Daily Archives: September 17, 2013
The Family (2013)
The most impressive thing I can credit The Family, an otherwise adequate action-comedy with identity issues, is that it makes each member of its titular family worth watching. Robert De Niro is the patriarch of a family on the run from the Mob, who used to serve as De Niro’s chief employer. They’re hiding in Normandy, France, and trying to blend in, with very mixed results. I was worried that everything was going to be too obvious, but the movie does a fine job of rounding out its cast, giving each family member a personality, flaws, and a reason you want to keep tabs with them. I enjoyed the son’s single-minded manipulation of his school, able to suss out everyone’s needs and how to turn alliances. De Niro starts writing his memoirs as a therapeutic exercise, but really nothing comes from this obvious plot catalyst. The nagging problem that dogs the movie is an inconsistent tone. The violence can be rather brutal and much of it is meant to be silly, but it doesn’t come across that way. In fact, most of the film’s laughs are tied up in over-the-top, and often, bloody violence. But the movie isn’t dark enough to work as a twisted comedy, holding back to become something of an uneven mob cartoon with plenty of hoary Italian stereotypes. As a result, when the third act is all bloody mayhem, it feels like The Family is three half-baked movies badly stitched together. I laughed enough and was passably entertained but The Family is too dark to work as a lark, too juvenile to be substantial, and too predictable by half.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Kick-Ass 2 (2013)
It’s hard for me to discuss Kick-Ass 2 without sounding like a hypocrite. I enjoyed the first film’s visceral thrills, style, and satire of superhero tropes. The sequel gives me more of the same except not nearly as well polished, and in typical sequel mentality, it goes bigger, expanding the world and the height of the sick puppy violence. Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Hit Girl (Chloe Grace-Moritz) are trying to live ordinary lives but keep feeling the need to don their suits and fight crime. Kick-Ass joins a ragtag team of other costumed vigilantes to battle a super villain team, lead by the former Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). For long stretches, the movie seems like an unwanted Heathers knockoff as Hit Girl attempts to fit in at high school. She has some particularly nasty vengeance against a popular bully, and if there is a line, it may have been crossed here. I don’t know what it says about me, but I guess I’m fine with a pint-sized kid slicing up bad guys and cursing like a sailor, but making a woman simultaneously vomit and defecate herself, watching both projectile streams spray out her ends, is too much for me. This is a darker, cruel, and mean-spirited feel with the material, and writer/director Jeff Wadlow fails to compensate for the lack of creativity this go-round (I miss you Matthew Vaughn). The humor is still lively, but the plot is predictable at every step, the characters behave in ways that don’t make sense, and the action sequences are poorly filmed, leading to an anticlimactic ending that simply peters out. Kick-Ass 2 won’t be knocking anyone out.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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