As ever, October is the home of the movies which are high-profile enough to boast A-listers and respected character-actors, but not quite brash enough to weather the Summer or Winter marketplace. And slipping neatly into that bracket is Gavin O'Connor's The Accountant, the story of Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), a mathematical whizz who runs an accountancy-firm by day and carries out conveniently-moralistic High End Security Work™ during his down-time.
The key plot-mechanic here is that Wolff displays Asperger's Syndrome / High Functioning Autism (while the script tries to shy away from specifically categorising its protagonists exact condition, everything points to that diagnosis). With many other directors and/or actors, the handling of the lead character's Asperger's would have felt more exploitative. Affleck keeps this to an impressive minimum, given that the behavioural quirks his adult-self displays have more to do with harsh parental upbringing than his condition. Not that he suffers an abusive childhood as such, but the film's regular flashbacks certainly show a gruelling one.
When a routine corporation-audit uncovers more than it should, Wolff finds his primary whistle-blower (and by association, himself) targeted by the people who were set to profit from the irregularities. What follows is a game of cat-and-mouse that never quite lives up to the intrigue or intensity that the trailer promises. The Accountant has some truly magnificent moments, but they're heavily padded by a just-above-average action thriller. Affleck's really the attraction here and even so, this probably isn't his best work. Part of the beauty of his performance is that the audience never quite gets to know his character properly. It's in-keeping with the Wolff's issues, but this is also the film's downfall; it's difficult to side with an unpredictable killing-machine, no matter how funny and self-effacing he can be.
Support comes in the form of Anna Kendrick, John Lithgow, Jeffrey Tambor, JK Simmons, Jon Bernthal and Cynthia Addai-Robinson; each giving fine performances, but you know that any film containing all of them should be absolutely on-fire. The Accountant seems happy to smoulder for a couple of hours, crackling and sparking only when Affleck's on-screen. At over two-hours, the film unevenly paced, but that comes down more to the writing table than the editing-suite. As much as I enjoyed this, I don't think I'd get any more out of watching it again.
Make no mistake, The Accountant isn't a challenging or provocative study of the Autistic spectrum, it's is an action movie. And as the story of a rich, troubled, highly intelligent vigilante with a formidable armoury and strong moral-compass, it makes intriguingcomparison-piece for Affleck's forthcoming solo-stint as Gotham's finest…
There are shades of Nightcrawler in here, but tonally it's probably closer to Prisoners.
Not particularly.
Just about.
Not really.
Not at all.
There isn't.
Well, The Accountant's got a lightsaber in it, in Wolff's lockup. But since that's clearly a Master Replicas version, let's go for Level 2: Jeffrey Tambor stars, and he rocked up in a 1991 episode of The Golden Girls alongside Bea 'Ackmena' Arthur...
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.
In an unforeseen move, a gap in the blockbuster schedule appears to have brought us exactly the kind of filler usually reserved for the graveyard-shifts in March and October. No matter, this film's set on a sunny tropical island, and it is currently Summer round my way, so break out the Hawaiian shirts and Margaritas, it's time to go and be obnoxious at somebody's wedding!
Yes, Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates*1 follows the titular brothers, notorious within their family circle for ruining parties and get-togethers, as they're ordered by their parents to find dates for their younger sister's wedding in the hopes that this will calm them down and avoid embarrassment. After they advertise their requirements on Craigslist - including the free holiday to Hawaii where the wedding is to be held - they end up attracting the kind of guests who are even more badly behaved than they are. And thus the comedy arises…
When the film is running through its genre-standard gags and set-pieces (booze, slapstick and dick-jokes), it's amusing enough. However, the moments of ill-judged (and ill-executed) characterisation are where the cracks really start to appear. The harder the film tries - whether it's raising the gross-out stakes or being brazenly, self-indulgently sappy - the closer it edges to failure. And while Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Adam Devine and Zac Effron are all likeable screen-presences, they do little to gel together and are largely on autopilot here. Kendrick and Plaza come out of the whole thing better than their male counterparts (even though the former looks visibly out of her depth on several occasions), but there's the feeling throughout that the principal quartet are capable of so much better.
The main story's Hawaii setting underlines that this is very much the white-trash cousin of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and other than the apparently quasi-biographical aspect, this movie could have been made at any point in the last 30 years, with any cast, and had ultimately the same effect. This will be perfectly fine for a night in with some friends, but it's nothing you probably haven't seen elsewhere. As provocative as Mike And Dave tries to be, it's ultimately harmless, if potty-mouthed, fluff.
Ninety-eight minutes of drunken shouting and embarrassment. Generally speaking I identified with that, but I'm deducting a point for the mortifying finale-performance of This Is How We Do It and for the closing credits gag-reel of improvised out-takes, each one succinctly demonstrating why it didn't make the final edit.
If you're with friends and you're going to have a few drinks before or after, sure.
Then again, you could wait three months and have just as enjoyable time doing that at home.
Not as much as it thinks it does.
No.
Probably not.
No, but that eagie-screech is in there.
Level 2: This movie stars Adam Devine, who provided voice-work for Ice Age: Collision Course alongside Simon 'Dengar/Plutt' Pegg.
*1 And fair fucking play to the powers-that-be for naming this film "Mike And Dave…" rather than "Mike & Dave…". Punctuation breaks hashtags, and movie-titles featuring ampersands are a recurring bugbear of mine. At least this way people can tweet about the film properly. Yes, it's the little things that make me happy.
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.
So yeah, it's taken me a week just to decide if I wanted to see this. The thing is, I love harmonies, but I hate twee. I love a cappella, but I hate ad-libbed scenes where it looks like the camera's been left running between takes and an editor has decided that the verbal scribbling in the margins of the film is pretty much as good as the script anyway, so it may as well make the cut. This film was like walking on a razor blade for me; even when you're not falling off, it's still painful.
The music in Pitch Perfect 2 is fantastic in both arrangement and execution*1. Seriously. The rest of the film is under-written, over-directed, over-produced and over-acted, like a heavily diluted version of American Pie filtered through Britain's Got Talent*2, and with a metric fuck-ton of casual xenophobia and misogyny presented to the audience draped in the thinnest layer of irony known to man*3.
But I think we all know it wasn't made with me in mind.
Knock yourselves out.
If you're in the target demographic (trailers for The Longest Ride and Magic Mike XXL beforehand), probably yeah.
The musical numbers work brilliantly on the big screen.
Only you can decide how important that is to you.
Anna Kendrick plays Anna Kendrick again, and Rebel Wilson it two steps away from becoming Melissa McCarthy. And she'll probably be out of breath after those two steps because having performers fat-shame themselves is still hilarious, apparently.
Wow, I'm still grumpy about that. Sorry, the film also showed the trailer for Spy where McCarthy falls over and it's funny because she's fat. Twice.
Rehash a surprise hit from two years ago with minimal writing effort? You betcha.
No, not really.
There isn't.
Pitch Perfect 2 stars Hailee Steinfeld, who appeared in 2013's Ender's Game alongside Harrison 'Solo' Ford.
*1 The wardrobe department even managed to give the singing-cast microphones in some of the scenes where they otherwise wouldn't be heard if the songs were actually taking place in real-space, this time around. Yes, that shit bothers me.
*2 Or America's Got Talent, or whatever the equivalent is in your neighbourhood. Don't pretend it's any less dreadful where you are, yeah?
*3 Because to paraphrase Tracy King's Mad Max article at the NS recently, if it really was about female empowerment, would the film need to show The Hot Young Women hosing each other down after rolling around in a mud-pool?
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.
Rob Marshall's celluloid adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical limps onto screens in the post-Christmas lull like a pantomime pulling a straight face; camp as a row of tents, but nowhere near as colourful. Or as useful. The story, a shared-universe crossover of well known fairytales taking place in the same woodland, is almost incoherent, desperately hoping that if enough plot-points and tropes are thrown at the viewer, enough of them will stick and might form a narrative in the process. They don't; Into The Woods is gibberish. But not creative, zany, who knows what could happen? gibberish. It's the sort where secondary - but fairly important - characters die off-screen (yes, really), central characters die from basically falling over (yes. really), and Johnny Depp is instructed to remove any semblance of metaphor from the Wolf character, and basically portray a cannibalistic child-molester in an ill-fitting suit (I wish I was joking).
But hey, the plot structure isn't critical, right? After all, we're here for a musical! Show tunes! Catchy songs! Right? Ah. Sondheim's cues all seem to blend into a single twee dirge with no memorable lyrics or melodies. The whole production has the rhythm and style of Broadway but feels completely directionless, as if the music round of Whose Line Is It Anyway? has been set up for "in the style of a West End Musical", and then just left to run for two excruciating hours while the audience file slowly out and the performers are too embarrassed to stop.
The whole debacle is only slightly (…JUST) saved by some decent performances beneath the charade of a screenplay. And it's a twisted version of reality that we live in where James Corden is one of the best things in a film. Emily Blunt Anna Kendrick and Meryl Streep also do their very best, but the roles are so haphazardly written*1 that you can see the desperation in their eyes. This will be on their CVs forever.
Oh, and Chris Pine has apparently been told to channel his best David Essex. Which, in fairness, he does and is truly bloody awful.
A stage-piece that should never have left the boards, Frozen took the Disney fairytale-story two steps forward, Into The Woods takes it one step back…*2
Well, Mrs Blackout and myself went with my Unlimited card and an Orange Wednesday code, and we still feel hard done by (I actually think she enjoyed it less than me).
Oh, rent it if you must, but this won't be one for re-watching.
Not at all.
Be a crap cinematic-port of a substandard musical? It might, actually.
…
There isn't.
Into The Woods' Emily Blunt starred in 2012's Salmon Fishing In The Yemen alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi himself, Ewan McGregor..
*1 Case in point, just in case you thought there was going to be some kind of Grimm's Morality Tale at work here on the top-level, The Baker's Wife (one of the few sympathetic characters in the entire film) has a quick snog with Prince Charming in the woods in a slip of judgement, is overcome with guilt and then dies when she falls off a cliff, while Prince Charming isn't punished for being a sleazebag for the last two hours of your time, and rides off without any character closure. Yeah, spoilers. Whatever.
*2 Truth be told, I probably didn't hate it as much as this review would suggest, but I am inordinately annoyed at having sat through the whole debacle, and who wants to read someone going 'oh, it was probably okay but not really for me'? That's not the case, anyway. I don't mind a musical at all, this was just a crap one. Humph.
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.
