Quick Reviews: Four Most Recent

Yeah, I keep procrastinating instead of writing about a movie right after I've seen it. It's a good thing I don't get paid for this. Of course, if someone would like to pay me, I'd be sure to stick to deadline. Anyway, I'll be pretty brief with these. Mostly not bad, but not really worth a ton of analysis.

The real selling point of 2 Guns is the Denzel Washington-Mark Wahlberg pairing, as law enforcement officials (undercover, but each thinks the other is an actual criminal) trying to bring down a drug lord. It gets much more complicated, with double-crosses galore. I just let go of trying to keep up and rode the wave of the two stars' having fun. My grade: B.

Speaking of drug lords, there's one in We're the Millers, and he forces a low-level drug dealer (Jason Sudeikis) to make a pickup of pot in Mexico. To do this successfully, he decides to take family with him in order to avoid suspicion at the border. As he has no family, he recruits a stripper (Jennifer Aniston) and a couple of teenagers, one a latchkey kid and one a runaway, to act as his family. At times raunchy but generally pretty funny. I can't entirely buy Aniston as a stripper, though. She's just too...nice. My grade: B-plus.

Elysium is a sci-fi film and a lesson. In 2154 the world is a real mess, and the wealthiest people have gone to Elysium, a space station/satellite/mini-world where life is perfect and disease is cured instantly with a short lie-down in a machine that looks like a tanning booth. Elysium is visible in the Earth's sky, like the moon, taunting those left behind with no hope of getting up there. So this is all a commentary on current events and the need for universal health care. Poisoned by an industrial accident and with five days to live, Max (Matt Damon) hooks up with a group who smuggles people onto Elysium to get their own diseases cured. Damon's fine, but Jodie Foster as a government official defending Elysium from the illegal immigrants is kind of a misfire. Still, it's watchable and food for thought, although the Tea Party nutjobs might disagree. My grade: B-plus.

And then there's Paranoia, which is pretty much a mess. It's about a guy (Liam Hemsworth, pretty but vapid; I think he has a total of one facial expression) who gets himself entangled in corporate espionage between two tech companies, run by a pair of former friends (Harrison Ford, with head shaved(!) and Gary Oldman). Ridiculous script and plot, and not particularly well-acted. What really got me was how some of it was filmed in Philadelphia but it's set in New York. But there are times when it's so obvious it's Philadelphia. Street signs, local establishments, the concourse under Broad Street that obviously isn't a New York City subway concourse -- and not only did they film inside the Comcast Center, but at one point you actually see the building's name. Really sloppy work. Fortunately, not many people will see it. When I saw it on Friday, it's first day of release, only one other person was in the theater with me. My grade: D-plus.

Quick Review: Horrible Bosses

For the first movie I've seen in a couple of weeks, I ended up at "Horrible Bosses." I worked for a couple of truly bad bosses in the past, although when you work for the Social Security Administration that's almost a given. But none of my bosses were quite as bad as those that the three friends in this movie suffer with. Nick (Jason Bateman) works for a guy (Kevin Spacey) who treats him like crap and then doesn't give him an expected promotion. Dale (Charlie Day) is being sexually harassed by his dentist boss (Jennifer Aniston). And Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), well, his boss (Donald Sutherland) is awesome, until he suddenly dies and his son (Colin Farrell, wearing a comb-over and given a pot belly), a cokeheaded, womanizing, obnoxious creep, takes over. The three friends joke about killing their bosses, and then decide to actually do it. And that's where the movie, which had me in stitches to this point, went south for a while. There was a decent gag at the end, but for some reason the humor began to fall flat once they tried to hire an ex-con (Jamie Foxx) to commit the murders. Aniston is great playing against her usual good-girl type, though. I will say that although I laughed much less as the film went on, the rest of the audience enjoyed the second half of the film much more. My grade: B.

Quick Review: Just Go With It

Oh, romantic comedies. Trying to find a way to make these things really great is either too difficult, or the studios aren't even trying. In "Just Go With It" Adam Sandler plays a plastic surgeon who wears a wedding ring and uses it in conjunction with made-up sob stories ("my wife beats me/cheats/is a prostitute") to pick up girls. Then circumstances conspire to have the ring in his pocket when he meets the apparent girl of his dreams (Brooklyn Decker). After they spend the night together she finds the ring and he says he's about to be divorced. She wants to hear it from the soon-to-be ex-wife. He persuades his office manager (Jennifer Aniston) to play his ex. Then her kids get involved in the story and, well, it's just one lie after another. Yet we're supposed to believe that two women would fall in love with this liar, even the one who knows that he's a liar? It wasn't a total loss. I kinda liked the two kids, and Nicole Kidman and Dave Matthews (as a married couple; she is an old college frenemy of Aniston's character, he claims to have invented the iPod) were fun. Maybe that's why I started out really hating it, but in the end I just...you know the rest... My grade: C-minus.

Quick Review: The Switch

How fun would it have been if "The Switch" had its original title, "The Baster," and at the same time perhaps had a little more subversiveness that such a title would indicate? A single New York City woman named Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) decides she wants to have a baby and hires a married man in need of funds (Patrick Wilson) to be the sperm donor, to the consternation of her best friend Wally (Jason Bateman), who loves her but hasn't told her because she put him in the "friend zone." Instead of doing it properly, Kassie holds an "insemination party," a drunken Wally stumbles into a bathroom and finds the cup with the magic material, and accidentally spills it. He then replaces it, with the help of Diane Sawyer.

Quick Review: The Bounty Hunter

Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston star in "The Bounty Hunter." She's Nicole, a newspaper reporter who skips a court appearance (for assaulting a police officer -- and when the movie gets around to explaining exactly how this "assault" occurred, eyes will roll) to follow up a lead on a big story, so there's a warrant out on her. He's Milo, an ex-cop turned bounty hunter who needs a quick influx of funds. They were married and divorced, so he tracks her down with glee, but others are after her, and still more are after him. The way the whole thing plays out is mostly predictable. Butler has the same type of role here as he did in "The Ugly Truth" -- obnoxious guy who has to turn into (or back into, in this case) Prince Charming. And in both cases, there's more obnoxious than charming, and it's not even a particularly witty obnoxiousness here. The one person who is charmed by Milo, and actually wants him and Nicole together again? Her mother, played by Christine Baranski. Maybe Baranski and Butler could costar in a romantic comedy. Older woman, younger man. Hmmmmm. My grade: C-minus.