Not since the Three Stooges has nonsense been this much fun. Over five movies, the frantic, Tic Tac-shaped Minions, the silly sidekicks to former supervillain Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), have brought the most kid friendly anarchy to the screen since Curly said, “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” for the first time.
Their new movie, “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” now playing in theatres, sets a new standard for silliness.
Set in 1976 San Francisco, the story begins with awkward twelve-year-old Gru and his dream.
“There are a lot of villains in the world,” he says, “but I am going to be a supervillain.”
To make his evil wish come true, he interviews to become a member of the world’s top outlaw team, the Vicious 6. But, he is not taken seriously. At all.
“I am pretty despicable,” Gru says proudly. “You don’t want to cross me.”
“Evil is for adults who steal powerful ancient stones and wreak havoc,” says Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson), the newly-appointed head of The Vicious 6, who took over from the former, recently deposed Wild Knuckles (Alan Arkin). “Not for tubby little punks, who should be at school learning, taking a recess and sucking his thumb! Come back when you’ve done something evil to impress me!”
To prove he’s got what it takes to be a supervillain, Gru steals something near and dear to the peach-pit sized hearts of the Vicious 6, their prized Zodiac Stone. Instead of impressing Belle Bottom, the theft turns her against Gru and his loyal Minions. With the mad, bad and dangerous to know Vicious 6 on their tail, Gru is kidnapped by Wild Knuckles. “My favorite villain is also my kidnapper,” marvels Gru. “This is going to be a great opportunity if you don’t kill me.”
Cue the Minion mayhem.
“The Minions: The Rise of Gru” provides fans of the franchise exactly what they want, no deep thoughts, just sublime silliness.
If you want to get all film critic-y about this, I suppose you could say the leitmotif is that of sweetly-inspired mayhem that follows the Minions wherever they go. But this isn’t a movie with layers of subtext or loads of diegetic elements. There is a denouement, a resolution to the story, but why overthink this? It’s short, fast and stupid, with an easily digested message of, as Armistead Maupin always says, finding your logical, not biological family. Or, as Gru says, “find your tribe and never let them go.” More zesty than arty, it’s made for kids, who I’m sure will gobble it up, while parents sit patiently through the 85 minute runtime with visions of the Three Stooges dancing in their heads.
More people die in the first five minutes “The Expendables 3” movie than in any other two war movies combined. There is death by bullet, bazooka and bomb. It’s a wild but oddly bloodless beginning to the movie. Perhaps its because they have scaled back the rating to PG1the from the hard Rs the last two Expendables enjoyed, but removing most of the over-the-top violence leaves an absence of the over-the-top fun of the originals. Why arm Stallone and Company up the wazoo and then skimp on the fake blood and faux carnage?
A mission to stop a shipment of bombs brings grizzled mercenaries Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Caesar (Terry Crews) face to face with their toughest adversary yet, arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson). Determined to bring down Stonebanks, Ross retires the oldtimers—“We aren’t the future anymore,” says Ross, “we’re part of the past.”— and recruits a fresh group of soldiers—Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz and Glen Powell—but just may find that his old dogs have some new tricks.
“Great plan,” says Luna (MMA fighter Rousey) of Ross’s old-fashioned bulldozer approach to mercenary work, “if it was 1985,” and this might have been a great movie if it was 1985. Despite the lack of overly gratuitous blood and guts, it feels like one of those direct-to-video action movies from the Reagan years. With no sense of nuance and clichés aplenty, it ploughs ahead, relentlessly reveling in its own stupidity. Kind of the like everything, but especially the action movies, in the 1980s.
But for much of the movie, that’s OK. How could you not love Wesley Snipes saying that his character was put in jail for tax evasion? It’s art imitating life! Or something.
Most of the other performances aren’t so much performances as they are action star posturing. Kelsey Grammar, as a recruiter for a new batch of Expendables, stands out because he does some actual acting. So do many of the obvious stunt doubles. The rest are all bulked-up chunks of machismo floating in a sea of testosterone.
Still, as an old-school action movie, it works well enough, despite the lack of gallons of fake plasma. I liked the attempts of creating new catchphrases—which are a must in these kinds of films—like Crews yelling, “It’s time to mow the lawn,” before spraying thousands of bullets into a dock packed with baddies. Also, the action scenes are shot clearly and effectively, and unlike last week’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” you can actually see who is shooting-punching-blowing up-kicking-garroting-etc who. It makes it easier to cheer for the good guys when you can tell who the bad guys are.
For the most The Expendables movies have been met part with critical disdain. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane christened the first film, “breathtakingly sleazy in its lack of imagination,” while reviewer James Kendrick said the second installment, was “a better concept than it is a movie.”
Both films star a who’s who of 1980s actions movies—Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and more—and have exterminated the competition, collecting an average of $289.9 million at the worldwide box office.
The new movie, inventively titled The Expendables 3, adds vintage action stars Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford to the mix and doubtless will add big bucks to the franchise’s overall gross, whether the critics embrace it or not.
The Expendables movies appear to be bulletproof to critical missiles but they aren’t the first films to be lambasted by reviewers and then clean up at the box office.
Meet the Spartans, a parody of sword and sandal epics from the creators of Scary Movie, currently sits at a 2% Tomatometer rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but that didn’t stop it from taking the top spot at the box office, narrowly edging out Stallone’s Rambo reboot, on its 2008 opening weekend. In the end it made $84,646,831 worldwide despite being called “one of the most painfully bad comedies I’ve ever had to endure,” by Garth Franklin of Dark Horizons.
Finally, Adam Sandler is a fan favorite, but finds little love from the critics. Jack and Jill, a 2011 comedy that saw him play twin brother and sister, earned a whopping $149,673,788 worldwide, but was dubbed “relentlessly witless” by the Daily Star while New Zealand critic Liam Maguren wrote, “Burn this. This cannot be seen. By anyone.”
Canada AM’s Jeff Hutcheson featured this picture of Richard and Jean-Claude Van Damme on Monday March 17, 2014 on his Things I Found on Twitter Today segment!
“The Expendables 2” has Cold War undertones to go along with a cast that found fame during that time. Aging action heroes Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger act out a shoot ‘em up with so much blood and guts it would make James Bond positively red with envy.
I could tell you the plot of “The Expendables 2,” but this movie isn’t about the story. It’s a revenge flick about a team of mercenaries who will take on any mission, no matter dangerous, for money. Imagine what they’ll do for payback! In other words: “Track ‘em. Find ‘em. Kill ‘em.”
The old guys are mixed-and-matched with (slightly younger and more limber) film fighters Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Terry Crews and Liam Hemsworth.
There’s enough grizzled faces on display here to make you think you’re watching at Mount Rushmore. The difference is, these faces speak. They say things like, “Rest in pieces,” after they’ve shredded a bad guy.
Most of the dialogue sounds as though it was run through the Action-Movie-Cliché-O-Matic™. The ever-popular “Houston we have a problem,” line makes an appearance, even though no one in the cast is named Houston and the film isn’t set in Texas.
More successful are some of the meta-jokes about clichés and the surreal cameo by Chuck Norris.
Mostly though the dialogue gets in the way of the big action scenes, which, let’s face it, are the real reason to see a movie like this. When the actors are speaking instead of shooting your mind wanders. “Why does Stallone have a Ming the Merciless moustache?” you may wonder. “How much did they set aside in the budget for arthritis medicine?”
But these are nit-picky points. How do you review a movie like “The Expendables 2”? I can say if you have a soft spot for 80s action, you’ll probably like it. If not, go see “Hope Springs” instead. The best review for the movie actually appears in the film. At one point Bruce Willis says, “A nice touch. A little extreme, but nice.” My thoughts exactly.
In a town that turns out — and on — celebs faster than Britney Spears can run from a court date, Hollywood did something worth watching in 2008. It gave us some Oscar buzz-worthy comeback moments from veteran actors, the likes of which made stars du jour like Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron look, well, a little old.
Sure, we had Britney Spears struggling, ad infinitum it seemed, to make her pop princess return. Like any good cliff-hanger, the Brit drama continues.
We hailed down-and-out action star Jean-Claude Van Damme in “JCVD” and cheered “Saturday Night Live’s” ratings comeback, an achievement owed largely to Tina Fey’s eerie transformation into Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Heck, we even lapped up 82-year-old Cloris Leachman, the acerbic, Oscar-winning actress who scored a whole new generation of fans thanks to her vivacious performance on ABC’s reality hit, “Dancing with the Stars.”
But 2008’s most compelling career conversions come down to these three stars.
Robert Downey Jr.: Hollywood’s red-hot man of steel
Dubbed 2008’s entertainer of the year by Entertainment Weekly (and we agree), Downey (aka “Iron Man”) proved that Hollywood mega-stardom is possible after drugs, jail time and everything else one can do to screw up a brilliant career.
At 43, Downey wasn’t “the most obvious choice” to play Tony Stark — the billionaire industrialist with a slew of playboy vices — according to “Iron Man” director John Favreau. In fact, Favreau planned on casting a newcomer in the role.
But after landing the part and delivering a box office juggernaut that made $98.6 million alone on its May 2 opening weekend, Downey became the red-hot lynch pin to the biggest superhero franchise launch since “Spider-Man.”
“Tropic Thunder” followed grossing $110 million, as did “The Soloist,” a film which generated enough Oscar buzz to score another best actor nomination for Downey. His first came with “Chaplin” in 1992. That prospect piffled away, at last for the time being, after DreamWorks bumped “The Soloist’s” November 2008 release to April 2009.
Now there’s “Sherlock Holmes,” Warner Bros.’ latest franchise launch built around the comeback kid Hollywood is openly rooting for once again.
Even Downey can’t explain his new hot factor. As he told EW, “To tell you the truth, I haven’t fully digested what’s happened to me before, during and after ‘Iron Man.’…But I do know that I don’t want to waste any more time. That’s why I’m putting my nose to the grindstone. That’s why I’m cranking them out.”
Mickey Rourke: Back in the ring
“Oh Mickey, you’re so fine. You’re so fine, you blow mind, hey Mickey, hey Mickey.”
Back in the 1980s, when Mickey Rourke’s acting career was on fire and the 1986 film “9½ Weeks” cemented his sex symbol status, fans often quoted Toni Basil’s 1982 lyrics to describe this Hollywood bad boy.
Rourke was hot all right, scoring critical praise in cult classics such as “Diner,” “Rumble Fish” and “The Pope of Greenwich Village” — a film Johnny Depp has called “perfect cinema.” But like some studio backdrop well past its prime, Rourke’s big career went up in smoke by early the 1990s because of his erratic behaviour.
Against the odds, the 52-year-old actor returned to the big screen in 2008 as a washed-up pro athlete in “The Wrestler.” His pummelling, nuanced performance helped the film win the Golden Lion Award for Best Film at the 2008 Venice Film Festival and score Rourke his first Golden Globe and Screen Actor’s Guild nominations for best actor.
“It’s all about Mickey Rourke this year. He’ll get an Oscar nomination and he deserves it,” says Canada AM movie critic Richard Crouse.
“Here’s a guy who hasn’t had a lead in a film for 15 years. In fact, if you read interviews with him he talks about borrowing money from friends just to eat and how he considered getting construction jobs to make ends meet,” says Crouse.
But as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, Rourke’s work reflected the pathos of his own life. “That’s what made a good movie great,” says Crouse.
Frank Langella: Hollywood’s new Olivier?
There aren’t many actors who get the role of a lifetime handed to them late in life. But as American actor Frank Langella turns 71 on New Year’s Day, the star of “Frost/Nixon” could get the best birthday present of all in 2009: An Oscar.
Nominated for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actor’s Guild Award for best actor, Langella’s Oscar nod is 99.9 per cent guaranteed.
“Frank Langella is one of the great American actors of all time. But when you ask anyone about him they’ll say ‘He was Dracula.’ That was 30 years ago,” says Crouse.
“Langella has never had the kind of fame that his contemporaries like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro have had,” says Crouse. “He was equally as gifted and has done some very distinguished work on stage and in films. Who knows? Maybe he just didn’t want Hollywood mega-stardom badly enough?”
Yet Langella’s searing, seamless portrayal as President Richard Nixon is as close to acting perfection as anyone will ever see on the big screen.
Even if he wins the Oscar alone, Crouse predicts the beginning of a true renaissance in Langella’s film career.
“If Langella wins, and I think he will, he could easily turn into that kind of in-demand, Olivier-like actor everyone wants,” says Crouse. “More great work will definitely come Langella’s way.”
