SYNOPIS: “Dog Man,” a new animated movie featuring the voices of Pete Davidson and Isla Fisher, and now playing in theatres, begins when Petey, the “world’s evilest cat,” blows up Officer Knight and his dog Greg. In a lifesaving operation, Greg’s head is grafted onto Officer Knight’s body. “I tried to get rid of both of you,” says Petey, “but instead I made a supercop.”
CAST: Pete Davidson, Lil Rel Howery, Isla Fisher, Poppy Liu, Stephen Root, Billy Boyd, Ricky Gervais. Written and directed by Peter Hastings.
REVIEW: Like an episode of Short Attention Span Theatre, most of “Dog Man” is so fast paced, it’s like someone is leaning on the fast forward button. To say it is frenetic is an understatement, like saying Count Orlock is not a morning person.
Adapted from the phenomenally successful graphic novels by Dav Pilkey, creator of the “Captain Underpants” books, “Dog Man” values silliness above all else. It never misses an opportunity to crack wise or showcase a visual gag. For instance, archenemy Petey (Pete Davidson) attacks Dog man with the one thing every dog is afraid of, a giant vacuum cleaner. It’s “an approach that sucks,” says “Live Breaking News Live” reporter Seamus (Billy Boyd). When that fails Petey resorts to The Butt Sniffer 2000 and mechanical exploding squirrels.
By the time an entire block of buildings, that fart great green clouds of gas, comes to life, the movie begins to resemble an acid trip for kids.
Subtle, it is not, but in between the goofy jokes are good messages on the importance of family, however you define it, logical or biological.
The style of animation will be familiar to lovers of the books, and there’s a lot of you out there, as the graphic novels have sold 60 million copies globally. Director Peter Hastings calls it “high-end handmade,” and it captures the organic feel of the original book art, which blends “South Park” style, comic book art and Pilkey’s book art. It’s exaggerated, playful and fits the film’s wild tone to a T.
“Dog Man” is a lot. It’s a pedal to the metal experience, filled with childish humor (and the odd gag aimed at parents) but the anarchy is tempered somewhat by heartfelt messages of the importance of doing the right thing, forgiveness and family.
A study in friendship, family and community, “We Grown Now,” a new drama now playing in theatres, combines reality and fantasy, hope and joy, to create a moving coming-of-age story that gently tugs at the heartstrings.
Set in 1992, against a backdrop of gang warfare in Chicago’s violent Cabrini-Green Homes housing project, “We Grown Now” tells the story of tweens Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), best friends who grew up in Cabrini-Green. Malik lives with his mother Dolores (Jurnee Smollett) and grandmother Anita (S. Epatha Merkerson), while Eric lives with his dad (Lil Rel Howery) across the way.
“Me and Eric have done everything together since we were born,” says Malik. “We grew up together. Our place is the people. This is where we’re from.”
They’re good kids who do the things kids do. They tell bad jokes—“How do you make a tissue dance? You put a little ‘boogie’ into it.”—get lost in their imaginations and even when they play hooky, do it so they can check out the Art Institute of Chicago.
But trouble is closing in on their neighborhood.
As drugs, gangs and violence are slowly taking over Cabrini-Green, Dolores looks to get a new job, hours away in Peoria. It’s better money and, most importantly, hours away from the neighborhood’s trouble.
Trouble is, Eric is being left behind.
“How do you say goodbye to somebody?” Malik asks his mom.
“I don’t know that you ever do,” she says. “You carry them in your hearty wherever you go.”
A mixture of nostalgia and hard-edged reality, of bittersweet poetry and heartfelt relationships, “We Grown Now” is a nuanced look at the ties that bind and their importance, even when those ties begin to fray. The story is told against a bleak backdrop, but the veneer of social decay infused into the neighborhood does not extinguish the light emanating from the characters.
James and Ramirez hand in lovely, natural performances, despite a script that sometimes gives them an emotional intelligence that seems far beyond their tween years. Even then, the two are never less than charming, funny, and sometimes, a little heartbreaking. Both are gifted with expressive faces, and director Minhal Baig understands how to make their small, quiet interactions into big emotional moments.
“We Grown Now” is a stylized, haunting portrait of childhood, and the power of dreams to provide hope in an ever-changing world.
“Deep Water,” the new movie from Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, now streaming on Prime Video, is an erotic thriller in name only.
Neither erotic or thrilling, it lacks the smoldering energy of director Adrian Lyne’s previous work. Movies like “9 ½ Weeks” and “Unfaithful” established him as a steamer of screens, but that was then.
This is now. A better title for “Deep Water” may have been “Cold Water.”
Affleck plays Vic, a retired software developer who made a fortune designing a chip that helps drones locate and destroy targets. He spends his days with his daughter while his wild wife Melinda (de Armas), having grown bored of their routine, entertains herself with a series of very public affairs. For the most part Vic bites his lip but when one of Melinda’s flings winds up dead, face down in their pool, cuckold Vic becomes a suspect and their already tenuous situation comes closer to the breaking point.
Lyne, in his first film in twenty years, seems unable to tease out the tension from the love-hate story, sexual or otherwise. The repeated affair/disappearance cycle gets old fast and Lyne does little to make us care about any of them, Vic, Melinda or her unfortunate boyfriends.
I can say that Affleck has one of the best scowls in movies, but that’s not enough to hang an entire performance on. A Sad Affleck meme come to life, for much of the movie it appears he’s given up, Ben, not Vic. It’s as though he stopped caring after the first reel. Vic should display hidden reserves of resolve but Affleck’s performance is as inert as the film.
De Armas, so wonderful in “Knives Out” and “No Time to Die,” is reduced to an eye-batting subject for Lyne’s male gaze.
A tepid psychosexual cuckold tale with a side of murder and loose ends galore, “Deep Water” wastes its stars in a movie that does not rise to the challenge of exploring the story’s themes of morality, murder and marriage.
“Vacation Friends,” a new rude and raunchy comedy now streaming in Disney+, is a riff on the old saying, ‘Whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” But instead of Vegas, the setting is Mexico, and instead of leaving bad behavior behind, Marcus (Lil Rel Howery) and Nancy (Anna Maria Horsford) would like to leave their new “friends” Ron (John Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner) behind.
Strait-laced construction boss Marcus wants to surprise his girlfriend Nancy with a marriage proposal at a fancy Mexican resort. To set the scene he books a beautiful hotel room, iced champagne and rose pedals strewn around the bedroom. Unfortunately, the big surprise is something he didn’t plan, a flood. The jacuzzi upstairs in the Presidential Suite overflowed, turning Marcus and Nancy’s dream vacation room into a soggy wasteland.
With no other rooms available, the pair accept an offer to bunk with perfect strangers Ron and Kyla, the party animals in the Presidential Suite. The two couples are polar opposites. Marcus and Nancy are kinda conservative vs. the thrill-seeking Ron and Nancy who rim their Margueritas with cocaine. They are thrown together by circumstance but a few gallons of tequila later they’re all “vacation friends,” and the Mexican adventure culminates with a wild, blackout night.
“You guys are in our lives now,” Ron says as they part ways at the airport. “Nothing can change that. I’ll remember this week forever.”
Marcus and Nancy, however, aren’t feeling the bond. “They we’re kind of fun on vacation,” Marcus says, “But not in the real world.”
The real world includes the high-end wedding Marcus and Nancy are throwing with the financial aid of Nancy’s tightly-wound parents. Ron and Kyla aren’t on the guest list… but that doesn’t stop them from bringing their own brand of chaos to Marcus and Nancy’s big day.
“Vacation Friends” is a sweet-natured film about friendship but is far racier than the usual Disney+ fare. Drugs and drinking are the bedrock of the Ron and Kyla’s vacation lifestyle so this one isn’t for the kids, even if it’s on Mickey’s channel.
Adults, though, should get a mild kick out of the odd couple buddy comedy. Howery and Horsford are the movie’s bedrock, Cena and Hagner, the wild cards. Together, the ensemble play-off one another, creating fun, situational comedy that takes advantage of Cena’s manchild persona and Howery’s tightly wound Marcus. Hagner draws some of the biggest laughs with Kyla’s disregard for the niceties of polite society.
“Vacation Friends” is lightweight but sweet and should provide a much-needed getaway from real life.
“Free Guy,” the new Ryan Reynolds action comedy now playing in theatres, has its philosophical moments but no one will confuse its search for the meaning of life with the explorations of Joseph Campbell or Socrates. This is pure pop philosophy that breathes the same air “The Truman Show” and “Edtv,” movies about men who yearn for more than life has offered them.
Reynolds is Guy, a bank teller in Free City, a video game metropolis where the main characters wear sunglasses, have devil-may-care attitudes, cool hair and treat laws as suggestions, not hard and fast rules. Everyone else, including Guy and his best friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), are NPC, non-player-characters, who exist simple to give the Sunglasses People someone to rob, beat down, or, in rare cases, flirt with.
They are set decoration in the grand video game of life. “People with sunglasses never talk to people like us,” Buddy says.
One day Guy’s orderly life is thrown a curve when he spots Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer), a gunslinging sunglasses person, who also happen to be the woman of his dreams. Consumed with feelings he has never had before; his behaviors change as he looks for love and meaning in his life. “Maybe I’ll get some sunglasses of my own,” he says.
IRL (In Real Life) Millie (also played by Comer) and Keys (Joe Keery) are former coding superstars whose idea for a videogame that would actually change and grow independently of its users was stolen by evil video game developer Antoine (Taika Waititi). Keys now works for Antoine, while Millie is obsessed with infiltrating the game as Molotov Girl to get evidence for her lawsuit against the obnoxious tech giant.
Soon the line between Guy’s algorithmic life and Millie’s quest blend as “Free Guy” asks, “Do you you have to be a spectator in your own life?”
You need a lot of hyphens to describe “Free Guy.” It’s a video game-rom com-satire-action-comedy that tackles, in a lighthearted way, questions that people had grappled with for thousands of years. “What is the meaning of life?” Guy asks. “What if nothing matters.” But don’t fret, this isn’t Camus. The nihilism that usually goes along with big questions about life is replaced with video game action and brewing romance.
Reynolds brings his trademarked way with a line to play man child Guy. He’s the definition of bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed, able to give Guy the naïve quality he would have as someone just coming to consciousness, driven by feelings he doesn’t understand, as it slowly dawns on him that he is free to make his own decisions.
Comer, best known for her Emmy Award winning work in “Killing Eve,” deftly hops between real life and Free City, creating two characters with a shared goal. She’s mostly present as a sounding board for Guy’s awakening, but Comer brings personality to both roles.
Ultimately “Free Guy” doesn’t teach us anything about life we couldn’t have learned from any number of episodes of “Oprah,” but the message that life doesn’t have to be something that just happens to us is delivered with a heaping helping of humor, heart and Reynold’s brand of irreverence.
“Bad Trip” is a hidden camera movie à la “Borat,” with gross gags, a road trip but without Rudy Giuliani.
Gonzo comedian Eric André is Chris, an underachieving Florida man drifting through life. His life finds new purpose when his high school crush Maria (Michaela Conlin) comes into the juice joint where he is a self-proclaimed chef. As he blends drinks (and other things) they catch up. She’s now a hot shot art dealer in New York, back in her home town for a quick visit.
He asks her out but she declines, telling him she’s off to the airport. But, she adds, “If you’re ever in Manhattan, you should come to the gallery.”
Chris, in love, takes her invitation to heart and convinces his best friend Bud (Lil Rel Howery) to “borrow” his jailbird sister Trina’s (Tiffany Haddish) hot pink Crown Victoria and travel cross country to New York City.
Trouble is, Trina, recently escaped from prison, thinks the car is stolen and vows to track down Chris and Bud, to get her car and revenge.
Partly scripted, mostly improvised, “Bad Trip” follows in the footsteps of “Jackass” and Sacha Baron Cohen and often kicks it up a notch. The satirical edge of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” is missing but the outrageous antics on display might make Borat Sagdiyev blush. Barf, poop and bestiality are stops along the way in a road trip that includes drunken line dancing, accidentally getting super high and a tribute to “West Side Story” that is as sweet as it is surreal.
Not every prank sticks the landing, but you have to admire how far André and company (including director Kitao Sakurai) are willing to go to get a reaction. The elaborately staged hidden camera pranks are so outrageous it’s hard to imagine anyone in real life falling for them, but in the moment, who knows?
Several things become clear watching “Bad Trip.”
Firstly, the cast was game for almost anything. André, Haddish and Howery risk life and limb for a laugh, putting themselves in harm’s way in ridiculous ways. “I experienced physical and mental trauma I may never recover from,” Chris says, but I might guess André may feel the same way.
Secondly, it speaks to human nature. André’s bad behavior generally speaking brings out the best in people. It’s an oddly life affirming message from a movie that features random people covered in puke. From an old man on a park bench who gives Chris life changing advice to a bus full of people cheering on his lovesick journey, it’s filled with as much heart as it is gross stuff.
“Bad Trip” is a loosely structured good time that rides the line between gross and goofy, sincere and shocking.
When we first meet twenty-eight-year-old Brittany (Jillian Bell) she’s at a low point in her life. Broke and unhappy, she drinks away her morning hangovers and is so unreliable an animal kill shelter rejects her adoption request because they don’t feel she can give the dog the future it deserves.
When her doctor (Patch Darragh) tells her she has a high BMI, placing her firmly in the obese category, she wisecracks, “I feel you completely missed the point of those Dove commercials,” but the news has an effect.
Feeling crappy, an influenced by her upstairs neighbour Catherine (Michaela Watkins) she decides to make some dramatic life changes. “I’m starting to feel like everyone’s life is going somewhere and mine isn’t,” she says.
Step one is exercise. She tries to sign up at a local gym but can’t afford the monthly fee. “I see under your fitness goals you have drawn a frowny face,” says her recruiter (Mikey Day). Instead she takes tentative steps that turn into a run through the streets around her walk-up apartment. With the help of new running friends Catherine, who is changing her life post-divorce and Seth, and Seth (Micah Stock) a novice athlete who wants to run the 26.2-mile New York Marathon to prove to his son it can be done. Together they train with the mantra, “We don’t have to win,” they say, “we just have to finish.”
She’s taking back her life, one block at a time but weeks before the big run Brittany is sidelined, forcing her to examine the deeper reasons she needed to change her life and begin to focus on the things she can control.
There’s a quick shot of Rocky Balboa, another great underdog who transformed through sheer will, in the film’s Philadelphia section. The comparison is apt. Both movies are underdog tales that transcend the sports on display. On the surface “Rocky” is about boxing, just as “Brittany Runs a Marathon” is about running but both have larger themes that examine dissatisfaction, respect, ambition and family. These universal themes, coupled with winning performances from the cast, particularly Bell and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Brittany’s sorta-kinda boyfriend Jern, and big laughs make “Brittany Runs a Marathon” more than an inspirational sports film. It digs deep and the story packs an unexpected emotional punch as it uplifts.
There seems to be something about basketball themed TV commercials that strike a chord with Hollywood. First it was Michael Jordan vs. Looney Tunes in “Space Jam” and now comes “Uncle Drew,” a new inspirational comedy featuring starring Kyrie Irving as the character he created for Pepsi Max.
The story begins with Footlocker employee Dax (“Get Out’s” Lil Rel Howery), broke after draining his bank account to sponsor a team in the Rucker Classic street ball tournament in Harlem. It is the epicenter of streetball, we’re told, “where the legends of the game you were born.”
The prize is $100,000 but more important than the money is showing up someone from his childhood, his nemesis Mookie (Nick Kroll), “the ghost of white boy past” who bullied Dax when they were players. “What’s that smell?” asks Mookie. “Is it a grudge?”
When Dax loses his best player and girlfriend (Tiffany Haddish) to Mookie he turns to an icon, streetball pioneer Uncle Drew (Kyrie Irving). Now in his seventies the onetime local legend once beat someone at a game of one-on-one with only his left hand while eating a ham sandwich (with extra cheese and mayo on it) with the right. He is the “Zen master of basketball,” but hasn’t played since his team skipped the 1968 Rucker Classic for personal reasons.
Together they hit the road to recruit a sure-fire team of Uncle Drew’s septuagenarian pals (Shaquille O’Neal, Chris Webber, Reggie Miller, Nate Robinson, and Lisa Leslie all hidden under layers of make-up) to take one last run at the game on the 50th anniversary of the game they never got to play.
“Uncle Drew” is a sports movie based on a commercial but there’s more swishes than misses here. It’s a sweet natured film about respect, teamwork—“Gladys Knight ain’t nothing without the Pips,” says Uncle Drew.—resilience and second chances. It is an undeniable, if somewhat predictable, feel good movie that doesn’t aim any higher than the rim of a basketball hoop. Filled with old coot advice we learn, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” and, “You don’t stop playing because you get old you get old because you stop playing,” it plays like a heavy-handed sports Successtory with loads of improv comedy.
SYNOPIS: “Dog Man,” a new animated movie featuring the voices of Pete Davidson and Isla Fisher, and now playing in theatres, begins when Petey, the “world’s evilest cat,” blows up Officer Knight and his dog Greg. In a lifesaving operation, Greg’s head is grafted onto Officer Knight’s body. “I tried to get rid of both of you,” says Petey, “but instead I made a supercop.”
