February Film Babble: JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 & FIST FIGHT

And now, a few new movies that I saw a bit back but am only getting around to babbling about now:

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2

(Dir. Chad Stahelski, 2017)

I was among those who were surprised at how much they liked the first JOHN WICK. I didn’t have any expectations going in, but found it to be thrilling, funny piece of high octane action cinema. Now Keanu Reeves, and stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski, are back for a second round of frenetically edited sequences crammed with gunshots to the heads of countless attackers.

As it begins right after the previous entry ended, with Reeves’ Wick tracking down his ‘69 Mustang coupe at a chop shop owned by Peter Stormare as the brother of the mob boss villain from the first one, it feels as much like an extention as it is a sequel. That’s fine by me as Stahelski, working with returning screenwriter Derek Kolstad, keep the original’s dark humor and ultra violent vibe going smashingly.

Sure, the plot is contrived – Wick retires from the assassin’s life for a second time, even reburying his weapons, but when he refuses a new job from a dapper Italian gangster (Riccardo Scamarcio) his house gets blown up (luckily his new dog, the pittbull he got in his first film, doesn’t get killed) and he’s pulled back into the criminal underworld game – but I was highly entertained throughout by how far the filmmakers stretched the limits of their stylized stunt choreography scene after scene.

And, sure, it doesn’t have the freshness of the first, but in Common as the bodyguard of Wick’s mark (Claudia Gerini), it has a worthy foe for our hero to fight, which a killer set-piece at the Rome Continental proves punch after powerful punch. It’s also a bit of a kick to have Reeves re-united with his MATRIX co-star Laurence Fishburne, as a brutal crime lord named The Bowery King, who comes to Wick’s aid.

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 is a solid follow-up that, for the most part, soaringly transcends its status as being a retread. It’s also a much better example of the form than how the Tom Cruise/JACK REACHER franchise is unfolding. Now there’s crossover mash-up I’d like to see: Wick vs. Reacher. But, of course, only if Wick wins, which, for sure, would be the only way it could really go down.

FIST FIGHT (Dir. Richie Keen, 2017)

Walking out of the screening for this film, I heard somebody say “I’m surprised this isn’t a summer release!” I chuckled to myself because I found the slapdash comedy, FIST FIGHT, to be a perfect release for the dumping ground season of February.

It’s got a slight premise –Ice Cube as an angry history teacher challenges Charlie Day as a meek English teacher to a fight on the last day of school – a B-list cast (no offense to Tracy Morgan, Dean Norris, Christina Hendricks, and Jillian Bell, but c’mon, who we kidding?), and a sloppy screenplay by first timers Van Robichaux and Evan Susser, so its slotting this season is dead on.

That said, I laughed more than I thought I would. Much like last December’s OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY, there are too many funny people on screen for there not to be a least some hilarious hi-jinks.

The use of over dramatic music to enforce the severity of Ice Cube’s threat to Day is a great gag at first, but like every other running joke – the drawing dicks on everything shenanigans of “Prank Day,” Day’s constant attempts to weasel out of the showdown (hard to root for him when he plants drugs on Ice Cube to frame him), and the creepiness of Bell’s character wanting to sleep with her students – it wears thin really fast.

FIST FIGHT is something that I’ve deemed many a movie that’s dropping during these off seasons – a throwaway matinee at best. With this one though, only check it out if you’ve seen absolutely everything else at the multiplex. Otherwise, stay home and watch some random episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia, that’s where Day and director Keen have put in much, much funnier work together.

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TOP FIVE: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

TOP FIVE (Dir. Chris Rock, 2014)

Finally, a good Chris Rock movie!

Yes, the third time is definitely the charm in the actor/comedian’s latest directorial effort after the critical and commercial flops that were HEAD OF STATE (2003) and I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE (2007).

In the semi-autobiographical TOP FIVE, Rock portrays movie star funnyman Andre Allen, who just like Rock’s idol Woody Allen in STARDUST MEMORIES, repeatedly says “I don’t want to make funny movies anymore.”

Rock’s Allen wants to hang up the bear costume he wore in the “Hammy the Bear” comedy buddy-cop franchise and be taken seriously in a historical drama about Haitian revolutionary Dutty Boukman called “Uprize,” which looks like a boring piece of Oscar bait.

Shades of TROPIC THUNDER, shades of Entourage, shades of every movie satirizing celebrity, but that’s so not a bad thing in these capable hands.

The film centers around Rock doing publicity for “Uprize” on its opening day, which is on the eve of his much hyped wedding to Gabrielle Union as socialite/reality TV star Erica Long.

In one of her most appealing performances, Rosario Dawson plays a New York Times reporter doing a profile on Rock, which he has mixed feelings about because the Times film critic, the fictitious James Nielson, has panned all his previous output.

With Rock and Dawson tooling around New York conversing about everything from PLANET OF THE APES to appraising favorite comic icons (Rock calls Charlie Chaplin “the KRS-One of comedy”), TOP FIVE can been seen as a “hangout movie.” Especially in a scene in which they visit Rock’s childhood home and chill with his family and childhood friends, mostly made up of SNL alumni including Jay Pharoah, Leslie Jones, and most hilariously, yet also sadly, a pre-accident Tracy Morgan, in which they discuss their individual top five rappers of all-time.

The laughs are consistent throughout, though some of the less successful bits concern relationship stuff. When Dawson catches her boyfriend cheating with another man and recounts via flashbacks how she should’ve known he was gay because of his anal fixation, it comes across like a throwaway joke sequence on the sitcom The Mindy Project, and not just because Dawson’s boyfriend is played by Anders Holm, who had an arc as one of Mindy Kaling’s suitors.

Otherwise, Rock, who unlike on his other films as director wrote this without a co-writer, has constructed a solid, thoughtful comedy that gives a bunch of his talented friends a chance to shine. 

An extended strip club scene, another of the many points in which the movie earns its hard R-rating, has funny turns by Jerry Seinfeld (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Seinfeld make it rain at a strip club), Whoopi Goldberg, and Adam Sandler (funnier than he's been in a while on the big screen) playing themselves, and in another laugh out loud bit set in a jail cellblock, DMX sings and somehow nails Chaplin’s “Smile” in an unironic manner. J.B. Smoove and Cedric the Entertainer also amuse in their sideline roles. If you're a comedy fan at all, you won't want to miss this movie.

Resembling a hip (or hip hop) take on prime period Woody Allen, TOP FIVE is a bit uneven, and it won’t make my actual top 5 (or top 10) of movies of the year, but it’s an immensely enjoyable and heartfelt project that’s a big leap forward for Rock. Here’s hoping he builds on it – i.e. makes more ambitious and worthwhile work – instead of going back to the same ole crap.

In other words, I hope he makes like his character turning down another Hammy movie, and doesn’t take the call asking him to appear in GROWN UPS 3.

While movies like GROWN UPS and the assorted rom coms and animated films that have dominated his career of late have made me forget how crucial Rock can be, TOP FIVE really reminded me big time.

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22 JUMP STREET: A Funny As F*** Follow-up That Makes Fun Of Itself

Now playing at a multiplex near us all:

22 JUMP STREET 
(Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014)

The first movie looked like it was going to be crappy, but actually turned out to be fairly funny in its riffing on being a big screen version of a ‘80s undercover cop show.

The sequel amps it up by riffing on being a sequel to the surprise hit big screen version of a ‘80s undercover cop show.

And I laughed a lot more this time. A lot more.

Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum return as officers Schmidt and Jenko, the partying, gun-toting duo who engage in their own particular brand of bromantic banter. This time, much of their banter revolves around being on an investigation that's just like the last one, except now it's college, not high school, and they have a much bigger budget.

To amusingly justify the movie's title, the police team’s headquarters has been moved across the street into a bigger church with vastly upgraded facilities resulting in many comments about how needlessly expensive everything looks. 

Ice Cube, reprising his hilariously drawn role as Captain Dickson, even remarks that the place looks like it's out of IRON MAN.

Posing as college students at the fictional MC State (short for Metropolitan City State), Hill and Tatum's assignment involves finding who's been dealing the dangerous drug “WhyPhy” (WiFi).

In the process, Tatum falls in with some air-headed football players (Wyatt Russell and Jimmy Tatro), while Hill, in the guise of a slam poet, falls for an art student (Amber Stevens). The film here toys with rom com conventions, but funnily enough more with Tatum connecting with Russell (Kurt's son btw) than Hill's courtship of Stevens; they even make a meta joke about them having a meet-cute via the merging of a meat sandwich and a Q-Tip.

Popping up throughout the guys' campus shenanigans, are cameos by Patton Oswalt as a psychology professor, standup partners/identical twins the Lucas Brothers as drugged-up dorm neighbors, Peter Stormare as an international criminal only known as “Ghost,” along with, from the first film, Dave Franco, and Rob Riggle, now prison inmate lovers (Franco, not by choice).

Riggle was the previous films' secret bad guy, and there's one in this one too, but don't worry I won't spoil that tasty twist.

Gags about sequel tropes are joined by gags about how old the leads look to be college students (“I got 99 problems but being young ain't one,” Jillian Bell as Stevens' acerbic roommate quips), gags about how close to gay these guys get in their bro-bonding, gags about college sex (the “walk of shame” bits are dead on), just gags about everything along these lines that they could stuff into the 112 minute running time.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher, the dudes behind the also ultra meta, and equally hilarious THE LEGO MOVIE, working from a screenplay by Michael Bacall (writer of the first one), Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman, never let up on the film's sense of fun right through to end where they go from making fun of sequels to taking on entire franchises.

Hill and Tatum are very funny here, they play off each other brilliantly and again prove that their pairing is no fluke, but Ice Cube, in his expanded role, is an angry comedy machine! In a restaurant-set scene in which he finds out that his daughter is dating Hill, Cube's performance is a tour de force of comic acting.

22 JUMP STREET is a funny as fuck follow-up that makes fun of itself for its simple cynical existence as a sequel, but it never makes fun of us for watching it. It wants us to be as in on the joke as they are, and have us all laugh together. With this many surefire laughs, and well tapped talent on display, I even felt a bit laughed out afterwards. Still, make sure you stay through the end credits for the final stinger.

Oddly, one of the only joke misfires was a reference to the comedy stylings of Tracy Morgan *. This was, of course, filmed last year, and it's so not a diss, but it got a bit of a gasp from the audience at the screening I attended. However, that bit of bad timing didn't throw off the crowd for long; they were rolling as soon as the next joke came around, which was less than 10 seconds later.

* If you haven't heard, Tracy Morgan is currently in critical but stable condition after his car crash last weekend. Film Babble Blog sends its best wishes for Morgan, the other victims of the accident, and their families.

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Good Cop/Goofy Cop

COP OUT (Dir. Kevin Smith, 2010)




"It's a homage." So says goofy rubber faced plainclothes cop Tracy Morgan of his unorthodox interrogation methods to his partner of 9 years, a stonewalling yet smirking Bruce Willis.

These methods are going to be familiar to anyone who's ever watched 30 Rock - Morgan does his patented crazy shtick. As Willis watches through a one way mirror, Morgan freaks out their suspect by yielding a gun and yelling movie quotes like "they call me Mister Tibbs," and "these aren't the droids you're looking for" even going for "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!"

Willis, in his definitively detached manner, says: "I never saw that movie." If that sounds funny to you, ignore the rest of this review and go see this movie - more such supposedly uproarious self-aware referencing awaits.

Cool, now that those people are gone I can tell the rest of you that this is one painfully unfunny film. Though it wasn't written by Kevin Smith (the screenplay is by Robb and Mark Cullen) it feels like it was in the worst way - at Smith's most hammiest and hackiest. It strains with every cut to elicit laughs, but cringes are what result from this tired and truly tiresome material.

What there is of a premise involves Mexican gangsters headed by Guillermo Diaz, Seann William Scott as an annoying thief, and a stolen baseball card worth 80 thousand dollars. The card belonged to Willis, who was hoping to use it to pay for his daughter's (Michelle Trachtenberg) dream wedding. Otherwise Smith regular Jason Lee as Willis' wife's smarmy new husband will pay for it and humiliate him. Ho hum.

Morgan meanwhile deals with his wife's (Rashida Jones) possible infidelity with a neighbor by placing a nanny cam in a teddy bear in their bedroom. So both cops drive around Brooklyn from one poorly constructed plot point to another bitching about these hardships while barely creating an audible chuckle from the audience.

One of the only inspired elements present is the soundtrack. It was a savvy move to employ famed electronic composer Harold Faltermeyer to do the score. His "Axel F"-ish waves of synthesizer and jaunty rhythms work better than anything else in the film to capture the genre aesthetic.

A new Patti LaBelle song ("Soul Brothers") accompanying the end credits also hammers home the 80's mindset. You're better off sticking with watching Morgan on 30 Rock from which he even does some of the same lines ("you're sweet like bear meat") and renting HOT FUZZ if you haven't seen it. Now there's a sharp satire of the buddy cop action movies.

COP OUT is a lot like Morgan's misunderstanding (and mis-pronouncing) the word "homage" - it's not a send up or anything close to a fresh take on the formula, it's just formula.

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