It's time to catch up with the movies. I'm not sure if these are still in the theaters at this point, so they may not be helpful if you're trying to pick a movie to see this weekend. Sorry. Regular readers know I sometimes procrastinate with these. And this is a case where these two different films arrive at the same grade for different reasons.
I had low expectations for "Killers." First, the female lead is Katherine Heigl, who followed up her success on TV's "Grey's Anatomy" and the big-screen "Knocked Up" with mediocrity like "27 Dresses" and "The Ugly Truth." Here she plays Jen, a careful, cautious, not remotely spontaneous woman who is on vacation in France with her parents (the fabulous Catherine O'Hara and the not-bad Tom Selleck), when she meets Spencer (Ashton Kutcher), who asks her to dinner. Unbeknownst to her, he's a contract killer for some secret government agency (right after they meet he blows up a boat. This is the second reason for my low expectations: I can't buy Ashton Kutcher as a super-spy/killing machine type. Anyway, they fall in love rather quickly, he proposes, she accepts, and he quits his contract-killer job. Cut to three years later, they're settled into a nice house and a normal life when his old life comes back to haunt him, and it puts the couple's lives in jeopardy. I enjoyed it more than I expected, especially seeing the people that actually are out to kill Spencer. My grade: B-minus.
Meanwhile, the movie "Splice" got some really fine reviews but was a box-office bomb. After seeing it, I'm not sure it quite deserved the raves it got. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play genetic engineers (who are also lovers) who take various strains of animal DNA and combine them, creating hybrid creatures that are being used to come up with medical breakthroughs. They want to take the next step, splicing human and animal DNA. Their employer, a pharmaceutical company, forbids it. They secretly do it anyway, and a new creature is "born." Dren, as they've dubbed her ("nerd" spelled backwards) grows up quickly, and things get complicated and very weird. The problem I had with this movie isn't with the premise, or the execution, or, to some extent, how it played out. My problem was with the actions and reactions of the two scientists relating to their creation. Sometimes they're very clinical, then they're dealing with Dren on an emotional level, and once their new "baby" arrives, they're hardly on the same page at the same time. Their characters were just too inconsistent, and for me it took away from a lot of the twisted stuff. My grade: B-minus.
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