Who let Sandra Bullock in my Minion movie?

The Minions might be my guilty pleasure. They are stupid, unredeeming, relentlessly pointless characters who were created to cute-up the mostly despicable Despicable Me franchise. Here they star in an awful prequel filled with awful characters, and all I can do is smile with delight. Because Minions!

These little pet characters in their blue overalls and yellow pill-like bodies, their unintelligible gibberish of a spoken language that sounds like a mix-up at the Rosetta Stone factory, their squeaky optimism shrouded in child-like innocence … they are very hard creatures to not like, although Minions does its best to test your limits. 

The film is an origin story for the lovable henchmen, who previously served (and stole the show from) supervillain Gru in two other films. In the opening credits, we learn that the Minions are their own species, one that evolved in the shadows of greater beasts from the time they were single-celled protozoa through the Jurassic period and right into the age of man. In the opening sequence, it’s revealed they were henchmen for a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a caveman, Dracula and Napoleon — and each time they failed miserably.

The Minions end up in a snow cave, where life is not the same without a master to serve in evil. Kevin, Stuart and Bob volunteer to leave the cave to search for their new boss, and once again restore order to the Minion species. The three explorers eventually land in New York City and it’s 1968, a great time for crooks, there was even one in the White House. Through casual mistakes and happy coincidences — the universe shines bright on these dopey characters — the Minion trio learn of Villain-Con, a convention for nefarious evildoers. Certainly, they think, they can find a new boss to serve there.

Villain-Con could have been it’s own movie entirely, with countless booths of crime gadgets and criminal empires conducting job interviews, but the film spends two short sequences there until it bounces away with Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), who enlists the Minions to steal the Queen of England’s royal crown. This is where Minions falls apart. 

Kevin, Stuart and Bob — and Bob’s tiny stuffed animal Tim — break into the Tower of London, hypnotize three stripping Beefeaters, tear through London on a stagecoach and a grappling suit, and eventually crash land at the Sword in the Stone, which sets the rest of the film into motion in an unpredictable and mostly blah sorta way. 

Minions is not high art here, I know that. But it literally could have went anywhere it wanted. The African Serengeti, time traveling, Venus, an office park in Toledo ... anywhere. It begins in primordial soup and quickly features dinosaurs, vampires and a caveman with a primitive flyswatter. How and why this silly film decided to go with this route, of all the routes out there, is a question that will puzzle me. It’s just not interesting, mostly because it requires us to believe that Scarlet Overkill would aim her wrath at three characters that did exactly what she asks of them. She tells them to steal the crown, and they do, and then she goes all supervillain on her supervillain henchmen for no other reason than the plot demands it. Gru wasn’t written much better, but at least he had more of an arc. 

One of the problems here is clearly Bullock, who is not a voice actor and who was added to the cast list because movie executives still think little kids care about celebrity voices. Kids don’t, and guess what, most adults don’t either. I would much rather listen to some unknown professional voice actor do this than someone whose name looks good on a poster. Bullock phones it in, and Minions devotes so much of the second half to her that it’s aggravating. I just want more Minions. How hard is that? Apparently very hard.

There are still some choice gags here, including brief scenes involving a faked moon landing, The Beatles on Abbey Road, and a news reporter who calls the Minions “bald, jaundiced children.” A stop-motion sequence, or a scene made to look like stop motion animation, is a fun addition. The soundtrack is simply perfect, with hits by the Turtles, the Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Beatles and other great era-appropriate bands. I appreciate how the title characters aren’t really that evil, and are genuinely kind and compassionate little creatures — if only they could find fulfillment in some other career. 

I love these little characters. I wish they had a better movie to call their own.

When the heroes become the villains

“We don’t want to be doing this,” the man in the mask says as he looks at the camera crew documenting him. “If we could we would have normal jobs, like you guys.” And then he and other men in masks, assault rifles slung around their necks, start making meth in the Mexican desert. 

Cartel Land is an unnerving documentary about the way the drug trade, in particular the Mexican drug cartels, are ripping apart worlds north and south of the border. On the north side, we are shown America’s self-appointed border protectors, an armed militia of conspiracy nuts and soldier of fortune types who watch Sean Hannity while they clean their guns, sharpen their knives and mumble about conspiracies in their soup. They keep saying they’re not racist, but then say what can only be interpreted as racist opinions.

The meat of this film takes place south of the border, where a tall gray-haired doctor named José Manuel Mireles has had enough of the cartels and their wanton cruelty, including one particularly awful massacre in which 13 men, women, children and babies are killed after a lime grower refused to pay cartel protection money. Mireles jumps into action in the southern state of Michoacan, where the Knights Templar Cartel has reigned over the people. Enough is enough, he says. He tours through villages and gives a heartfelt plea: join us to rise up against the cartel so we can take back our towns. And people join him. 

Cartel Land depicts the uprising with a patriotic zeal, with convoys of armed young men bouncing through the Mexican streets, manning checkpoints at the village edges, and raiding cartel members’ homes. Some of the men are skilled fighters, and look the part with body armor, advanced weaponry and communications equipment. One man wears a holster that holds a nickel-plated revolver with a pearl handgrip — it’s the Wild West. Other fighters are just kids, their tiny hands comically out of place on oversized pistols and AK-47s. 

Through diligent patrolling, cartel raids and tight security, Mireles’ paramilitary defense force succeeds in driving out Knights Templar members. When the Mexican government gets wind of armed groups maintaining order, it sends the army to confront Mireles and his group. Soldiers disarm the ragtag defenders, but the townspeople hit the streets in protest of the army, who they say are in cahoots with the cartels. The crowd grows so big and so angry, the army returns the guns and drives away. “What happens here is in your hands,” a top-ranking soldier tells Mireles.

These events are exciting and moving, but Matthew Heineman’s film doesn’t let you off the hook that easily, though. It portrays these events with a hint of malice, with just a slight suggestion that something more diabolical might be at work here. In one scene, we see the good doctor tell another man to question, and likely torture, a known drug member. “Get everything you can out of him and put him in the ground,” Mireles says in the shadows of a roadside checkpoint. Later scenes seem to hint that the raids aren’t linked to cartel members, but to people the defense force wants to rob. After one raid, armed men ransack the house and leave with electronics and stacks of clothing still on hangers.

The turning point came for me during a daytime raid that nabbed a man that supposedly fired on the town’s police force. As the man is being hauled away, his family pleads with the men in tears to let him go. His daughter threatens to kill herself. It seems unlikely that the man would fire on anyone with his family in the car, right? But then he also has a big luxurious car, designer clothes, what might be a gang tattoo that has been disfigured, and one man notices his skin is too smooth for hard labor? Maybe he is a cartel lieutenant. So much is unknown, but the man is hauled away to a detention center where the screams of men can be heard piercing through the concrete hallways. 

Cartel Land is essentially a Batman story. It’s about vigilantes, their origins and their undoings. Remember that line from The Dark Knight: “Die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It’s the only possible outcome here for Mireles and his defense force, which eventually becomes exactly what it was created to fight, a cartel. 

Heineman captures all this beautifully, with shots that seem almost too good to be true — guns hanging out car windows, an apparition-like shape emerging from smoke produced during a meth cook and numerous gunfights in Mexican villages. I think the film could be a little more focused, especially with the mostly unnecessary segments north of the border. It has a twist ending that feels a little manipulative, but is still bonkers in how it changes everything we just witnessed. 

This is a fascinating and polished documentary that reveals how complicated the war on drugs has been, is now and forever will be.

Book of Genisys sets back Terminator franchise

Cheering for the villain is only called for in extreme cases, but here, with the woefully spelled Terminator Genisys, all I can say is: Go Skynet!

Yes, Skynet — the sentient robot army that becomes self aware, nukes mankind and then enslaves the survivors in futuristic death camps — deserves your cheers and untethered adoration if only because it’s the second best way to protest the existence of this clunky hunk of sequel. The best way is to not see it at all, but Terminator fans have taken abuse before (see Terminator 3) and they’ll do it again here.

Terminator Genisys is a big dumb movie. From its big dumb title all the way down — it’s dumb at a cellular level. It’s so stupid that one movie couldn’t contain all it’s idiocy, so it had to reach back into its own filmography to fondle with the earlier movies in an inebriated stupor. It plays this up like an endearing tribute or homage, but it feels more like aggravated assault.

We begin with Kyle Reese, who you’ll recall is the future soldier sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor, mother of the leader of the human rebellion, in 1984’s The Terminator. After infiltrating a Terminator time travel base in 2029, Reese is sent back a handful of decades to what should be James Cameron’s first movie, but instead he finds an alternate timeline that now is a convergence of both The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, including another blank-faced liquid metal T-1000. In the future, somewhere between “almost defeated” and “defeated” Skynet realizes that the humans had out-Back to the Future’d them, so they just start sending Terminators everywhere, or everywhen, which is how Genisys acknowledges its cinema roots and also exploits them. 

The movie stars Jai Courtney, who opens the whole damn picture with the most unnecessary and heavy-handed exposition-filled narration — it makes Harrison Ford’s theatrical Blade Runner voiceover sound downright peppy. He plays Reese, rebel leader John Connor’s right-hand man, and also his younger father, which only makes sense in the Terminator universe. Sarah Connor, John’s soon-to-be mother (stay with me!), is played by Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clark, a feisty little robot killer with a gun taller than she is by at least a foot. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only returning actor, and here he plays several Terminators, including one fresh out of the Skynet bubble wrap (it’s a naked stunt double with a CGI Arnold mask). The main Terminator, called Pops, is showing his age, a point that is explained away by saying that Terminators age, which seems to go against canon, but whatever. 

These three go tearing through 1984, and then time-travel to 2017, where Skynet is ready to launch Genisys, a computer system that gadget-hungry modern-dayers paw over in gleeful anticipation. I wasn’t really sure what the product does, and I’m assuming it’s some kind of Siri-like appointment scheduler — Genisys: “Today is your salon appointment. And tomorrow nuclear armageddon.” The subtext here is that Skynet is a lot like Apple, another company with a legion of devoted fans and enough hardware to link the world (nukes and all) in web of disharmony. But the joke falls dreadfully flat. 

The film is largely a series of despondent chase sequences, each more mindless than the one that preceded it, including one that begins with a liquid Terminator materializing out of nowhere, and another that ends with a crashed helicopter arriving at the intended destination faster than a non-crashed helicopter. A school bus chase on the Golden Gate Bridge has both a school bus and a bridge of golden gates and yet has a climax so utterly boring that it has to end with the COPS theme song to jazz it up. The chases go nowhere and accomplish nothing, and they only serve as interludes to bigger set pieces in spark factories and generic server warehouses. Recall the build-up in the earlier films: Terminators doing their detective work, hunting for leads, killing other Sarah Connors, waving photos of John around at the mall dressed as a cop … all that nuance and prelude to action is gone. It’s traded in for lines like, “Oh no, he’s behind us,” and “faster, faster” and then 22 minutes of vehicular destruction. But how did the Terminator get there? Where did he come from? Where are you driving? What is even happening? I couldn’t hear an answer in the noise.

Say what you will about James Cameron and his well-documented eccentricities, but he was, and still is, a visual storyteller of the highest caliber. He knew how to edit his films, how to pace action, how to use film’s complex grammar to create visual coherence, and he knew how to make grand science fiction masterpieces out of very simple ideas. Genisys is not simple, and I’m not just talking about the time travel. It’s a sloppy mess all over, with plot holes, dead ends, choppy editing, characters of little significance, dialogue that is recited (never spoken), and it tinkers with the franchise in such a major way that it feels malignant and terminal. There is no coming back from what this film sets in motion.

Cameron’s T1 and T2 are action juggernauts, and nothing was going to touch them, so I’m not faulting Genisys for failing to top those classics. But it’s just as sloppy as Terminator 3, if not more so, and that says a lot because that movie was all over the place. And people like to dump on Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation, but despite their obvious faults both films made noteworthy deviations in Terminator lore: T3 showed us that the robot apocalypse was unavoidable, no matter how many Arnolds came back, and Salvation ditched the time travel elements completely to just focus on John Connor and what made him so important to the resistance. Genisys does its damndest to undo the whole franchise by reaching way back to fumble around with the very origins of what Cameron created. It’s so unfortunately ill-conceived it feels blasphemous. And if the franchise keeps degrading at this rate, we’re two movies away from late-night Terminator infomercial. 

Now, to be fair, Cameron has come out in support of this movie, which seems odd, but I will take him at his word. Fans, though, don’t owe Genisys any lip service and I think they’ll see through the film’s wanton disregard for what made the franchise great to begin with — impressive visual storytelling and its straightforward science fiction plot, both of which are muddied here. Director Alan Taylor, so good with everything he directs on HBO, should stick to television, where plot and characters aren’t steamrolled into the landscape. He was dealt a hard blow when the marketing team revealed the plot twist (spoiler alert, sorta) that John Connor (Jason Clarke) had turned into a Terminator. But problems began long before that. They began when the film decided the rest of the franchise was fair game and then — and this is my key argument — didn’t even attempt to make a film that could match the power of the first two. 

The last time I saw a franchise fall this hard it involved crystal skulls and Shia LaBeouf Tarzan swinging with monkeys. Franchises should stop while they’re ahead.

And, hail Skynet.

The Overnight bares its soul and more

“This is California. Maybe this is what parties are like?”

It’s that refrain that keeps a married couple stuck in a Los Angeles house for an increasingly awful and awkward overnight dinner party, one that involves breastfeeding how-to videos, paintings depicting “portals” into the human body, red-light massage parlors, and not just one but two prosthetic penises. 

We aren’t supposed to know they’re prosthetics, because the actors are depicting nudity with a special effect, but it’s obvious they are because, well, the pale color, the stiff rubbery flop, and the ’70s-era pubic hair growth. Does it sound like I’m an expert? Well, I am, because I’ve seen Patrick Brice’s The Overnight, which stars four people and two rubber stunt dicks.

Before these faux phalli come out, we have to back up to the previous afternoon: Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling) are in a park with their young son, and they meet proto-hipster Kurt (Jason Schwartzman), who invites them over for dinner. Kurt has a son about the same age, and Alex and Emily are new to the area, so they agree. At Alex’s beautiful home, they meet his wife Charlotte (Judith Godrèche), and they settle in for what appears to be a lovely evening.

If you can sense this going south quickly, then a gold star for you. After the children tucker themselves out and fall asleep, the evening slowly tips into the wild and weird. First wine, then more wine, then pot and then before you know it Kurt is showing Charlotte’s acting video, which involves a nurse manipulating her bare breasts to demonstrate a breast pump. Kurt smiles up at the screen like he’s watching Citizen Kane. Alex and Emily’s jaws are in their laps. 

But that’s just the beginning as Kurt and Charlotte slowly unravel their complex and often sordid lives in front of their consistently shocked party guests, who try to leave several times but get roped into sticking around. Eventually they are skinny dipping in the pool, and the film is not shy to show us gratuitous, albeit fake, male nudity. The joke here is that Kurt is well endowed and Alex is not, but one pep talk later and Alex is flaunting his little guy with an exuberant glee.

This strange behavior — and don’t get me started on Kurt’s X-rated paintings of human voids — unlocks buried fears, anxiety and desires within Alex and Emily, who find themselves less shocked in their hosts and more surprised in each other and their revealing actions. I kept waiting for Kurt and Charlotte to be a more malevolent force, but they are mostly good people, just utterly confused about life, love and each other. And Alex and Emily are hiding repressed feelings that glow white-hot once unearthed. After one particular revealing moment, Alex says, “I feel like I just gave birth to myself.” 

This is a strange, strange movie. And it gets stranger the longer it crashes itself into the screen. I can’t say it all works, but it has a kind spirit and a good heart. It’s certainly made better by the four leads, who maintain their chemistry across this one bizarre evening. Scott and Schilling are especially great because they have to contain these bewildered people, who should flee in terror but stick around out of sheer curiosity.

The Overnight is not for everyone, but it has its charms. It also has two fake penises that hijack the movie.