Film

All over again

A college girl learns a few lessons about life—and not being a total ass—by reliving the day she is murdered over and over again in Happy Death Day, a mediocre movie that gets by completely on the star power of a relatively unknown actress, Jessica Rothe.

Rothe plays Tree Gelbman, who wakes up in a strange dorm room on the morning of her birthday to discover she has spent the night with a bit of a dweeb in Carter Davis (Israel Broussard). She storms out of the room, ignoring phone calls from her dad and basically being nasty to everybody she encounters on her walk of shame. It’s established fairly quickly that Tree is a campus jerk and has more than a few enemies.

All of those enemies, and even some of her friends, become murder suspects when Tree is stabbed to death by a mask-wearing baddie on her way to a party that evening. After her life force is snuffed out, she immediately wakes up in Carter’s bed again. She goes about the same day thinking it’s just déjà vu, but when she is murdered again and wakes up in the same bed on the same day again, she figures things out. She’s living a murder mystery—Groundhog Day style.

The list of murder suspects is long. There’s Lori (Ruby Modine), the caring, neglected roomie who baked her a cupcake for her birthday. Then there’s Gregory (Charles Aitken), the slimy teacher she’s having an affair with, and Tim (Caleb Spillyards), the creepy stalker type who took their one date a little too seriously. Even Tree’s own dad (Jason Bayle) can’t be scratched off the suspect list. In fact, director Christopher Landon and writer Scott Lobdell pile enough suspects on, then break so many rules, that it becomes virtually impossible to guess the killer. I guess that’s a good thing.

Rothe just sort of comes out of nowhere to make this movie more than a rip-off of the classic Bill Murray vehicle. She was one of Emma Stone’s friends in La La Land, and that’s probably the only place most of us have seen her before. She sort of has a Rachel McAdams meets Piper Perabo thing going.

This is the darkest of dark horror comedies, and it takes major acting chops to keep something this repetitive both engaging and humorous. Rothe is basically playing a jerk that you are supposed to like and root for as she learns a few lessons and becomes a better person. And, yes, even though her character is a pompous twit at the start of the movie, Rothe manages to make her a funny, semi-likeable pompous twit so that the audience can hang in there and get invested in her character’s evolution.

While the movie isn’t horribly scary, it’s scary enough to put it alongside that other classic horror spoof, Scream. Actually, you could make the argument that Happy Death Day rips off both Groundhog Day and Scream shamelessly. The movie even mentions Groundhog Day at one point, to let you know the filmmakers are well aware of what’s getting copied.

When the movie finally wrapped after what turned out to be a pretty good fake-out ending, I realized I’d had a relatively good time watching it. I also appreciated the little nod to Sixteen Candles. Therefore, I’m giving it the mildest of recommendations. It’s PG-13, so if you like your horror movies hardcore and super bloody, you might be let down.

Happy Death Day is a decent enough goofball of a movie, and it marks the arrival of an actress you’ll probably hear a lot about in the near future. If she can make something as contrived as this movie enjoyable, just imagine what Rothe could do with some real material. Ω

“Who wields it better? me or Jack Nicholson?”

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3American Made The messed-up life of pilot Barry Seal gets a movie that’s not messed up enough in American Made, an entertaining film that plays it a little too safe. Drug cartels and Iran-Contra are played for laughs in a story that probably shouldn’t have us giggling all that much. The movie winds up being moderately enjoyable thanks to Tom Cruise sweating it out in the lead role. Director Doug Liman, who teamed with Cruise on the sci-fi masterpiece Edge of Tomorrow, rips off Catch Me if You Can, The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas, Blow and many more in telling the story of the notorious TWA pilot turned pawn for the CIA. Inspired by Seal’s true story—and some of the more outlandish stuff depicted in the film actually happened—the movie starts with him grinding out flights for TWA, smuggling the occasional box of Cuban cigars and trying to support a family that includes wife Lucy (Sarah Wright). He winds up taking a side gig for the CIA, taking reconnaissance photos, delivering arms to Central America. This eventually leads to smuggling drugs for Medellin cartel. The movie is a whirlwind of activity, but skimpy on some of the details that could make it more than just a silly blast. Honestly, this story might have played better as an HBO or Netflix miniseries than a big motion picture. It feels far too slick for the source material and needs some more meat on the bone. A 10-hour running time probably wouldn’t even be enough to cover everything Barry got himself into.

2Battle of the Sexes Usually reliable directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Farris (Little Miss Sunshine, Ruby Sparks) somehow manage to make this, the story of Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’ infamous early ’70s tennis match, quite boring. King is played by Emma Stone, who brings a nice warmth to one of the great trailblazing athletes of the 20th century. Steve Carell labors a bit playing Riggs, the chauvinist pig who challenged the much younger King to a battle of the sexes, an exhibition tennis match to prove the superiority of the male athlete. The actual match happens in the film’s final half hour, and it’s an entertaining half hour that manages to incorporate real footage of Howard Cosell and a realistic depiction of the actual tennis play. The movie doesn’t have much of a pulse in the buildup, portraying King’s love life in a way that would seem too schmaltzy for your average soap opera. Surely, there must’ve been some fireworks when the married King started sleeping with her hairdresser on her tennis tour, but this movie goes a dull and sappy route. I expected to laugh more at this movie, but the film just sort of drags along until Stone and Carell pick up their rackets, which looked a lot like badminton racquets back in the ’70s. The movie also tries to make Riggs too likeable, and it probably would’ve been OK to make him a little nastier. No doubt, Billie Jean King is a legend. This movie doesn’t quite live up to that legend.

4Blade Runner 2049 Ridley Scott’s original sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner came out in 1982—35 years ago. Scott has tooled with the cut of that movie numerous times, resulting in a final cut that was released about 10 years ago. While there was a lot of monkeying—in a good way—with the original, it didn’t seem there was much thought, or chance, for an actual sequel. The original was a box-office bomb and didn’t start gaining its classic status until a decade after its release. In fact, critics beat up on it a bit. Here in 2017, we actually do get a sequel, this time directed by Denis Villeneuve, the visionary behind Enemy and Arrival. (Scott remains involved as a producer.) Harrison Ford, who has classically moaned about the original movie, has, nonetheless, returned to play blade runner Rick Deckard. A terrific Ryan Gosling steps into the starring role of K, a new blade runner tasked with “retiring” older model replicants, the synthetic humans originated by the likes of Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah in the original. Other than the presence of Ford in the final act of the movie, and the vision of Pan Am and Atari logos still present in the Los Angeles skyline, there’s little to make this one feel like a standard sequel. 2049 goes off on many new tangents, bending the mind when it comes to topics like artificial intelligence, what really constitutes love, and determining what is “real” in this world. Villeneuve, along with writers Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, have concocted a whole new world, a realistic evolution of Scott’s. Cinematographer Roger Deakins puts pure art in motion with his camerawork, giving us a dirtier, gloomier, yet still beautiful Blade Runner. K’s travels take him to the ruins of major cities. Ruined cities have never looked this gorgeous.

4Brawl in Cell Block 99 If you saw Bone Tomahawk a couple of years ago, you saw the directorial debut of one S. Craig Zahler, who also wrote the script, a guy who knows how to tell bleak, brutal stories. I thought Tomahawk was nasty but, as things turn out, it’s a tea party with bunny rabbits compared to Zahler’s second feature, for which he also penned the script. Vince Vaughn shaves his head and steps into the role of Bradley Thomas, a tow truck driver who loses his job and discovers his wife (Jennifer Carpenter) is having an affair. After a meltdown in which Bradley destroys a car with his bare hands, he makes a bad career choice, and returns to running drugs to save his marriage and make some money. Things go bad, and Bradley winds up in a couple of prisons, ultimately resulting in the event mentioned in the title, an unholy showdown with his new enemies. That event is a bloody affair—the film in unrated and often quite gross—featuring heads getting crushed by boots, and victims spitting jawbones out of their mouths while dying. The transformation Vaughn undergoes here is stunning. Yes, he’s handled dramatic roles well in the past, but he’s never done anything this dark and physically brooding. He’s a one-man wrecking machine here, and you believe he can take out rooms full of attacking marauders with violent proficiency. This movie is a sick trip, with the normally humorous Vaughn a million miles away from any jokester laughs. (Available for download and streaming on iTunes and Amazon.com during a limited theatrical release.)

5The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) Writer-director Noah Baumbach delivers his best movie yet with his latest story of family dysfunction that is yet another reminder that Adam Sandler is a knockout actor when he puts his mind to it. Sandler plays Danny, older brother to Matthew (Ben Stiller), father to Eliza (Grace Van Patten), and son of Harold (Dustin Hoffman). Danny is going through hard times, separating from his wife as Eliza prepares for college. His only option is to live with his dad and stepmom (Emma Thompson), a move that drudges up a lot of past difficulties. Matthew comes to town, looking to sell his parents’ house, much to the chagrin of Danny, and tensions grow. Yet, despite the tension, there’s a hilarious way this family communicates and, even when things get bad, their warmth and desire for better times with each other shines through. While Sandler gets some good laughs in the film (especially when he’s allowed to rage, Sandler style), it’s the quieter moments that put him in legitimate contention for an Oscar. As for frequent Baumbach collaborator Stiller, this just happens to be his best dramatic performance as well, so he qualifies as legit competition for Sandler. (A public speaking meltdown by Matthew constitutes the most impressive moment in the film.) Hoffman, who has played father to both Sandler and Stiller before—Sandler in The Cobbler and Stiller in the Focker movies—hasn’t had a chance to shine like this in a long while. Like Gene Hackman as the unreliable patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums, he owns his every scene. This is one of the year’s funniest and best acted movies and a fabulous reunion for Stiller and Sandler, over 20 years after they shared the screen in Happy Gilmore. (Available on Netflix during a limited theatrical release.)