Disney goofs with awful Maleficent

And this is why you don’t needlessly tinker with franchises.

Never before in Disney’s history — at least, not its theatrical history — has a movie been so poorly constructed, so rattled, so lost, so hopelessly written and so inconceivably misguided. From top to bottom, Maleficent is a wreck heaped on more wreck, a smoldering ruin of what was once 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Disney has been sitting pretty the six months since Frozen blew out the windows, and now comes this awful setback.

Fairy tales are known for their simplicity, but you’d never guess that here as a simple premise — an enchanted sleep, “true love’s kiss” and a demonic sorceress — is turned on its head and punted into the backfield. Angelina Jolie stars as the fairy Maleficent, a name that will challenge even the most gifted public speakers. I think the syllable-busting name is pronounced mall-eff-iss-cent, though it’s hard to tell since each character says it differently.

The winged and horned fairy lives in a tree kingdom called James Cameron’s Avatar, which is right next door to a human kingdom of stone and iron, presumably called King’s Landing based on its number of mindlessly cruel old white dudes. One day she falls in love with the human Stefan (District 9's Sharlto Copley), who is clearly just bored with life. When Stefan doesn’t show much interest, and later hacks off her wings, she goes on an epic bender that culminates into her publicly cursing an innocent baby in its cradle. If she had friends they would stage an intervention at this point. Anyway, you’ve heard the curse before: before her 16th birthday, the baby will prick her finger on spindle and fall into a death-like sleep. The movie gets that part right, though not much else.

This plot is a mess, one that begins with a 25-minute voice-over introduction and then flops forward in flailing lunges for the next hour. Once the film establishes Maleficent is a wounded lovelorn fairy, it doesn’t take long to make her a villain, first with a big Lord of the Rings-style battle and then with her creepy stalking of the baby, Aurora, as she grows up in a nearby forest. These Aurora scenes are unintentionally hilarious as Maleficent lingers outside windows and behind trees for 16 years. Other witches have glowing orbs or swirling cauldrons that will show them the things they want to see; Maleficent has to sneak through the bushes in black latex bodysuits and velvet robes. And with those horns, she better hope it’s not elk season.

Making matters much worse is the comedy relief, three fluttering bobbleheaded fairies played by Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton and Juno Temple. Of the dozen or so jokes they were given — including throwing flour, fidgeting with blue butterflies, and lots of ditzy cluelessness — only about two ever land a hit as the others fizzle into oblivion. Their heads are digitally cut and pasted onto little pixy bodies in a terrifying special effect right out of 2002. Another noteworthy side character is Maleficent’s henchman Diaval, a shapeshifting crow. He’s played by Sam Riley, who bears so much resemblance to another feminine-featured fantasy hero that his Rent-a-Bloom tag is showing.

Even Jolie, an Academy Award-winning actress, struggles. Aside from a few sequences of giddy delight as she hams it up, Jolie has the loosest grasp on the limp material. Her tortured screams early in the movie are especially cringey and in need of some overdubbing. Much of her role is about holding uncomfortable poses for dramatically long periods of time in forests, behind bushes, hovering with her wings high above the clouds, or in Stefan’s lifeless castle. And speaking of poor Stefan, this guy is simply the worst. First he snubs his lady and then the flubs roll one after another: he starts a pointless war, marries another lady, ditches his baby in a forest, spends more time burning spindles than being a father, and then he tries to kill Maleficent after she’s saved the day. This character literally does nothing right for an entire movie.

What irks me most about Maleficent is the dangerous branding that Disney is imposing on its vintage franchises. The premise here is that the evil sorceress isn’t all that evil; in fact, she’s the hero who’s been misunderstood all these years. By recasting the villain as the hero, Disney is invalidating its own movies.

What’s next, a movie about a gentle wildlife enthusiast who heads deep into the woods to shoot a deer to feed his starving family? They could call it Bambi Killer.

 

 

Laughs, deaths equal out in Western comedy

Filling in the long-dormant void of absurdist cowboy humor left by Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, Seth MacFarlane’s equally batty A Million Ways to Die in the West goes far at convincing us Saddles’ unchallenged dominance might be ready for a toppling. Just not quite far enough with this lesser, though still amusingly irreverent, western.

If anything, MacFarlane — the star, writer and director — restrains himself. If you recall, Blazing Saddles ended when the cowboys spilled out of the picture and into adjacent movies. A Million Ways to Die in the West seems poised for a similar feat, but then it reins back its galloping absurdity even as Neil Patrick Harris, mid-duel, fills a ten-gallon hat with 12 gallons of you’d-rather-not-know. 

The Family Guy and Ted creator is a curious actor. He enters the Old west scenery as an oddity: suspenders, vest, impeccably smooth plastic-like skin, an anime-like tuft of hair above his forehead. He looks like he’s headed to an audition for Pinocchio, not The Searchers. And then that voice — it booms like he’s about to advertise for American-made pickup trucks. 

MacFarlane plays Albert, a sheepherder with some confidence issues. In the opening moments he loses his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) because he’s perceived as weak and not manly enough for the West. This is the mantra of the movie: the Old West is so dangerous that literally anything can kill you. And if it doesn’t kill you — perhaps just wounds or maims — then the doctor will finish you off with his bizarre frontier treatments. We meet the doctor later when he lets a bluejay peck at an open wound on Albert’s face. 

Albert isn’t a coward. He just values life, which is why he doesn’t take any risks, although he does have a few too many drinks in the saloon and then tries to ride home — “Don’t drink and horse,” his friends warn him. Later, Albert goes to the town fair, where an escaped bull skewers a man (Mr. Belding!) like a hot dog over a roasting fire. “People die at the fair,” he confirms to himself after a photographer’s flash lamp explodes, igniting the photographer and his two subjects. Two nearby cowpunchers “put out” the fire by shooting the burning victims. Yeah, people die at the fair. 

The beautiful part of this deadly motif is that it allows MacFarlane to dredge up every western cliché, if only to lampoon it to the bar in his cynical tone and style. Gunfights, whorehouses, snakebites, horses, saloons, sheriffs, preachers, American Indians … if it’s been in a western then it’s desecrated here with MacFarlane’s vitriolic wit. Some of the jokes crack like thunder, including one where a man pulls out a dollar bill and the gathered townspeople bow their heads out of respect to a denomination they have not been privileged to see in the flesh. “Take your hat off, boy, that’s a dollar bill,” a father yells at his son. 

Other jokes land with thuds, including a scene with a pot-laced cookie, Islamic death chants, a sheep with “retardation,” and an unfortunate line about women and the size of their butts in frontier fashion. White guys opening jokes with “If I were a black guy I would …” rarely goes well. Racial humor comes up several times, including at the fair where Albert plays a game called Runaway Slaves, with century-old imagery that is still shocking today. The arcade game turns up in the post-credit sequence with some vindication, but it’s a risky joke that almost derails West’s forward momentum. 

The movie is all fun and games until Clinch (Liam Neeson) and his posse ride into town with the intention of killing and robbing before moving onto the next town. Little humor is written into this villain, which is such a shame considering that Neeson, with that classical cowboy face, seems like a sport for MacFarlane’s twisted sense of humor. Charlize Theron plays Anna, Clinch’s wife and Albert’s new love interest. Theron’s Anna is written some jokes, but Clinch is not — he’s a completely serious character in an otherwise wacky movie. It’s very strange. 

Giovanni Ribisi and Sarah Silverman play a deeply religious couple in the middle of a very chaste courtship, even though she plays a rather accomplished prostitute who has sex with “10 men … on a slow day” but won’t go all the way with her man because God forbids it. Silverman is appropriately foul mouthed, and Ribisi feigns timid embarrassment — they are hilarious performances. Neil Patrick Harris plays a early douchebag who works in the town’s Mustachery; he has a largely perfect song and dance number about facial hair. The film has many fart jokes, including four in the first 20 minutes, but Harris will out-gross everything late in the movie with his painful hat maneuver. Keep your eyes open for many cameos, including Ryan Reynolds, Ewan McGregor, Gilbert Gottfried, Bill Maher, Wes Studi and Christopher Lloyd pulling a John-Hurt-in-Spaceballs appearance. 

As rewarding as this western-themed comedy is, A Million Ways to Die in the West could have gotten away with so much more. The rambunctious farce, a horse hair shy of an outright spoof, should have went bonkers, yet came up a day late, but not — hats off — a dollar short.

Celebrate July early with crime stunner

Modern crime movies don’t get much pulpier than Jim Mickle’s wickedly sinister Cold in July.

This rapturous and sweaty thriller, about a man’s journey into his own fear and obsession, crept up on me in an ambush of filmmaking and storytelling. It’s an electric film, one of my favorites of the summer. 

It opens on big boxy cars, plastic coffeemakers, acid-washed jeans, floral-printed couches and rotary phones. “East Texas, 1989,” the screen says, and it feels it. Little time is wasted: Richard (Michael C. Hall) is asleep in bed when he hears a noise in the living room. He loads a revolver and creeps out in his pajamas. An intruder stands at the coffee table. A shot rings out. The intruder drops.

The police arrive and determine the killing was in self defense, but that doesn’t settle well with Russel (Sam Shepard), the intruder’s madman of a father, who was just released from prison. Soon, Richard and his wife and son are being terrorized by Russel — telephone hang-ups, bullets sprinkled in their house, break-ins. The police can’t do anything because there is little proof. An overnight stakeout reveals a terrible surprise, but it doesn’t end Russel’s campaign of terror.

Now, at this point I thought I knew what Cold in July was all about. But this is no Cape Fear, a point that is made abundantly clear after a huge twist remaps the landscape of Mickle’s crime universe. The twist is so delicious that I won’t be spoiling it here, but know that it is one of two major plot twists the film whips you through in its fiendish tale.

Drenched in delicate nuance and so tightly woven I thought it would pop, Cold in July is based on a book by Joe Lansdale, and adapted to the screen by Mickle and Nick Damici, who plays a police officer. The script might be the genetic offspring — or from within the same psychosphere — of HBO’s True Detective and a movie like Winter’s Bone, or even David Gordon Green’s Undertow. It’s about men of low moral character, and how their actions bleed into the rest of the world.

The movie asks its audience to bite into some implausible plot developments that are almost too big to swallow, but the many payoffs more than make up for it. One payoff late in the movie has Richard, the suburban picture framer, shooting up at a man from the floor. Blood sprays upward coating a lightbulb and bathing the scene in a deep crimson. Rarely is a man’s descent into violence more explicitly shown then here in this scene, as the blood literally changes the color of the world.

Blood is a frequent motif. Early in the film, at a point I knew Cold in July was something very special, Richard and his wife clear out the bloody couch from their run-in with the intruder. After moving the heavy load outside, they drop to the floor in exhaustion and look up at the blood splatter on their once-clean wall. The act of killing a man has drained them, and left them a twisted new piece of artwork. 

Hall, so often wasted on Dexter’s repetitive plotlines and predictable meanderings, is given more to chew on here as the curious husband and father. Against his better judgment, Richard is propelled forward into the darkness; Hall plays it believably and effectively. Shepard is appropriately vile, even as his character grows more sympathetic as secrets are revealed. Don Johnson, so great now in his later years, turns up as a private detective that steals every scene he’s in.

This is a legitimate thriller with a sophisticated presentation and powerful characters. The summer’s tend to produce a lot of big-budget dreck; Cold in July is not part of that heap.

X-Men rights a decade of wrongs in one film

After six stupendously scattered X-Men movies, someone at Twentieth Century Fox finally straightened a paperclip and poked it into the back of this overcooked franchise. That much-needed hard reset is a refreshing development here in X-Men: Days of Future Past, a flail-free action bonanza that proves less is almost always more.

Right off the bat, you’ll notice there are fewer mutant superheroes. At first, though, it doesn’t feel that way as they are paraded out in their ridiculous outfits. There’s a fire guy, an ice guy, some sort of hawk man, a Thor clone, portal girl, metal dude and a mutant that needs to be charged like a cell phone before he goes into service. These are the future X-Men, the X-Kids perhaps, and they’re in trouble as giant robots descend on their corner of a futuristic wasteland. My expectations sunk as the film trotted out each character, introduced their superpower and then discarded them within a mindless action scene reminiscent of any action scene from any other X-Men movie — “More of the same,” I grumbled.

But then Days of Future Past jumped the rails and did something very risky: it went back in time. And it might have saved the entire franchise. The setup is rather simple, which is notable even in a film without time travel: Because of toxic mutant-human relations, an elite race of robotic future cops called Sentinels have been allowed to police the planet, which is now a gloomy apocalypse-strewn field of rubble. Our team of X-Kids have survived only because Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) has learned to take the group back in time in brief spurts.

When the real X-Men — Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry), Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and the reformed tag-along Magneto (Ian McKellen) — turn up, they hatch a plan to send Wolverine back much further in time to stop the events that lead up to worldwide catastrophe. Only Wolverine can go, because he’s basically immortal, a convenient superpower (especially when he only takes his claws out like three times). The plan is to stop a mutant-hating scientist before he builds the first Sentinel prototypes. It’s a Terminator mission, and it allows the film to switch gears and detour away from the trappings of the last films.

Wolverine is sent back to the 1970s, presumably not long after the events of X-Men: First Class, where he finds young Professor X (James McAvoy) and blue teddy bear Beast. Other notable mutants are young Magneto (Michael Fassbender), shapeshifting Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and the speedster Quicksilver, who can run so fast he can play ping pong with himself. Five mutants. That’s it. And it’s a perfect amount. 

Much of the drama in the plot comes from Professor X trying to convince Magneto that, while they’re enemies now, in the future they’ll be best buddies, and they have to unite to stop the world from sinking into an anti-mutant hysteria that will doom them all. Magneto, though, is a surly little bugger. Villainy just pours from him, and he can’t help it. We first meet him underneath the Pentagon, where he’s being held for the JFK assassination, which is likely a legitimate conspiracy theory according to someone somewhere.

His incarceration sets the stage for a break-out and what is ultimately the best scene of the film, and quite possibly the best from any X-Men movie. The scene stars Quicksilver (Evan Peters) as he zips through a Pentagon kitchen repositioning security guards, gently altering bullet trajectories and taste-testing airborne soup. The whole sequence, shot in extreme slow motion to show us Quicksilver’s time-bending speed, is scored to Jim Croce’s “Time In a Bottle.” The scene is a howler — the audience gave it a rousing round of applause and, for once, I felt compelled to join them — and it's easily worth the price of admission all by itself.

Other scenes, of Wolverine fighting the Sentinel prototypes and of Mystique doing her naked blue iguana kung-fu, aren’t as rapturous, but they serve their purposes. Fassbender and McAvoy are gifted actors, which is obvious as they split the seems on their respective characters. Magneto seems to be checking his watch until he can do his final-act supermove — hauling some really big piece of metal around for no reason whatsoever. This time he flies in a baseball stadium to drop over Richard Nixon’s White House. 

I’m not an X-Men fan. The previous movies were jumbles of bland characters, wandering plots, utterly stupefying comic minutiae, and horribly staged action centerpieces. X-Men: Days of Future Past doesn’t reinvent the wheel here, but it does not succumb to the problems of the previous films. The story is clean and concise, the characters and their motivations are easy to follow, the action is restrained and never zany, and the film ends in a way that allows for some very interesting possibilities for later entries in the X-Men story.

This movie seems to have righted a sinking ship, an exhilarating development for a franchise I had all but given up on. Until now.

 

Sandler slumps through African safari

Measuring one Adam Sandler movie against all the others is like ranking the world’s worst sewer systems, or death rows, or wars — the futility of that endeavor is just too vile to stomach.

Yet, here we are, with another tone-deaf Sandler movie that’s so awful you can’t help but get out a ruler to compare it to all that came before it: Mr. Deeds, Big Daddy, Little Nicky, Grown Ups or the brown standard, Jack & Jill, in which two Sandlers pummeled the life out of the theater’s real estate. 

Blended is no Jack & Jill, though it certainly aspired to be — a terrifying thought. The comedy begins with a set of jokes that do not give much hope for the rest of the film: a babysitter is blasted with a fire extinguisher that is likely filled with vanilla frosting, the perplexing phrase “like Weird Al starring in Weird Science,” and a gag that ends with someone saying “you should roofie her and shave her head.” Even the crickets were cringing.

The setup is that Jim (Sandler) and Lauren (Drew Barrymore) go on a terrible blind date, but the next day they score some discount tickets to Africa from a man who was going to take his five kids and girlfriend on a “blended familymoon.” Jim takes his three daughters and Lauren takes her two sons, and off they go to Africa. Where in Africa, though? I’m still not sure, because the movie never says. Hopefully director Frank Coraci knows Africa is a continent made of many countries, but that might be wishful thinking.

Making matters worse is Africa itself, which looks and sounds like one of those safari movies from the 1940s, with lots of ivory chairs and stuffed zebra heads. Coraci — whose comedy credentials include The Waterboy, Click and Zookeeper, an unholy trinity of cringe-worthy cinema — puts all his African characters in dashikis and then promptly gives up at portraying the culture or its people with any nuance or respect. Apparently, all of Africa is a theme park for white tourists. Blended isn’t overtly racist; it’s just obnoxiously negligent.

Jim and Lauren start out hating each other, first at their date (at a Hooters) and then during an embarrassing run-in at a pharmacy. Jim is there to get tampons for his daughter; Lauren is there to get porn for her son. It’s an interesting visit that ends with the pharmacist revealing something they teach in pharmacy school to never do. By the time they get to Africa, they’re still bickering, but it’s shortlived as the two fall in love amid scenes of rhino humping, warthog evisceration, and Terry Crews and his harmonizing a cappella group photo-bombing every scene. 

Sandler seems to have transferred his trademark rage onto the child actors, who channel Sandlerisms through comedy so unfortunate that I was secretly hoping Rob Schneider would pop up to slow the descending momentum. Hilary (Bella Thorne) plays the oldest daughter; her dad calls her Larry. She wears an awful pageboy haircut and boyish clothes, which spawns some uncomfortable transgender jokes. “All the kids think I’m a lesbian,” she says after she stuffs her training bra with some Dr. Scholl’s foot inserts. The middle daughter is called Espn (pronounced ess-pen), after Jim’s favorite TV channel. The youngest daughter makes it out mostly unscathed aside from a demonic little growl she gurgles out “in the name of Lucifer.”

Lauren’s boys have their own brand of issues, including the elder son, Brendan, the serial masturbator. There’s a recurring joke about him taping a picture of their babysitter onto his porn. This actor seems too young for jokes this crude. His brother spends much of the movie asleep so we can get repeated shots of Lauren bonking his head into walls and doors as she maneuvers his sleeping corpse into bed. 

This is Barrymore and Sandler’s third movie together after 50 First Dates and The Wedding Singer. No significant improvements are made on their chemistry, which can be gentle and rewarding at times. Like most Sandler movies, there is a tenderness hidden within key scenes — if only the jokes that lead into and out of it weren’t so tonally destructive. Mostly, Blended is just amateur and juvenile. It’s the kind of movie that names a character Dick so another character can say things like “I miss Dick so much” or “I can’t get enough Dick,” because that’s never been done before.

Sandler is an acquired taste, and American audiences are an acquiring bunch. The audience I saw the movie with howled in approval. Maybe it was the free movie, or maybe they’re just Sandler True Believers. Either way, Blended is a largely terrible comedy from my point of view. It made me miss Eddie Murphy in fat suits, Tyler Perry in drag, or Ryan Reynolds in anything. I guess I should be grateful it wasn't Jack & Jill.

Mischievous couple score big in goofy caper

Charm is a valuable currency in movies. Where action, humor and drama might be deficient, charm can swoop in and make a bankrupt film much more solvent.

That little feat happens several times in The Love Punch, a movie that frequently rewards your patience in its plodding plot and overacted gags. 

The film, written and directed by Joel Hopkins, is a slightly madcap comedy about white-collar banker Richard (Pierce Brosnan) and his ex-wife Kate (Emma Thompson) teaming back up many years after their divorce to go on a covert mission to rescue their stolen pensions from a swindling venture capitalist.

Brosnan and Thompson, James Bond and Nanny McPhee, play their roles as bickering children with long-healed wounds. These are mostly hammy performances — especially Thompson, who overacts in several agonizing scenes — although they’re occasionally very fresh and funny, like when the divorced couple share a tense dinner from across a courtyard; their conversation involves the comparing of cholesterol numbers.

The action takes the film to France, where their crook is going to be married to a sweet-natured French woman with a diamond that could double as a boat anchor. Spy-movie clichés get goofy makeovers, including car chases, elaborate heists, climbing fortress walls via grappling hooks and ropes, and the hijacking of some Texans’ identities. “Who are we now, the Pink Panther?” Thompson says as their stunts get wilder and more dangerous. 

Late in the film, Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie turn up as Kate’s neighbors and fellow wannabe spies. Spall’s character brings a gun to a dinner and, of course, everyone has to see it and point it until someone shoots a hole in wine barrel. These jokes feel old, but the giddy looks on everyone’s faces are light-hearted and fun. After they grapple their way up a castle wall, Imrie suggests they all break for lunch; she’s packed sandwiches into her scuba suit. In another scene, Brosnan orders the synchronizing of watches: the numbers said out loud are 7:28, 7:32, 7:32 and 6:30 — Spall’s face looks deeply, and hilariously, troubled at his misplaced hour. 

You can see the writing on the wall as the film draws closer to its finale: Richard and Kate have never gotten over each other. And their wanton mischief sparks new life in their dead romance. It’s a predictable turn, but one that works simply and effectively. The Love Punch is not a great comedy, but it has its occasional charms. And that goes a long way.