Film

“Can’t say i blame Caine for not showing up for the photo shoot on this turkey.”

Gone wrong

I know I bitched a little a few weeks ago about the Beauty and the Beast remake being a little unnecessary a couple of weeks ago. At least that movie was enjoyable and sweet on some levels. Then came the Ghost in the Shell remake that looked good and had decent performances, but was a letdown as far as remakes go.

Now comes Going in Style, a total disaster remake of the “old guys rob a bank wearing rubber noses” bleak comedy from back in 1979 that starred George Burns and Art Carney. The original was directed by Martin Brest, the guy who would go on to direct Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and, uh oh, Gigli.

Martin Brest, where are you? Yes, Gigli sucked an awful lot, but you had a decent batting average until then, and you haven’t done anything since bombing with Gigli back in 2003? That film didn’t kill Ben Affleck’s career, so why did it knock you off?

Back on point, this remake loses all of the charm of that fun and slightly dark Burns vehicle. It’s super heavy on schmaltz, and it asks a strong cast to embarrass themselves for more than 90 minutes.

Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin replace Burns, Carney and Lee Strasberg in the updated story, and that setup probably looked pretty good on paper. Unfortunately, they handed the film to Zach Braff, the guy from Scrubs, to direct. Braff does so with all the subtlety and nuance of an M80 going off in a candlelight yoga class.

The comedic moments demand that you laugh, and you don’t. The touching moments grab you by the collar and scream, “Cry for me!” and you don’t. The heist itself insists that it is clever while being rather rote and mundane. The payoff involves a little girl basically doing something totally wrong, and it feels weird.

Caine replaces Burns as Joe, the brains of the group. Joe, during a visit to a bank to complain about his upcoming foreclosure, witnesses a bank robbery. So, naturally, when he and his pals’ pensions go away, he decides to rob a bank.

Then, after some gentle persuading with Willie (Freeman) and Albert (Arkin), they rob a bank. The big twist here is that they rob a bank wearing Rat Pack masks instead of the rubber nose glasses they wore in the original. That’s the biggest twist the film has to offer.

The heist itself just sort of happens. Braff shows you some of the planning and execution in flashbacks, but this technique doesn’t reveal the heist as anything ingenious. The whole beauty of the ’79 Going in Style is that three old men simply robbed a bank, and rather sloppily. Trying to make them seasoned, crafty pros in this one is a major misstep.

The original, just a few minutes in, had Joe deciding to rob a bank basically because he was bored and broke. Now, Joe’s motivations are all trumped up and complicated. All of the spontaneity is lost.

Of course, Ann-Margret is around to sleep with Albert, the grumpy one, and make him feel young again. That’s Margret’s job these days. She gets the “sleep with the old guy” role that she had in Grumpy Old Men again. I think her character would be up for a good firing, the way she aggressively pursues Albert while on the clock in the produce aisle. It’s hard watching a great, fun actress being reduced to a stereotype, that stereotype being the “older lady who tries to grab your junk by the avocados” role.

This is a case of well enough should’ve been left well alone. All of the dark, twisted fun has been taken out of the premise, replaced by mawkish sentimentality. Caine, Freeman, Arkin and Margret are lost in a screenplay that doesn’t feel the need for inventiveness, and simply tries to get by on their star power. It’s not befitting of their legendary statuses.

The movie is a real bummer—a blue paint bomb in a bag full of hundreds and fifties. 2017 is shaping up as the year of the unnecessary remakes. Ω

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3Beauty and the Beast This live-action take on the classic Disney animated musical isn’t a shot-for-shot remake of the original like, say, Gus Van Sant’s time-wasting Psycho effort. However, it does follow a lot of the same plot points and incorporates enough of the musical numbers to give you that sense of déja vu while watching it. Thankfully, Emma Watson makes it worthwhile. Hermione makes for a strong Belle. Since director Bill Condon retains the music from the original animated movie, Watson is asked to sing, and it’s pretty evident that AutoTune is her friend. She has a Kanye West thing going. As the Beast, Dan Stevens gives a decent enough performance through motion-capture. The original intent was to have Stevens wearing prosthetics only, but he probably looked like Mr. Snuffleupagus in dailies, so they called upon the help of beloved computers. Like King Kong, the CGI creation blends in nicely with his totally human, organic cast member. The cast and crew labor to make musical numbers like “Gaston” and “Be Our Guest” pop with the creative energy of the animated version, but they don’t quite reach those heights. They are nicely rendered, for sure, but not on the masterpiece level that was the 1991 film. As for the romance between Belle and the Beast, it has a nice emotional payoff. In a way, the movie is a sweet tribute to the animated movie.

2Ghost in the Shell Ghost in the Shell, a groundbreaking, subversive 1995 piece of Japanese anime, gets a live-action redo with Scarlett Johansson sporting a formfitting flesh suit and a bunch of plot enhancers aimed at making the story more humanistic and straightforward. The results are always good to look at, but the puffed-up plot and safe PG-13 rating keep the film far away from being an upgrade on the original. It’s a largely boring, misguided affair. Johansson can’t be faulted for the film’s failures. She could’ve been a solid choice to play Major, a human brain inside a synthetic cyborg’s body policing the streets of a futuristic dystopia that makes the Blade Runner landscapes look like Lincoln, Nebraska, in comparison. As she has proven in Lucy and playing Black Widow, Johansson is a capable action hero. She also fares well as somebody placed in an artificial body, as she did in Under the Skin. She does a good job of appearing slightly lost but centered, a character who is in that body somewhere but isn’t entirely whole. Most importantly, she can play a robot without seeming robotic. She gives Major some decent dimensions. Unfortunately, Major also has a new plotline that involves her past life, a mystery that overwhelms the action and turns the film into a bit of a melodramatic exercise.

3Kong: Skull Island The King Kong cinematic machine gets cranking again with Kong: Skull Island, an entertaining enough new take on the big ape that delivers the gorilla action but lags a bit when he isn’t on screen smashing things. Among Kong incarnations, this one has the most in common with the 1976 take on the classic story, basically because it’s set just a few years earlier in ’73. While there is a beautiful girl the big guy does get a small crush on (Brie Larson as a photographer), the story eschews the usual “beauty and the beast” Kong angle for more straight-up monster vs. monster action. Unlike the past American Kong films, this one never makes it overseas to Manhattan, opting to stay on Kong’s island—thus, the title of the film. Kong himself is portrayed by motion-capture CGI, and he’s a badass. He’s also tall enough to be a formidable foe for Godzilla, a mash-up already announced for 2020. In the few scenes where he interacts with humans, Kong plays like an organic creature rather than a bunch of gigabytes. That’s right, there hasn’t been much mention of those human counterparts yet. That’s because, with the exception of John C. Reilly as a fighter pilot stranded on the island during World War II, most of the humans are bland. Tom Hiddleston might make a decent James Bond someday, and he’s a lot of fun as Loki, but he just doesn’t play here as a rugged tracker/action hero. 3Life This sci-fi/horror film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds is an inconsistent but overall sturdy genre pic that looks great and ultimately delivers the goods despite a few slow patches and a couple of remarkably dumb moments. Credit director Daniel Espinosa for setting a grim tone and sticking with it through the very end. Gyllenhaal and Reynolds play astronauts pulling a long haul on an international space station. Gyllenhaal’s David Jordan is actually about to break the record for consecutive days in space, and generally prefers life in the stars to life back on our miserable planet. The crew is awaiting a space capsule containing samples from Mars, and these samples will put forth an amazing discovery: life beyond our planet. Ship scientist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) discovers a cell, wakes it up, and marvels at its ability to grow at a rapid pace. He eventually finds himself marveling at the little guy’s ability to grab on to his glove and basically mulch the hand within it. So, as the viewer quickly discovers, life on Mars was probably a total shit show, because this globular nasty—a distant cousin of Steve McQueen’s The Blob—digs on killing everything in its path. The expedition goes from a triumphant discovery to ultra protective mode in a matter of seconds. If this thing gets to Earth, the Blue Planet will look like the Orange Planet virtually overnight.

5Logan Hugh Jackman—allegedly—says goodbye to Wolverine with Logan, a total shocker of a superhero movie that lays waste to the X-Men and standalone Wolverine movies that came before it. Director James Mangold, who piloted the decent The Wolverine, revamps the character’s mythos, and pulls along Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) for the gritty, bloody, nasty, awesome ride. It’s the future, and the X-Men are gone. A mutant hasn’t been born in a quarter of a century, and Logan isn’t looking too hot. He’s driving a limo to make ends meet, coughing up blood, and basically not aging well. He’s doing a lot better than Xavier, the mutant formally known as Professor X, who’s prone to seizures and suffering from some sort of degenerative brain disease. In short, the days of X-Men glory are way, way over, with Logan and Xavier having a shit time in their autumn years. Just when it seems as if the pair will waste away in their miserable existence, along comes Laura (a dynamite Dafne Keen). She’s a genetically engineered mutant equipped with the same retractable claws and viciously bad temper as Logan. When her life becomes endangered, Logan throws her and Xavier in the back of his vehicle, and they are off on one wild, dark road trip.

3The Void This throwback to John Carpenter/Clive Barker horror films is completely insane, horribly acted, and totally great for anybody who likes their horror served up with a side of cheese. A brash policeman (Aaron Poole) picks up a stranger on the side of the road and takes him to a sparsely populated hospital (shades of Carpenter’s Halloween 2). While there, a possessed nurse (shades of Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness) murders a patient, then promptly turns into a messed up monster (shades of Carpenter’s The Thing) while the hospital is besieged by a zombie-like throng of people dressed in white cloaks (shades of Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13). Shortly thereafter, the head doctor dies but comes back, promptly skins himself, and unleashes a world down below filled with mutants (shades of Barker’s Hellraiser). That’s just some of the homages, and they all come together to make little or no sense. Still, the style of the movie, which features schlocky special effects, and both over- and under- acting, makes the whole mess work in an effective horror revival sort of way. If you hate horror films full of blood and puss where skinless doctors are bellowing devilish incantations, this one isn’t for you. If you are a fan of the recent Stranger Things and the Carpenter fare of old, this one will satisfy you. (Available for download on iTunes and Amazon.com during a limited theatrical release.)