CTV ATLANTIC: RICHARD AND TODD BATTIS ON NEW MOVIES IN THEATRES!
I join CTV Atlantic anchor to talk about the Christmas actioner “Red One,” the drama “Magpie” and the stop motion animated “Memoirs of a Snail.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Chris Evans’
NEWSTALK 1010 with Jim and Deb: DOES RICHARD CROUSE LIKE THESE MOVIES?
I sit in with hosts Jim Richards and Deb Hutton on NewsTalk 1010 to play the game “Did Richard Crouse Like This?” This week we talk about the Christmas actioner “Red One,” the drama “Magpie” and the stop motion animated “Memoirs of a Snail.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 26:34)
CKTB NIAGARA REGION: THE STEPH VIVIER SHOW WITH RICHARD CROUSE ON MOVIES!
I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres and VOD including the Christmas actioner “Red One,” the drama “Magpie” and the stop motion animated “Memoirs of a Snail.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
BOOZE & REVIEWS: “Red One” and getting into the “spirits” of the season!
I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” for Booze & Reviews! This week we have a look at the Yuletide action flick “Red One” and I’ll tell about a drink that’ll get you in the sspirit of the season!
Listen to “Booze & Reviews” HERE! (Starts at 10:44)
Could there be a Simon & Garfunkle reunion happening? Find out HERE! (Starts at 20:47)
YOU TUBE: THREE MOVIES/THIRTY SECONDS! FAST REVIEWS FOR BUSY PEOPLE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to do a high five! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the Christmas actioner “Red One,” the drama “Magpie” and the stop motion animated “Memoirs of a Snail.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
RED ONE: 2 STARS. “the season teaches us that not all good things come in big packages.”
SYNOPSIS: In the new Yuletide action flick “Red One,” when Santa Claus (code name: Red One) is kidnapped twenty-four hours before Christmas, the North Pole’s Head of Security, an ELF “(Extremely Large and Formidable”) named Callum Drift, played by Dwayne Johnson, teams with Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), hacker and the world’s best tracker, in a dangerous mission to save Christmas. “There are worse ways to go out than saving Santa Claus,” says Jack.
CAST: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt, Nick Kroll, Kristofer Hivju, Wesley Kimmel, and J. K. Simmons. Directed by Jake Kasdan.
REVIEW: As Santa’s bodyguard Callum Drift, Dwayne Johnson complains that for the first time ever more people are on the naughty list than the nice list. It’s ironic, then, that as the star of “Red One,” the new high-tech, low-reward holiday movie directed by Jake Kasdan, Johnson’s name belongs at the top of that ignominious list.
A Christmas movie with product placement for the whole family, from Hot Wheels to Bulleit Bourbon, it’s a formulaic action film, with generic CGI battles and Johnson in automaton mode.
Johnson is in his wheelhouse. This is a big family action flick, reminiscent of “Disney’s Jungle Cruise” and “Jumanji: The Next Level.” Difference is, both those movies gave Johnson the chance to exercise his comedy chops as well as his muscle-bound physique. “Red One” sees him as a dour, oversized ELF with resting Grinch face who, when he isn’t barking orders is glaring at the film’s baddies. Despite one slightly amusing size-shifting fight scene, it’s a particularly uninspired performance that should get noticed come Razzie Awards time.
Chris Evan fares slightly better. He shrugs off the Captain America persona to play a Jack, a deadbeat dad, drunk and degenerate gambler. “I’m not a scrupulous person,” he sneers. “Ask anybody.”
Of course, they will learn from one another. Jack will discover how to be good from Callum, while proving to Callum that there is good in everyone, even a “Level Four Naughty Lister.” The movie’s messages of nice triumphing over naughty are the usual holiday fare, hammered home with the subtility of fifty-foot Christmas tree.
Add to that a forgettable villain with very little screen time and even less presence when we do see her and you’re left with a film about the magic of Christmas, with very little magic.
“Red One” is a big, $300 million movie, but, as the season has taught us, not all good things come in big packages.
PAIN HUSTLERS: 2 ½ STARS. “lighter tone than other recent opioid dramas.”
“Pain Hustlers,” a new true crime dramedy based on the non-fiction book “The Hard Sell” by Evan Hughes, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, and now streaming on Netflix, joins the ever-growing list of movies and television shows that detail big pharma’s culpability in the opioid crisis.
Blunt plays Liza Drake, a broke single-mom to daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman). Kicked out of her sister’s garage, where they’d been sleeping for more than a month, Liza is desperate for a job and cash.
During a chance meeting with oily pharmaceutical sales rep Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), she impresses him with her tenacity. Sensing she’d do anything for a buck, he offers her a job, despite her complete lack of qualifications, selling a new, inhalable fentanyl-based pain killer directly to doctors.
“It’s a long-odds lottery buried under a thousand rejections,” he tells her.
To keep the job, all she has to do is get the ball rolling by convincing one doctor to prescribe the drug. Just under the deadline, she lands a whale, the morally compromised Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) who hands out the drug to his patients like candy to kids at Halloween.
Liza’s piece of the action is more money than she ever could have imagined. “You’re not going to make a hundred K this year,” Brenner tells her. “It’s going to be more like six-hundred.”
Drunk on success—and frequent drinking binges—she bends laws and bribes doctors as she chants her mantra, “Own your territory,” to a growing legion of sales reps. But while her bank account swells, so do her doubts, as her conscience becomes her moral compass.
“Pain Hustlers” breathes much of the same air as “Dopesick,” “Painkiller” and the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Some. But not all. Those stories focused on patients and the personal toll of the opioid epidemic. Conversely, “Pain Hustlers” turns the camera on the sales reps, the pharmaceutical pushers who made fortunes on the misfortune of others.
Liza’s shift from desperation to greed isn’t a particularly fresh take on the rags-to-riches tale, but Blunt works overtime to make her character compelling. Her desire to succeed, to improve her life isn’t simply about the Benjamins, it’s about creating a new start for her daughter. Blunt grounds the movie with ample humanity, anchoring the film’s often over-the-top antics with her earthbound presence.
To its detriment, “Pain Hustlers” has a lighter tone than other recent opioid dramas. It’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but the jocular tone seems at odds with the serious subject matter, particularly in the performances of Evans and Andy Garcia, whose character loses his mind and the audience’s attention midway through.
“Pain Hustlers” attempts a new take on a hot button topic, but, the formulaic execution and uneven tone feels wonky given subject matter.
GHOSTED: 3 STARS. “best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
The action in “Ghosted,” a new espionage comedy now streaming on Apple TV+, begins with a meet cute between Cole and Sadie, played by Chris Evans and Ana de Armas, and a question, Is it romantic or weirdly obsessive to follow someone you’ve only met once halfway around the world to ask for a second date?
Cole and Sadie meet at a country market where he’s working a flower stall. It isn’t exactly love at first sight. They get off to a bad start when he refuses to sell her a plant that needs lots of TLC, even though she is often out of town for work, frequently for months at a time. “Who can be so indifferent to a living thing?” he asks.
Feeling guilty and rude, he catches up with her as she drives away and, then and there, they agree to go on a date. What begins as an afternoon coffee hook-up quickly turns into all night affair, leaving Cole convinced he has met his soulmate. He even took a selfie of her in bed, while she was asleep, so he could cherish the moment later.
When she doesn’t return his texts, he decides to track her through the microchip on his inhaler, which he conveniently left in her purse the night before. Turns out, she’s in London.
“She didn’t ghost me,” he says optimistically, “she just doesn’t have an international calling plan.”
Despite never having been out of the country—not true says his dad. “He was conceived in Ontario.”—he jumps on a plane to rekindle the fire that sparked the night before.
But instead of being met with a shower of hugs and kisses, he is caught in a hail of bullets, when it turns out Sadie is CIA operative on a dangerous mission. “I cannot believe you got me kidnapped and tortured after one date,” he says.
She points out that he flew across the ocean to find her after only knowing her for a few hours. “That is not passive behavior,” she says.
With Cole misidentified as a spy, cue the international intrigue, heavy artillery and some light romantic complications.
“Ghosted,” which pairs Evans and de Armas after “Knives Out” and “The Gray Man,” is an action-comedy-romance in the style of “Romancing the Stone.” A mismatched pair must rely on one another to survive, all the while falling in and out of love.
The movie works best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously. By the time we get to the “protecting the people you love is never a mistake” sentiments, much of the fun of watching Captain America play against type—Cole’s own sister calls him “smothering, needy, pathetic and delusional—and de Armas in full-on action mode has wilted. Up until then, however, screenwriters Rhett Rheese and Paul Wernick—best known for writing the “Deadpool” and “Zombieland” movies—keep “Ghosted” fairly nimble on its feet, blending the action, adventure and romance into an appealing frothy confection.
During its two-hour running time “Ghosted” goes a little OTT with multiple MCU cameos, sets itself up for a sequel and slides by on the charm of its leads.
THE GRAY MAN: 2 ½ STARS. “overwhelms the senses with an underwhelming story.”
“The Gray Man,” a new shoot ‘em up starring Ryan Gosling, and now streaming on Netflix after a quick trip to theatres, overwhelms the senses with an underwhelming story.
The story begins in 2003 with convicted murderer Court Gentry (Gosling) accepting a job offer from a CIA operative named Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) to live in the “gray zone” in return for a commuted sentence. He will be part of the top-secret Sierra program, trained to be a “ghost,” live in the margins and assassinate people who need killing. He’ll be the kind of guy you send in when you can’t send anyone else in. “Take all the pain that got you here,” says Fitzroy, “turn it around, and make it useful.”
Cut to 18 years later. Gentry, now known simply as Six, because “077 was taken,” he deadpans, is on assignment in Bangkok. On the orders of CIA honcho Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page), he’s there to assassinate an asset and retrieve an encrypted drive. When Six refuses to pull the trigger because there is a child in the way—he’s not all bad!—things quickly spiral out of control.
With the help of CIA agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), Six gets the disc, but, in doing so, becomes a target himself. Turns out the disc contains info proof of unsanctioned bombings and assassinations ordered by Carmichael, in his bid to turn the CIA into his own personal army. Carmichael wants the disc destroyed and to eliminate any traces of the only people skilled enough to expose him, the Sierra program.
But how do you kill the CIA’s most deadly assassin? You hire morally compromised independent contractor Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) to “put a Grade A hit” on Six. To lure Six into his web, Lloyd kidnaps the closest thing Six has to family, Fitzroy and his young niece (Julia Butters). “You want to make an omelet,” says Lloyd, “you gotta kill some people.”
“The Gray Man” is a big-budget, globe-trotting adventure that makes up in exotic locations and gunplay what it lacks in intrigue and interesting characters. Filtered through the endlessly restless camera of Anthony and Joe Russo, the movie has all the elements normally associated with high end action movies. Fists fly. By times it is a bullet ballet. Things explode. There are tough guy one liners (“Are you OK?” Miranda asks after one city-block destroying action sequence. “My ego is a little bruised,” Six snorts.), double-dealing and death around every corner.
So why isn’t it more exciting?
The story is fairly simple. It’s the kind of superkiller on-the-run we’ve seen before in everything from “John Wick” and “Nobody” to almost any Jason Statham movie, but it isn’t the simplicity or familiarity that sinks “The Gray Man.” It’s the overkill. And I don’t just mean the unusually high body count. It’s the more-is-more Michael Bay by-way-of-the-“Bourne”-franchise approach that overwhelms. The story is constantly on the move, jumping from country to country, from time frame to time frame, never pausing long enough to allow us to get to know, or care, about the characters.
Six is meant to be an enigma, and while Gosling can convincingly pull off the action and deliver a line, but he’s basically unknowable, a stoic man with a number for a name. His relationship with Fitzroy’s niece gives him some humanity, but he remains a dour presence in the center of the film.
At least Evans, as the “trash ‘stached” sociopath, appears to be having a good time. Nobody else does. That could be because there are so many characters, most of which are underused or underdeveloped. No amount of fancy camerawork could make Carmichael interesting. As the big bad meanie at the heart of all the trouble, he’s a pantomime character with only one gear.
More interesting are Indian superstar Dhanush playing a killer who values honor over cash, in his striking debut in a Hollywood film, and de Armas who does what she can with an underwritten part.
“The Gray Man” is big, loud popcorn summer entertainment that spends much time setting itself up for a sequel, time that would have been better spent creating suspense.
