Film

Clunker

Transformers: Age of Extinction

by Director Michael Bay seems to be taunting his haters at this point, employing all of those things that sicken his detractors, and cranking everything up to despicably disgusting levels. It’s as if, with this movie, the director is saying, “I’m Michael Bay, and now I’m going to get away with cinematic murder! You will buy the toys. You will swill Bud Light out of those wacky blue aluminum things. You will shell out for the IMAX. You will leer along with me at this girl’s ass in slow motion. I … AM … MICHAEL …BAY!” For starters, this damned movie is nearly three hours long. I’m an advocate of long movies when those movies are at least decent. This thing has no right for a single tick past the 90-minute mark. Had Bay just knocked it off with his slo-mo shots, he probably could’ve shaved a half hour. Had he gotten rid of every inane line characters mutter in this donkey shit, he could’ve brought the whole thing in at 30 minutes. Replacing Shia LaBeouf, who was too busy pinching ass and pouring drinks on patrons at a Battle Creek, Michigan, high school production of Fiddler on the Roof to participate, is Mark Wahlberg. He plays Cade Yeager, a crazy robot inventor living on a farm with his smoking hot daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz). In between stints trying to make clunky robots—there’s actually a sequence where Wahlberg lovingly tries to show a newborn robot how to paint—Cade is busy trying to stop his daughter from ever having sex. He also threatens real estate agents justifiably showing his soon-to-be-foreclosed property by chasing them with a baseball bat. He, simply put, is the worst father on a movie

screen in years. The action picks up four years after the annihilation of Chicago in the last Transformers movie, which, apparently, has been completely restored because Bay includes shots of some cranes picking up beams and stuff. The Autobots are on the run because CIA agent Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) Bob Grimm has decided they’re the enemy because they’re aliens. Michael Bay is getting political. bgrimm@ Yeager buys a beat-up truck hiding out in an newsreview.com abandoned movie theater, and soon discovers it’s Optimus Prime. He nurses the robot thing 1 back to health with the help of buddy Lucas (T.J. Miller), much to the chagrin of Tessa, who trolls about pouting in impossibly tight denim shorts and high heels. She’s upset, and she’s going to look damned good being upset. A black ops government team commanded by Attinger eventually winds up on Yeager’s lawn, and one of the only reasons to watch this movie is killed off. The focus, if you can call it that, then goes to Stanley Tucci as Joshua, a Steve Jobs-like tech mogul, and his army of Autobot clones. The real Autobots will eventually face off against the fake Autobots, and we’ll see ads for Chevy cars, beer, China, denim-ass porn and Texas along the incredibly long way. During the film’s running time, I celebrated five birthdays, took an online computer course in psychology that I failed because the professor was such a jerk, and managed to construct a scale replica of the Brooklyn Bridge using toothpicks and Dots. And that was just during the first third! The Transformers themselves look cool, especially when they transform (although Bay, even with his mega budget and super long running time, cuts corners and skips some transformations by showing an Autobot in one shot, and then their vehicle in the next). There’s a sequence where some characters have to walk on a high wire between an alien ship and a skyscraper that’s pretty good. That’s about all of the nice stuff I can say. Bay says that this is the first in a new trilogy. If you should choose to see part one, make sure all of your bills are paid, the dogs are fed, and you’ve winter-proofed your house before you sit down, because you aren’t getting out of that theater for a very long time. Ω

Is this another one of those movies where Mark Wahlberg runs from the wind?

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Poor

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Fair

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Good

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Very Good 5

422 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, an unlikely duo if there ever was one, basically repeat the same steps of their very funny 21 Jump Street, and they do it in a way that keeps things fresh while knowingly recycling the same plot. And by knowingly, I mean this film acknowledges what it is, a run-of-the-mill sequel, for its entire running time. It’s a self-mocking technique that works well thanks to its stars and the deft comic direction of returning directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who are on a roll, having also directed this year’s The Lego Movie. This one picks up where the first film left off, with Captain Dickson (Ice Cube in serious comic overdrive) assigning Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) to college. In college, they will do exactly what they did undercover in the first movie: Infiltrate the dealers, find the supplier. They get the laughs the same way, through Hill’s selfdeprecating, rat-a-tat delivery, and Tatum’s dumb lug shtick. It worked well the first time, and it works well again.

5Edge of Tomorrow In the future, Earth is fighting a crazed, vicious alien force that’s shredding our armies with little effort. Tom Cruise plays Cage, an armed forces officer who serves more as a public relations man than anybody who belongs on a battlefield. After a publicity tour, he sits down with a hard-nosed general (a cold Brendan Gleeson) and finds out that he is going into battle. Cage is justifiably terrified, and his first taste of battle doesn’t go well, and he’s killed in especially gruesome fashion. For reasons I won’t give away, he instantly wakes up after his death, transported back to a moment shortly after his meeting with the general, and before the battle that will take his life. Cage is in a seriously messed up situation. He starts repeating the same day, and dying every time. He does his best to change that outcome, but he always winds up meeting a grisly death and waking up in the same place. He eventually comes into contact with Rita (Emily Blunt), the military’s poster girl for the perfect soldier. By repeating days with Rita, Cage starts to build himself up as a soldier, discover secrets about the enemy, and increasing life longevity chances for himself and mankind. The film’s handling of this situation is thrilling and even funny, thanks to Cruise’s strong performance and nice direction by Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity). It will easily stand as one of 2014’s best.

2Jersey Boys Director Clint Eastwood continues his creative slump with this drab adaptation of the Broadway musical which further proves something that Eastwood established 45 years ago with his appearance in Paint Your Wagon: Dirty Harry has no business being around a movie musical! The film tells the story of Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, who performed the role on Broadway) and The Four Seasons, and how they went from being small time hoods in New Jersey to big time rock stars. Much of the focus of the film falls on Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) an early leader of the band and majorly bad influence on Frankie. Over the course of time, DeVito gets himself deep into debt, to the point that he has to be bailed out by a friend in the mob, represented here as Gyp DeCarlo and played by Christopher Walken in a thankless role. As they did in the musical, each member of the Four Seasons breaks the fourth wall to address the audience, like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. It’s a gimmick that feels forced the way Eastwood stages it. Every time somebody faced the camera and started gabbing in this movie, I found myself getting annoyed. Young gives it a good go belting out the hits with something akin to Valli’s signature falsetto, and it’s admirable that Eastwood and his performers opted to have the music performed live on set rather than lip-synching. I don’t know if it was the theater I was in, but something happened in the final mix that flattens the overall musical presentation. The songs, although competently performed, lack a certain spark. They just feel like pale copies of the originals. 2 Maleficent Angelina Jolie plays the title character, the infamous horned villain from Sleeping Beauty. There’s a little bit of revisionist history here, with Maleficent portrayed as more of a fallen angel rather than a straight up baddie. The whole thing almost works because Jolie is damned good in this film, especially when the script allows for her to bellow curses and just act devilish. It gets a little sleepy at times when it deals with, well, Sleeping Beauty (Elle Fanning), the young woman who stands to have a very bad 16th birthday thanks to a Maleficent curse. Jolie has a creepy getup that I thought would bother me, but I kind of liked looking at it after a while. It’s the world surrounding her that I found a bit pedestrian. Director Robert Stromberg worked as a production designer on films like Alice in Wonderland, Avatar and Oz the Great and Powerful. I didn’t like any of those movies and, in the end, I don’t really like this one. At this point in watching Stromberg’s work, I’m just not taken by his weird visual worlds. They put me off for some reason, and have a choppy pop-up book feel to them. On the plus side, it is better than Alice and Oz, and perhaps even Avatar. On the negative side, it’s still not all that good.

4They Came Together David Wain and Michael Showalter, two of the funniest men on the planet and long-time collaborators, have put together a great goof on romantic comedies with the perfect vehicle for Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler. Wain directs from a script co-written with Showalter, and it turns out to be a nice companion piece to their brilliant summer camp parody Wet Hot American Summer, a film I will confidently call one of the 10 funniest movies ever made. Wet Hot also starred Rudd and Poehler, performers right at home with the Wain-Showalter brand of bizarre, random, rapid-fire humor. The film takes pokes at drippy rom-coms, most notably the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan barfer You’ve Got Mail, while also being a legitimate, authentic romantic comedy. Wain and Showalter use the age-old romantic comedy framing device of two couples talking and reminiscing about relationships over dinner and wine. Joel (Rudd) and Molly (Poehler) reveal that their meeting was a “corny romantic comedy kind of story” and, indeed, it is. Joel and Molly are two recently dumped individuals living in Manhattan and toiling away on opposite sides of the candy trade spectrum. Molly owns a little candy shop called Upper Sweet Side. Joel works for an evil corporate candy company opening across the street, a faceless corporation determined to put Molly out of business. They commence one of those romcom unlikely relationships, and many offbeat laughs follow. Rudd and Poehler are perfect for this kind of material, and Wain remains a comedy maestro. (Available for rent on iTunes, Amazon.com and Video On Demand during a limited theatrical run.)

4X-Men: Days of Future Past Director Bryan Singer returns to the X-Men franchise with this ingenious chapter that includes both the main X-Men casts, time travel and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine holding everything together. The movie starts in the future, where robotic monsters called the Sentinels are giving the Mutants a truly hard time in a post-apocalyptic world. All hope seems to be lost until Charles Xavier/ Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and his crew figure out a way to time travel. The hope is to cease the production of the Sentinels, which were created by Dr. Bolivar Trask (the always excellent Peter Dinklage) and take Raven/ Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) off a dangerous destructive path. Jackman’s Logan makes the trip the 1970s, where he wears a cool leather coat and still has bone claws. The action is terrific, especially in a sequence where Peter/ Quicksilver (Evan Peters) foils a gun attack, and another where young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) uses an entire baseball stadium for nefarious purposes. The cast’s true standout would be James McAvoy as young Charles, still messed up after the events of X-Men: First Class. He adds a truly dramatic dimension to the proceedings. Having Singer back proves to be a good thing. The franchise surely suits his talents.