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Zoolander 2

A bad film sticks in the craw a bit more when somebody capable of genius delivers it. Ben Stiller is one of the great modern day comedic actors. He started with The Ben Stiller Show, a project that basically gave birth to Mr. Show and Tenacious D. The man is directly or indirectly responsible for about 78 percent of the laughter that has come out of my face by over the last 24 years. Bob Grimm As a director, he made a clunker out of bgrimm@ the gate with Reality Bites, but followed it up newsreview.com with an underrated gem, The Cable Guy. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is much better 1 than it gets credit for, and Tropic Thunder is a bad taste masterpiece. Of all the comic creations Stiller has come up with and directed, Zoolander is the most bothersome. It’s a skit that wasn’t funny in the first place stretched into a feature that feels flat and in-jokey.

“We’re walking off  this set!”

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Stiller returns for another shot of unneeded male model parody with Zoolander 2, far and away the worst thing he’s ever done. It’s so bad, it’s a formidable, early contender for 2016’s worst film.

It basically takes a half-baked premise from 2001 and sequel-izes it, with the resultant goo having close to nothing to do with the original, tragically stupid half-baked premise, making it even more half-baked. It’s like, one quarter-baked. It represents Stiller at his most lost and floundering.

It’s 15 years later, and Derek Zoolander is living a hermit crab’s life in remote New Jersey, mourning the loss of his wife (Christine Taylor) after the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too collapsed and crushed her to death.

Note to Stiller: Zoolander came out just a couple of weeks after 9/11, and is forever associated with that event because the Twin Towers were digitally removed from the film. Is it really a funny idea to have your wife’s character killed in an NYC building collapse that takes place in 2001? I didn’t laugh, so I’ve answered my own question.

Hansel (Owen Wilson) is living a secluded life in the deserts of Malibu with his orgy family (including a very sensitive Kiefer Sutherland). He’s visited by a messagedelivering Billy Zane and goes on a quest to find Derek. Unfortunately, he does find him, and a forever boring comic duo gets another chapter.

A search for Derek’s son and some other nonsense leads them to Rome and an eventual showdown with fashion bad guy, Mugatu (Will Ferrell). The Mugatu subplot feels tacked on, as if they only had Ferrell for a week. He’s given close to nothing to work with, forcing him to mug for his paycheck. This feels like a total rip-off of Austin Powers, with Zoolander and Hansel becoming spies, Penelope Cruz stepping in as the tightly clad female sidekick, and a daddy issues subplot involving Zoolander’s long lost son, not to mention Mugatu has become a sad riff on Dr. Evil. The first half hour of the movie is actually less than terrible. Benedict Cumberbatch shows up as a hauntingly androgynous model called All who has married himself, and Derek’s comeback when somebody calls him a narcissist is the best line in the movie. So, I laughed twice.

There are too many cameos to count, many of them fashion icons I could care less about. When a big moment in your movie hinges upon the dramatic talents of Tommy Hilfiger, you’ve got yourself a problem. Did I mention that Kristen Wiig is in the movie, too? No, I didn’t. That’s because her bizarre character is something that begs to be forgotten.

Stiller got lazy and perhaps a little distracted with Zoolander 2. Time to reboot. Hopefully, he’ll consider a stint on some Netflix comedy series. (He would’ve made a great Wet Hot American Summer camp counselor, right?) He needs to get his edge back after this tremendous miscue. Ω

excellent 4 The Big Short Director Adam McKay, the master behind such broad comedy gems as Anchorman and Step Brothers, flexes his slightly more serious muscles for this one, a take on the housing bubble that nearly destroyed the global economy. An ensemble cast featuring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt make this a funny-yet-scary look at how big banks nearly sent us back to the stone ages. Carell is especially good as Mark Baum, a banker with a conscience who realizes a little too late that things are going bad, and his wealth is going to come at the expense of a many U.S. homeowners. Bale is typically good as Michael Burry, the man who saw the storm coming and made a boatload of money betting against the biggest monsters of modern finance. Pitt has fun as a financial guru who has taken to the hills in anticipation of the oncoming financial apocalypse, while Gosling gives the whole thing a nice Martin Scorsese vibe as a fast-talking banker/narrator. It’s a drama, but it’s often funny. McKay shows that his chops go well beyond directing Will Ferrell with a fireman’s mustache.

4Deadpool After a false start with the character of Wade Wilson in 2009’s uneven yet unjustly maligned X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds gets another chance at superhero—albeit unorthodox superhero—stardom. This time he scores big in this twisted film from first time director Tim Miller. The movie establishes its weirdness with scathing opening credits that poke fun at Reynolds’s stint as Green Lantern and all aspects of that film’s production. It then becomes a consistently funny tragi-comedy involving Wade, a recently smitten mercenary who comes down with terminal cancer, dimming the lights on his future with girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). He submits himself to an experiment that leaves him disfigured yet superhuman, bent on revenge against the criminal who made him this way. Reynolds finally gets a really good movie to match his charms, and Deadpool gets the nasty film the character beckons for. The film gets an R-rating for many reasons, and there really was no other way to make a Deadpool film. It needed to be depraved, and it is. T.J. Miller provides nice comic support as a weary bar owner, and a couple of X-Men show up in a hilarious way. A sequel is already in the works, and this is a very good thing.

3The Finest Hours In 1952, an oil tanker called the Pendleton split in two during a blizzard off the coast of Cape Cod. All eight crewmembers who were in the stern at the time the boat broke perished. Thirty-three men initially survived in the bobbing bow section of the ship, mere hours away from certain death. Upon hearing news of the situation, a four-man crew boarded the smallish CG-36500 boat and set out to sea, a violently choppy sea, in search of the Pendleton and its crew. Director Craig Gillespie has crafted an exciting seafaring movie. That is, an exciting seafaring movie when it is actually out at sea. Some of the stuff that happens back on shore bogs the movie down in schmaltziness. Chris Pine plays Bernie Webber, who captains the tiny ship tasked with saving over 30 men. Yes, this provides the opportunity for the guy who plays Captain Kirk to be called Captain a lot during the course of this film. Bernie rides into the belly of the beast with three crewmembers played by Ben Foster, John Magaro and Kyle Gallner. All four are terrific at looking scared shitless while being drenched and bounced about like a 5-year-old in a bounce house with a bunch of energetic and older fat people. Casey Affleck is terrific as a member of the Pendleton crew trying to keep everybody alive. The film rocks when there’s lots of water involved, but it falters when the story turns to Bernie’s new love affair. Holliday Grainger is given a tough role to pull off as the love interest. Most of her scenes simply distract from the good stuff.

4Hail, Caesar! The latest from the Coen brothers follows a day in the life of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a studio enforcer at Capitol Pictures in the 1950s tasked with keeping stars out of trouble and assuring moving pictures stay on schedule. In the middle of filming a biblical epic, huge star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped by Hollywood communists, who demand ransom money. Mannix must figure out how to get his star back while dodging two gossip columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton in increasingly hilarious wardrobe), navigating the latest scandal of studio star, DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) and comforting hot director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), who has had a marble-mouthed stunt actor named Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) forced into his romantic comedy. The plot is paper thin, but it does give the Coens a chance to do their quick interpretations of old timey movie Westerns, screwball comedies, Esther Williams pool epics, overblown Bible movies, Gene Kelly musicals, and more. The film is comprised of short homages to all of these cinema genres, and each one of them is a total blast to behold. On top of that, the movie features communist writers in a manner far less serious than the recent Trumbo. The whole thing is a blast but, admittedly, will probably go over best with diehard Coen fans.

3Kung Fu Panda 3 Jack Black returns as the voice of Po in this decent second sequel in the saga of the Panda warrior and his warrior cronies. This time out, Po encounters his long lost dad, Li (the warm growl of Bryan Cranston), who takes him to the land of the pandas so that he can learn the powers of his chi. Such an advancement in his warrior techniques is absolutely essential for the lands are being threatened by a spirit realm warrior named Kai (J.K. Simmons voicing what I think is some sort of super muscular yak-type thing). The stuff with Po and Li is cute, with the added element of Po’s adopted dad (James Hong) being a little jealous. There’s a cool psychedelic look at times, and the animated series continues to impress on artistic levels. The story feels a bit like a repeat of the previous two. That’s OK, but doesn’t necessarily place this chapter high on the originality scale.

1Pride and Prejudice and Zombies The zombie movie craze hits its low point with this crap attempt at horror comedy featuring a fairly faithful take on the Jane Austen classic mixed with the undead. Lily James, so delightful in Cinderella, plays Elizabeth Bennet, one of the esteemed Bennet sisters and zombie hunter. She sets her sight on Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley), who thinks she’s pretty and all that but must refrain from serious courtship in order to behead some ghouls. For starters, director Burr Steers shoots for a PG-13 rating, which results in much of the action taking place off screen, via incomprehensible editing, or in the dark so as to reduce the bloodletting. The movie features so much carnage that it feels incomplete for soft-shoeing the yucky stuff. As for the balance of period romance and comedic bloodletting, Steers never finds a comfortable place. The movie feels uneven and sloppy, with lousy special effects and players that look lost. Like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter before it, a perhaps clever idea gets lost in messy direction and lousy scripting. It’s a shame, because Riley and James are much better than this.

5The Revenant For the second year in a row, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has delivered the year’s best film. The best movie of 2015 is The Revenant, an eye-popping Western thriller that gives Leonardo DiCaprio, the winner of the Golden Globe for Best Actor, the role that should finally score him that first Oscar. DiCaprio gives it everything he’s got as Hugh Glass, a scout working with fur traders on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century. Glass, while doing his job, gets a little too close to a couple of bear cubs, and Mama Grizzly is not all too happy about such an occurrence. What follows is a lengthy and vicious bear attack where Glass tangles with the nasty mother not once, but twice. Inarritu, DiCaprio and some amazing visual technicians put you in the middle of that bear attack, minus the searing pain of actually having a bear’s claws and teeth rip through your flesh. Trust me when I tell you, it’s an unforgettably visceral moment when that bear steps on DiCaprio’s head. DiCaprio is incredible here, as are Tom Hardy as a villainous fur trapper who wants to leave Glass behind, Domhnall Gleeson as the commander forced to make horrible decisions, and Will Poulter as the compassionate man who makes a big mistake. It’s a revenge tale amazingly told.