Review: The Blackening

The Blackening
Cert: 15 / 97 mins / Dir. Tim Story / Trailer

In Tim Story's*¹ satirical horror/comedy mashup, eight black American friends arrange a Juneteenth party in a remote AirBnB in the rural backwoods, doubling as a ten-year reunion get-together. Their jollity is interrupted as they learn a killer is targeting the house and forcing them to play the most inappropriate game...

After the ads, trailers and BBFC card, an ominous fade-in red-on-black caption reads "The following is based on true events...", a preposition joined a few seconds later by the words "...that never happened". That's the level we're at, here. That's the film setting out its stall. That's how this opens.

So. The Blackening only has one real joke: that the token black character in a slasher movie always dies first*², so what happens when the slasher movie is filled with those? That joke, incidentally, is written out on the poster in a point-size larger than the fim's title, so you already know it before the lights go down. You can imagine how this drags out across 97 minutes. After a scene-setting pretitle sequence involving a couple of casualties, the friends arrive at the customary cabin in the woods and the plot thickens. To the point of stagnation. The key thing in slasher movies is that the players are picked of one-by-one, ebbing the protagonists' ability to fight back, narrowing the identity of the killer, raising the tension and giving the whole thing a pyramidal structure. Without going into too many spoilers, not here. So the whole thing drags its heels while nothing actually happens. Oh, except for a third-act reveal which may be one of the most repeatedly telegraphed progressions in cinematic history.

The core problem is that Story's movie isn't thoughtful enough to be a satire, gruesome enough to be a horror or funny enough for a comedy. So... well done, Tim? And it’s not that horror-comedy is difficult to do right, it’s just very easy to get wrong. This is a shining example of that which isn't trying to be so bad it's good, it's just an astoundingly painful waste of a neat idea and an otherwise solid cast. The Blackening feels like a reboot of the Scary movie franchise which foregoes the parody set-pieces and moves straight to shrieking, falling over and shit scripted gags.

Horrifying for all the wrong reasons.

*¹ Yes, that Tim Story. The one who directed the first two widely condemned Fantastic Four movies for 20th Century Fox, hopped over to Universal to make Ride Along and then after a period of sombre reflection still went on to make Ride Along 2.
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*² Note: While there are certainly other factors in play, they don't always die first. But why let statistics get in the way of a good generalising trope, especially if your movie is depending on 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.

Review: Ride Along

Ride Along
Cert: 12A / 100 mins / Dir. Tim Story




There's a point, a few minutes into Ride Along, when hip, streetwise police officer, Ian Cube*¹ calls on a hotel valet attendant get him a car to pursue an escaping gunman. The vehicle arrives speedily, within about a second, and Cube does a comedy-double-take and exclaims "What, a Prius? Oh hell no, get that outta here!" What follows is a brief, wider shot with no dialogue; a lull which director Tim Story imagined would be filled with the raucous laughter of the packed auditorium; a lull which was more accurately filled tonight by the (admittedly small) audience thinking "…oh. Oh, that was a joke then?". Get used to that awkward cinematic silence my friend, for it will be your sporadic, yet wearily familiar, companion through the following ninety-five minutes of four screenwriters vying for your attention. While Ian Cube arches an eyebrow and says "bullshit".

Now… That sounds harsh, I know. Ride Along is by no means awful, but it's patchy as hell and relies too heavily on the chemistry between Cube and Hart to hold things together. The central pair have some great scenes together, just not all the time. Cube frequently looks like he can't believe the script he's delivering, and Hart frequently looks like he can't believe he's getting away with playing his role as Chris Rock. The supporting cast autopilot their way through what appears to be a promising first-draft of a screenplay, with the honourable exception of Laurence Fishburne who seems to be having a whale of a time (even if his part is as hackneyed as the rest of the movie). And then Cube says "bullshit".

There's shrieking, grunting, the obligatory underwritten girlfriend character, bikers, Eastern European gangsters, the obligatory stuffy police-chief character, black kids on an urban basketball court, gunfire, and a car bursting through the flames of an explosion before the title-card lands. And then Cube says "bullshit" (I think that's a thing). Ride Along did make me laugh in places, but considering how little there is that's 'new' about the film, you'd expect everyone to at least try a bit harder.

For best results, file next to The Other Guys, Cop Out and The Heat.
Make of that what you will.

Pretty much. That bit with the shotgun? Best joke.



Not as much as Tim Story intended me to.



Not really.



It's a rental with a few beers.



Nah.



I wouldn't not watch it again, but I'd need a beer in my hand.



There is. Within the first five minutes.

Why is it a thing with Cube saying "bullshit" as if he invented the word? Did I miss a memo, or something?

*¹ Call him by his name. Ian Christopher Cube.

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.