Review: No Hard Feelings

Every now and again, Hollywood decides to dust off a time-honoured genre and take it out for a spin, just to see if there's any interest out there in anything that isn't horror movies or superhero sagas. Here's a tip: always see these movies. 

Why? Because they're put together by people actively trying to make a good movie and not just serving up another product from the assembly line. Even if the subject doesn't seem to be up your alley, you'll find a care and attention to detail that's often lacking in something that might seem like more of a sure thing. 

Not to mention they're usually working from a large database of examples that worked: if you're going to make a teen sex romp in 2023, it's not like you're short of classic examples to borrow from. Plus you hardly have to worry that someone else is making a rival that'll come out two weeks before yours and steal your raunchy thunder.

(note to self: write script titled Raunchy Thunder)

In case you'd hadn't picked up on it, No Hard Feelings is one of these films, a test sample released into the wild to see if there's any life left in the teen sex comedy - a genre that dominated the low-budget end of the box office for three decades in living memory but today largely seems like an embarrassing accident everyone would like to pretend never happened. Heard anyone mention Porky's in polite company lately?

The twist here is that while the set-up is pure classic sex comedy - a wimpy guy's rich parents hire a mature hottie to, uh, "guide him into manhood" and give him some vital experience-slash-self-confidence before he heads off to college  - the focal character is not the wimp or his sleazy mates (he doesn't even have any sleazy mates), but the hottie, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence).

Working in a resort town in Upstate New York, Maddie is financially struggling under the weight of property taxes she can't pay off without working over summer as an Uber driver, and she can't work as a driver because her car's just been impounded because of the unpaid taxes. The solution? Seems some rich locals are running an ad on Craigslist offering a free (old) car to any woman who will "date" their son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), and away we go.

Pretty much all the obvious questions in 2023 are handled with impressive efficiency: no, lonely boy isn't gay (his parents have seen his porn), and he's not some undatable incel either - just socially stunted due to school problems and helicopter parents and being named Percy. 

Maddie herself is refreshingly upfront about the deal: she needs a car, women have sex for all manner of unromantic reasons (the list includes not wanting to be murdered by your date), so as long as the kid isn't a monster, it's a deal.

You'd think that'd pretty much be the end of the movie right there. What heterosexual eighteen year old is going to throw up roadblocks with Jennifer Lawrence hitting on him? But it turns out that she's really, really bad at hitting on guys outside of drunken bar hook-ups (we've already learned she's not big on commitment either), while he is refreshingly sensible and wary about the bizarre situation he finds himself in. Looks like they're going to have to get to know each other first.

Even at their sleaziest, many of the best teen sex comedies had a heart; it was more about finding a connection and love than just getting it on. Here it rapidly becomes clear that Percy is already 95% of the way towards being a decent guy (he even has girls his age interested in him) and what Maddie has to offer isn't really going to get him over the line. 

Maddie, on the other hand, is secretly (and not-so-secretly at times) a bit of a wreck, and Lawrence is perfect at making Maddie seem messed up enough to get herself into this situation without tipping over into being a comedy trainwreck. She's not incompetent, she just has issues (and a blunt sense of humor that doesn't really mesh well with the phone-obsessed puriteens that are Percy's peers).

The core of why No Hard Feelings works so well is that both leads are believable, likable, often funny characters you want to see succeed. Even when the jokes don't work there's still reason to keep watching; when the jokes do - and they do most of the time - it's a winner. 

The slightly shabby realism of the setting helps ground things further; even the big comedy moments still feel plausible in a way that reinforces the characters' struggles. They might go flying off car bonnets or run naked out of the ocean to punch drunk teens stealing their clothes, but there's no easy answers for the problems they face. 

Even when the problem is "I want to have sex and this attractive older woman is throwing herself at me for some unknown reason".

- Anthony Morris

Review: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Every new Transformers movie starts with a question. Will this finally be the film where a robot transforms with a human inside and crushes them to death? Of course not. But Transformers: Rise of the Beasts poses an all-new question: why would transforming robots on another planet take on the form of animals from Earth? Especially when they're giant sized robots that could in no way be confused for the thing they're trying to imitate?

Our story begins with the long-awaited arrival of planet-eating-planet Unicron (Colman Domingo in a role originated by Orson Wells) who sends his underling Scourge (Peter Dinklage) onto an alien world to get the Transwarp Key, a device that will enable Unicron to travel anywhere in the universe. Scourge and his sidekicks wreak havoc, only to find the Key's animal-style transformer guardians the Maximals have escaped with it (so Unicron eats the planet). Smash cut to Earth, that unknown backwater that transforming robots just can't stay away from. 

The year is 1994, the place is New York, and while museum intern Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) studies an ancient statue that in no way resembles the Transwarp Key, Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) struggles to find a job despite his skill with electronics - especially when it comes to getting free cable TV.

When Elena breaks open the statue to reveal the Key (well, half of it) it sends out a pulse that alerts boss truck Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, back again), who summons a collection of autobots that includes Bumblebee and fellow car Mirage (Pete Davidson). Mirage is in the middle of being stolen by Diaz, but as Mirage is the kind of transformer that likes humans - unlike Optimus Prime, who is pretty much a space racist for much of this film - he brings him along on their mission to grab the key before Scourge and his evil crew turn up.

Obviously the Maximals, notably their gorilla leader Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) and the falcon-like Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), are going to turn up, but not until a bunch of fight scenes and setbacks sees everyone head to Peru for more fights and setbacks. It's a mcguffin-driven movie that's all about ancient relics and lost tombs; they even make an Indiana Jones joke.

With Michael Bay now out of the transforming business, the series - both this and 2018's Bumblebee were prequels to Bay's run of films - has lowered its sights a little, preferring to build up the human characters and keep the fight scenes to a semi-plausible scale and length.

The result is undoubtedly more satisfying on a basic storytelling level: these are solid films, in contrast to Bay's garbled brain-vomit. Unfortunately, they also lack the impact and sheer insanity that Bay brought to the story of giant alien transforming robots that turn into cars and trucks then trash the planet.

On the up side, now the humans are playing actual plausible human beings, while the robots come across as real characters distinct from each other. The stakes are no less enormous and over-the-top, but now the characters' struggles in the shadow of armageddon have at least some dramatic weight: when somebody dies, it means more than just one less mass of pixels gyrating around on screen.

Director Steven Caple Jr (Creed II) serves up a perfectly respectable and often exciting tale of giant transforming robots and the humans who love them, but there are times when Bay's demented approach to what is always going to be the violent adventures of giant toys feels sorely missed. Who can forget the time Shia LeBeof and Megan Fox made out on the bonnet of a transformer while another transformer watched? And now the transformers are sending heartwarming messages to sick kids. 

Hollywood needs to transform back into a pit of depravity before they start thinking a wholesome Barbie movie is a good idea oh wait.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: The Flash

Super-speed has always been one of the more obvious super-powers. Who wouldn't like to be able to get things done in one one-thousandth of the time? And yet The Flash goes for 150 minutes; guess even when you can travel so fast you go back in time, there's always one more thing to do.

The Flash as a character has been around in various forms since the 40s (DC has had three separate main Flashes, plus an entire family of spin-offs and sidekicks), so they've had plenty of time to come up with new twists on his super-speed. Time and dimensional travel is one; being able to vibrate his molecules so he can move between solid objects is another. Throw in some lightning bolts and you'd have a pretty effective fighting machine if Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) wasn't so much of a dork.

Treated as a joke by his co-workers at CSI Central City and used as something of a last resort by the Justice League - with Alfred (Jeremy Irons) handling the disaster relief scheduling - Allen's mostly a goof who's funny largely by accident. But he's deadly serious when it comes to trying to free his father (Ron Livingstone), currently in prison for murdering his wife / Allen's mother (Maribel Verdu) in a crime that seems to have been a case of the police arresting the first person they saw and saying "yeah, he'll do".

When Allen accidentally discovers the ability to run so fast he can travel back in time (via a visually interesting temporal amphitheater where past events circle around him like 3D frames of film - the closer in time they are, the nearer they get to him) he's tormented enough by the possibilities to have a brief chat with Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who advises him that the past has made him who he is today. Unfortunately, the past has made Allen into someone who wants to mess with the past, and so back to save his mother he goes.

It's no surprise that time travel only makes things more complicated, and not just because now there are two Allens - "our" version and a teenage one who never lost his parents and might not gain his powers unless Allen gets him in the right place at the right time. Then General Zod (Michael Shannon) shows up just like he did in that Superman movie, only there doesn't seem to be a Superman handy and when the Allens go ask for Batman's help it turns out this Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) isn't the one our Allen was expecting.

Like all multiverse movies, the whole point is that there's a lot to take in. Having two Barry Allens works well for Miller, as he gets to play up the comedy side with the younger version while the older one is slightly more tortured (and annoyed at his younger self). The traditional superhero angst here is largely kept simmering in the background but it's well used when it comes to the fore, making for one of the more solidly satisfying DCU movies to date.

The always-reliable Keaton is basically the third lead once he shows up. His version of Bruce Wayne gets enough of a character arc (and a very cool batcave) to make his appearance feel worthwhile and not just a nostalgia cash-grab trap for Tim Burton fans. Sadly Zod and Supergirl (Sasha Calle) are basically glorified cameos. Everyone else? Pretty much action figures.

The story moves fast (sorry) and the action scenes are thrilling, but the big surprise here is how funny it often is. Some scenes - most notably a big early rescue based on a "baby shower" pun - go for a more over-the-top and cartoony take than we've seen in the DC movies (aside from new boss James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, so the DCU's new direction possibly starts here). The DC films have often distinguished themselves from the Marvel pack by actually putting in some thought as to cool things you could do with superpowers, and there are a number of decent gags (and a few dramatic moments) based on Allen's connection to the Speed Force.

The recent Spider-verse film might have stolen some of the multiversal thunder, but The Flash is more about the ideas and possibilities of an interactive multiverse. Here it's Barry Allen's actions and choices that create the parallel worlds as a reflection of his drive to change his own circumstances - they're not just a setting that enables him to meet a bunch of different versions of himself.

He meets a bunch of different versions of the more popular character Batman instead. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Considering how far animation technology has come in the last few decades, it's a shame we haven't seen bigger leaps in how animated films actually look. Especially as one of the many reasons why 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was such a hit was because it wasn't afraid to mix things up a little (or a lot) visually. The directors may have changed but the goal remains the same: the animation style of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is often so busy you might need a second to figure out where best to let your gaze rest in some of the more frenetic scenes.

"Busy" is probably a good way to describe the latest animated Spider-adventure in general. Opening with a focus shift to the super-powered parallel world version of Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), drummer and somewhat depressed teen after the death of her version of Peter Parker (and her cop father's determination to hunt down the masked menace he thinks killed him), we're swiftly introduced to a pan-dimensional Spider-Society charged with tracking down menaces to the cosmos.

Meanwhile "our" Spider-Man, the now fifteen year-old Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is doing... not bad. Which is off-brand for a Spider-Man, as their character arcs usually revolve around tragic loss and isolation. Actually, there is a bit of isolation going on, as while school is ok and crime-fighting is working out well - even if current "villain of the week" portal-potholed bad guy The Spot (Jason Schwatzman) is a little trickier than he looks - Miles wouldn't mind someone he could really talk to. Someone like Gwen, last seen months ago returning to her home dimension he has no way to access.

If you remember the ending of the previous film you know where this is going (turns out that movie's finish was set a third of the way into this one), but the idea of jumping across dimensions making wise-cracks while fighting bad guys isn't quite as fun as it seems. 

For one, Gwen (and everyone else) seems strangely reluctant to get Miles involved. And when he doesn't take no for an answer - meeting up with Spiders Jessica Drew (Issa Ray), the extremely cool Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), and the angsty, humourless boss Spider behind the dimensional defence team, Miguel O'Hara (Oscar Issac) - things quickly take a turn for the extremely serious. Even if old friend and mentor Peter B Parker (Jake Johnson) also shows up. And he's got a baby!

It's the extremes that make Spider-Man work as a character. He's good with a quip; he's also constantly being put through the emotional wringer. This film happily spins both sides of the coin, being packed with jokes and easter eggs while also going really hard on both Gwen and Miles' teen angst. One of animations big advantages is that you don't have to be constrained by human limitations; here even the script has taken that to heart.

As for the animation itself, it looks great, pinballing from relatively sedate and serious to near impressionistic (the backgrounds sometimes degrade to near-abstract in big emotional moments), with characters from various dimensions often having striking different visual styles. Throw in the wide range of looks of the dimensions themselves and an approach to action sequences best described as "chaotic" (without ever becoming confusing) and this isn't so much a feast for the eyes as the kind of banquet you stagger away from feeling like you won't need to eat again for a week.

Miles and Gwen's struggles are firmly grounded even as everything around them seems to be in violent flux for the full 140 minute run time (and this is only the first half of the story: the rest is due in a year or so). Which is probably the point: as a metaphor for general teenagedness - and unlike most movie Spider-men who inhabit the usual "they're in high school but they're clearly in their early 20s" zone of movie "teens", Miles is firmly 15 and still under his parents (loving) thumb - having a broken heart be your anchor in a world constantly exploding around you is a lot better than most.

Which handily is also where Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse falls on the superhero movie scale.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Little Mermaid

It's no secret that the Disney version of The Little Mermaid doesn't have a whole lot in common with Hans Christian Andersen's original. It's a shame they didn't take as many liberties when they decided to remake their own version. This live-action do-over is often painfully faithful to the original, and as the original featured singing crabs and an undersea creature jazz band, "live-action" is probably not the best term to describe what's been put on screen.

Mermaid Ariel (Halle Berry) is the youngest daughter of the king of the sea Triton (Javier Bardem, doing his best). He's forbidden his daughters to have anything to do with the surface world after humans killed his wife / their mother. But Ariel sees good in them, especially hot prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) which opens the door for her evil Sea-Witch aunt Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) to do a deal.

She'll give Ariel legs for three days in exchange for her voice - but she'll only give the voice back if Ariel gets a kiss from the prince, and also she magically can't remember this part of the bargain even when told it over and over by crab Sebastian (Daveed Diggs) and sea bird Scuttle (Awkwafina). Fortunately the prince seems as into her as she is into him. So the course of true love runs smoothly? Not quite.

The frustrating thing about Disney's live-action remakes of their animated films isn't that they're tinkering with classics - that's been the basis of the movie business for almost a century - but that they're not tinkering enough. There's a timidness that runs throughout them, a feeling that the original was so good that any major changes could only ruin things. Bad news Disney: that ship has sailed. And then sunk, going by the number of shipwrecks featured here.

This version of The Little Mermaid has its strengths, mostly early on with a dramatic sinking ship sequence where the live action really shines. And the casting is never less than decent, with Berry a clear stand-out - a better film would make her a star, and hopefully even this can't slow her rise. She's almost enough to keep this afloat, even when the plot renders her mute for a hefty stretch (singing in her mind turns out to be a useful loophole).

But in taking a script and story (and songs) designed for old-fashioned animation and transferring it to live-action (which here is about 30% CGI "realistic" animation), much of the charm of the original has been lost. A two-hour run time (the original was a snappy 83 minutes) doesn't help, especially when the new elements - notably a quasi-rap track sung by Awkwafina - are often jarringly out of place.

When you're left thinking "well, I guess Sebastian could have looked a lot worse", the bar has been set pretty low - and in some scenes (including a supposedly emotional gathering towards the end which had the audience openly laughing at my screening) it can't even clear that.

There's an argument to be made that classics should be regularly updated for a new generation. Hand drawn animation is out of style, greater diversity in casting is what people now want, and so on. But by often sticking so closely to the original, this version of The Little Mermaid fails to make that case. 

An all-new take on this story might have equaled the original; this one is left floundering.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Plane

 

Briefly the butt of internet snickering for its somewhat blunt title - and yet Air escaped unscathed - Plane is not a film of subtlety. Nor would anyone want it to be: a fancier title would just be wasting everyone's time, and this is an all-action thriller that knows that wasting time is the worst crime this kind of film can commit.

Gerard Butler is Brodie Torrance, the kind of two-fisted pilot who is too good for the shabby airline he's flying for but it's the best he can do after (heroically) punching out an unruly passenger. Unfortunately, that means he's now working for the kind of bosses who think having him fly through a storm to save on fuel costs is a good idea. It is not.

A big part of the fun of Plane - and Plane is a lot of fun - is the way it rapidly cycles through genres fast enough to touch on all the good stuff without ever making it too obvious that we've seen it all before. So of course the storm messes up the flight and we get a condensed version of a disaster movie before Butler manages to safely crash-land (but in a way that leaves the plane intact, which will become important later) on a seemingly deserted island in the Philippines.

Okay, so clearly the next genre up is the "we're trapped on an island and one of the passengers is a killer", because I forgot to mention earlier that one of the few passengers on this New Years Eve flight - yes, Torrance is trying to get home to his family - is a killer (Mike Colter, who already has a spin-off set up) who's been on the run for decades and is being taken back to the US. His guard died in the pre-crash turbulence; can Butler handle a hardened criminal with nothing to lose?

Forget that, because it's time for the next twist. Turns out that the island isn't deserted - well, it has been deserted by any kind of government or law enforcement, because it's the home base for a bunch of terrorists who like holding tourists for ransom then making them star in snuff movies. Can Torrance get the passengers off the island without being detected? Of course not. Time for plan B, where the B stands for "blowing stuff up".

There's a few entertaining diversions along the way - the airline puts together a crisis team and hires mercs for a rescue mission, only when Butler manages to make a call to the airline after the crash the operator thinks it's a prank - but for the most part this is solid meat & potatoes genre fodder with just enough going on to keep things fresh. 

Butler's gruff charm carries this a long way, and French director Francois Richet's non-nonsense approach to this occasionally nonsensical story does the rest. Butler's character is noticeably appalled by killing; he's much more of a "I've got to save these people" than "time to take out the trash" type, which stops this from completely losing touch with reality, at least as far as the on-ground carnage is concerned. 

Once they get in the air, all bets are off.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3

More than most Marvel movies, The Guardians of the Galaxy have been all about the vibe. Well, maybe 20% about the vibe: the rest has been the usual mix of making quips then running around shouting and kicking bad guys in the face while things explode high above a planet's surface. But that's still a lot of vibe for the MCU, where movies like The Eternals made it to cinemas despite a vibe level verging on the negative.

So it's a surprise to discover that this movie not only is actually About Something - it's not like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had any connection to any real world concerns at all, and fair enough - but the real-world issue it's tackling is experiments on animals, which is about as far as you can get from the fun-loving classic rock vibe the Guardians usually specialise in.

The topic comes up in the form of the never before mentioned backstory of Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), who it turns out was the product of a lot of nasty experiments by the colourful yet sinister High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). Now he wants Rocket back, and has sent the super-powered but dim-witted Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), one of his more humanoid creations, to collect what he sees as his property. 

Warlock trashes the Guardian's cyperpunk-esque space skull base, fails to collect his target, and leaves Rocket dying with no way for the Guardians to heal him thanks to a bunch of fail safes built into the tech that's part of his body. Looks like they're going to have to steal the codes to bypass the fail safes, and that heist is only the beginning (mostly because the movie goes for two and a half hours).

Rocket's plight is no barrel of laughs, and having Peter Quinn, AKA Star Lord (Chris Pratt) a heartbroken drunken mess thanks to the death, then revival from an earlier point in time when she didn't love him, of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) also cuts down on the quips - for a while at least. 

So this is the grim and gritty Guardians pretty much nobody was asking for? Hardly, but the tonal whiplash is sometimes pretty severe as the story goes from Rocket and his tortured animal chums dreaming of freedom (good luck there) to the more traditional sitcom-style banter between Drax the Destroyer (David Bautista), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (Vin Diesel, getting to enunciate a bit more this time) and Gamora's perpetually angry sister Nebula (Karen Gillen).

Throw in the usual big action scenes, a bunch of cameos, a few too many characters (if Warlock feels shoehorned in, the return of his mother is definitely surplus to requirements) a lot of needle drops (Beastie Boys fans get the extra thrill of finding out which lines Disney won't allow from 'No Sleep Till Brooklyn'), and an adorable subplot where Cosmo the space dog spends the entire film worrying that Kraglin (Sean Gunn) has called her a bad dog, and you have an overstuffed, often frantic film that's all over the place (and space).

Which is not unusual for the Guardians of the Galaxy. Writer / director James Gunn was briefly fired from Marvel in 2018 (dodgy tweets, obviously), leading to an odd MCU speedbump where Thor joined the Guardians, didn't fit in, and then almost immediately left and never looked back. There was also the recent Guardians Christmas Special for Disney+, which explains a few Kevin Bacon references in the end credits but is otherwise best left unmentioned.

This third and seemingly final installment is the kind of film with too much going on for everyone to like all the moving parts equally, but the high notes are high enough that the flat patches don't linger. It's not afraid to go directly for the tear ducts in all manner of ways; one death is a tragedy, the destruction of an entire inhabited planet is just something that happens as part of a day's work, and experimenting on animals is really, really bad.

Lately the more comedic Marvel movies seem to have embraced a kind of sloppiness in their storytelling as a way to amp up the energy. It doesn't always work (try to keep track of where people are standing in almost any big villain confrontation), but at least here there's a sense that Gunn is throwing in everything on his way out the door. You'll never doubt this one's coming from the heart - 20% of the time at least.

- Anthony Morris