Monthly Archives: April 2021
The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021)
After watching it twice on Netflix, I have come to the conclusion that The Mitchells vs. The Machines is my favorite animated film since 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse. It’s so colorful, so exuberant, so clever, while still being heartfelt on its own terms and packing more jokes into a minute than any studio comedy in years. Everyone should check out 2021’s first cinematic treat.
The Mitchells are known as the weird family in their community. Rick (voiced by Danny McBride) is more about the outdoors and hands-on activities. His teenage daughter, Katie (Abbi Jacobson), is more about the digital sphere and creates her own sardonic, strange videos. She’s leaving for college and eager to fly the coop. Rick feels his last opportunity to bond with his daughter is leaving with her, so he forces the family into a cross-country road trip to drop Katie off at her school. Linda Mitchell (Maya Rudolph) is doing her best to be supportive of her husband and daughter while trying to bridge their divide. Youngest son Aaron just wants everyone to get along and talk about dinosaurs endlessly. The road trip gets even more precarious with a machine uprising and flying robots rounding up humans to eventually jettison them into space.
This is a gloriously entertaining movie that looks absolutely gorgeous. The animation is accentuated with similar styles from Into the Spider-Verse, so the filmmakers have implemented an overlay that adds a two-dimensional shaping and shading to the characters to provide more distinct definition. It’s a new design I heartily enjoyed in the Oscar-winning Spider-Verse and I hope more major animation projects employ it. It’s combining the fluidity and scale of 3D animation with the tactile and personal flavor of traditional animation. The movie also echoes its Gen Z-YouTube culture with cute hand drawn additions that will pop on the screen as accents or take over as quick freeze frames. I thought it was fun and a good indicator of Katie’s meta-drenched sense of humor and creative voice. This is also an explosively colorful movie with vibrant arrays popping off the screen. There were several visual sequences that took my breath away just at the arrangement of colors. The heavy use of neon pastels made me wonder if Nicolas Winding Refn (Neon Demon) was a visual consultant. There’s a stretch that highlights pinkish sunsets and the beautiful light blues of approaching dusk that I said this was the Nomadland of animated movies. Even when this movie has nothing happening, it’s a pleasure just to take it in and appreciate the artistry.
But oh my goodness there is so much happening with The Mitchells vs. The Machines. It’s a longer animated movie at 110 minutes but it’s also so fast-paced and antic, filled with ideas and jokes and moments it feels like it cannot wait to share. In some ways it feels like talking with a hyper-literate, boundlessly excited little kid, and I don’t mean that as a negative. I’m sure there will be more than a few viewers who will tire out early or find the pacing exhausting, but if you’re a fan of The Lego Movie and its hyperactive style of comedy, then you should be able to adapt here. The movie is densely packed with jokes, some that zip by in fractions of a millisecond to reward multiple viewings. I was laughing throughout and besides myself at several points, laughing hysterically from the slapstick to the offhand one-liners to the callbacks and silliness. There’s a little of everything here comedy-wise and it all works. It’s a buffet of laughs. One joke that is simply a tonally serious push-in on the question of mortality had me howling and it’s only a one-second gag. There’s a segment in a deserted shopping mall with the re-emergence of Furbys that is inspired lunacy (“Behold, the twilight of man!”). You have to be this good to be this smartly silly. This is the kind of comedy you can only do in the realm of animation, packing as much into the visual frame as possible and moving at the clip of the creative’s imagination. The side characters are the film’s secret weapons. The dumb dog made me laugh just about every time he was onscreen, and the fact that the movie legitimately finds a significant solution with this dog later is fantastic. The family also come across a pair of malfunctioning robots (voiced by Beck Bennett and Fred Armisen) and take them in as part of their unconventional family, and the robots are a terrific team for comedy bits, from their early entrance trying to ineptly persuade the family they are in fact humans (“Yum yum. Yum yum good.”) to their one-off remarks from a confused perspective had me laughing regularly.
The movie is more than just an assembly line of expertly calibrated gags, though again it must be said how flat-out hilarious this movie can be, like it’s disarming how instant the funny can break. The Mitchells vs. The Machines is also a well written movie from a character perspective and makes the audience genuinely care about this self-described clan of weirdos. My girlfriend looked at the running time for the movie and initially balked at how long it was, especially since we had seemingly come to a part that could serve as its Act Two break. “It better be worth that extra time,” she warned, and by the end even she agreed that it was time very well spent.
The heart of the movie is on the father-daughter relationship and while the other characters don’t get shut out, they become helpers to their various sides of this fractured relationship. The conflict is relatable, about the disconnection between two loved ones who just don’t feel like they have much in common any longer. For Rick, he doesn’t understand technology, the thing that Katie thrives in, and he’s struggling to adjust to her growing older. Those familiar daddy-daughter points of bonding don’t have the same appeal to her as a young woman increasingly embarrassed by her Luddite father. There’s a sincere warmth between the two, it’s just they don’t know how to express it fully to the other person and be seen as how they would like to be seen. It’s a generation gap, yes (Rick’s fear of technology will ring true to those with Boomer parents), but it’s also just two people who cannot use the same old tools to get the same results. The screenplay serves up both sides so that we see where each is coming from, understand their frustrations and overreaches, and pull for their reconciliation and growth. The themes are kept simple but expertly developed and with wonderful payoffs not just for Rick and Katie but for everyone. Each member of the Mitchell family unit has a character arc with a payoff, and each is utilized in a meaningful way with our outlandishly joyous climax, and that includes the dog and robots! Even the villain’s perspective is a parallel to our central family conflict, and that is just good writing. The story is deceptively clever and there’s more going on under the surface.
Besides the visuals, the comedy gold, and the heartwarming family relationships, there’s amazingly even more reasons to enjoy The Mitchells vs. The Machines. The voice acting is great, with McBride (This is the End) being a surprise standout as a loving middle-aged father. Also, of note, is that 2/3 of the principal cast of Netflix’s Disenchanted series are found in this movie (where for art thou, Nat Faxon?). The thrumming musical score by Mark Mothersbaugh is a synth-heavy blast that made me recall the scores for Blade Runner 2047 and his own Thor: Ragnarok score. The movie even features inclusivity in a casual manner; the son’s autism and the daughter being LGBTQ are treated with “yeah, sure” acceptance. At no point is either called out or featured in a moment to highlight this but neither are they dismissed as unimportant. Stick around because there are extra levels to the end credits, and I was happy for each because I didn’t want this wonderful time to end, so I kept hoping for more resolution to play out.
The movie was originally meant to be released a year and a half ago but COVID pulled its release date, and eventually Sony sold their project to Netflix for a cool $100 million. It’s hard for me to put an exact price on a work of art (what is this, an NFT? Seriously, someone explain these things to me) but I’m happy Netflix saved this movie and gave it a home. At this point, I’m willing to give producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller the utmost benefit of the doubt when it comes to anything animated. After Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, Spider-Verse, and now this, they haven’t let me down yet. The Mitchells vs. The Machines is an eye-popping action movie and a superb comedy that the whole family can enjoy.
Nate’s Grade: A
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My Octopus Teacher (2020)
I’m close to finishing the documentary My Octopus Teacher and felt the urge to already begin typing out my thoughts, something I rarely do as I prefer to marinate over movies, let alone waiting for them to conclude. This Oscar-winning documentary wasn’t even part of Netflix’s critics screeners they sent me in the mail to consider for the top documentary prize, which tells me even its home didn’t have the highest of hopes for the true story of one man’s relationship to a mollusk. As it steamrolled through the awards season, my curiosity grew, and I finally took the plunge and watched the movie within hours of it being declared the finest documentary of the year by the Academy. As you can likely guess from the fact that the movie is still ongoing while I write, I may disagree with the Academy’s choice. My Octopus Teacher is a beautiful looking movie with some larger messages about our connections to nature and conservation, but the entire time I kept looking around and thinking, “There has to be more to this, right?” Alas, this is the story about one man and the octopus that won his heart, as told by that man, and that is it.
Craig Foster was a depressed nature photographer who was feeling lost. He would dive into the icy waters off the South African coast to reconnect with his childhood. He discovers a peculiar octopus and follows her movements, studying her for months, and earning the trust of the creature. Craig learns about himself and his view of nature through this fortuitous undersea bond.
This is literally the story about one man explaining, without interruption, his life lessons he has learned through his yearlong relationship with an octopus, and I just couldn’t fully engage with this on an emotional or intellectual level. The underwater photography is stunning and gorgeous to watch, as would many high-gloss nature documentaries covering the same environment. Watching the octopus hunt, hide from predators, camouflage, contort itself, and even seemingly walk on its tentacles is fun to watch, and nature has plenty of weird specimens to discover and analyze. I’m on board with re-examining the depths of our understanding with some of the weirdest creatures doing their thing thanks to millions of years of evolution. However, where the movie left me wanting is that it is, one hundred percent, one guy talking to the camera and explaining his observations about one nifty octopus and what he has learned from these experiences. The scope of the movie is so minor that it feels less a film and more like a filmed nature article, a little colorful expose that your local news might play to close out its programming. I found the movie to be too slight and unvarying in its information and delivery.
Perhaps I’m a curmudgeon at heart but I kept thinking that Craig Foster was projecting a lot of emotions onto this octopus. I believe this creature meant something special to him, and he became familiar enough that the octopus saw him less as a threat and more as a… what? Does this octopus really see this man in a snorkel as a friend or an ally? She reaches out a tentacle to touch the appendage of this underwater man, but what does that mean? Is this signaling a friendship or is it merely signaling an animal taking stock of its surroundings? I don’t know and depending upon your personal relationship with the animal world, you will either accept everything Craig says at face value without skepticism or you will see him as a slightly foolish romantic.
The movie’s gentle and empathetic nature is unbroken, though I’d be lying if I didn’t say I thought about the extremes of where this man/octopus relationship could lead. I wondered if Craig was going to declare that he and this octopus were getting married, he was leaving his wife, and that no one could compare to the touch of her tentacles. I don’t mean to sound cruel or dismissive about this man’s emotional experiences. This shared bond clearly touched this man and allowed him to realign his relationship with nature. He even says he feels like a better man and father thanks to these experiences. I’m happy that Craig found that kind of epiphany and direction in his life, and his story has fun details that made me agree that octopuses can be strangely fascinating creatures. However, that doesn’t mean I needed an 85-minute documentary about the guy more or less debriefing to the camera about his year of journaling. It’s just not that grabbing of a subject to satisfy a feature-length documentary. I don’t feel like I gained anything monumentally more from this movie being 85 minutes than I did if it was 25 minutes.
I may watch My Octopus Teacher again and give it another chance (for those wanting to know, it’s since concluded as I compose this review). It beat out serious competition in a year that had some seriously excellent documentaries (Collective and Dick Johnson is Dead both made my Top Ten of 2020). I’m happy so many people seem to be moved by this man’s personal tale of his magical bond with an eight-armed buddy. I was left mostly indifferent. The photography and plenty of the exclusive video captured is interesting to watch, but there’s little separating My Octopus Teacher from a viral clip you’d see forwarded to you from an animal blog. You can find plenty worse movies out there but I guess what makes this movie so special is just lost on me.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Mortal Kombat (2021)
Mortal Kombat is video game royalty, and if you were a Millennial that grew up in the 90s, then you likely have your own personal connection to this bone-crunching franchise. Released in 1992, the halcyon decade of fighting games, the arcade game gained notoriety and parental infamy for its photo-realistic fighters and for the over-the-top violence. Players could finish off their opponents in brutal and bloody fashion, drawing the condemnation of parents and politicians and only making teenagers want to play the games even more. I can recall my disappointment over the Super Nintendo port of the first game lacking the blood and gore of the arcade, something my Sega Genesis friends could lord over me with their faithful port (there was a code where you could turn the copious amount of sweat red, but it wasn’t the same). This was corrected with the release of Mortal Kombat II, and I think I devoted two whole years of my teenage life to playing that game, memorizing every player’s special moves and deadly finishes. I never really kept up with the franchise after the third game, and from what I’ve seen with the newest versions, I can safely say they just aren’t for me anymore. The gore of the 90s games was campy and ridiculous and the gore of the current games is too medically graphic for me (I’m not alone; apparently the game developers also needed therapy as they suffered trauma from their research and detailed recreation of the intensely destructive violence upon human bodies).
I can recall seeing the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie at the local drive-in with my friend and fellow fan of the franchise, and we lapped it up eager to see any live-action version of our video game obsession. We were so excited and ignored the faults of the film, and we weren’t alone. It gained the reputation as one of the “better video game movies,” which is a criminally low bar to clear. I never watched the 1997 sequel, Annihilation, but it’s widely regarded as a so-bad-it’s-good farce and definitely an insult to fans of the games. From there, fans have been savoring the day another Kombat film could find its way to the big screen, something to wash away the taste of the cheesy 90s movies that were both PG-13 and lacking the signature gore of the series. The new 2021 Mortal Kombat movie is firmly rated R and is chiefly made for the diehard fans. It’s a fun and bloody movie with some flaws, but I don’t know what more I should have expected from a franchise that, from its very beginning, has literally spelled “combat” with a K.
The plot is straightforward for a game centered around a super-powered inter-dimensional fighting tournament. The Outworld has won nine tournaments in a row and with one more victory they will gain control over Earthrealm. Sorcerer Shang Tsung (Chin Sun) is the ruler of the Outworld and has the bright idea that if he kills all of Earth’s chosen fighters ahead of time, it will make his next tournament victory that much easier. He sends powerful assassins to Earth to locate the Chosen One, an MMA fighter named Cole Young (Lewis Tan) who doesn’t know he’s the descendant of a destined family line of warriors. Cole is taken under protection by Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), where he is trained to reach his true potential. He needs to unleash a hidden superpower to compete with the best of Outworld.
First off, if you’re looking for a Kombat movie that is faithful to the atmosphere of the games, then you should walk away happy. Nobody is going into this movie and expecting Oscar-level material. We’re here for the fights, the crazy characters, and the gasp-inducing gore effects, and to that end the third film incarnation of Mortal Kombat mostly delivers the goods. Compared to the 1995 movie, populated with majority white actors with varying degrees of martial arts skills, and “varying” might be charitable, this is a clear winner. These are actors here from The Raid, Wu Assassins, Into the Badlands, The Twilight Samurai, Mongol, and plenty other worthy martial arts spectacles, so the filmmakers clearly valued having actors who could credibly perform the complex fight choreography. It’s also worth noting that we have Asian actors playing Asian characters, so that’s a bonus for authenticity and reverence as well.
The opening six minutes of the movie really sets up how serious and potentially great it can be. It’s the early 1600s, and we’re introduced to the quiet family man, Hanzo Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), a member of a Japanese ninja clan that is being hunted by Bi-Han (Joe Taslim), a dangerous warrior from a rival Chinese ninja clan. The opening is patient, thoughtful, and eerie, and when the fighting breaks out it’s done in longer takes where we can watch the actors strut their physical stuff. The fighting makes specific use of each character’s skills and is a satisfying start. The movie never quite lives up to these artistic heights again, at least for a sustained duration, but this taste of a legitimately good Mortal Kombat movie is enough to make you believe we can return here again.
The rest of the movie is decidedly fun and clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously (they even make fun of the “combat” with a K spelling). It’s got characters that can shoot lasers from their eyes, invisible monsters, four-armed strongmen, metal arms, and just about every character introduction is another opportunity for the movie to shrug and just accept its inherent weirdness of its rogue’s gallery. There’s a lady with dinosaur wings and another guy with a really sharp hat. What you want is for the filmmakers to present a world where these characters work, something that didn’t succeed with the goofy 1990s movies. I think the script by Greg Russo and Dave Callahan (Wonder Woman 1984) accomplish this feat and presents a world that finds a credible middle ground between campy indulgence and self-serious blather. It’s serious enough to not break out into derisive laughter but it’s still not too serious that the filmmakers have forgotten what the audience has paid to see. The gore effects are sticky and impressive and gross without being offensively so. The creative process for this movie was likely crafting a list of all the red-strewn finishing moves from the games and figuring out how best to squeeze them into the royal rumble. Every character gets a signature move, along with plenty of clunky catchphrases also crammed in for fan approval. If you’re a fan of the games, they’ve designed this movie with your demands primarily in mind.
Where the movie falters are with decisions of pacing, structure, and some editing. Centering the story on a newcomer seems odd when any other established character could have sufficed, until you realize they’re setting up Cole Young to inherit the legacy of his ancestor and likely become the Scorpion we know so well from the games. Except that’s not quite what happens, which makes the decision to center him as an entry point perspective more confusing. It’s not like Cole is that interesting on his own. He’s a boring MMA fighter who wants to protect his family and that’s about it. He needs to summon his special power, and when he does, prepare to be underwhelmed. Another issue is that the second act is far too long and protracted. It’s mainly comprised of training exercises and people being told, “You’re not ready,” and vague force fields and teleportation powers that invite questions over whether they could have been used earlier. It’s too much training without the bloody reward of the gnarlier fights. This leaves the final act to be rushed and many of the climactic one-on-one fights are pushed into a measly montage. Finally, the editing of the fighting can become too choppy and jumbled to fully appreciate the onscreen action. The opening sequence is an example of where careful edits can highlight the choreography.
The new Mortal Kombat movie is fun, cool, bloody, and probably exactly what diehard fans would hope for from a big-screen rendition. It’s ridiculous but not tongue-in-cheek in tone. The visuals and special effects can often be weirdly beautiful especially with the crystalizing powers of Sub-Zero, the game’s popular ninja with the power to freeze and create deadly daggers of ice. There are some standout “wow” visual moments, like when Sub-Zero freezes a bullet firing from the blast of a rifle, or when he freezes his opponent’s spurting blood to form a knife. There were as many moments that brought a smile to my face as made me check the time. The dialogue is flat and the only actor who seems to really be enjoying himself is the proudly profane Josh Lawson as Kano. But when it comes to the fighting, the fatalities, and the franchise’s glorious selling point, it might not be a flawless victory but it’s still a victory nonetheless for fans.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Nobody (2021)
If you ever wanted to see Saul Goodman crack skulls like John Wick, well you’re in luck with Nobody, a perfectly enjoyable action movie that does little to separate itself from its influences. Bob Odenkirk has been on a wild ride of a career, beginning primarily as a writer and director of cult comedies and then turning into an award-nominated dramatic actor thanks to Breaking Bad and its spinoff, and now he gets his chance to try being an improbable action hero. Odenkirk plays a family man who freezes during a break-in. We think he’s a push-over, an office drone, a nobody, but he’s really nothing of the sort, and woe unto those who come after him for bloody vengeance. The plot is pretty thin and plays out very much like a combination of Joker and The Equalizer, even down to its final, explosive, booby trap-laden final act. Much like the John Wick series, the importance is heavily placed upon the action and stunt choreography. We’re here for the spectacle. While Nobody doesn’t rise to the dizzy action highs of the Wick franchise, it’s an above average action movie and has fun moments of unique style thanks to director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry). A fight scene aboard a bus is extensive and exhausting, leaving both parties gasping and bloody. Odenkirk’s character isn’t quite the impervious video game avatar that Keanu Reeves portrays; he’s rusty and limited, but by the time that climax comes rolling, he might as well be the Terminator. It’s not enough to disrupt the fun of the movie but the one area that could separate Nobody from the punchy pack just vanishes by the conclusion. The addition of Russian gangsters feels too cliche and unremarkable, as they just serve as a quick pipeline for bad guys to be abused. The addition of 83-year-old Christopher Lloyd as a sneakily formidable nursing home resident is much less cliche and much more enjoyable. If you’re looking for an action movie that packs a punch without taxing your brain, Nobody hits enough of the right buttons to suffice.
Nate’s Grade: B
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A Father’s Fight (2021)
Even though it doesn’t quite count as an Ohio indie, filmed primarily in southern Indiana, I was requested to write a review for the low-budget, faith-based film, A Father’s Fight, which is currently enjoying a small theatrical run in West Virginia and in its Hoosier home state. This was a passion project years in the making for director Tyler Sansom (Restore). Its $30,000 budget was fully financed by a local church and many of the cast and crew worked as volunteers, aiding the production which was filmed during COVID. In many ways, the movie is already a success story, a lot of people worked together to see an artistic vision to completion and during some of the most dire and restrictive circumstances of modern times. A Father’s Fight is a rare Christian indie that has more in mind than preaching to the choir. It wants to entertain too as it uplifts.
Bo Lawson (Travis Hancock) is a drunk. He’s also a lousy husband, yelling at his wife, Kacie (Sarah Cleveland), and ignoring her threats to leave with their two kids. Then she does it, and Bo doesn’t know how he can get his life back together. Enter Sal Burton (John French), his old boxing trainer, with an offer of a lifetime. It seems the reigning boxing champ wants to come back to his home town to stage a charity bout for the community, and the champ has personally requested to fight his old rival, Bo. This is his chance to make a statement, to shape up, and to win back his wife and perhaps find a new strength through Christianity.
For a faith-based film, I am happy to report that A Father’s Fight is refreshingly more concerned with its characters than purporting a big message. This has been my bias for Christian movies time and again, and it’s usually reinforced by slapdash storytelling that spells out a pragmatic assessment of, “Well they’re coming for the message and not the intricacies of plot and multi-dimensional characters.” Any viewer, no matter their personal belief, deserves a story worthy of their attention and characters that have depth and care. With this movie, it’s far more a domestic drama than a sports film. It has more to do with Marriage Story than Rocky. The boxing doesn’t even come until the final five minutes, which in hindsight also feels like too little boxing. I was impressed that the screenplay by Hannah Mowery does not get pushy with its spiritual message. The first real reference to the power of faith doesn’t even occur until 45 minutes or so into the film, and Bo doesn’t attend church until after an hour into the movie. In the realm of Christian indies, this is remarkable restraint. By no means are the filmmakers soft-pedaling their affirmative message. They just realize that it will be more powerful, and accessible to a wider audience, if you’re sincerely invested in the characters, their humanity, and their redemption. The power of their story will be better translated if they feel like characters rather than bland figures.
It’s here where A Father’s Fight shines brightest, with its depiction of alcoholism and abuse. He’s spiraling, angry all the time, drinking whenever he can, projecting much of his disdain into outbursts against his wife trying to control his behavior, judging him and his failures, and we recognize it as the Drunk Abusive Husband in your standard made-for-TV melodrama. Granted, this is a faith-based film in a PG realm, so the danger of abusive behavior will only go so far, but this movie pushes it. This does a few things for the narrative. It establishes a clear baseline of bad behavior, the Before, that we can judge the protagonist’s progress against, the After period, the triumph. It also makes it more challenging to connect with Bo. He has to earn our respect just like his wife. What’s even more appreciated is how the screenplay really treats Kacie as her own character worthy of consideration, heartache, and struggle. She gets a lot of screen time here, almost equal to Bo during those first 40 minutes, and I thought it was terrific. It’s shockingly rare for the other half of an abusive relationship to be given legitimate consideration and voice. Too often movies will place the wife as a prize needing to be won through penitence or the symbol of How Far the Man Has Fallen, the chief victim that represents the toll of his decline and misery. With A Father’s Fight, my favorite moments where when the script just gives Kacie time to share her complicated feelings, and they are refreshingly complex. She’s torn over what to do, she’s upset with herself that she still worries over this man, she sees her kids and sees her husband in them, and she recognizes her value and that she deserves to be treated better. The brief monologues where Kacie pours out her heart, her frustrations, with Bo, with herself, are the highlights of the film. The characterization is nuanced and empathetic.
The other main characters stand tall. Bo is following a pretty familiar redemption arc, and the vehicle of boxing seems tailor-made for a redemption story, a man voluntarily inflicted with pain to atone or prove a larger point of sacrifice. Adding a spiritual element to that redemption story seems pretty natural and familiar for a formula. The character of Bo isn’t quite as nuanced or clear as Kacie but there’s enough there to qualify as a heartfelt if not entirely satisfying character arc. His apologies and personal growth by the end feel genuine, and his acknowledgement that he has hurt those he loved and doesn’t deserve their forgiveness sets a nice balance for a Christian message about mankind not deserving its own sinful forgiveness. It works, it just could have worked better (more on that later). Bo is strapped into the reliable redemption track but there are points that confused me. At one point, he is backing out of a parking space, almost hits a pedestrian, and the angry pedestrian provokes Bo to almost fight him. This passing incident, with a guy we’ve never seen before, is curiously the thing that almost pushes Bo off the wagon and back to drinking. Why? Why would this one incident have that drastic effect? It’s not like he did get into a fight with the guy. The early Bo is never really clarified why he’s in such a stupor. He’s angry, but angry at what and why? Does he just feel stuck? Emasculated? Unable to provide? A little more time setting up how he fell into drinking and his life before would have smoothed this out. Also, this upcoming fight is with the literal champion of boxing but we don’t ever get a strong sense of what it means for Bo. This is a big deal, something that would attract national media attention, and yet it is never treated like a big deal (Bo is only making a laughably paltry $5,000 for his participation – IN A FIGHT WITH THE CHAMPION). What does this fight, the very title of the movie, represent for him? He’s told he needs to fight for what he believes in, which will ostensibly be the lessons of family, self, faith, etc., but why boxing? Why this guy? Why a champion? Does he want to become a boxer again? Is this his failed dream? It feels just like another odd job for our blue-collar protagonist.
There are two primary areas that detract from the mighty goals of A Father’s Fight: the second act squeeze and the strange editing. There seems to be a switch about 50 minutes into the movie where Act Two and all the personal growth we’re waiting to experience gets severely truncated. It’s hard to explain but the patience and nuance that was exhibited in the first 45 minutes starts to wave and the movie gets sloppy with its storytelling shortcuts. There’s one extending grocery shopping scene that seems to be the changing point. It’s Bo explaining all the changes in his life through one methodical trip down a grocery aisle, chatting to local busybody, Tammy Lynn (Lindsay Rawert). He’s explaining all the changes he’s undergone that we haven’t witnessed. He explains the guy he greeted was his AA sponsor, shows her his chip for being sober for a month, talks about how much he enjoys his time with his kids. All of this is important information and would certainly push Bo along on his predetermined redemption arc, but why are we being told it like we’re catching up with a long-lost friend who only has a few minutes to cover the basics? Why haven’t we been seeing these moments? Why didn’t we see Bo go to an AA meeting, feel uncomfortable and out of place, and then eventually open up, talk about his own history with alcohol and the wreckage it has caused him? It would be a dramatic breakthrough. The same with his interaction with his children. Let’s witness these moments, so that we can see their attitudes changing about their father that once scared and upset them in Act One. Movies are meant to be a visual medium and the screenwriting edict is “show, don’t tell.” The first half of A Father’s Fight was following this model. The second half seems to be rushed to tell us what it feels we need to know to fulfill our redemption obligations and get to the big finish.
The work by three credited editors, including the director, is also a frequent concern. There are several weird editing choices that took me out of the movie or undercut the intended drama. First off, many conversation scenes will awkwardly jump around an assortment of angles, and the pacing feels jumbled, especially when the 180-degree rule is frequently being broken and disorienting the viewer. I’m not a stickler that the 180-degree rule in film should be ironclad but flagrant violation throughout a scene creates unconscious disconnection. That can be put to good use if you’re going for something like loopy David Lynch territory. With a faith-based film, it’s distracting. There are drone shots wedged into montages that don’t need them because the production had drone shots and by golly they were going to be utilized regardless. The inclusion of certain shots and sequences also feels baffling. In the first act, Bo is picked up from the police station by his wife, and during the drive home we get flashbacks of Bo as a child watching his drunken father berate his mother. Minutes later, Bo returns home, immediately starts drinking again, and Kacie confronts him. He berates his wife and his two kids appear, horrified and afraid of how their father is behaving. Wouldn’t it make more thematic sense to include that flashback scene here, to make the connection that he is following in his father’s footsteps, and wouldn’t the scene simply have more dramatic impact here? Likewise, at the end of the movie, when Bo is fighting in the boxing ring, the movie’s big question is not whether Bo will beat the champion but whether Kacie will be present in support (so yes, it’s basically entirely Rocky). Bo gets knocked to the mat. He looks over. He sees his wife. He smiles. He has a reason to get back up, to continue fighting, renewed and stronger. Except that’s not what happens. He gets up, and the ref is checking with him, and he looks over and there she is. This is truly baffling to me. The obvious movie moment is, when he’s at his lowest, after taking the hit, he looks over and there she is. We don’t need to see her enter. It should be a surprise for the audience too and including it at its most dramatic point. We feel Bo’s elation. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t have a plethora of these moments but enough that add up and make me wish there had been a fourth editor to help.
The acting is much more subtle and controlled than what I was expecting from a faith-based indie where big theatrical acting can make the proceedings feel overly staged and phony. The three central performers deliver. Cleveland (End of the Road) is very emotionally affecting as Kacie, and she deftly handles the multiple conflicting emotions of a woman at the end of her patience. She’s the most nuanced character in the movie and Cleveland digs deep. She is not a cliche. Hancock (A Soldier’s Secret) has the more traditional role and leans into that familiarity but carries himself well physically and emotionally. His outbursts can be wince-inducing but his pleas for forgiveness can also ring true, aided by the character’s reflection and personal growth. French (The Right to Remain) has a really strong monologue where he reflects on his own war experiences and what motivated him to keep fighting. It relates to the larger theme of the movie, allows the versatile actor to slow things down, to open up, and become very vulnerable, and it’s a welcomed humanizing aside for a character that could have just been a standard coach cheering on our hero’s conditioning from the sidelines. I must admit this monologue is hampered by poor editing choices with quick camera pans and push-ins that feel entirely wrong. You want to slow things down and let the character have the moment, not ramp things up and distract. There is one major acting curiosity I need to cite and this belongs to Rawert and her thick accent. She sounds like she’s auditioning to be on Fargo (“Oh yay, yer’ goin’ inta tha boxin’ ring, doncha know”), and it’s a pronounced lilt that’s missing from every other actor in the movie. I don’t know if maybe this was her idea of a typical “Midwest voice” or a misplaced character choice.
As a faith-based drama, A Father’s Fight has a lot going for it and a lot I wish more Christian indies would prioritize. It puts its characters and story above its feel-good message, at least for half of the movie. The second half does feel rushed and sloppy, and while it does take away from the conclusion feeling fully earned, it cannot detract from the early good feelings. It’s a strange assessment that a movie has a first act, a third act, and a smushed second act, the one meant to bridge the problems to solutions, but there you have it. It’s quite possible there was more intended for the movie and the reality of budget and filming during COVID caused unfortunate shortcuts and the like. It definitely feels like the promise of the first 45 minutes was unable to be fulfilled for the second half. At 90 minutes, the movie could have even stood an additional 20-30 minutes of material to provide room for that character development and some time to breathe. Still, this is a professional looking production for its budget and the song selections are great finds, even if they quite often literalize the inner emotional state of characters onscreen. There’s much more right than wrong with this polished production, and I’m impressed with the consideration given to the characters, especially from the wife’s perspective. Most Christian indies feel more like elaborate sermons than genuine stories (sometimes they’re just Kirk Cameron lecturing you in a driveway). I think this film will play well with its target audience and even earn some fans from outside the flock, people who recognize the humanity of the people onscreen. Even with its limitations and weird edits, A Father’s Fight knows what it’s fighting for – your entertainment value.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Chaos Walking (2021)
Chaos Walking has been shrouded under the ominous reputation of “troubled production” from its very inception. It’s based on a 2008 YA science fiction series by Patrick Ness and has gone through writer after writer, trying to hone this story into a visual medium. At one point, Charlie Kaufman was attached as the screenwriter, and if Kaufman, the man who turned his struggle to adapt a book about flowers into a meditative and meta experience, can’t find a way to make your story work, then I doubt many other Hollywood writers can. It began filming in 2017 with director Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow) and sat on the shelf for years, with the studio execs reportedly dismissing the finished version as “un-releasable.” Fifteen million dollars in reshoots took place in 2019, helmed by Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe), and now the finished movie has been quietly dumped to theaters and on-demand markets. Chaos Walking is, indeed, chaotic, but it’s mostly dull and simplistic with a premise that feels ripe for social commentary that the movie has no interest in because it would detract from its eighteenth depiction of another forest chase.
In the future, mankind has settled on an alien world with some unexpected results. There is a strange quirk about this planet – the men are incapable of hiding their inner thoughts, which materialize in front of their heads as visuals with their narration echoing (nick-named “The Noise”). Women, for whatever reason, are unaffected. It’s been so long since another supply ship from Earth has come that life on this alien world has begun to resemble the struggles of the early terrestrial pioneers. Todd (Tom Holland) wants to impress his small town’s authority figure, Mayor Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen), and become an adult faster than he might be ready. Viola (Daisy Ridley) has made the multiple-generations trip from Earth but her spaceship crashes. Todd finds her and panics because she may very well be the only woman alive on the planet. He elects to hide her and try and reach an old technological outlet, while the Mayor leads a posse to round her up and maybe kill Viola.
Given that premise, you would think that Chaos Walking was setting itself up for some sharp, uncomfortable, and relevant social commentary about the plight of being a woman in a modern society. If Get Out was a horror story about being a black man in America, I was thinking Chaos Walking would be a horror story about being a woman in America, but I was wrong. Think about the premise, with every woman subjected to a society of men that cannot hide their unconscious objectification, their leering harassment, their distressing ulterior motives, where every man’s uncontrollable thoughts will be broadcast. It’s an empathetic and horrifying glimpse into the daily dismissal, exploitation, and condescension that woman experience. You add the extra element that women are immune and now they also become the subject of projected male resentment, that they feel judged, and this only makes the men more hostile and confrontational. Being “the last woman” also presents an obvious threat of sexual violence as well. It’s all right there, and yet Chaos Walking barely even toys with its explosive gender commentary; there’s a reason all the women are dead on the planet, but it’s not exactly revelatory, and its inclusion, at the expense of all other notable social or political commentary, makes the explanation feel more perfunctory. Why even bother having a premise that features a gender disparity if you’re not going to really say something about the treatment of women? If you think about those old movies where it’s one man on a planet entirely of women, or some similar dynamic where there is a giant gender upheaval, and they always say something about it. What would be the point of making an exception for one kind of person and then ignoring the larger implications? Well, I’ll never truly know, because Chaos Walking doesn’t seem to know either.
I can see why this premise works on the page where the reader is already able to immerse themselves in the inner thoughts of a point of view character. I’ve never read the source material but I can imagine it being like a jigsaw puzzle of first-person perspectives. It’s a little harder to translate into a visual atmosphere in a clear and meaningful way, especially when you’re limiting what it all says. As its portrayed onscreen, The Noise is often muddled and visually hard to decipher, and while it mimics the half-formed nature of thoughts (people don’t typically think in complete, declarative sentences) it’s still too abstract and confusing. The wispy visuals are opaque and glisten like sunlight in gasoline pools, which makes the imagery less easy to determine. It’s like someone made a sci-fi thriller and just ladled on extraneous visual elements but didn’t want anyone to properly decode these special effects. Sometimes the premise works, like when Todd is trying to hide his fears, like when he envisions a beat-down from a dangerous crowd, or when he purposely imagines scary imagery to spook a rival’s horse. Too often The Noise just feels exactly like that when it comes to the narrative. It’s a peculiarity that is underdeveloped and could well be forgotten. It’s such a strange experience to watch a high-concept movie where the filmmakers are seized by indifference with their high-concept. I don’t know if maybe this is a subtle acknowledgement of defeat.
There’s one character that symbolizes the futile adaptation of The Noise and that’s Reverend Aaron (David Oyelowo). He’s living in conflict with his own community and his Noise is more apocalyptic, fire and brimstone, and he views The Noise as a connection between man and God. Now that is interesting, looking at this quirk as a gift or curse from God and trying to make a spiritual understanding over why man, and only man, has been given this ability. It seems to radicalize him. At long last, here is a character with a direct and personal relationship with The Noise, the hook. How does this change his relationship with God, his sense of self, and his feeling of disconnect from being so far away from home in this alien world? Well, all of that tantalizing characterization and potential depth is cast aside. Reverend Aaron is merely a religious zealot and a boring one at that. It’s hard to determine whether he’s gone over into violent extremism or is seeking absolution, which makes him just another dangerous antagonist that appears here and there but you can’t quite square. This character could have been legitimately intriguing from the story specifics of how he would respond to drastic change, isolation, introspection, and a crisis of faith brought on by the environmental turmoil. Instead, he just becomes a secondary heavy chasing characters for vaguely unsatisfying reasons.
Chaos Walking is not a fascinating failure or a so-bad-it’s-amazing fiasco, it’s just a mediocre chase movie. It’s patterned after Westerns visually and structurally, with the frontier town being lead by a Black Hat who is chasing after the Drifter who represents a threat to the status quo. It’s not just the horses, dusty trails, vilified natives, and small-towns shootouts, Chaos Walking is very intentionally a science fiction Western, a pairing that seems to keep getting tried on by Hollywood studios like an old pair of cowboy boots they’re positive fit perfectly once long ago. As far as space Westerns go, it’s fine. The action is fine, though I grew tired of the visual mundanity of characters continuing to walk in the woods, run through the woods, and take refuge in the woods. For an alien landscape, Chaos Walking often feels frustratingly plain and unimaginative. All of these interesting science fiction asides and additions and it’s really just interested in being a second-rate space Western. The screenplay is held together as a series of rote chases. The main characters are bland and Ridley’s straw-like blonde wig gave me bad memories of Kate Mara’s bad wig from the infamous Fantastic Four reshoots. For its 110 minutes, you won’t exactly be repelled from the screen with boredom but you won’t be tempted to pay close attention either. Chaos Walking is too generic, too safe, and too derivative to be anything more than passing entertainment. I wish it was more chaotic and un-releaseable just to be more memorable and worth your time.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Thunder Force (2021)
I feel like we were just here a matter of months ago, another aimless Melissa McCarthy comedy vehicle written and directed by her husband and chief enabler, Ben Falcone. With Thunder Force, McCarthy becomes an accidental superhero and that premise should be enough with this star to power a silly and amusing 90 minutes of entertainment. Once again it’s a dispiriting comedy that feels like it’s just sitting around and waiting for the performers to find something funny in their scenes and family-friendly improv ramblings. The energy of this movie is completely slack, and scenes feel adrift, lacking proper direction or purpose. The whole movie feels gassed and grasping. It takes 45 minutes for McCarthy to train to be a hero and sometimes there just aren’t jokes. Take one instance where McCarthy literally throws a bus, a point strangely referred to multiple times earlier as a setup for this long-desired moment, and then under Falcone’s uninspired direction we don’t even see the messy results. We don’t even see the bus crashing into, like, an orphanage or something that would provide an actual punchline. The comedy malpractice can be staggering. It’s the kind of movie that resorts to characterization where everything is clumsily reported to us, like, “You’ve always been this way since…” The chemistry between McCarthy and Octavia Spencer (The Witches) is lukewarm at best for these longtime friends. The buddy comedy doesn’t even seem like it was developed beyond its initial pitch. The shining light of this movie is easily Jason Bateman (Ozark), who plays a crab-armed mutant criminal that becomes an improbable romantic suitor for McCarthy’s character. If there is anything that made me laugh, it was related to this character (and an ordinary henchman named Andrew who may or may not be targeted as the next to get killed by his evil boss played by Bobby Cannavale). I even loved the simple image of Bateman crab walking off screen with his arms in the air. The sheer weirdness is enough to make you realize what potential could have been tapped with this super premise and with McCarthy, who can be so charming and disarming when she gives into her odd impulses. Just give me a full movie where a middle-aged superwoman tries to make a relationship with a crab-man super villain work. I wish that Thunder Force had more courage to chase its weird rather than settle, time and again, as an action comedy that is middling with its action and middling with its comedy. I think I had more fun with 2020’s Super Intelligence, another mediocre Falcone collaboration.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Freddy Got Fingered (2001) [Review Re-View]
Originally released April 20, 2001:
The beauty of Tom Green (if you’ll call it such) works in the realm of television. His bizarre humor and meddling nuisance on the streets worked in a “Can’t believe he’s doing this” way. He thrives in this environment where he can wreck havoc amongst the unknowing. Take him out of this environment into a scripted venture where people are acting against him, and the reality is killed along with why it was funny in the first place. It’s not so much funny that Tom Green can hump dead animals on camera, it’s funny that he’ll do it in front of bystanders.
As it stands, Freddy Got Fingered is plot-less. It is basically Green doing one weird and bizarre antic after another with little relation to anything. It’s basically a meandering mess, almost like an abstract artist’s work if that artist were insane. Freddy Got Fingered is Green’s attempt at cinematic gross-out stardom. Sure, he does things that would be considered in poor taste but they are scripted and lose their appeal. Green guts an animal and wears its skin like a poncho, he bites the umbilical cord, he even eroticizes a horse and aids in its… release. But all the charm is gone when it’s Green just doing zany things in a closed environment. What is the fun of seeing people do scripted reactions to Green’s antics? He needs to be in the real world, he needs to piss people off, he NEEDS reality. A movie will do no justice to Tom Green and this one surely does not.
Nate’s Grade: F
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Freddy Got Fingered was comedian Tom Green’s only movie that he ever wrote and/or directed. It was his only starring vehicle after several relatively memorable supporting roles in 2000 movies like Charlie’s Angels and Road Trip. It was the most creative freedom and the biggest budget that the absurdist provocateur who began on Canadian public access and became an MTV star would ever earn. When it was released in the spring of 2001, Green was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly with the headline, “The New King of Comedy.” It all feels like another world, like a half-remembered memory, like looking at an old photo of yourself in a hairstyle that makes you cringe today, and you say, “Oh yeah, that was a popular thing… for some godforsaken reason.” In some ways, Green trail-blazed the idiosyncratic, anti-humor brand of fringe comedy that found a welcomed cult following from Adult Swim and Internet culture. He seems ahead of his time in some ways and yet also completely out of time today. It’s hard to imagine a comedian like Green having the same sort of zeitgeist-tapping reach he had during his MTV talk show where he would test the patience of strangers and harass his saintly parents. His shtick was being weird and confrontational and reminded people of the legendary Andy Kaufman (I too question whether Kaufman could thrive in today’s irony-saturated new media environment). Green was unabashedly different and during the turn of the century felt potentially exciting and new, and then he quickly wore out his welcome when we all realized there wasn’t really a joke behind the joke. Sometimes a guy yelling the same word repeatedly is just an unfunny lunatic who shouldn’t be given a preposterous $14 million dollar budget to splurge.
Judging by the critical reception of Freddy Got Fingered, you would think Green had committed a cinematic hate crime. Roger Ebert wrote, “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.” Variety wrote, “One of the most brutally awful comedies to ever emerge from a major studio.” The Washington Post called it a “horror film.” The New York Post claimed it qualified as “cruel and unusual punishment.” The most wincing take came from The Austin Chronicle, which wrote, “Green, who looks like a chinless, hollow-eyed pederast at the best of times, is simply out of his league here.” It won five Razzie Awards including Worst Film, Worst Actor, and Worst Director, all of which Green appeared in person to accept, where he then delivered a kazoo performance so long that they literally had to pull him off the stage. The fact that Freddy Got Fingered has developed a mild cult following in the years since and been hailed as a Dada-esque experimental comedy. Some have theorized that it was all one big joke on the studio. I don’t know. That reclamation seems like projection for larger meaning that Green typically eschews. I cannot tell if he is deliberately trying to make a good bad movie or a bad good movie. Either way, twenty years later, Freddy Got Fingered is the same regrettably noxious and obnoxious experiment it was back in 2001.
It’s hard to classify the 87 odd minutes as a movie. It’s relatively plot-less and hung together on the flimsy premise of 28-year-old man-child Gord (Green) wanting to become an animator with his cartoons. There’s nothing that would be classified as characterization or arcs. In fact, very little has relevance beyond the immediacy. It’s a movie of inconsequential ephemera. Comedies are built upon subversion but also the reliable setup-payoff development. There are some running jokes here, notably a small child who continuously gets viciously hurt. I don’t exactly know what the joke is here because the suffering is so accentuated, like the kid spitting a mouthful of blood. There’s another character, a friend of Gord’s, who has the exact same running joke, where he too keeps suffering calamitous injuries, and that’s all he provides. Why have two supporting characters who only serve to be butts of the exact same kind of joke? It’s redundant. The closest thing the film has to a character arc literally involves Gord beginning the movie, at minute seven mind you, by masturbating a horse, and it concludes with Gord masturbating an elephant. He did transition to a larger animal to manually masturbate over the course of those 87 arduous minutes.
No one was expecting anything resembling high art for Green’s filmmaking debut, but one would hope for more than a vapid gross-out vomitorium. I’ve written it several times before but there’s a distinct difference between gross-out and gross-out humor. Take that opening moment where Gord literally leaps out of his car to run over to a horse and touch its wobbling member. He excitedly shakes it and screams, “Look at me now, daddy,” but his father, played by Emmy and Oscar-nominated actor Rip Torn (Men in Black, The Larry Sanders Show), is nowhere. What is the joke here? What is the context for this to be funny rather than off-putting? What is the context for humor when Gord skins a dead deer and wears its pelt, gyrating on the ground and muttering to himself? What is the context for humor where Gord delivers a woman’s baby, bites the umbilical cord with his own teeth, swings the newborn baby around the room, and then tapes the umbilical cord to his own belly and when his date finds it he says, offhandedly, “It’s just for fun”? For much of the protracted, punishing runtime, there simply are not jokes. There are bizarre antics that might make you retch or cover your eyes but there aren’t actual jokes. Seeing Gord dressed in a scuba outfit in the shower isn’t a joke. Seeing Gord dress his clothes backwards and repeatedly hum, “The backwards man,” isn’t a joke. Seeing Gord wave a sausage around his own genitals isn’t a joke. Having the female love interest, Betty (Marissa Coughlin), plead with Gord to violently strike her paralyzed legs with a bamboo rod until she climaxes isn’t a joke. These are ideas, at best, and lacking any suitable comedic legwork. It’s like a Mad Libs scenario that wasn’t completed. It feels like Green might be aware of his own comedy shortcomings so he just structured his movie with tiresome and nauseating asides.
Gord is also a thoroughly repulsive human being. He is the villain of this dreadful movie, the cause of mass suffering and annoyance for every lost soul stuck in the purgatory of interacting with this cretin. I don’t know Green’s level of self-awareness with anything he does. Does he view the character of Gord as a lovable underdog seeking out his dreams? Does he view Gord as a hero in a world of compromise and conformity? Gord is a despicable human being that only lives to torment and harass those around him. The very beginning of the movie Gord’s family warmly greets him, gives him a new car, and wish him well as he heads to Los Angeles to pursue his dreams. What a bunch of irredeemable assholes, right? His father is Gord’s biggest antagonist throughout and yet you feel the old man is justified in his reoccurring anger and disappointment. His son is a dangerous lunatic. At one point, Gord blithely accuses his father of molesting his adult brother Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and, for whatever reason, the state takes this man’s word as gospel (this is where the title even comes from). The brother is thrown into foster care, his mother leaves his father, and this is never resolved. The story wants to have a late father-son reconciliation, right after the father is literally blasted with elephant semen, and is the joke that something so inconceivable is even being attempted under the ridiculous circumstances? I found myself often sympathizing with the father and with Torn the actor, both of whom had to put up with so much nonsense. He’s the persistent foil for Gord and Green’s persistent madness and watching him pull his pants down and scream at his son to live up to his words and assault him just made me feel sad. This whole movie made me feel depressed for everyone onscreen and for the many indie movies that could have been birthed from Green’s $14 million budget. When the executives read the finished script, if there was an actual script, what exactly won their approval? Was it the torrential elephant semen?
Freddie Got Fingered is less a movie than an endurance test. If you considered yourself a nominal fan of Green’s TV antics, maybe there was some appeal. If you’re a fan of the bizarre, maybe there was some appeal. If you’re a fan of an artist possibly sticking it to his studio bosses, maybe there was some appeal. I didn’t see the appeal in 2001 and I still don’t see the appeal to this day. My initial review was more charitable for a film that eventually earned my Worst of the Year title. Back in my teenage days, I was a fan of Green and even taped his show on MTV. I enjoyed the awkward discomfort he forced upon others in his interviews and pranks, but when you place that in a scripted realm, it just becomes excess upon excess, finding new ways to sink to new bottoms. I think it was only a matter of time for Green’s merry prankster shtick to grow tired. Repeating a word 100 times doesn’t seem to make it funnier (Family Guy seems to have taken the wrong notes). One interview with Martin Short just amounted to Green putting bacon strips on his head. Watch enough of the man in his element and you begin to realize the emperor has no clothes. There isn’t really a point to anything, and if that’s the point, in a torturous Dada explanation, then why even bother making any art at all? Freddie Got Fingered is no unfairly maligned, misunderstood masterpiece, no daring act of performance art. It’s unparalleled self-indulgence from an artist that had nothing to say and nothing to do even at the height of his career.
Re-View Grade: F
Plug: Check out the “Saturday Night Jive” podcast, recorded in 2015, where my pals Ben and George try and make any sense of this movie. It’s a good listen, much funnier than Green’s movie, and I agreed with all major points.
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Godzilla vs. King Kong (2021)
Godzilla vs. Kong is the kind of movie where you need to question what your qualifications would be for its true entertainment value. Four films into the fledgling MonsterVerse, we’ve set up its Batman vs. Superman, its Infinity War, its climax, the biggest names on the biggest stage to settle the score once and for all. With indie director Adam Wingard at the helm, best known for peculiarly violent genre-defying movies like You’re Next and The Guest, the results with G vs. K (I’m not writing the full name every time) strictly fall into the realm of dumb fun. It’s up to you which of those categorical designations will reign supreme, the dumb or the fun.
The gigantic 100-foot tall ape Kong is being kept in a caged atrium by the Monarch organization. Godzilla is running amuck and attacking a shady company that may have a shady conspiracy afoot. Kong and Godzilla are two alpha predators, the last known titans, and it’s believed that Godzilla is seeking out Kong to put him down for good. The government is trying to protect its great ape, figure out why the big lizard is acting up, and maybe explore this kooky Hollow Earth theory. There’s a reason I haven’t mentioned any human character names because, once again, they don’t really matter.
This movie is going to entirely depend on how much your love of monster brawls can, essentially, push aside crazy, incoherent plotting and meaningless human characters. If you’re the kind of fan going to G vs. K and expecting nothing else than bruising knockdown fights that decimate the landscape and ensure untold death, no matter how many times we’re told the entire city of Hong Kong has miraculously evacuated in minutes, then the movie delivers. There are three big brawls and each one of them is satisfying and has a weighty quality to them; they really do feel like heavyweight title fights, with each side giving it their all and then some. It’s an epic showdown and we demand the best from this clash of the titans, and Wingard comes alive during these sequences, finding stylish ways to demonstrate and develop the carnage so that the brawls feel unique rather than stale. Each of the three major battles takes place in a different location and uses that environment to its advantage when developing its action particulars. The first bout is at sea and Kong is chained to the galley of a warship, so Godzilla capsizes the ship, attempting to drown Kong. The water is also a far more friendly place for Godzilla, with Kong forced to jump from ship to ship like platforms in an old school video game. The rematch takes place in downtown Hong Kong and offers the traditional metropolitan cataclysm we’ve come to expect from disaster escapades (again, with vague reminders that somehow all these buildings are empty). Godzilla’s fire breath becomes a laser field that Kong must avoid with drastic escapes. Wingard’s camera finds fun ways to communicate the back and forth, at one point seemingly attached to the monsters as they pummel and move, like an arty Darren Aronofsky film. He finds ways to make two age-old creatures fighting still appear visually fresh and exciting. When the creatures are slugging it out, G vs. K is at its best as big-budget popcorn escapism.
I also must applaud that filmmakers that, four movies in, we finally have monster fights where the audience can see what is happening. 2014’s Godzilla reboot kept teasing the big lizard and giving glimpses, a foot there, a closing door here, that built anticipation but also tried audience patience. My biggest complaint was I wanted more Godzilla in my Godzilla movie, and 2019’s King of the Monsters answered this complaint, providing four different monsters to duke it out for monster supremacy. However, the supernatural slug-fests were undercut by sequences that were hard to see. Whether it was in the rain, at night, in a blizzard, in the fog or smoke, it was hard to tell what was happening because of all the annoying visual obfuscation. We had more monster fights, yes, but they weren’t that much easier to see than in 2014. Thankfully, this movie seems like a direct response to that chief criticism. The big fights take place entirely during the day, and not only that, it’s clear and even sunny, making sure we can soak up every loving CGI detail of these two giant pretend creatures having their big pretend rumble. It may sound like I shouldn’t be too congratulatory for a franchise that dares to allow its paying customers to actually see the spectacle that they paid to see, but after several other films of mitigating results, I’m happy we at least can enjoy the big brawls after so much build-up and delayed gratification.
But if you expect more from a versus film other than predicated pugilism from your preferred participants, then G vs. K is going to disappoint. It is a vast understatement to say that this movie is extremely loony. It is so goofy that you will either shrug and go with the silly twists and turns, or you’ll be like several of my friends, and my girlfriend, who just stared stupefied and shook their heads, muttering how much more crazy-pants bananas things could possibly get.
For a franchise that started fairly grounded in 2014 from a science standpoint, and whose sequels have more or less hewn to that tonal vision, G vs. K says, “Hey, what if we…,” and injects whatever it deems might be insane and awesome, like an improv game that never meets resistance. Whatever you may be prepared for, this movie goes deeper and crazier. It literally goes to the center of the Earth and back. If I were to describe the parameters of the final fight, it would sound like I was drunk or needing of mental check-ups from concerned loved ones. It feels like the Asylum version of what a Godzilla and Kong match-up would be, and by that I refer to the low-budget studio known for its schlocky knockoffs and crazy all-you-can-eat buffet-style sci-fi plotting. There’s one solution that literally involves dumping alcohol onto a computer. Again, maybe your exact sensibilities will be a match for this wilder, sillier tonal wavelength; maybe you felt the earlier MonsterVerse entries took themselves too seriously. I’ll readily admit that they devoted far too much time to human drama I felt was, no pun intended, irritatingly small-scale. 2017’s Kong: Skull Island is the high watermark for this monster cinematic universe, and definitely better than you remember, and it didn’t take itself too seriously but found an agreeable baseline that allowed the film to have its spectacle while holding the human drama to be meaningful and entertaining itself. The movie was stylish, fun, and your brain didn’t melt when the big creatures were off-screen for long duration.
With G vs. K, any sense of established connectivity with the other movies is thrown out the window. Sure, there are faces that reappear (hey, Millie Bobby Brown), but they might as well be new characters. Even more than that, the tone of the movie is shifted so forcefully into self-parody, cheesy ludicrousness, including a spaceship serving as a moving defibrillator and psychic skulls, that it’s hard to take anything remotely seriously. I can already hear some detractors saying why should a movie about a giant ape fighting a giant lizard ever be taken seriously, and maybe you’re right you detractor you, but every movie needs an established baseline to provide a foundation of what is real, what is meaningful, and what is exceptional. If everything is crazy, it makes the monster action seem more mundane, and if anything can happen at any moment, it makes the plotting less important of careful setups and development, and satisfaction will be capped.
If you’re just looking for a movie about a giant ape punching a giant lizard with top-notch special effects, well Godzilla vs. Kong has that aplenty, and if that’s enough for you, then enjoy. It’s far more of a Kong sequel with the occasional special appearance from Godzilla, so if you’re more a fan of the big lizard you may be a little miffed at the big guy being a second banana. The action is fun and splashy, and I wish I watched this titanic title match on the big screen where it belongs, and I’ll admit that likely has dulled some of my experience. The sharp tonal shift for the MonsterVerse, and the escalating silliness that climaxes into insanity is either going to be selling point or a breaking point for every viewer. You’ll either rock with glee and happy that this franchise has finally evolved into the schlocky spectacle you’ve been dying for, or you’ll be trying to hang on to the silly, over-the-top plotting to orient your staggered senses. Godzilla vs. Kong is everything the title suggests and little else, and for many that will be enough. For me, I think it kind of lost me somewhere between here and Albuquerque.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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