Being an only child has its benefits. You don’t have to share clothes or wait in line for the bathroom, but Nate Gardner (voice of Anton Starkman) is lonely and one day announces to his busy parents, “I’ve decided I want a baby brother.”
To speed the process along the youngster writes a letter to the folks at Stork Mountain. “Dear Stork Delivery Service,” he writes, “Our son really deserves a baby brother. P.S. He has to have ninja skills. Signed adult parents Perry and Sarah Gardner… adults, not Nate.”
What Nate doesn’t know is that Stork Mountain head honcho Hunter (voice of Kelsey Grammer), a white stork and the executive CEO of Cornerstore.com, dropped babies years ago in favour of picking up packages. Why did they stop? Because there are other ways to get babies.
With huge profits rolling in the CEO offers the company’s top job to Junior (Andy Samberg). With over 1 million deliveries under his beak, he’s their best stork, but the new job it comes with a caveat. Junior must fire the company’s lone human employee, Orphan Tulip (Katie Crown), but the brash-but-kindhearted bird can’t bring himself to let her go. Instead he assigns her to the least used department in the company, the Letter Sorting Department.
Tulip intercepts Nate’s letter and accidentally feeds it into the Rube Goldberg-esque Baby Making Machine—literally a machine that makes babies, and not… well, you know what you were thinking—and through the science of baby making transforms the note from pen and ink to an adorable baby girl
Trouble is, Junior has never delivered a baby and doesn’t know what to do with the unauthorized child. He knows he must do something before Hunter gets wind of the kid. With a wounded wing Junior has no choice but to take Tulip along as they begin a wild adventure to unite the child with Nate and his parents. “If I can deliver this by Monday I can still be made boss,” says Junior.
“Storks” never quite takes flight. A manic mix of action-adventure and kid’s humour, it often feels padded by cut-a-ways and musical numbers and never met a gag it can’t run into the ground with repetition. There are several stand-out moments, like a silent battle between storks and penguins, kept quiet so as not to wake the baby and the ever-morphing Wolf Pack, who can change Transformers style into anything from bridges to submarines, but everything else is over-amped and loud with a side of sentimentality thrown in.
Samberg is perfectly cast as the brash but not-so-bright lead character and Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele provide funny and interesting voices to the Wolf Pack leaders but most of the voices are as undistinguished as the story.
“Storks” has promise but never really delivers the goods.
Movie critic Richard Crouse gives his reviews for this week’s releases: “Captain Phillips,” “Machete Kills,” and “The Right Kind of Wrong.” Watch the whole thing HERE!
In “Machete Kills,” the further adventures of Robert Rodriguez’s titular vengeance seeking ex-Mexican federale, the director comes up with new ways to cut a person in half. For the first time (in my memory anyway) a human being is bisected down the middle from cranium to crotch.
Unfortunately it’s the only new idea in a movie that slavishly pays tribute to el cheapo grindhouse flicks.
Danny Trejo is back and badder-than-ever as Machete. The man with the deadly machete is on the biggest caper of his career. Recruited by the President of the United States (Carlos Estevez)—with the lure of a green card—his mission is to find Marcos “the Madman” Mendes (Demian Bichir), a mentally unstable man turned terrorist who lives in an Aztec ruin along with a private army and a rocket aimed at Washington. “You know Mexico,” POTUS says to our hero. “Hell, you are Mexico!”
The trail to Mendes is littered with colourful characters, including a “man eating” madame (Sofía Vergara), a mysterious bounty hunter called El Cameleón (no spoilers here!) and billionaire arms dealer Luther Voz (Mel Gibson).
“Machete Kills” echoes the arch performances, over-the-top violence and cheeseball dialogue off the grainy old grindhouse movies that inspired Rodriguez in the first place. He nails the look and feel of those not-so-classic films—although he relies a bit too heavily on computer-generated gore over good old-fashioned special effects—but this time out he misses the spirit that made them great. I guess it’s harder to make a good bad movie than I thought.
It starts strong with a wild action sequence jammed with spraying splatter and gory gags. Stretch that out to a tight eighty-five minutes and “Machete Kills” would have been a fun guilty pleasure Saturday afternoon matinee. At one-hour-and-forty-five minutes, however, it feels drawn out, filled with scenes that seem to exist only to wedge another celebrity cameo into the story.
Trejo oozes grindhouse cool, but the movie itself commits an exploitation film sin—it’s dull. Scenes lumber along, blandly bereft of wit. Worse, the kitsch value that made “Grindhouse” and the first “Machete” movie so much fun is almost completely absent.
The movie begins with a grainy fake trailer for “Machete Kills Again… In Space,” the proposed third part of the saga. It’s a campy throwback to a simpler time and it’s a bit of fun. But at 2 minutes it also hammers home the point that a little Machete goes a long way.
Judging by the look and feel of “Machete” director Robert Rodriquez has clearly spent a lot of time at the local repertory theatre. Either that, or he’s hung around Quentin Tarantino’s house, watching old exploitation films from the 70s. The look and feel of his new film, “Machete,” inspired by a fake trailer he made for their co-directed epic “Grindhouse,” harkens back to a simpler, rougher time, but the context is very 2010. The film is part Mexploitation gore fest, part rant about illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States.
The story begins with federale Machete (Danny Trejo) trying in vain to rescue a hostage from the evil drug lord Torres (Steven Seagal). Less than three minutes into the film the knife wielding lawman has decapitated one unlikely bad guy and shot another using a gun still attached to a severed hand. Don’t trust this guy with the cutlery. The bust, however, goes bad and Torres ends up killing Machete’s wife and leaving him for dead. Cut to three years later. Of course Machete isn’t dead, but he is a broken man, living illegally in Texas, working as a day labourer. When he is asked to assassinate a radical congressman (Robert De Niro) it turns out that he is just a pawn in a much larger political game. Of course, Machete doesn’t like this. Machete doesn’t like lots of things—texting, for instance—and with the help of a radical Mexican rights leader (Michele Rodriquez), an immigration cop (Jessica Alba) and his brother, the murderous priest (Cheech Marin), Machete gets his bloody revenge.
“Machete” mixes Rodriquez’s usual blood and babes with a message, which could have been a good thing, but he is as subtle about hammering home his pro-immigration stance as he is when he sprays the walls with gallons of fake blood. As much as I like the “in-your-face-Tea-Partiers” attitude, I wanted less of that and more of the blood and babes. Rodriquez allows the pace to lag, wedging in too much story and too much “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” in what should be a down-and-dirty b-movie.
But when he gets it right, when Machete is slicing and dicing and Lindsay Lohan is wearing a nun costume, wielding a gun and trading quips with Robert De Niro, the movie is Saturday afternoon matinee fun. Where else but in a Rodriquez movie would a character survive getting shot in the head because an old bullet already lodged in his skull blocked the new pellet? Who else but Rodriquez could get the notoriously unfunny Steven Seagal to deliver an intentionally funny line?
“Machete” has its moments and a timely message but falls victim to slack pacing. A shorter running time would still showcase Rodriquez’s ideas on race, class and immigration and result in a better movie.
Being an only child has its benefits. You don’t have to share clothes or wait in line for the bathroom, but Nate Gardner (voice of Anton Starkman) is lonely and one day announces to his busy parents, “I’ve decided I want a baby brother.”
