Jason Bourne

Posted on July 28, 2016 at 5:29 pm

Whoever thought that the “Fast and Furious” series would keep getting better while the once-smart “Bourne” series is the one that drives off a cliff?

During the boring parts of this movie, I played a game I made up that I called “Same or Different.” For example, in one of the earlier Bourne movies, our hero, the once-amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) grabbed a limited-use anonymous cell phone for a particularly clever maneuver. In this one, he grabs a small tracking device handily left out in a bowl like peanuts at a bar for happy hour. Same or different? Different because the first one was plausible and this one was ridiculous.

The earlier films had exceptionally well-staged fight scenes that felt like real people who get out of breath and hurt each other and jockey for advantage. In the first moments of this film, in addition to completely unnecessary jumps between five different locations around the world for no purpose, he knocks out an enormous professional fighter with one punch. Same or different? Same answer as above. And if we distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys by how much collateral damage they inflict on the world — how many innocent bystanders get killed, the answer here is more same than different.

There are franchise films made for fan service and then there are those that do not even service the fans, are merely a cash grab, and retroactively devalue the franchise.

This is a movie that asks us to believe that the head of the CIA and a Mark Zuckerberg-young titan of the world’s coolest social media company, a sort of cross between Google and Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat, decide to have a conversation of the utmost secrecy in a posh Washington DC restaurant, the kind where everyone eavesdrops on the big shots at the next table, especially reporters, politicians, and Hill staffers.

The first three Bourne films transcended the action/spy genre with a gritty, almost intimate feel far from the glossiness of James Bond, and with an expanding, deepening storyline that, as the then-LA Times critic Manohla Dargis said, began with the existential in “Identity” (Who am I?), extended to the moral in “Supremacy” (What did I do?). With the third film, the question of culpability extended to the larger “I” of the government: Who are we and what have we done? We will put aside for the moment the non-Bourne “Bourne,” which mistakenly went in the direction of a secret government program that was more “Captain America” than Bourne, with a mysterious ability-enhancing drug that removed the somber reality that resonated with the era of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib. There is plenty to explore and attempt to expiate now, and the movie tries to touch on contemporary issues explored in far more compelling — and terrifying — terms in documentaries like Alex Gibney’s “We Steal Secrets” and “Zero Days.” It just doesn’t do anything interesting with them while it is piling improbable motivations and preposterous situations almost as high as the carnage and wrecked cars.

Parents should know that this film has constant spy-related action-style peril and violence, many characters injured and killed including many innocent bystanders, themes of government corruption, and some strong language.

Family discussion: Who should decide the balance between privacy and security and how much information about those decisions should be public? What real-life events inspired this story?

If you like this, try: the other “Bourne” films and “Zero Days”

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Central Intelligence

Posted on June 16, 2016 at 5:22 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for crude and suggestive humor, some nudity, action violence and brief strong language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, scenes in bar
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended action-style violence, characters injured and killed, some disturbing images and sounds and torture
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	June 17, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	September 26, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01H4FJQ2G

There’s not much intelligence of any kind, central or otherwise, in this silly spy comedy, but what did you expect from a movie based on the sight gag of pairing man mountain former WWE star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson with pocket-sized pepperpot comic Kevin Hart? But its good-natured script by Ike Barinholtz, David Stassen, and director Rawson Marshall Thurber and the pleasure of watching the appealing stars enjoying themselves make it work.

Hart, something of a straight man for a change, plays Calvin, a one-time high school all-star voted Most Likely to Succeed, now an accountant working in a building with a huge inflated gorilla in front of it, and just passed over for promotion. He adores his wife, Maggie (“The Game’s” Danielle Nicolet), but is disappointed in himself. His wife wants him to go to couples therapy, but he is reluctant. “Black people don’t go to therapy. We go to the barbershop. Or we watch the movie ‘Barbershop.'”

Just before the 10th high school reunion he has refused to attend, he hears via Facebook from a classmate now known as Bob Stone (Johnson), who lists his “likes” as unicorns, cinnamon pancakes, and guns. In high school he was known as Robby. He was very overweight and awkward. Bullies grabbed him in the locker room shower and threw into the gym naked in front of the whole class. Calvin was the only one who was kind to him, handing him his letter jacket to cover up.

Now Bob is handsome and muscular, but not intimidating because he is wearing a unicorn t-shirt, a front-facing fannypack, and jorts. It seems all he wants from Calvin is a chance to thank him.

But then he punches out some bullies in the bar. He’s really good at it. And then he asks Calvin to help him with a “forensic accounting problem.” He asks to spend the night on Calvin’s fold-out couch (Maggie does not seem to be around). It’s a little weird, but then it gets scary. The next morning the CIA shows up because, according to Agent Pamela Harris (Amy Ryan, playing it very straight), Bob Stone is a traitor and a threat to national security who is about to deliver some very dangerous computer codes to the highest bidder.

All of this is just to set up a zany series of chases, shoot-outs, captures, and escapes, with a terrified Calvin trying to figure out who is telling the truth and stopping in the middle for many, many pop culture references, a marriage counseling session, and a visit to the ringleader of the guys who bullied Bob in high school (Jason Bateman).

The good spirits and anti-bullying message are sullied by some uncomfortably unkind “humor,” especially concerning a surprise cameo appearance that consists only of her being swept away by Johnson’s body and having crossed eyes. I’m pretty sure that punching a bully is not the message of empowerment that we should be getting here. But they’re no more serious about the message than they are about the storyline. This movie is about hanging out with Johnson and Hart as they goof on their own personas, and that is silly fun.

Parents should know that the film includes some comic nudity (bare tushes), potty humor, strong language, and extended action-style violence with torture and some disturbing sounds and images. Characters are injured and killed.

Family discussion: What is the best way to prevent bullying? Why didn’t Calvin achieve what he thought he would?

If you like this, try: “Spy” and the original “The In-Laws”

Trailer: Central Intelligence

Posted on March 23, 2016 at 8:00 am

It looks a little bit “The In-Laws,” a little bit “Spy,” and a lot every Kevin Hart movie ever made, but it also looks like it might be fun.

Trailer: “Criminal” with Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, and Ryan Reynolds

Posted on February 12, 2016 at 8:01 am

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Spectre

Posted on November 5, 2015 at 5:52 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence, some disturbing images, sensuality and languag
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Spy-style action violence with chases, shootouts, and explosions, characters injured and killed, torture, suicide
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 6, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	February 8, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B018WXLFSM

I thought “Skyfall” was the best Bond film ever, from the Adele theme song to the storyline that literally brought Bond (Daniel Craig) home. “Spectre” picks up where “Skyfall” left off, M (Dame Judi Dench) dead, the headquarters destroyed, the future of the double-O program in jeopardy. If this chapter, reportedly Craig’s last as Bond, is not up to the “Skyfall” level, it is still a solid entry in this series, more than half a century since the elegantly attired agent with a license to kill first appeared on screen.

The opening scene is brilliantly staged by returning director Sam Mendes. It takes place in Mexico City, in the midst of the Day of the Dead celebration and parade. Skeletons and signifiers of mortality are everywhere. An masked man with a man bun (so he must be a bad guy) passes by. Another masked man seems to be paying attention only to the beautiful woman he is escorting, but we can tell by the elegantly tailored suit that this must be Bond and therefore he is paying attention to everything. Sure enough soon he is spying, shooting, and chasing in one bravura shot that takes him through the crowd and the parade and into a fight inside a swooping helicopter.

Great beginning! And then we go into the credit sequence, which is pretentious and silly, with a sub-par song from Sam Smith. Ah, well.

It continues along those lines, with some set pieces that are exactly what we want from a Bond film, but other elements that show the uneasy bridge the Broccoli family, which controls the franchise, is trying to develop between the late 20th century Bond (Grace Jones! Space! Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist named Christmas! Infomercial level product placement!) and the grittier, more down-to-earth geopolitics of the 21st century, whether on screen (the Bourne series) or in the news (9/11). The film raises the question both in its storyline and in its presentation about whether the era of the shaken-not-stirred martini drinker who never carries a suitcase but always seems to have a dinner jacket on hand is over.

The dinner jacket, the beautiful women who find Bond irresistible, the martini, the cool car, the exotic locations, and the guns and gadgets are all there. A nice twist is that the car was designed for another agent, so Bond has no idea what the various buttons do. And the new gadget actually assigned to him is below the technology level of Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. The gadgets that matter here are lines of code, and in this movie they serve as the MacGuffin as well. All of that works, though there were some snickers in the crowd during a brief pause in the action where Bond and the new Bond Girl (Lea Seydoux) get all dressed up for dinner on a train. The cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema finds a nice consistency through all of the globe-hopping ports of call, with lots of white space around our increasingly isolated hero. Craig, as he has done in all of his Bond films, gives a performance of depth as well as charm. He faces some choices with moral complexity, especially when he meets with a former adversary, and it is intriguing to see how he thinks them through. The somber tone is Bourne-ish, but the storyline teeters too close to recent stories like the last “Mission Impossible” and even “Captain America: Winter Soldier.” The final resolution exemplifies what is best and worst about the film, taking the “Skyfall” revelations about his past further, but going completely overboard with a brilliant villainous strategist who puts way too much time into an elaborate trap. And an otherwise sensible Bond girl who picks a very bad moment to discuss the relationship.

“Bond will return,” we are reassured once again at the end of the film. And by then we’re already looking forward to the next reboot.

Parents should know that this film has extended and graphic scenes of action-style spy violence with many crashes, explosions, chases and shootouts. There is a suicide and and some torture, with characters injured and killed, as well as some strong language, some sexual references and situations, and alcohol.

Family discussion: Who should decide what information is available to government agencies? How did childhood trauma affect three of the main characters?

If you like this, try: “Skyfall” and some of the Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan Bond films