Spies In Disguise Cert: PG / 102 mins / Dir. Troy Quane & Nick Bruno / Trailer
Reader, I seem to have two states of mind when it comes to non-Disney studio animation movies. I'm either viewing the trailer for some saccharine nightmare and rolling my eyes at the caption-card listing which musical artists appear on the soulless, thumping soundtrack, as if the inclusion of sanitised, corporate techno could lend the feature any more individuality - or I'm watching an actual movie in 2020 with Snow's Informer and Rob Base's It Takes Two in the soundtrack, in which a character makes a scripted reference to the members of New Kids On The Block while I'm thinking 'wait...is this an old person's idea of what a young person's movie sounds like?'.
As you know by now, there is no pleasing me.
BLUE SKY So, failing to please me today is Blue Sky Studios' latest offering, Spies In Disguise. Based on an idea from an award-winning animated short from a decade ago, it's effectively a body-swap / odd-couple comedy, set against the backdrop of a spy-caper. Will Smith and Tom Holland provide the central voices, and it's fine. By which I mean the animation is bang-on-standard (shiny but bland), the rest of the voice-cast are interchangeable with similar jobbing actors*1 and while the central message of pacifism in a violent world is by no means a bad thing, it's rammed home so ham-fistedly that this derails any genuine nuance or debate on the subject*2.
It's absolutely Fine™.
The best moments arise from Smith's Agent Lance Sterling as he's transformed into a pigeon and undergoes a comedic Cronenbergian psychological duality-shift to match. Although he's a pigeon who can actually talk, he also understands other pigeons and begins to make friends with them, with some newly-avian mannerisms filtering through to Sterling's human form after a species-reversal in the finale. This is arguably far more interesting than the spy-flick.
BRIGHTSIDE Unfortunately, the editing process seems to have provided a bumpy road to the cinema. There's a 'pigeons can't see glass' routine from the one of the film's trailers*3 which has been completely excised from the completed movie, so that when this is used several times as a punchline there's no preceding set-up. This isn't the worst gaffe a film could make, but it's indicative of the haphazard final product. By the time this reaches its third-act, the cumulative effect of all the characters and plot threads waiting to be tied up results in what can only be described as an incoherent crescendo.
Blue Sky Studios have been dining out on Ice Age for too long, now. Don't get me wrong, Spies In Disguise is basically okay, but it's a well-meaning Happy Meal of a movie; the young ones will be attracted by the bright colours, additives and play-value, and it won't poison those taking them along for the outing. It's short-term energy for a day out, but you couldn't live on it. Nor would you want to...
Pretty much any mid-tier animation of the last ten years.
If your padawans are tugging at your sleeve, you could do worse.
Stream it.
It is not.
Likely.
Not that I heard.
Although the last twenty minutes of this movie is pretty much white-noise, so there could be one in there.
*1 While Ben Mendelsohn always gives a spirited performance, the likeness of super-villain Killian (solid name, guys) matches the actors voice is precisely no way. Karen Gillan is also on hand as kooky tech-sleuth Eyes, with a volume of dialogue suggesting it was recorded in a ten-minute session during post-production - they just wanted her name on the poster. [ BACK ]
*2 Namely in one surprisingly heartfelt scene, where Will Smith's "...because the bad guys don't care how nice you are" may be the wisest words of the entire movie, shortly to be lost in a fog of CGI glitter. [ BACK ]
*3 No, since you ask, I can't seem to find it on YouTube. Look, I've definitely seen it, it was definitely there at one point. I just don't want to waste more hours of my life watching more of Spies In Disguise, thanks. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Tag Cert: 15 / 100 mins / Dir. Jeff Tomsic / Trailer
So, I see Hollywood's quest to recreate the lightning in a bottle which was The Hangover continues apace, with an ensemble comedy featuring the crap one out of Hangover, the crap one out of Avengers, the crap one out of Jurassic World, the crap one out of Baywatch and the crap one out of Baby Driver.
Three guesses what's happened.
Initially telling the story of a 30 year game of tag through the device of a reporter keen to write about the gang, the cast roster quickly expands to a number of players it can't realistically juggle. We're treated instead to a series of clockwork-timed set-pieces which have the air of something that was originally written for some movie anyway, but pulled off the shelf and dusted down for this.
Playing the living fuck out of its tenuous True Story™ card, the film has, admittedly, more laughs than it deserves. Although these come from choreographed slapstick rather than the half-baked script which feels like it's been written by a committee. A committee who decided that waterboarding and miscarriage were fine to use as punchlines*1. At least we now know that playing tag with this writing team would be so thuddingly predictable that it'd be a piece of piss to stretch the game out to 30 years...
We get a montage of camcorder footage before the mortifyingly self-indulgent end credits, showing the real life participants' tags over the years. This has more wit and sincerity than anything in the hour and a half before it.
Not enough ideas to actually justify its own existence, Tag is essentially 100 minutes of middle-aged men making dick jokes. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
Level 2: Jeremy Renner's in this, and he's been in those Avengers films with (among others) Sam 'Windu' Jackson
*1 No word in the film's final moments on whether the waterboarding, miscarriage or cancer sub-plots were based on factual events or the screenwriters' idea of upping the comic/dramatic ante.
The cancer thing in particular feels horribly ill-judged. Did this happen? If it did and the guy died, then it might be an idea to put up a card dedicating the film to his memory. If it did and he survived, it might be an idea to put up a card letting the audience know. If it didn't happen at all, it might be an idea to drop it from the fucking screenplay after what's come earlier with the fake-miscarriage debacle. Not going to lie, I didn't stay 'til the very end of the rolling-names, but then I didn't think I should have to. "By the way, Terry died" is hardly a post-credits stinger, is it? [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Cuban Fury Cert: 15 / 98 mins / Dir. James Griffiths
Among the opening credits of the movie are the words "based on an original idea by Nick Frost". While I like Frost very much, this movie wouldn't know an original idea if one bit it on the arse. That's strike one. It'd be untrue to say I was disappointed by Cuban Fury as I was expecting it to be rubbish, but I at least expect the film to act like it's interested...
It appears that Mr Frost has examined his buddy's film Run Fatboy Run, and taken it as an Approved Formula For Mainstream Success™, rather than the Warning From History™ that everybody else remembers watching*1. The producers of Fury have assumed that their entire audience is so au fait with the mechanics of the underdog-romcom that they don't have to bother trying to inject any tension into the screenplay. At all. There's never any doubt that the former salsa dancing champion will become a great salsa dancer again; there's never any serious threat in the romantic stakes from Chris One-Note O'Dowd*2; there's never anything other than the glaring certainty that the former dancing champion and the recreational dancer he's besotted with will be together by the end credits as they're essentially "getting on really well" for the entire film; and there are fewer inevitabilities in this universe than when you book Ian McShane as a supporting character in your comedy, he'll turn up and play Ian McShane. That's strike two.
The best gags are all in that trailer, but if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film, really. There are several chucklesome moments throughout the movie, largely due to the supporting cast in the shape of Olivia Coleman, Rory Kinnear and Kayvan Novak, but they're really just leaning over the side of a battleship with dinghy paddles. At best, the film is astoundingly average, and it's frequently not even that. For what it's worth, Nick Frost is good as lapsed salsa-star Bruce Garrett, and it's clear he's put the work into perfecting the dancing, but his path to redemption is more of a moving walkway, with minimal dramatic effort required from all concerned. Rashida Jones' part is so chronically underwritten that all she can do is play Female Lead In RomCom™ until a throughly lacklustre finale. It's not even a bad film; it can't even be bothered to do that right.
For a movie with an exercise-pastime as its central conceit, it's ironic that Cuban Fury can be so staggeringly lazy. I was expecting a by-the-numbers romcom, but this film just gives you the start and end numbers and asks you to fill in the rest yourself.
Frost, you're far, far better than this.
That's strike three. Get off my dancefloor.
The trailer is the film.
Nah.
No. And it doesn't set out to achieve that much, either.
Telly.
Yes.
Not of my own volition.
There isn't.
Was the Back To The Future reference a little heavy-handed?
I think it was. Discuss.
*1 I'm not even going to try and bolster this one. Run Fatboy Run is a fucking lazy film for fucking lazy audiences.
*2 Even though O'Dowd usually plays Affable Idiot™, and in Cuban Fury he plays Irritating Idiot™, he's still just Chris O'Dowd™. Feel sorry for Dawn Porter; she's got to live with it. No wonder she keeps sending him off to do films.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Reader, I seem to have two states of mind when it comes to non-Disney studio animation movies. I'm either viewing the trailer for some saccharine nightmare and rolling my eyes at the caption-card listing which musical artists appear on the soulless, thumping soundtrack, as if the inclusion of sanitised, corporate techno could lend the feature any more individuality - or I'm watching an actual movie in 2020 with Snow's Informer and Rob Base's It Takes Two in the soundtrack, in which a character makes a scripted reference to the members of New Kids On The Block while I'm thinking 'wait...is this an old person's idea of what a young person's movie sounds like?'.
