right down the middle on its merits. To the movie’s credit, it features far better performances than most of the movies that pollute its genre, the violence tastefully takes place off-screen, and it has a brazenness that the torture porn flicks could only dream of. On the other hand, one could easily “mistake” that brazenness for…
There is far too much talent in “Married Life” for the movie to be so dull. The four leads consist of an Oscar winner, and Oscar nominee, James Bond, and one of the prettiest young women in Hollywood. And they’re all unspeakably boring. Actors can only do so much with a bad story, though, and director Ira Sachs is so hung up on showing everyone smoking cigarettes in every scene – the movie is set in the 1940s – that he forgets to give his characters something, anything, interesting to say or do. The story is told by businessman and…
If one were to pitch “CJ7” to a studio exec, odds are the description would boil down to “Chinese ‘E.T.’.” And while that is technically true, we would suggest adding four more words: “Directed by Tex Avery.” Writer/director/star Stephen Chow, you see, is a Looney Tunes character come to life; his movies aren’t just cartoonish, they’re cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs crazy, but in the most entertaining way imaginable. “CJ7” isn’t as slap-happy as Chow’s previous effort, “Kung Fu Hustle,” but that’s actually a good thing. In fact, when it attempts to venture into “Kung Fu” territory, the movie nearly goes off the rails.…
All signs pointed to “The Bank Job” being a disappointment. For starters, the movie stars Jason Statham who, like him or not, does far more bad movies than good ones (his last film was directed by critical punching bag Uwe Boll, yikes). The movie’s second strike: the dreaded Thursday night screening, timed so print publications cannot get their reviews submitted in time for Friday’s paper. But then a funny thing happened: the movie turned out to be pretty damn good. Credit director Roger Donaldson, himself no stranger to the occasional box office dud (“The Recruit,” “Cadillac Man”), for keeping Statham’s…
Hollywood has been kind to the estate of Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, but it has beaten the spirit of his work to a pulp with a nail-studded baseball bat. Ron Howard’s live-action remake of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” is one of the most unloved $260 million-grossing movies in history, and the less said about “The Cat in the Hat,” the better (though that movie grossed $100 million as well). Thank heaven then that “Horton Hears a Who!,” the first Seuss foray into CGI, rights nearly every wrong of its live-action predecessors. The design is spectacular, the laughs are unforced…