Fast Five movie poster

Click to Enlarge

I know we haven't talked about Fast Five much on the blog; I can speak for myself by saying I'm not a huge fan of the franchise.  Well, I sort of take that back.  The first one did nothing for me.  The second one, which most people hated, was entertaining at best.  The third was terrible in my opinion.  But the forth film, Fast & Furious, really did it for me.  I believe director Justin Lin was the difference.  He re-invented the franchise with a swagger and grit, the franchise was missing.  He did great bringing back Vin Diesel back to the franchise, along with Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez.  This year?  This year the franchise adds Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson!  Also joining the huge cast are Tyrese and Ludacris from the second film.  Check out the official synopsis and my thoughts below (minor spoilers):

Since Brian and Mia Toretto (Brewster) broke Dom out of custody, they've blown across many borders to elude authorities. Now backed into a corner in Rio de Janeiro, they must pull one last job in order to gain their freedom. As they assemble their elite team of top racers, the unlikely allies know their only shot of getting out for good means confronting the corrupt businessman who wants them dead. But he's not the only one on their tail.

Hart-nosed federal agent Luke Hobbs (Johnson) never misses his target. When he is assigned to track down Dom and Brian, he and his strike team launch an all-out assault to capture them. But as his men tear through Brazil, Hobbs learns he can't separate the good guys from the bad. Now, he must rely on his instincts to corner his prey...before someone else runs them down first.

 I have to give credit where credit is due.  The franchise has financially always done well.  I'm really not into cars, but I know a LOT of people who are.  I have to give the producers credit for always making the films different and distinctive from one another.  That's really hard when you're dealing with relatively the same subject matter.  I doubt I will go see Fast Five in theaters, but you can bet I'll rent it.  Your thoughts?

"The Other Guys" Review

Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay have set a pretty high standard for comedies. They've succeeded in every project they've worked on together leading up to The Other Guys. Mark Wahlberg joins them, playing a tough-guy cop forced to a desk after he shoots Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees! Ferrell plays the bumbling idiot who loves sitting behind a desk all day. The comedy is in the two characters' differences, and craziness ensues. Let's get started.

What I liked about the movie:
Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg chemistry
Wahlberg delivers... for 2/3 of the movie. His tough-guy cop character (who secretly loves to dance) is hilarious. Sudden outbursts of anger with Ferrell on the receiving end were great.

Will Ferrell is playing, yet again, the absent minded moron. There are a lot of scenes where Ferrell is the awkward schmuck in the room; his fellow officers get him to shoot his gun off at his desk, making him believe its tradition. Funny stuff.

The Supporting Actors

I have to be honest, as funny as Ferrell and Wahlberg were, their supporting cast stole the show for me. Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson are by far the funniest aspect of the first 15 minutes of the film. Their satirical look at cops and the way they're portrayed in movies is terrific. They play on every stereotype, all the way to their demise.

Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr. are their replacements and do great! There is a scene where Riggle's character fights Wahlberg's character during a funeral ceremony. They roll around on the ground fighting, while only whispering as to not disrespect the family of the fallen officer. This was so funny; I was laughing so hard during this scene.

Then there is the immortal Michael Keaton. Keaton plays the captain of the police force, but the force doesn't pay enough to send his bisexual son to college. So Keaton gets another job at Bed, Bath and Beyond to help pay for his son's school. Throughout the movie, Keaton's character uses the titles of TLC songs to explain what he's thinking. The funny thing is that Keaton doesn't know they're TLC songs! He was great.


What I didn't like about the movie:
The Story
The story is pathetic at best. I follow director Adam McKay's tweets on Twitter and he talks a lot about his political views. This is all fine and dandy, but don't make it the plot of your movie just because it's something that interests you. The plot is so dumb, so preposterous, it leaves no reason to care about the characters. It's all about corporate, white-collar crimes. That's great, because it's relevant, but it doesn't make for a good story for a comedy, especially when it reaches the pinnacle of stupidity. The state lotto is about to get taken for 32 billion dollars? Come on. The police department giving up it's entire pension to invest in a scam? Come on!

Characters
The sad thing is, it looks like this is a direct contradiction of the comments I wrote above, but it's not. I told you about Wahlberg being funny 2/3 of the movie. Well, the last 1/3 he was just straight-up annoying. There was no arc to his character, no growth of any kind. Same goes for Ferrell's character. He was a bumbling idiot to start the movie, and he was a bumbling idiot to end it. I was really disappointed in that.

Then there are characters that have absolutely no purpose of being in the film whatsoever. Take, for example, Wahlberg's ex-girlfriend. He visits her at her ballet class, yells at her and her dance partner and then leaves in a fit of rage. We don't see the ex-girlfriend again for the rest of the movie. What the hell is she in the movie for? Same goes for the "villains" of the movie. Anne Heche and Steve Coogan. Both unfunny and really only in the movie to have a villain at all.

Adam McKay/ Genre
I've seen actors and directors alike do this: try a genre for the first time, and it fails. It hurts me to say this, but McKay failed, big time. The action sequences are bad, the pacing was really bad, and the story was really really bad. McKay couldn't decide what genre it was: Comedy? Action? Corporate satire? Political satire? Law enforcement satire? What was it? Also, there were bits that should have never been in the movie, nor dragged out as long as they were. Case in point, the grandma crossing the street bit. You'll see.


The Other Guys wasn't good at all. I left the theater feeling let down more than anything. Maybe McKay and Ferrell's formula for success has already reached its maximum potential. Maybe this was a good movie, but they've set the bar so high, anything less is considered bad? Well, my opinion stands. The movie is bad, underachieves and loses itself amongst too many genres for its own good. It's OK, I have faith McKay and Farrell will bring the goods on their next project together. Hopefully that project is Step Brothers 2!

Guest Review: Al Berto: "Planet 51"

Welcome to a world of creativity with a lack of… creativity.

Captain Charles "Chuck" Baker played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson , an American astronaut, lands on an unknown planet thinking he's the first life form to step foot on it. To his surprise, he finds that this planet is inhabited by little green people who are happily living in an American 1950’s, white picket fence world. Lem, played by Justin Long, (who you can usually be find in the Mac vs. PC commercials), is just a teenager working on getting the girl of his dreams, while trying to land a job at a local planetarium. Lem risks his job, his relationship with his family and his future girlfriend to help Chuck get back to his ship orbiting the planet above.

When I watched the trailer to this movie I was totally excited. I thought to myself, “finally, something original.” I’m so sick of this phase the film industry is going through of bringing back old ideas to keep selling tickets. It’s as if Hollywood writers lost all touch with the right side of their brains and I’m honestly getting sick of the “Hollywood Formula:” Everything’s normal, something disrupts it all, the main character faces a number of challenges, he or she overcomes those challenges, happy ending. You’d think in this day and age that movie watchers would expect more, something a little different.

Sadly this movie is typically the same as the rest. The one thing that stuck me the most was the complete lack of imagination and creativity from such an amazing plot idea. They took absolutely no effort whatsoever to give you the feeling that you were on another world. I think the only real difference between earth and planet 51 was that the inhabitants physically look different, (they were obviously green with four fingers and didn’t have noses), and they have weird gravitation properties. Their dogs were a small cute version of the alien seen in the 1986 movie Alien. For some reason they had American looking cars that floated, yet their helicopters needed blades to lift them off the ground. Somehow, 50 million light years away, another species also invented a game that required a round heavy object to hit 10 pins, and they called it bowling! Did I mention it rained rocks? The odds of all this occurring has to be one out of, I don’t know, a billion-zillion-kagillion! The one and only thing that was remotely entertaining about this movie was a small probe sent to the planet to study and find living creatures, but failed its mission because it had an obsession with examining and collecting rocks.

You would figure an animated movie would have encouraged a number of creative ideas from such an interesting movie plot idea. Planet 51 was basically just a reason to make a quick buck by an unknown animated movie company. This is why Pixar will still be number one in my book; DreamWorks comes in a close second.