Review: Crazy Rich Asians

2018 might be the year that Hollywood finally figured out that representation is a great way to get overlooked audiences into the cinema, but they're not putting the big money into risky projects just yet. Much like this year's earlier big breakthrough Black Panther, this is about as solidly traditional an example of its chosen genre - in this case, the romantic-comedy - as you could ask for. But where Black Panther's superhero audience had another four or five films to choose from this year alone, if you're a fan of big lavish rom-coms featuring grown-ups this is pretty much it for 2018. And 2017. And 2016. And as far back as it takes until the last one of those Judd Apatow comedies that pretty much trashed the genre.

So this is really aimed at two under-served markets, but only one gets anything original: this is the first Hollywood film with an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club, and the total sidelining of any kind of white western experience is easily the most interesting thing going on here. The big cast means we get a variety of representation here too: there are plenty of comedy jerks and loud-mouths alongside the more restrained and noble characters, and while one subplot about a doomed marriage doesn't really have much of anything to do with the main story it does add some useful emotional texture to a rom-com which occasionally gets uncomfortably close to just saying "hey, being super rich really is awesome".

(to be fair, director Jon M. Chu does make spending massive amounts of money on everything look like a pretty good time)

The romance side of things is largely built around the classic rom-com trope of not giving either lead any real personality so the audience can project pretty much anything they like onto them. In this case American-born Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) is a professor specialising in game theory (as you do) who doesn't realise her boyfriend Nick (Henry Golding) belongs to an insanely wealthy family until they visit his hometown of Singapore for his best friend's wedding. Nick's personality is "occasionally shirtless nice guy" while she is "cheerful but slightly worried she's in over her head", but Wu and Golding have good chemistry together; they're a fun couple to watch.

This leaves the supporting cast to pick up the slack when it comes to being memorable and again, having a big cast is a definite plus - there's the broad comedy types (Awkwafina as Rachel's bestie steals just about every scene she's in), the serious confidants, the sneaky bitches, and Nick's mother (Michelle Yeoh), who is the real obstacle as far as their happily ever after goes. 

These days rom-coms live or die by the obstacles they can throw up in the lovers path, and she's an excellent one: having been constantly judged as inferior by her own mother-in-law, she's fully aware of the sacrifices any wife of her son will have to make to fit into the family and their world, and she simply (and with some justification) doesn't think a westerner will give up their freedom for the family's greater good.

It's this that makes Crazy Rich Asians more than just a slightly unsettling celebration of excess. After all, for all this is lauded as being ground-breaking, the core message is about as old Hollywood as it gets: money can't buy happiness.. Their great wealth comes with responsibilities that seem inconceivable in today's west; it's possible to imagine a billionaire US matriarch giving a possible daughter-in-law the cold shoulder in 2018, but not in a way that would gain her much sympathy. 

But here her argument is, at the very least, reasonable - and so when Rachel has to step up and fight for her love, it's a real battle. It's that culture clash, coming in a film that treats both cultures with respect, that gives the romance some grit. And it's that as much as the shirtless guys and fancy weddings that makes this film work: a love story without a struggle isn't much of a love story at all.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: The Happytime Murders

There is maybe one laugh to be had from the idea of children's puppets doing adult things and The Happytime Murders can't even get that right. It's not that a movie that features a puppet octopus "milking" a puppet cow somehow isn't depraved enough - it's that this movie acts like everyone watching it is totally invested in the idea of puppets as symbols of child-like innocence and wonder, and so putting puppets in adult situations is automatically hilarious. 

It's not. It's amazing how much is it not.

Most of the previous movies about children's characters doing adult things - Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Team America, and so on - got at least some mileage out of putting their children's characters in then-current mainstream adult movie genres. Unfortunately in 2018 there are no mainstream adult movie genres: making a puppet movie about superheroes would just be a regular superhero movie.

So the story is fresh out of 1987: ex-cop turned PI (what, no “puppet investigator” joke?) Phil Phillips (puppeteer Bill Barretta, who also provides the voice) finds himself tangled up in a string of murders seemingly targeting the former cast members of hit puppet sitcom The Happytime Gang, and is forced to work with his former partner Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy) – the cop who had him thrown off the force.

This buddy cop plot is the strongest part of the film, which shouldn't really be surprising as it's played absolutely straight. The whole "we've got to solve this mystery and also we hate each other" thing is pleasingly retro, McCarthy is decent as a pissed-off cop, Barretta has just the right amount of world-weariness for a worn down PI, and while the mystery does contain zero surprises it does keep the film moving along.

Oh wait, this is a movie about puppets having sex and getting their heads blown off; who cares about the plot?  Unfortunately this film, despite being made by Jim "Muppet" Henson's son, has access to a grand total of zero much-loved muppet characters and so has to come up with a crazy new bunch of puppets for us to care about. Only it doesn't bother: this film has put all its chips on betting that the audience will find hilarious the idea of a puppet - any puppet - doing adult things. This is not a good bet.

The result is a steady stream of puppets we are never given a single reason to care about being killed in briefly amusing (that is to say, graphic) fashion, while others do drugs (sugar is puppet drugs) and have sex, which is just two puppets flailing up against each other so don't get too excited. But you do get to see a puppet vagina in a Basic Instinct parody that turns out to be essential to solving the mystery. Well, not "you" - you're never going to see this movie.

It's a film full of characters we don't care about doing things we don't care about while making jokes that aren't funny (the old "asshole says what" joke is done multiple times like Wayne's World never happened) in between action sequences that aren't exciting: you'll have more fun putting your hand in a sock.

- Anthony Morris

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Review: The Meg

It takes a lot of skill to make a firmly forgettable film about a giant killer prehistoric shark running amok at a public beach. Blame Jason Statham: without him this wouldn't even be watchable, let alone something you might possible recall a week from now when looking at a picture of the ocean. "Didn't I see a shark movie recently?" you might think. You might even be right.

The story isn't exactly a pressing requirement but here goes: years ago professional underwater rescue guy Jonas Taylor (Statham) had a deep sea rescue interrupted by what he - and nobody else - believed was a giant shark. Now he's a washed up drunk, as shown by the way the next time we see him he's got a beer bottle in his hand and lives above a bar. But that doesn't matter (literally - as soon as he puts down the beer it's never mentioned again), because a bunch of hi-tech science guys have gone deeper than anyone though possible and now a shark is chewing on their sub. Get me Jonas Taylor!

For an actor people thought stopped caring five films back Statham gives a surprisingly strong performance here; with this, his recent work in the Fast & Furious films, and Spy (he's got to be the only reason they're currently making a Spy 2) he’s back as one of Hollywood more entertaining not-quite leading men. Here he's clearly having slightly more fun than the film (which is long and drawn-out for most of the running time) deserves; even when he's acting alongside a cute kid he's able to make it work.

But who cares about the humans? It's a movie about a giant shark: IS THERE ANY GORE? Sadly no, unless you count the chum they tip into the water at one point when they’re trying to lure the shark to its doom. And while there are a couple of severed body parts left behind, this is really pretty mild on the chomp scale... which is even more disappointing as most of the supporting cast seem perfect shark snacks. Ok, the Chinese characters have to live (or do they?) because it's Chinese money that's behind this film, but what kind of a world do we live in where Ruby Rose plays a "cool chick" named Jaxx whose only character trait is her hair and yet she doesn't get eaten?

This might be a spoiler but it's for your own good: the sole black character in the film who is also the most annoying character in the film - seriously, he's named "DJ"; the end credits song really should have been The Smith's 'Panic' so we could sing along with the "hang the DJ" line -  does not get eaten. Not even a little bit. Clearly, something is badly wrong with this film. But the shark looks cool, there are a few effective jump scares, and… look, it’s Statham versus a shark. You’ve probably already bought your ticket.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Superfly

A film like Superfly has to walk a very fine line. Play it too straight and what's the point; go too far over the top and it just gets silly. So while it's easy to dismiss it for not working - and most of the time it doesn't really work - films like this almost never click. Good pulp crime dramas are few and far between, and even the good ones usually get dismissed as trash. Having this one make it to cinemas at all is some kind of victory.

It's a tale as old as time: the biggest drug dealer in town (Atlanta) decides to get out of the game, and the only way he can do that is by pulling off one last big score. Problem is, this film never actually gets around to explaining what that one last big score is: Youngblood Priest (Trevor Jackson) pulls off a whole bunch of smooth moves with hustler skill (his superpower is that he has information on everyone), but his big plan seems to be "sell even more drugs than usual" while his partner Eddie (Jason Mitchell) urges him to solve his problems in the usual lead-heavy manner.

Taking things up a notch is a risky move, because he's been able to build up his business while everyone in town's been distracted by not-really-rival drug gang the Snow Patrol, who all dress only in white right down to their guns: these guys are both brilliant and hilarious, and the film could have used a dozen more ideas as great as this one. But when a Snow Patrol member sets his eye on one of Priest's girls - he's got two, one African-American (Lex Scott Davis) and one Latina (Andrea Londo) - it ends in a street shooting (Priest literally dodges the bullet) and he realises it's no point being smart if everyone around you is an idiot.

What follows is slightly better than functional, as Priest ends up constantly dancing between various forces out to bring him down, including the Snow Patrol, his former mentor Scatter (Michael Kenneth Williams), the Mexican Cartel, and a pair of murderous corrupt cops (Jennifer Morrison as the brains of the outfit is clearly enjoying being bad to the bone). There are car chases (which end up trashing a Confederate monument), multiple bloody shootouts, a three-way sex scene in a shower and a drug selling montage set to Curtis Mayfield's "Pusher Man"; so far so good.

No-one cares if a plot is stock standard so long as there's something original going on, but this never comes to life. Director X somehow manages to make Atlanta look even more generic than it did in Baby Driver, and even the over-the-top moments of crazy excess - Snow Patrol are based out of a mansion bigger than Buckingham Palace - feel like the kind of thing you could find in any C-list cop drama. The action is functional at best, the performances are good but not great, and Priest's hair is often the most interesting thing on screen.

Occasionally there's a sharp line of dialogue that lifts proceedings - an early diss towards Priest's skinny jeans is a solid laugh, and Scatter almost single-handledly brings the film back to life when he starts on about Priest's "Morris Day-looking hair" - but there's nothing here you can't get better elsewhere. And a drug dealer like Priest knows that's no way to run a successful business.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Mission: Impossible: Fallout

It's safe to say that back around the turn of the century if you'd asked anyone what two franchises were going to dominate action movies in the 21st century they wouldn't have said Mission: Impossible and The Fast & The Furious. And not just because The Fast & the Furious didn't hit cinemas until 2001. It's not exactly a weird direction for action movies to take: building franchises around crazy stunts has never been a bad idea. But actors used to be important too; it's a sign of how diminished the idea of performance and charisma has become that the big selling point of Tom Cruise now is that hey, maybe he's going to die making this one.

Then again, for a movie touted as a non-stop action thrill ride, opening with a scene where Cruise watches a "previously on"-style informational movie for around two minutes is a brave choice – especially as pretty much everything he’s told we can safely and instantly forget. But that’s how these kind of movies have always worked, and with the learning out of the way Ethan Hunt (Cruise) can get back to the job of saving the world one crazy over-extended stunt sequence at a time. 

The story actually does hold together if you pay attention, but why would you? It’s just the usual “terrorists have the bomb, stop them before it goes off” deal with a few fun twists involving the Mission: Impossible Force’s fondness for masks and deception mixed in. And while those moments are fun, they've become the equivalent of the scenes in the Fast & Furious films where Toretto heads down to the local street racing convention to make everyone there feel bad; they're just a faint echo of what these franchises were going to be about before the stunts took over.

So what about those stunts, hey? The film takes a little while to get going - there's no opening where Cruise hangs off the side of a plane here - but eventually things reach the kind of exhausting crescendo that single-handedly justifies Hollywood’s existence for another fiscal year. It’s a smorgasbord where each item is only served up once – one fist fight, one car / bike chase, one rooftop running sequence (where everyone knows to watch for the stunt that busted Cruise’s ankle), one helicopter chase while dangling off the undercarriage.

Ironically, while Cruise's determination to do all his own stunts makes for great marketing - "maybe he's going to die making this one" is a sales point that's hard to beat at a time when actors in general are increasingly superfluous - it tends to cramp the actual film-making when it comes to the big sequences. Having Cruise do his own foot chase stuff is one thing; seeing him actually doing the running is both exciting and fun, especially as his running style is, uh, hard to duplicate.

But when it comes to the bigger sequences, having the actor involved actually limits the kind of footage available. Having Cruise really skydive out of a plane is kind of pointless when it comes to creating a thrilling sequence; it'd actually look more exciting if it was done with computers and green screen. What's being celebrated here is a kind of film-making that's rapidly becoming obsolete: when both actors and stunts have been replaced by zeros and ones, this'll stand as a slightly unnerving monument to a time when western civilisation spent a fortune so a tiny man could have a fist fight on a cliff top.

- Anthony Morris