Close Encounters of the Bird Kind

Last week, I gave Jack Black quite a bit of stick, and while that was definitely warranted, I inadvertently stumbled across a movie that unexpectedly brought him back into my good graces.  Surprisingly, with a movie I watched years ago and didn’t like.  And the critics—and audiences—didn’t like it either, with the film garnering only a 41% RT score and a matching 41% audience score.  But, while mindlessly scrolling Max (I still hate calling it that) and looking for a time waster to do chores by, and with birding fresh in my mind having recently watched Netflix’s flawed, but watchable quirky whodunnit The Residence, I decided to give The Big Year another gander.

A big year, in birding (which still sounds silly to me, but apparently is the correct term over bird watching; though, truth be told, it seems like it’s the birds who do the birding and the humans who do the watching, I’m not going to argue with how birders want to be referred to and end up like Tippi Hedren) terms, is when a birder decides to see as many species of birds as they possibly can.  It’s a personal challenge that can turn into an informal competition amongst the birding community.  In The Big Year, it’s presented as a dream by Brad Harris, played by Jack Black (that one episode of Community), Stu Preissler, played by comedic legend Steve Martin (Only Murders in the Building, Father of the Bride), and reigning champ, with 732 species of birds spotted as evidenced by his vanity license plate, Kenny Bostick, played by the man who wowed his way into America’s hearts, Owen Wilson (that same episode of Community that Jack Black was in, Loki).  Brad has a full time programming job, an ex-wife, and not much else, Stu has a career he’s trying to retire from and a grandchild on the way, and Kenny has a wife who wants to start a family and is frustrated with her husband’s one track mind.  Rounding out the cast are talented names like Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation, Our Idiot Brother), Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl), Dianne Wiest (Bullets over Broadway, The Birdcage), Kevin Pollack (The Usual Suspects, The Whole Nine Yards), Joel McHale (Community, Animal Control), Brian Dennehy (who was in perhaps my favorite duel ever from the western Silverado, First Blood), Anthony Anderson (Romeo Must Die, Black-ish) and more.  Oh, and did I mention it’s narrated by John Cleese (Silverado, Fawlty Towers) in the manner of a nature documentary?  This is such a talented cast with so much comedy pedigree, you can expect some big laughs.

But you’d be disappointed.  The Big Year presents itself as a comedy; this informal personal challenge has the look of a massive, all-consuming competition with an economy that rivals the ridiculousness of the competitive tornado-chasers in Twisters, but it’s not particularly funny.  I can tell the scenes which are supposed to make me laugh, like when an announcement that a specific species of bird has been spotted and two dozen grown adults rush Black Friday style to bicycles to race each other to see it before it flies away or when Kenny figures out how to make Stu seasick on a birding tour boat.  But they don’t land comically—they’re quirky, but not funny.  The idea of all this, it’s supposed to be completely ridiculous and hilarious and it just isn’t.  In fact, Jack Black’s Brad here is almost understated—and very understated by Jack Black standards—playing a lonely computer programmer who wants to have his big year and has little else on his mind other than that, isolated from just about anything but birds and his job.  Normally when a comedy fails at being comedic, that’s the end of it.  And this was largely my memory of it from watching it the first time.  It was a comedy that didn’t make me laugh, which is why I haven’t revisited it in over a decade.  Watching through the whole movie again, I still can’t remember a moment where I got more than a chuckle, though admittedly, I did get a few and handful of smirks as well.  So, at this point, you’re probably wondering why I’m taking the time to tell you about this forgotten birding movie from 2011.  And I don’t blame you.

But the thing that makes this movie good are the moments that weren’t meant to be funny.  It paints a picture of three very different men, all at very different stages of life.  Kenny is a successful business owner on the verge of starting a family with a frustrated wife who doesn’t want to play second fiddle to his winged first love.  Stu is an extremely successful entrepreneur who is so afraid of the stage that comes after the stage after retirement that he retired once and it didn’t take, so he’s now trying to retire again, as much as his employees don’t want him to go.  His wife supports his passion, but his son and daughter-in-law are expecting their first child as he takes this opportunity to have his big year.  And Brad…well, Brad is a little lost.  His ex-wife is getting remarried, his father doesn’t understand his bird obsession, and his mother is trying her best to support him, and he’s working a full time job while trying to have his big year (yes, all the main characters here are white men, those were the times, with a few gender stereotypes thrown in along the way, but nothing that offends the ears too much).

They compete with each other—Kenny is the leader of the flock, the holder of the record, the king atop the hill that everyone wants to overthrow, but along the way, they find ways to connect with each other.  One of the most quaint things about this big year concept, something that to me still sounds ridiculous, but perhaps I’m too jaded by this modern world in which we live, is that it goes by the honor system.  People fill out their journals with the birds they’ve seen—or even just heard, as long as they’re sure they can identify the birdsong—and that’s taken at their word.  When a dubious opportunity to cross off a rare bird arises, it’s rejected until there’s real confirmation that the birder heard what he thought he heard.

Kenny is positioned as an antagonist here, and yet he’s not really a bad guy.  He’s certainly his own worst enemy and a pretty bad husband, and he has a few tricks up his sleeve to deal with the competition, but he’s never so underhanded that you hate him.  Stu and Brad are underdogs, despite Stu coming from a place of serious privilege, and they form a friendship out of their shared love of birds and birding that was actually heartwarming in a time where so much of the world’s aim is to divide us from each other and we gatekeep hobbies to shame those who are newer or more casual at it.  And yet, Stu and Brad, competitors at the opposite ends of life—chronologically and financially, as Brad is spending basically all his life savings and then some on this quest and Stu can afford the finest things in life (though he refuses to fly in private planes or hire guides, because he feels that’s not in line with the spirit of the big year; to him, that’s the equivalent of big game hunting from a helicopter)—find real friendship with each other.  They share this passion, they share their lives, their fears, their concerns.  They’re there for each other and that touched me in a way I didn’t expect from this unfunny comedy.  It showed that there’s more to this movie than a lack of laughs.  In a moment where Brad is explaining to his father about his favorite bird, a rather plain looking grayish brown feathery fellow (I think that’s the scientific name) and why it’s his favorite, well, readers, I fully admit to some water spraying into my eyes, forcing me to wipe it away. Complete freak occurrence, I wasn’t tearing up at all.

We don’t just get to see plenty of birds and absurd scenarios in this film, but we also get to see a year in these men’s lives and everything that entails.  We get to see the parts of their lives that happen around birding, the things they miss, the things that make them feel alone, the things that make them feel a part of something.  We see the cost of their passion, the toll it takes on them and the people around them.  The moments where The Big Year isn’t trying to be funny are the moments where the movie truly, truly shines.  It’s in those moments where the movie pecked its way into my heart and went from a failed comedy to a mildly comedic slice-of-life film, the kind I really enjoy.  So often in media and society, we praise the sacrifice; we praise those who eschew all of life’s normalcies in order to achieve their one thing, the one thing that makes the quiet nights and lonely holidays worth it.  We deify those who give up everything to achieve something, we give Oscars to movies about assholes whose great accomplishments outweigh the dirt on their souls.  But The Big Year isn’t about that.  It’s not about the relentless pursuit of perfection, it isn’t about the need to give everything up to attain your goal at any cost.  It’s about the costs, it’s about the need to balance our lives, our passions, our relationships.  The Big Year is a movie about remembering that there’s more to life than that one thing.  That there’s so much that’s important in life and that it’s important to be present for that too—to be there for the big moments, to be there for the people you care about, to be there for yourself, to make connections with people.  It’s a movie that on its surface is about the destination, but in the end, is about the journey.  And whether that journey is one that should even be taken.

It wasn’t that long ago that I lamented the state of the adventure film and wondered how adventure films are supposed to move forward without leaving that uncomfortable, culture-pillaging, colonizing taste in your mouth.   Yes, the movies has its flaws.  Much of the supporting cast, while stacked with talent, is fairly one-dimensional and under-utilized.  Rosamund Pike’s character in particular is reduced to a stock wife who just wants a baby, even though she plays the hell out of it. But maybe this is it, as imperfect as it is.  Small stories about regular people having low stakes adventures as part of their daily lives.  Maybe critics and audiences alike missed a trick here 14 years ago when this movie first came around.  Yes, it could have been done better, it could have had more depth to it, more time spent fleshing out the supporting cast.  But maybe The Big Year isn’t a comedy after all—maybe it’s an introspective adventure movie that serves to remind us of the things that are really important in life and celebrates the things that surround our adventures more than the adventures themselves.  When I put on this 1 hour, 44 minute (4 minutes longer than the theatrical release, both of which are on Max) film I didn’t like, I was looking for something that was meaningless and filled up the empty space while I did some chores.  What I got was much, much more than that and much, much more than I bargained for.  I didn’t plan on writing about this.  I didn’t think of it as a hidden gem I needed to bring to you or some important film that made me feel something.  But I do now.  And I do hope you give it a chance with an open heart.  Because it helped open mine up a little.

If you’ve made it this far, I should give you a bit of a programming note.  I’m in the middle of a move and may not be able to stick a weekly schedule in July, but I will do my level best to keep this coming to you.  I love sharing movies and TV shows with you, dear readers, and I appreciate every single one of you.  As Pride Month comes to a close, I want to tell you all that I appreciate you and who you are.  Thank you for being here.

Block Pilgrim vs. The Overworld

Okay, it’s time to get into A Minecraft Movie (2025), now streaming on Max.  There’s a lot here to say and, unfortunately, not a lot of it is very good.  In case you didn’t know, A Minecraft Movie is based on the video game Minecraft, a sort of blocky sandbox creation game that is popular with gamers of all ages, from kids aged four or five and up, to full on adults with jobs and existential dread and everything that comes with that.  Starring Jack Black (one episode of Community, Be Kind Rewind), Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones, Dune), Danielle Brooks (Peacemaker), Emma Myers (Wednesday), and relative newcomer Sebastian Hansen, who plays her little brother.  The characters have names, but they’re not really important, other than Steve, Jack Black’s character.  The rest are just there to take up space on screen and for things to happen around them as the story, such that it is, unfolds.

Steve, if you know the game, should mean something to you, but at this point, I should mention that I’ve never played Minecraft and I have no plans to, nor any interest in it as a game.  I should also admit to going into Minecraft hoping to dislike it.  I can’t help it, I’m human, and I have biases and the best I can do is admit them to you.  Luckily, I wasn’t disappointed; I’m not going to play hide the ball here, Minecraft is a bad movie.  It’s really bad.  But it serves its purpose.

As long as you view that purpose as distracting children for just about two hours by bombarding them with bright colors, memes even I understood (the children, they yearn for the mines), Jack Black randomly yelling every 90 seconds, doing his own Foley, and breaking out into song every 10 minutes, and other children on screen so they can relate.  There’s almost a story here—mostly things just happen from one scene to another—but it’s about as important as the characters’ names, and Jack Black’s Steve will painfully explain everything to you like a five-year-old who has you cornered at a family gathering and is educating you on their newest obsession.  Which is cute when it’s a kid telling you about dinosaurs, but when it’s a man in his mid-50s screaming at you about gorgonzola, it’s less endearing.  To be fair, I appreciated some of the exposition, because I don’t know anything about Minecraft.  That seems to be Steve’s biggest function in the movie, telling the characters and audience how everything works, which is practical, but I think it could have been masked a bit better so it didn’t feel so much like a game tutorial instead of a film.  There’s nothing new or original in this movie—if you’ve seen the Jumanji reboots, you’ve already seen A Minecraft Movie, just done much better (not to mention that it also stars Jack Black in the role he was meant to play—a popular teenage girl).  Kids get sucked into the magical world of Jumanji—oops, I mean the Minecraft Overworld—they complete a quest for the MacGuffin, and then they get to go home.  Along the way, they learn some lessons about how it’s important to be who you are, and they take those lessons back to the real world. 

That’s not a knock—that’s the point of children’s adventure movies and I suppose A Minecraft Movie serves that purpose (as long as you can ignore that Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks basically just exist to do reaction videos about what’s going on in the Overworld; they don’t have a whole lot here to work with, which is disappointing because I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Emma Myers and her possible casting in the MCU and I hoped there’d be a little more meat to her role, but I suppose that was misplaced), but execution matters and Minecraft manages to just stumble over the low bar we set for children’s entertainment and I suppose that’s okay if that’s all you’re looking for out of a kids’ movie.  To be fair, I got a few chuckles here and there—especially in the scenes between minutes 5 and 26 where Jack Black wasn’t in it—and it’s pretty much the best way to use Jason Momoa.  He’s really leaning into his big, imposing silly guy period, with that real John Cena feel to it.  And it works.  He drops some one-liners that get the job done—I laughed when he says to Emma Myers that he’s been more of a sister to her brother than she has, all while wearing a fringed pink leather jacket with aplomb.  And it actually delivered one of the scant few genuine moments in the film.  He slays the look and the juxtaposition from his intimidating physical appearance to his childish behavior pretty much works.  In fact, even with Jack Black’s in-your-face performance (even by Jack Black standards), it’s Jason Momoa who is the standout in this movie and steals the show rather thoroughly.

Of course, analyzing this movie as a grown adult who doesn’t play the game and doesn’t have children to distract, it makes me wonder some things about why we set the bar so low for kids’ stuff.  Because it doesn’t have to be this way—a cross between an Illumination animated movie and CoComelon with about as much nutritional value as the tub your popcorn comes in—it can be better.  I don’t think this movie’s biggest failure is its inability to entertain me because I fully expected that.  I’m not the target audience and it’s okay that not every movie is made specifically for me.  I think the biggest failure is that it failed at conveying the appeal of Minecraft in the first place.  I spoke with a group of Minecraft players, all adults, some with children and some without, asking them what appealed to them about the game, because I just don’t get it and that’s, again, also okay.  But the overwhelming response that I got was that Minecraft is fun for them because it allows them to do just about whatever they want.  The word “freedom” came up in almost every response, creativity was another buzzword, relaxation was another thing they mentioned, because you can play Minecraft in a way where you don’t face enemies and don’t seem to have missions to accomplish.  It’s a big virtual sandbox where you can play with Legos without playing with Legos (and as a huge Lego nerd myself, I can appreciate that) and leave a confining world behind in the endless Overworld of Minecraft where the limits don’t apply.  And none of this comes across in the movie.  There is no feeling of freedom, there is no sense of relaxation or creativity; framing this story as an accidental quest to return home doesn’t give you any time to live in the Overworld or experience it the way a kid or any Minecraft player would.  Sure, there are a few scenes where characters point at the ground and blocks appear, but when something actually interesting is built, it’s done offscreen and only you see the results.  No one ever gets to indulge in the freedom the game gives its players.  Instead, the narrative structure puts a ticking clock and a sense of urgency on the film, which are things Minecraft the game doesn’t have.  Of course there has to be an impetus for the plot, but it doesn’t give the audience any time to appreciate the Overworld because everyone’s running for their lives all the time (even though it never really seems like anyone is in danger).  And I really think that’s the biggest issue with the film and why it feels like a failure of a narrative to me.  The Super Mario Bros. Movie may not have been good, in many ways the same sort of complaints I’ve lodged here could be lodged at that movie, but at least it felt mostly like Mario.  This was just Jumanji with a DLC skin on it that felt like the Canal Street version that you’d buy off a folding table on the sidewalk next to a $20 “Louis Vuitton” handbag.

You can use A Minecraft Movie to occupy your kids, but you don’t have to give them something with so little redeeming value.  It’s the empty calories of kids’ movies and studios have proven that they can do better than aiming to just graze that low bar we’ve set for children’s entertainment.  There are better options out there and we don’t have to lower our standards for storytelling just because it’s aimed at a younger audience.  Bluey has proven that, Hilda has proven that, and for many years now, Pixar and Dreamworks have been proving it as well.

How to Train Your Dragon, for example, is a better way to spend your time with or without your kids.  With the hollow-feeling live action remake in theaters now, it’s the perfect time to go back and watch the original animated trilogy and even watch the Dragons: Race to the Edge series on Netflix to supplement it.  Smarter, better storytelling in a fantastical adventure setting that really sells the beauty of the world in which the characters live, it’s a great series.  The aforementioned Jumanji films do everything Minecraft does better, and the original Robin Williams classic is also out there to watch and is much, much better than A Minecraft Movie (if a bit darker when you’re paying attention).  And let’s not forget Pixar in this conversation, the studio that revolutionized children’s entertainment and continues to deliver time and time again.  One film of theirs that I want to highlight here is another movie about a kid who experiences a magical and foreign world to him, but with a twist—overshadowed by the excellent Encanto, Luca tells the story of a sea monster who ventures to the surface world and goes on a beautiful, heartwarming adventure.  If you spent 2021 not talking about Bruno, it was easy to miss Luca, but it is well worth your time to go back and watch it because it’s really a great movie for kids and adults alike.  Even Disney returned Star Wars to its kid-friendly roots with the excellent Skeleton Crew, which draws heavy inspiration from classic kids’ adventure movies from the 1980s.  And of course, I can’t talk about kid-friendly movies that make an adult’s heart melt without mentioning Paddington, movies that were so good I can still hardly believe it.  I’ve had it in my head to do a big compare and contrast between the character of Paddington and the MCU portrayal of Captain America and how they both embody the ideals of a society without the rather horrifying trappings of the past (and now that the Paddington trilogy is complete, it might be time to revisit that idea).  Children’s entertainment doesn’t have to be mindless, it doesn’t have to yell “Sneak attack!” every twenty minutes (when only one was actually a sneak attack, though yelling that seems to defeat the purpose), it doesn’t have to references meme after meme, it doesn’t have to leave you walking away from it feeling like you should have just been folding your laundry in silence instead.  It can be wonderful, it can be beautiful, it can tell meaningful stories that don’t talk down to kids, but that teach them something while entertaining them.

So yes, while Minecraft may offer more laughs than the entire series of the truly dismal and unfunny Night Court reboot, you can do much better with your and your kids’ screen time than this.  I can’t tell you whether to skip it or not, because you might enjoy it, you might appreciate the references, you might like being bathed in the nostalgia of a game you played or still play; but, if you haven’t seen the movies or shows I mentioned, I urge you to give them a try as well.  Because they’re really worth the time.

Dr. Heckle and Mr. Blindside

After the disappointment of Fountain of Youth, I thought it was time to brave the waters of streaming originals once again with Amazon Prime’s new R-rated comedy Deep Cover.  Before I tell you what the movie is about, I want to preface this by saying what I’m about to say isn’t a joke.  The London police draft in three improv comics for their ability to think on their feet and roll with the punches to go into a special undercover program.  One of said comedians is Bryce Dallas Howard (The Help, Jurassic World), taking a break from directing some of the best episodes of Star Wars television to play Kat, a directionless comedian teaching an improv class as she waits for her big break, which more and more seems like it’ll never come.  Rounding out her team is Orlando Bloom’s (The Lord of the Rings, The Outpost) Marlon, an out of work advertisement actor with aspirations for serious drama, and Nick Mohammed’s (Ted Lasso) Hugh, coming off a wonderful run on Taskmaster to play a socially awkward and isolated IT guy at a large London financial firm, desperate for a way to relate to people.

Of course, the idea that improv comics are the perfect choices for undercover operations is preposterous on the level of sending a Pontiac Fiero to space or recruiting a group of deep-sea oil drillers to become astronauts instead of having them teach astronauts how to turn on a drill, but since it’s a comedy, you sort of just roll with it the way they’re supposed to and let yourself become caught up in the shred of believability in the plot.  I mean, there is a tiniest bit of something there if you think about it just enough, but not too much.  Comedians can be quite quick thinkers—I mean, look at how well Ike Barinholtz does on quiz shows, for example—so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility, but it is mildly insane all the same.  The Armageddon problem still exists; why not put cops through improv classes rather than put improv comics in the field with little more than a briefing before giving them a good luck pep talk and placing them in harm’s way.  If you’re able to suspend your disbelief just enough to accept the premise though, you will be rewarded with a very funny comedy with more than enough heart to keep you invested in the characters.

As you can imagine, there are lots of hiccups along the way, and the impulse to “yes, and” their way through scenarios finds our lot of comedians quickly escalating their way along in a local gang run by a fellow called Fly, played by the always excellent and very versatile Paddy Considine (Hot Fuzz, The Outsider), who quickly takes a liking to them and gets them involved way, way over their heads.  To be honest, though, the lowest rung on a step stool is over their heads because they’re comedians and not trained investigators.  There’s a certain amount of danger that a normal person is subjected to on a daily basis that we sort of shrug off; driving a car, crossing the street, taking a shortcut through an alley, etc., and our plucky protagonists go far, far beyond that.  When faced with real danger, the comics act admirably, but there’s a realness to how they react to things once the scene is called.  They act heroically when the time comes, but it is just acting. But instead of just playing one on TV, these actors are doing it for real, even if they’re just pretending.

Comedy is often hard to write about—I can tell you that the comedic timing in the film is top, top notch, especially coming from two actors with whom I don’t usually associate comedy.  While it is an ensemble cast with three fully realized characters, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Kat is probably the star, and when you look back through her credits, you can’t find a lot of comedic roles (though it is fairly laughable just how bad the Jurassic World movies are, but I don’t think that was intended).  But here, she’s as natural as can be.  Kat is funny, she’s evenly toned throughout the film, even though she’s the only one who really has to balance her life outside of being an undercover comic/police consultant, she manages to play it without jarring the audience between undercover Kat and real life Kat.  I’ve always been a big Bryce Dallas Howard fan, perhaps even more as a director than as an actress now, but Deep Cover has me yearning to see her in more comedies.  Orlando Bloom’s washed up ultra-method commercial actor is a far cry from Legolas, and even a completely different kind of character than Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean, where he is kind of the straight man as Johnny Depp Johnny Depps all around him.  But he plays it with such an earnest bent that he sells it and you buy it hook, line, and sinker because he does such a good job.  It’s a feat to pull off this kind of smoldering intensity and over the top commitment for comedy and he just nails it.  Now, I can’t say the same about Nick Mohammed—his role here is quite similar to Nate in Ted Lasso, but I don’t mind that one bit when he does it so well.  Hugh is definitely cut from the Nate mould, but it doesn’t matter when it’s a role he’s born to play.  Not quite as timid or as nervously tight-lipped as Nate, Hugh still struggles to fit in as an IT guy at a high dollar finance firm where not only do the people there not like him, they clearly don’t respect him and barely acknowledge his existence unless they need something from him.  He’s so amazing in this role, it doesn’t matter that he’s not playing against type.  In fact, based on his Taskmaster appearance, I’m not even sure he’s doing that much acting.  But he absolutely kills every frame.

And this is where the movie really shines.  It’s not just that it’s funny, of course it is, but lots of movies are funny (well, fewer and fewer, it seems) and it’s the characters that elevate this beyond your average action-comedy.  As preposterous as this premise is, as fantastical the plot, the movie is so well grounded in real-life stuff.  Kat had a dream that isn’t working out and at 39, she’s desperately trying to figure out if there’s still time left for her to pursue that dream or whether she needs to drastically reconsider her life choices.  Marlon wants nothing more than to be taken seriously, but, like Hugh Grant’s character from Paddington 2, his iconic role in an ad has taken over his entire career (though unlike Grant’s has-been, Marlon is a never-was).  Hugh is struggling to find a way to exist in a social world where he’s at the bottom of the hierarchy and he wants to do more and be more than he is.  Who can’t relate to that?  I think one of the things that makes this movie work so well is that each of the protagonists is extremely relatable in one way or another and if you don’t see at least part of yourself in one of them, you’re sure to see it in one of the others.   And unlike some of the recent streamer original films, Deep Cover has a star-studded cast and uses them all very well—unfortunately, there’s no Stanley Tucci this time, but Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings, Ronin) doing his best Jackson Lamb impression as the cop who brings them into this program, Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina, Devs), and Ian McShane (John Wick, Deadwood) round out the very talented cast and give the shady underworld our protagonists are jumping into much more real feel than it has any right to be.  And, at just 1 hour and 39 minutes, the movie hovers around that near-perfect 90 minute mark for comedies, returning us back to form from the 2+ hour movies that marked the Judd Apatow comedy era of the mid-to-late 2000s.

What’s even more surprising about Deep Cover is that it focuses very heavily on friendship and the relationships between the characters as human beings and in a very rare move for an R-rated comedy, doesn’t go all-in on raunchy comedy, sex jokes, or otherwise easy comedic mechanics.  There’s barely even a romantic subplot, which again, feels nice after how often we see it shoehorned into movies (not to beat up again on Jurassic World, but it deserves it, it’s a perfect example of “Well, they’re both good looking and the stars of the movie, so they have to get together”). It’s not that it bothers me, but it is an easier route to getting laughs and doing it without that shows off the skill in the writing and acting that bit much more than a comedy like Let’s Be Cops, which I also really enjoyed (despite it dismal reviews, but I do have a fondness for Jake Johnson and not just because he liked one my tweets about an deep cut TV-friendly dubbing of a line in Die Hard 2) or 21 Jump Street.  This movie felt like an elevated version of Let’s Be Cops and 21 Jump Street in some ways, but done in a way that you could almost watch with your family, bar some bloody violence and swearing.  I’m not saying it’s a replacement for Bluey, but you could easily watch this with older kids.  I mean, if the family barbecue gets rained out, this is one you can put on and not worry too much if the kids walk in while the adults are watching.

Deep Cover proves that while dying is easy and comedy is hard, not dying can be pretty hard too.  And also very, very funny and satisfying to watch.  I highly recommend this one.  Great R-rated comedies that are grown-up and mature in the writing are rare in the time of major film franchises replacing both the action movie and the comedy, and this is a movie that deserves to not only be watched, but celebrated.  It’s such a refreshing experience after movies like Fountain of Youth, Electric State, and The Gorge, which did a great deal of damage to the reputation of straight-to-streaming films, nearly undoing the great work of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and Glass Onion.  And in a world that can, at times, feel like it’s crumbling around us, it’s nice to be able to escape that for a just over an hour and a half, laugh for a bit, and remember that even while all this is going on, our smaller struggles are still our struggles and it’s okay if we need to focus on them—and on ourselves—for a little while.  Not every story has to be the biggest story in the world and if you need a break from the world, a movie like Deep Cover is a wonderful way to take that break.

Bland of the Lost

As the warm weather starts to roll in across the Northern Hemisphere, are you ready for a fun, lighthearted adventure?  Well, I was too, but then I watched Apple TV+’s new big budget action-adventure movie Fountain of Youth.  I remember when Guy Ritchie’s name on a film meant something—Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels were two formative movies for me, his recent war movie The Covenant felt like a turning point from big budget fluffy movies like Sherlock Holmes to serious filmmaking with impactful stories and great acting, even the humorless crime thriller Wrath of Man showed that he was capable of more serious storytelling.  But with Fountain of Youth, Guy Ritchie returns to the meaningless, nonsensical movies that have defined the last 20 years of his filmography.

So let’s get into it.  The movie opens on John Krasinski (The Office, A Quiet Place), playing Luke Purdue, on a scooter driving through the streets of Bangkok as a cover of “Bang Bang” plays (I didn’t recognize the language, but considering this scene is set in Thailand, Thai is probably a safe bet) with a painting tube on his back.  Cue the very polite henchmen/gangsters who roll up, threaten Luke, and then start shooting as a car and scooter chase ensues.  He escapes rather clumsily—which is honestly refreshing to see.  So many times we’re used to seeing protagonists be essentially superhuman even when they’re not playing superhumans, but here, Luke takes a tumble and actually has to limp away and is affected by it.  Unfortunately, that’s about the last good thing I have to say about the movie.

With plans A, B, and C pretty much all blown, Luke gets on the earpiece to talk to his support, who directs him to a train.  On the train, he falls asleep and we get the first of many intercalary chapters where he dreams of finding something far off, but with serious consequences.  Once he wakes up from this bit of foreshadowing, he’s confronted by Esme, played by Eiza Gonzales (Baby Driver, 3 Body Problem), who describes herself as the “hand of mercy” and her associates as the “hand of judgment” before demanding the painting that Luke has.  He immediately starts flirting with the amount of charm and charisma that should make anyone feel more confident in their own flirting skills, because it sounded like being hit on by a cardboard box.  Esme’s not going for any of it, and then, well, there’s another fight and another escape.  It’s all meant to be very funny and very exciting and almost none of it works.   In fact, that’s kind of how much of the movie goes.  It’s trying very hard to be funny and exciting and more often than not, it fails.  It’s one of those times where you’re aware that they’re making a joke or trying to make to you laugh in some way and it just pretty much never lands, save for one legitimately funny scene that probably would have worked better as a YouTube Short than a movie.

After his escape, Luke goes to the museum where his sister Charlotte, played by Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta, Black Swan), works and pulls off the most incredible art heist I’ve ever seen.  And by incredible, I mean in the literal sense of the word, because it lacks any credibility as a scene.  Luke distracts Charlotte, walks up to a painting, lifts it off the wall, and then jogs out to a perfectly parked AC Cobra because apparently in this museum all the security guards take their coffee break at the same time, convinces her to get in with him and they go through a fairly leisurely car chase where you never believe anyone is in actual danger and nothing feels exciting despite the fact the AC/Shelby Cobra is one of the most stunning cars of all time and it’s always a treat to see one in action (even one that is most definitely a number of different replicas).  Eventually, he reveals that he’s working with his father’s old team, played by Laz Alonso (The Boys) and Carmen Ejogo (True Detective, Selma).  I didn’t bother learning their characters’ names or looking them up for you because despite the fact that Alonso and Ejogo are both talented actors, they’re essentially set dressing and diversity checklist casting in the film, their characters each amounting to roughly half of a “man in the chair” archetype.  They then reveal that their quest for the Fountain of Youth is being bankrolled by dying billionaire Owen Carver, played by the usually excellent Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina, Brooklyn).  Yeah, shady billionaire funding, what could go wrong that they couldn’t painfully telegraph?

There are a lot of problems with this movie and most of it has to do with how it’s written, directed, and acted.  I know this is a talented cast.  Even Stanley Tucci (Conclave, Big Night) shows up, and between this and Electric State, it makes me wonder just how many vacation homes he’s paying off with these movies.  The scenes are written like a video game, specifically an Uncharted game.  As soon as our “heroes” get to their next objective and solve the puzzles to reach their goal the right way, the “bad guys” burst through the door or wall and start shooting.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Uncharted games, they’re some of my favorite games I’ve ever played, but a movie has to have a narrative structure and not an objective based structure.  Movies aren’t the same as games, as evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t get through 15 minutes of the Uncharted movie before shutting it off.  It’s very unsatisfying to watch your main characters go through a bunch of disjointed fetch quests—it’s not that it can’t be done, but Fountain of Youth isn’t pulling it off.  More than that, there are nonsensical decisions abound here, relating to Charlotte’s shoehorned custody battle for her only son because of course the best way to not only demonstrate that you’re the more responsible parent, but also keep your child safe is to take them with you on a globetrotting graverobbing tour where not just one, but two shadowy organizations are trying to gun you down and so is Interpol.  Nothing like dodging a hail of bullets at every turn to earn your “World’s Best Mom” mug the right way and not just get it from the Hallmark store like everyone else.

It’s also incredibly unoriginal.  Like Electric State, I walked away with the sense that the overall feeling in the writers’ room is that if they copy enough movies, it’ll feel like an original film, and it just doesn’t.  Like I said before, the similarities to Uncharted were impossible to miss, but everything from Luke’s Indiana Jones wardrobe and their dead father being named Harrison as an homage—if that’s the right word when dealing with a piece of media as bad as this—to Harrison Ford, to Luke’s charmless Star-Lord energy that made him incredibly annoying instead of endearing.  And there’s a whiff of The Da Vinci Code, which is either a piece of memetic pulp fiction or a very bad movie, depending on whether you read it or watched it.  The whole movie felt familiar in a bad way, the way a store brand soda kind of tastes like a Coke or Pepsi, but not quite and in a way that you can’t put your finger on, but is off-putting.  The knowledge they have feels unearned—unlike something like Uncharted or Indiana Jones, where the characters draw on a deep well of knowledge and ingenuity gained from years and years of study and experience, everything here is at their fingertips.  It’s all too easy.  The extensive use of technology to find the answers to their problems make them feel more like an IT department than a group of archaeologists or specialists with arcane knowledge of the past.  Every time they figure something out, it’s because a computer program did it, not because they knew or deduced something.

I wish that was where the problems with this movie ends, but it goes far deeper than that.  It shows off some of the most Eurocentric thinking I’ve seen in a modern movie.  In practically the same breath, Luke, when convincing Charlotte that there’s enough truth in the myth of the Fountain to warrant trying to find it, he states that dozens of cultures over centuries all have the same myth, but then goes on to say that the path to the Fountain is hidden in six paintings of Jesus Christ.  That’s right, it goes from every culture to the only one that matters in the eyes of this movie, white European Christianity; even a special Bible is part of the path.  Now, I understand that European art is something people learn about in school and a name like Rembrandt is one that people will recognize moreso than artists like Katsushika Hokusai or Amrita Sher-Gil, but if you’re putting together a continent-spanning adventure taking you from places like Thailand to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, you can do a little more research than just grabbing the names you remember from your grade school history textbook and Googling what paintings of Christ they did.  So while every culture has the Fountain of Youth myth, it’s the white Christian ones that count.  Although they’re happy to plunder other cultures to get to the Fountain, those cultures are not the ones that have any clues or knowledge that helps them find the Fountain itself.  It’s just these six paintings of Jesus that hold the truth.  Now, I hesitate to call this racist, because I don’t think it is, not at its core or intentionally; but it is incredibly lazy writing.  Just like all the writing in Fountain of Youth is incredibly lazy.  How does Eiza Gonzalez and her crew of faceless red shirts keep showing up just after Luke and Charlotte?  And then how does Interpol keep showing up just after they do?  How are they being tracked?  How are they finding them?  If Luke and his team are the only ones with the clues, how does everyone keep catching up to them 15 minutes after they break the cryptic codes that have sat in plain sight and gone unfound by everyone else for hundreds of years?  What it comes right down to is that it doesn’t matter to the film how this is happening, it’s only concerned with the fact that it’s happening, whether or not it makes sense.

Another problem with the film is how much of the violence is sanitized in order to give it a family-friendly vibe.  People die, they die violently, and none of that is ever mentioned.  Sure, it’s pretty much always Interpol agents in tactical gear or Esme’s merry band of baddies, but not a single character ever mentions the human cost this quest is taking.  Not even the Interpol inspector, Jamal Abbas, played by Arian Moayed (Succession) in charge of the investigation seems to notice or care that his team are the ones being killed.  Nor are the possible effects of seeing this violence and being the target of it as well on a 12 year old child ever explored.  The aim of this is likely to keep violence from bothering people who would be watching this with their children—the PG-13 rating and inclusion of a child character really show that it’s written with family viewership in mind—but the effects of it are to make Luke, Charlotte, and their team seem incredibly callous to the loss of life.  There is never a moment where anyone cares about anything that happens to anyone outside of their little circle; even Luke’s moments of introspection, those foreshadowing dreams, only exhibit fears about the possible consequences for his family, whom he had no qualms about putting in danger in the first place.  People are dying and they’re right at the center of it and because they don’t care, they feel like highly unsympathetic characters and bad people.  No amount of awkward flirting or Ryan Reynolds-style quips can endear someone to me if they don’t ever take a moment to reflect on the deaths happening around them.  They appear to lack humanity, which for villains is a bit boring, but okay, but for protagonists, it’s unforgivable.  It makes them all seem like awful people and by the end of it, I was waiting for one of these ancient spaces they were going in to collapse on them and put me out of my suffering by burying them all alive.

The movie also showcases the problem with adventure movies.  I have a hard time looking back and trying to remember the last time we had a good one.  And now that so much is mapped out by satellites and the answer to almost every question is available at our fingertips, it feels like mystery and adventure have disappeared from the world (although thanks to AI-powered search engines, we now have a little mystery restored, because you never know if they’re being truthful or not) and it would be really nice to see some convincing adventure in our films.  Movies like National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code are B-movie schlock at best and calling Fountain of Youth that would be an insult to B-movie schlock.  Even the Indiana Jones movies don’t feel as good to watch as they did in my youth, although The Mummy remains a largely fun Sunday afternoon film to watch.  If we count the Jumanji reboot films and their virtual world, then they’re probably the last bit of adventure films that was enjoyable to watch.  And in some ways, divorcing the the cultural plunder from the real world into a virtual one removes the icky feeling that comes with some of these movies and thinking just a little bit too long about how some exhibits got to the museums in which they now live.  Maybe that is the way forward for adventure films.  Ironically, as more of these movies begin to feel like video games, which themselves learned from movies to become more cinematic, it’s the ones about a video game world that feel more organic.

Sometimes movies are frustrating when you see the potential to be better go terribly unrealized, but unlike those movies, Fountain of Youth is frustrating because of how mind-numbing it is.  This is the kind of movie I want to be made; not attached to a major IP, not part of a cinematic universe, something meant to be fun.  But I want it to be made better.  I mean, there’s so much wrong with this movie, I couldn’t even mention it all, like when they float the wreck of the RMS Lusitania to find a painting while continually insisting that they’re not graverobbers.  I wanted to bring this movie to you because in the midst of the anxiety and fear gripping many in the world, a plucky adventure films that brings a smile to your face can be worth a hell of a lot.  But this isn’t that film.  I felt like my time was wasted; at 2 hours and 5 minutes, it’s not the longest movie, and it is action-packed, but it has nothing going on.  The screen is always flashing something at you, but devoid of any meaning or any affection for the characters or any stakes, because no one ever feels like they’re ever in danger (with Luke even dismissing his sister being held hostage at gunpoint in a scene using slow-motion to play it for comedy that, surprise, surprise, also misses), it feels like nothing of any importance ever happens in the film.  I’ve said before that I don’t give letter grades in this blog, but if I were to, this elementary grade level movie wouldn’t be passing on to middle school.