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Get on Up

The Godfather of Soul gets a rollicking but milquetoast biopic with Get on Up, showcasing a dynamite Chadwick Boseman as James Brown. The movie is entertaining, and it does flirt with the more controversial aspects of Brown’s life, but it plays it a little too safe. A true telling of James Brown’s often insane life would command an R-rating and be a real powder keg of a movie. Director Tate Taylor (The Help) doesn’t avoid the domestic violence, drugs and brushes with the law that were mainstays in Brown’s life, but he does treat those aspects as a bit of a side note. The film’s focus stays primarily on Brown’s tough upbringing and his music. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does result in what feels like a missed opportunity for greatness. The movie, which is not told chronologically, starts promisingly as we see the events leading up to the infamous police chase that landed Brown in jail for three years. Boseman is nothing short of amazing in these scenes as the somewhat crazy, older Brown, brandishing a shotgun and seeking out the person who dared to use his bathroom to take a dump. The film then commences to bounce around in time, showing Brown as a young child in Augusta, Georgia, all the way up to his latter years as a performer. This narrative technique is certainly fun, giving the movie a sense of “anything can happen” and making it feel far from routine. Boseman even breaks the fourth wall to chat with the audience, something that’s a bit jarring at first but eventually works.

The film highlights many of the legendary concerts from Brown’s career, including his groundbreaking first concert at the Apollo and the healing experience that was a Boston concert shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King. For most of these scenes, Boseman lip-synchs to Brown’s voice, but he does sing a few passages in the film using by his own vocals. Taylor puts it all together Bob Grimm seamlessly. bgrimm@ newsreview.com As for the physicality of his performance, Boseman is a kinetic marvel. He becomes James Brown, immaculately recreating the dance moves and stage theatrics that made 3 him one of the all-time great performers. His method of delivering dialogue is, quite appropriately, sometimes intelligible. Brown had a tendency to mumble and ramble as he got older, and Boseman doesn’t shy away from that. Somehow, I managed to understand everything he said. Viola Davis is good in her few scenes as Brown’s troubled mother. Dan Aykroyd and Craig Robinson certainly impress as Brown’s manager Ben Bart and saxophonist Maceo Parker. The supporting cast’s most valuable player is Nelsan Ellis as longtime Brown sideman Bobby Byrd. His role amounts to the voice of reason in the madness that was often Brown’s life. This story has taken a long time getting to the big screen, with everybody from Wesley Snipes to Eddie Murphy rumored to play Brown. Spike Lee was attached to direct at one point. He was also attached to direct a Jackie Robinson biopic. The eventual 42 was not directed by Lee, but did star Boseman. I guess this sort of makes Boseman an enemy of Spike Lee by default. If you go to this movie to see somebody kick some major ass with the James Brown dance moves, Get On Up definitely delivers. If you’re looking for a biopic that captures his amazingly crazy life, you’ll just have to keep waiting. I’m no James Brown expert, but what I do know tells me this movie doesn’t even scratch the surface. Ω

"I don't know karate, but I know ca-razy!"

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4Dawn of the Planet of the Apes The motion-capture apes take another step toward world domination in a sequel just as good as its predecessor, and certainly a step forward when it comes to pure, unadulterated ass-kicking ape action. The movie picks up 10 years after a well-meaning doctor played by James Franco first shot an experimental drug into a chimp and unintentionally initiated the end of the human race. Caesar (Andy Serkis doing his motion-capture best) is leading a group of genetically modified apes in the redwoods near the Golden Gate Bridge. Life is good, and the humans have seemingly disappeared thanks to the Simian Flu brought on by the Franco character’s experiments. As it turns out, some humans have survived, led by Gary Oldman’s frustrated Dreyfus, who fears the humans will soon run out of fuel for their generators. There’s a chance for some hydraulic power via a dam in the woods, a dam that just happens to be near the apes compound. A band of humans led by Malcolm (Jason Clarke) sets out to repair the dam, stumbles upon the apes, and those apes aren’t happy to see them. Koba, an ape who figured prominently in the first film, returns, and he has no interest in a peaceful existence with humans. So, they fight, and they fight in glorious and exciting fashion. Matt Reeves, who directed Cloverfield, Let Me In and the vastly underrated The Pallbearer, proves a more than ample choice for this movie. He’s already been announced for the sequel, due two years from now.

5Guardians of the Galaxy This is a goofy, dazzling, often hilarious convergence of inspired nuttiness. You’ll probably hear comparisons to the original Star Wars, The Fifth Element and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and all of those comparisons would be plausible. It’s a blessedly new and crazy direction for the Marvel universe, and director James Gunn (Super, Slither) has taken a huge step towards the A-list. Also taking a giant leap toward the upper echelon of Hollywood royalty is Chris Pratt, who mixes great charm, rugged action hero bravado and premium comic timing as Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord. After a prologue that shows the Earthly origins of his character, Pratt sets the tone for the movie during the opening credits, grooving to his cassette-playing Sony Walkman on an alien planet and using squirrelly little critters as stand-in microphones. After unknowingly stealing a relic that could have the power to take down the entire universe, Quill finds himself in serious trouble. Events lead to his joining forces with a genetically enhanced Raccoon named Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper), a gigantic tree person thing named Groot (voice of Vin Diesel), an angry, muscle-bound alien named Drax (Dave Bautista) and an ass-kicking green woman named Gamora (Zoe Saldana). Together, they become the Guardians of the Galaxy, an unlikely troupe of mischievous outcasts that plays like the Avengers meets the Marx Brothers. The cast, buoyed by a spirited script cowritten by Gunn, keeps things zippy and always funny. Visually, the movie is a tremendous feat of special and makeup effects. If you see it in 3-D, you’ll be happy with the results.

3Hercules Dwayne Johnson, following the likes of Steve Reeves, Kevin Sorbo and Arnold Schwarzenegger, steps into the role of Son of Zeus. Actually, this film suggests that the title character might not be immortal, and is part of a scam. It’s one of the many sly touches that make this movie enjoyable. Johnson is good in the lead, and his band of battle disciples includes Ian McShane and Rufus Sewell in fine form. It’s directed by Brett Ratner, the man who got himself into trouble with legions of rabid fans for screwing up X-Men: The Last Stand. (I didn’t think it was that bad.) Ratner does a lot with a medium-sized budget. (Yes, $100 million for a blockbuster is medium these days.) The movie looks good, and is quite clever at times. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this to be much good given its pedigree, but the results are kind of enjoyable. Johnson has developed into a fun movie star, and Ratner can make a decent movie, even if he is the guy responsible for the Rush Hour films.

3Lucy What starts out as a potentially great movie winds up being a merely good one in the end. Scarlett Johansson stars as the title character, an American living in Taiwan who gets mixed up with the wrong people and winds up not only a drug mule, but a drug mule with a highly experimental drug placed inside her lower stomach. When the drugs start to leak, Lucy winds up using her brain to full capacity, not only resulting in her ability to control her body but also the forces around her. Luc Besson directs with his usual visual competence, and Johansson is great in the title role. The problem keeping the film from greatness is that it feels as if it’s going to some great place, and then suddenly ends at 89 minutes. Granted, it’s a good 89 minutes, but I was left feeling a bit unfulfilled. Morgan Freeman shows up as a scientist who knows a lot about brains, while Min-sik Choi (the original Oldboy) plays a true bastard of a bad guy. Surely, the premise is total bullshit, but the resultant mayhem is fun bullshit at that. I just wish Besson had a more complete story to tell.

2The Purge: Anarchy Last year’s The Purge was a good premise backed up by a boring slog of a movie. This sequel, delivered just a year later, is a better movie. Now, I’m not saying it’s a good movie, for it is not. It’s a better movie with a lot of problems. It starts mere hours before the annual Purge, a one-day holiday where citizens of the United States are allowed to put their cherished arsenals to use. Yes, murder is legal for a day in this universe, although certain types of explosives are strictly prohibited. This is sort of the Magnolia or Crash of Purge movies, in that we see a lot of story lines involving multiple characters eventually converging. Frank Grillo plays the most interesting of those characters, a vengeful man gathering up some heavy artillery and taking to the streets on Purge night. The whole affair feels like a bit of a John Carpenter rip-off, and not the good John Carpenter, but the fair-to-middling John Carpenter. Now, that’s better than watching Ethan Hawke mope around his house and having tense conversations through his front door for an entire film, but it still doesn’t feel fresh.

1Sex Tape Once upon a time, there was a director with a very promising career. In 1998, Jake Kasdan made his directorial debut with the excellent Zero Effect, one of that year’s best movies. It still stands as one of Ben Stiller’s best efforts, and Kasdan even wrote the thing. Since then, I’ve been following all of his releases and they have gotten progressively worse (Orange County, Walk Hard, Bad Teacher). Now comes this mess starring Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz, an ugly comedy that tries to get laughs out of people being very, very uncomfortable. The two play a husband and wife who don’t know how to have sex with each other anymore, so they make a video using an iPad. Then, that video syncs up with a bunch of other iPads that they gave away as gifts, so a bunch of friends and family are at risk of seeing them naked and sweaty. Somehow, Kasdan manages to work in an overlong bit of Segel getting attacked by a dog, while supporting stars like Rob Corddry and Rob Lowe labor for laughs. The film feels like a flat, dated and shameless piece of advertising for Apple—who must be seriously regretting the decision to allow their product placement in this movie—and internet porn. Let it be known that Diaz and Segel look and sound absolutely disgusting when they are making out.

1Transformers: Age of Extinction 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 disgusting levels. Replacing Shia LaBeouf is Mark Wahlberg. He plays Cade Yeager, a crazy robot inventor living on a farm with his smoking hot daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz). After inadvertently buying Optimus Prime from an old guy at an abandoned movie theater (yep!), Yeager and his daughter wind up fighting alongside the Autobots as they battle an evil race of American-made Autobot clones courtesy of a Steve Jobs-like mogul (Stanley Tucci). The movie is a billion hours long, and none of those hours are ever any good. Some of the visuals pop, but you won’t care because you will be glazed over by the time most of the big action kicks up. If you should choose to see this one, make sure all of your bills are paid, 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.

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