GAME OVER, MAN

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

There's a good movie to be made out of Pixels, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to get there. First, keep all of the visual effects setpieces from the movie as it exists, for they are surprisingly beautiful and convincing considering how much lower the film's budget than the usual summer tentpole. Second, make exactly the opposite choices that the filmmakers actually did, because there's literally not one thing about the plot, characters, tone, morality, or basic comprehensibility about Pixels in this form that works.

The film began life in 2010 as a lovely little conceptual short by French filmmaker Patrick Jean (which you can watch here, and have a far more enjoyable 2.5 minutes than anything in the lugubrious 105 minutes of the feature), whence it was almost immediately nabbed by Adam Sandler, who wanted to transform it into a feature. And that's really sad, because of all the changes that would have clearly benefit Pixels at some stage in its development "don't make it an Adam Sandler vehicle" is unquestionably at the top of the list. Sandler tapped Tim Herlihy to write the first draft, which was supplanted by a rewrite by Timothy Dowling, making this the most Timmed-up Hollywood movie in recent memories, and makes me gravely unhappy at my name.

All those Tims whipped up a rather peculiar monstrosity, in which Sam Brenner (Sandler), a video game champion during his teen years in the early '80s, is called upon by his dumpy buddy Will Cooper (Kevin James), now President of the United States, to help save the world. It is first among the film's gaping flaws - not worst, not most inexplicable, just first - that the film makes the stock Kevin James character, the schlubby loser best friend, into the President without having any slight idea of how to make that funny. Or believable. I know that expecting rigorous realism from a Happy Madison joint is my problem, not the film's, but like anything else, comedy needs a baseline of logic to develop from. Given his background as a suburban nerd, given how viscerally everybody in the country hates him, and given that he clearly has no friends besides a sad sack tech nerd working at a Best Buy knockoff, it's impossible to imagine how Cooper got elected in the first place, and if we can't make that leap, there are huge swaths of the movie that never feel like anything other than the standard Happy Madison formula forcibly lacquered onto a framework that doesn't fit them. It's like a comedy sketch that everybody realises is going wrong, but has committed to in front of a live audience and can't back out of.

Earth's existential crisis, anyway, is an alien race that received our transmissions of video game footage in the early '80s and took it as a challenge to attack. So they use their highly advanced ability to form energy into cubes - voxels, technically, not pixels - and they form those cubes into three-dimensional versions of '80s arcade figures, who come to do battle with the ill-prepared human military. Lt. Col. Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan) quickly leads an R&D team to build an energy gun - a blaster, basically - that can disrupt the alien cubes, but it will take a genius arcade gamer to know how to use that technology to beat the aliens. And luckily, the president's buddy is just that genius. How this will work in tandem with the antagonistic sexual tension between Cooper and van Patten is anybody's guess, by which I mean that the second Monaghan appears onscreen and Sandler makes all sorts of leering, drooling faces at her, you're able to guess.

Now, that's one of the worst flaws: the insistence on welding the helpless Monaghan into the unenviable position of playing the woman who just can't help herself from being attracted to the life force that is Sandler at his most disengaged and inarticulate (you would never know he originated the project, based on how mopey he is onscreen). It is astonishing to me that in the year that the infamous The Cobbler was released, there'd be an even more off-putting, shambling Sandler performance than that film gave unto the world, but it's really not even all that close. The nominally comic actor pushes through the role with a single, unyielding sense of bitterness, as though trying to make any of the scripts theoretical jokes play as funny was a disgusting idea to him. But there he is, anyway, as Our Guy battling for the girl. It is all very dismal, at a level that goes beyond the usual "women in movies are objects to be won by vaguely unpleasant men" boilerplate. Brenner is viscerally repellent, both in his physical carriage and his defeated personality; trying to sell him as a romantic lead - even just the star of an enjoyable summer action-comedy, for that matter! - is a crime against decency.

Meanwhile, Brenner revives his 33-year-old rivalry against the loathsome video game superstar, Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage, correctly concluding that he could only make the role interesting by playing it as a Lynchian satire and giving the film's sole effective performance as a result), an arrogant weirdo who dresses and acts like time stopped during the first term of Reagan's presidency. This is slapped onto the film crudely, but Dinklage is a life raft while you're watching the film, and I wanted to praise his name.

It's next to impossible to tell who is supposed to find any of this interesting. Chris Columbus directs with all the slam-bang gee-whiz gusto that a filmmaker of his punishingly anonymous style can muster, and in concert with the film's broad-as-a-barn dialogue, this makes it impossible to assume that this is meant for anybody but kids. At the same time, the film is anchored to Brenner's perspective, and so indulgent towards the video game culture of the early '80s (you are expected to know such games as Frogger and Galaga by sight and without explanation) that it seems unlike that the filmmakers genuinely cared about bringing in any audience member under the age of 35. And anybody who cares enough about the mere fact of watching '80s video games rendered as live action giants for nostalgia alone to carry them through the galling screenwriting and insipid directing is unlikely to make it past the film's misunderstanding of what playing those games consists of (a cheat code to make the ghosts warp around in Pac-Man? What the fuck does that even mean?).

But against all of that, I present the film's visual effects: loving and creative renderings of iconic characters who glow with diffuse internal light before collapsing into piles of shiny cubes. Not even during the asinine finale, a battle against Donkey Kong, had I grown so immune to the texture and color that made up the video game characters, that I ceased to enjoy staring at them as they danced across the screen. That's not a whole lot, but- no, I don't have a "but". It's not a whole lot, and you can see enough of it in the film's trailer to get the best of the experience. Fuck Pixels.

2/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990S - CROCODILE SCHLOCK

The late 1990s were a deeply insincere moment in American pop culture. Emboldened primarily, I suppose by the enormous success of Jerry Seinfeld's famous stand-up and television comedy about nothing, every facet of music, movies, and television were infested by a great desire to indulge in something that was not, in fact, irony, but was described that way so pervasively that the word "ironic" now basically refers to that. To the glib, sophisticated style of mordant humor that permits the speaker to divorce themselves from any real engagement with what they're talking or thinking about.

I bring this up because Lake Placid, from 1999, is something of an irony bomb, explicitly mouthing these exact sentiments in the opening scene through the vessel of a character who is unmistakably looked at askance by the screenplay by David E. Kelley, himself one of the leading lights of the Age of Irony, thanks to his TV show Ally McBeal (a show for whose popularity we shall have to some day answer to our children). "Look at this joyless, square cop", the movie says in this opening scene, with mirthful detachment, "he's such a hick. Doesn't like sarcasm or city folks. Hey, let's throw a line in two-thirds of the way through the movie to suggest, a propos of nothing, that he's also a homophobe".

The film itself is part of the wide-ranging trend of mixing self-aware & self-effacing comedy into horror movies, distinctive mostly because of how heavily it skews that balance towards comedy. As will happen when a TV auteur noted for his quips takes the lead on a giant killer animal movie, and make no mistake, Lake Placid is a Kelley film in all the ways that matter, even if he didn't direct it. Even if, in fact, the director is somebody like Steve Miner, who you'd think should keep the movie more firmly tied down in horror territory: Miner having the distinction of being the only man to direct films in both the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises (F13, Part 2 & F13, Part 3, and Halloween H20, specifically). But he also spent 1998 directing four episodes of the slick teen soap Dawson's Creek, including the pilot, and it's that skill set that gets a far more robust workout over the course of Lake Placid's gratifyingly swift 82 minutes.

The movie's plot is thoroughly formulaic in a way that would become even more familiar during the glut of direct-to-video and made-for-TV creature features in the 2000s, but was as old as the very first Jaws knock-offs. In the Maine countryside, on the picturesque Black Lake (we are told that they wanted to name it "Lake Placid", but that was taken already), Fish & Game officer Walt Lewis (David Lewis), a monosyllabic snarky bastard, and Sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson, not even feinting towards an American accent) are on a boat. It doesn't matter why. What matters it that Walt gets attacked by some kind of a Thing, that absconds with his lower half. And this is something that Sheriff Hank has no clue how to deal with, so off we dissolve to New York City, and the film gets down to its real project: forcing us into the company of the worst goddamn people in the world. The first of these is Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), a paleontologist at the natural history museum, who finds out that her boss-boyfriend (Adam Arkin) and BFF (Mariska Hargitay) have been sleeping together, and in this circumstance, taking an assignment to the Maine backwoods seems totally reasonable. But upon arriving, Kelly starts to complain about everything. In this wide-ranging arrogant New Yorkers-hate-nature way that, to save my life, I can't tell if we're meant to laugh with or at.

Kelly, Sheriff Hank, and a new Fish & Game officer, Jack Wells (Bill Pullman) begin to investigate, and are quickly joined by Kelly's colleague, a mythology scholar and crocodile fetishist named Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt). Note that nobody at all has said one word about crocodiles so far. That's how good Hector is. For it is, in fact, a saltwater crocodile that's haunting Black Lake and devouring the local fauna, and the film give us just enough real knowledge to encourage us to really dig in and think about all the way that this makes no sense at all (a croc swimming across the Pacific is the kind of dubious science it's possible to swallow in the interests of kicking off the plot; traversing the Indian Ocean and rounding South Africa before crossing most of the Atlantic from north to south is daring us not to call bullshit). The film eases us into that: it's a good halfway through the total running time before we see the croc in more than just a flash for a second or two, at which point it is predominately played by a really neat Stan Winston Studios animatronic, and occasionally by shiny CGI that I'd say has aged poorly, except that I distinctly remember it already looked terribly insubstantial in 1999, like this massive 30-foot crocodilian weighed no more than a soap bubble, or a fairy's kisses.

But, I mean, hell! We're not at this giant crocodile movie for the giant crocodile, I hope! No indeed, we're hear to enjoy that one of a kind David E. Kelley banter, as Kelly, Hector, Jack, and Sheriff Hank have personality clashes between their four different outlooks: Jack's taciturn manliness, Sheriff Hank's bullish rural gruffness, Hector's animalistic mysticism, and Kelly's bottomless ability to hate goddamn everything in the world. There's also sassy Mrs. Bickerman (Betty White), the old lady who's the sole human being living on the lake, ever since the time her senile husband died under circumstances that are too enormously shady for words, and now busies herself feeding cattle to the crocodile. And Deputy Sharon Gare (Meredith Salenger), who's there largely to let Platt bounce lines off somebody who won't fight back.

So all these different personality types come into conflict, which in this case means hurling invective at each other. Florid insults, to be sure. Here's a nowhere near comprehensive list of the snappy things that are said over the course of the movie:

-"Maybe later you can chew the bark off my big fat log."
-"Officer Fuckmeat."
-"The longer you live, the more sex you get to have with your sister."
-"You fuckshit!"
-"If I had a dick, this is where I'd tell you to suck it."
-"It helps to hear it from a complete stranger: you're fat."
-"If you call me ma'am one more time, I'll sue you, and with today's laws it's possible."
-"They conceal information like that in books."
-"Maybe I should just wipe myself with some leafy little piece of poison oak. And then I can spend the whole day scratching my ass, blending in with the natives."

And that's not even counting the more routine "fuck yourself" and "asshole" and such that litter the script. It's truly fatiguing. In the hands of the greats, vulgar language can be the source of some of our finest poetry, but too much of it used too bluntly is beneath artlessness. It is the effluvia of filthy-minded adolescents, gleefully shouting "fuck!" because they know it's offensive, but unable to do anything beyond carpet-bomb insults.

This is, please understand, the only card Lake Placid has to play. You either find the nasty-minded writing amusing or you don't, and there's nothing left for the film to draw on if you don't. The acting is no help to the screenplay at all, which is kind of absurd: you'd think the one thing that dialogue this chewy and acidic ought be good for is providing a lot of fun for the actors spouting it. That was, after all, the entire basis of George Sanders and Sydney Greenstreet's careers. But the unifying characteristic of the cast is that they're terrible. Unsurprisingly, in the case of Fonda, who magnifies everything objectionable, shrill, and bitchy about her deeply unpleasant stereotype of a character. And unsurprisingly in Pullman's case as well, though mostly he's just a lump of meat for the vast bulk of the film, until he finally gets an outraged moralistic speech that he completely fluffs. It is very surprising that White is so weak in her role: the foul-mouthed old lady with a cheerful attitude should have been a gift to this actor among all actors, but there's not a single moment of White's performance where she appears to believe in the character, her motivations, or the words she say. Go back to that "if I had a dick" line - there are so many ways to make that line funny, or at least energetic, and White just sort of slurs it out and lets it die.

Platt's not terrible - the crude, erratic role is a liability that any actor would be hard-pressed to make work, and he at least has the right personality for it - but it mostly falls to Gleeson to be interesting in any way, with any plot beat, or any line reading. His deadpan response, "He seemed taller", when snarkily asked to identify a corpse from just the toe is the only line in the whole movie that I, for one, find even a little bit funny, and generally speaking his deliberate approach to the character - play the man, not the collection of quips - is enough to make him far and away the most tangible figure in the movie. (we know from other evidence, of course, that Gleeson is far and away the most reliably talented member of this ensemble, but I wouldn't want to use Lake Placid itself to mount that argument).

The flat acting and the deadening effect that has on the already shaky comedy is emblematic of the film's biggest overriding problem. It wants to occupy too many tonal registers at once, and can't make any of them succeed. The lurches from comedy of ill-manners to creepy monster movie to campy exercise in musty genre mechanics are ungainly at best, and they are rarely at their best. More often, the film heaves its way through the shift from comedy to horror like a drunk attempting to navigate a narrow doorway, doing through brutal force what cannot be done through mental clarity. Miner's directing is exactly wrong: he has no apparent sense of comic timing and his approach to making a thriller consists entirely in telegraphing jump scares, not all of which actually arrive. He does, at least, show off the crocodile well, lingering on half-seen animatronic shots and jumping briskly through whole-body CGI shots. And the film gets some decent mileage from the simple technique of showing nothing on the water in wide shots: a good way of suggesting both the size and the unknowability of the lake, and allowing us to sketch in our idea of the creature living inside of it.

Still, when everything is working perfectly Lake Placid is no more than the exact same creature feature that was all over the place in the years after Jurassic Park, and was often done better (it's easy to spot problems with Anaconda, but I'd never pass up a chance to watch that movie in favor of this one). And the catastrophic mixture of dumb comedy and wimpy horror that keeps apologising for itself means that things almost never work perfectly. There are many worse giant killer animal movies than Lake Placid, of course; it is a subgenre uniquely adept at producing tacky, formulaic garbage. A snotty sense of humor detaching the film from its own content and characters is certainly not a winning strategy to redeem that formula.

Body Count: A moose, a bear, two cows, and a crocodile, and then all of two human beings, in full disregard for how badly we want to watch every last one of these people die.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: TALKING ANIMALS AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the plot of Ted 2 touches on the sex life of a human woman and a talking animal brought to life with top-end effects. How nice it would have been if I couldn't come up with another such creation.

Howard the Duck isn't as bad as you've probably heard, but since you've probably heard that it's bad enough to melt the polar ice caps and give puppies cancer, that's not much of a defense. Still, let's run with it a little bit: as a story, it's neither more convoluted nor more contrived than any other '80s big budget creature feature and sci-fi romp (a bigger subgenre than I've just made it sound), and it has mostly the same strengths and limitations of any given superhero origin story in the three intervening decades. Jeffrey Jones dives right into a chewy, garish role, and makes a splendidly creepy voice as the family-friendly adventure bad guy. And I think that taps me out pretty much. There's nothing else good here; the best to cling to is that some of the elements are merely insipid and not actively rancid.

The film's origins stretch back to 1973, when Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik created a cynical, sarcastic three-foot tall anthropomorphic duck from another planet for Marvel Comics. Howard the Duck quickly found a spot in the Zeitgeist, ushered by Gerber into a potent force of comic book satire, running the character for U.S. President in 1976 among several less-showy examples of the character mocking society, pop culture, and the comics medium itself. He was as close to an underground comic book sensation as a character owned by one of the two big publishing concerns could get.

By the early 1980s, following Gerber's acrimonious split from Marvel over issues of creative control with the character, Howard wasn't quite the sensation he'd been in the previous decade. There was still enough there there for the character to attract the attention of the man who was, at that point, perhaps the most powerful individual in the American film industry: George Lucas, producer and overseer of the Star Wars trilogy, and the power behind Steven Spielberg's throne on the two Indiana Jones movies. In 1984, a year after Return of the Jedi, Lucas was in a position to do anything he could possibly have wanted, and what he wanted was... Well, the generous reading is that he just wanted a version of Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial to call his very own. I much prefer to believe that; it makes everything strictly a financial transaction. The alternative is to assume that Lucas was so infatuated with the Howard the Duck that he wanted to bring the creature to life, and so profoundly misunderstood the material that this ungainly display of ugly visual effects and nonsensical action sequences was in some way aligned with his actual vision. And that's just sad.

That being said, this is not a Lucas movie even in the sense that the Star Wars sequels that he didn't personally direct still count. Instead, it was a gift that the super-producer made to his longtime colleagues and friends, the married couple Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz. The thing to know about them is that they helped shape Lucas's 1973 breakthrough American Graffiti into a screenplay, and after its enormous success opened every imaginable door for him, he remembered them and what they did for him. As the intervening years made it clear that the Huyck/Katz magic was something nobody wanted much to do with, Lucas swept in and revived the couple's fading fortunes by offering them screenwriting duties on the heavily anticipated Indiana Jones and the Temple Doom; and once that was wrapped up, he blessed them with Howard the Duck, their seventh screenplay and Huyck's fourth movie as a director. It would turn out to be his last, as will happen when you direct a movie whose title quickly inserts itself into the cultural dialogue as a particularly mean-spirited synonym for "one of the highest profile bombs in the history of commercial cinema".

Huyck & Katz weren't the first filmmakers of limited talent to be given the reigns to a project because of their connection to a producer, and they weren't the last; but they might be the ones who got in over their heads the most. Howard the Duck was enormously expensive: some of the many 1986 releases that were made for less money include Top Gun, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Aliens. Something else those films all have in common: they were big hits. Not so for poor Howard, which made less than half of its production budget back at the domestic box office, and became so tainted by the reek of failure that it was feebly re-branded as Howard: A New Breed of Hero for the rest of the world's markets, where it still came nowhere near turning a profit.

It takes mere minutes for the sheer forcefulness of how repellent Huyck & Katz's script is going to be to make itself manifest: it opens on a tour of the apartment of one Howard T. Duck (voiced by Chip Zien and operated by several puppeteers and six different suit actors, though Ed Gale did it the most), a duck living in a city on Duckworld. It's like our world, only with ducks. And to demonstrate this, we see several duckified versions of our own world, like a poster for My Little Chickadee starring '30s duck superstars Mae Nest and W.C. Fowls. The apartment is also decorated with posters for Breeders of the Lost Stork and Splashdance, and at this point I was done with the movie. We still haven't seen the protagonist's face or heard a single word of dialogue, by the way. But "Splashdance" makes sense only vaguely in that ducks like water, and "Breeders" is just fucking nonsense. "Brooders" is at least bird-related. "Breeders" just means "the ducks like to have sex". Though that is a useful piece of foreshadowing for the remainder of Howard the Duck, which for a dippy talking animal movie with all the satire and nuance sanded off and replaced with shticky jokes for a family audience, is remarkably smutty. For example, the scene that immediately follows, where Howard is caught in a tractor beam of yet-unknown provenance and sucked through several apartments in his building. One of these apartments includes a lady duck taking a bath, and for reasons that I am anxious to learn nothing more about, the filmmakers wanted to make sure that she had preposterously detailed naked breasts, with pink nipples poking through her feathers.

On the backside of that tractor beam, Howard ends up in an alley in Cleveland, where he crosses paths with punk rocker Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson), who decides to help him figure out what the hell is going on. This first involves visiting a science lab janitor named Phil Blumburtt (Tim Robbins), who can do nothing at all but flail around crazily. Dejected, Howard fights his way into the Cleveland night, discovering that he can do nothing, and returning to Beverly, at which point they play-flirt and come about thiiiiis close to having sex, in a scene that should have been set on fire the moment it was written, and then set on fire twice when they actually went to all the work of filming it. Apparently, the mechanism to have the feathers on Howard's head stand up erect when he becomes aroused was the one of the most complicated effects involving any of the duck suits. This was a waste of Industrial Light & Magic manpower that borders on a moral crime.

Anyway, Beverly and Howard are interrupted by Phil, this time with a real scientist, Dr. Walter Jenning (Jones), who knows how Howard got to Earth, because it was his laser beam that brought him. Upon returning to his device, it malfunctions and warps another space being to our planet, this one a member of the Dark Overlords of the Universe, who inhabits Jenning's body and prepares to bring its allies here to eliminate humanity and take over. Naturally, only Howard, Beverly, and Phil are in a position to save the day.

That is a mercilessly stramlined version of the plot, which includes a lengthy side trip to Howard's job as a handyman at a sex club, and and even lengthier sequence at a diner that theoretically isn't more than a few minutes from Jenning's lab, but is also so far that it takes all night to drive back and requires commandeering an ultralight aircraft to fly back in time to save the day. Which is also a lengthy narrative digression that finds the movie stopping everything to lavish energy on a setpiece that is alarmingly flaccid and anti-exciting.

But while the script is a structural disaster and clunky at almost every line of dialogue, those are the least of the film's problems. The tonal mismatch present in the indecision between the blithe kiddie fantasy of most of the film and the unadulterated filthiness of a few key scenes is worse, exacerbated by Huyck's flat-footed direction. And it's not the only tonal imbalance in the film: Howard the Duck is, among its other sins, a comedy, and a particular wretched one with only one joke to speak of - he's like, a duck, but he acts like a person. Repeated ad nauseam, which only takes a few minutes. Certainly, the duck tits are about as nauseam as it gets. Mostly, the film tries to put over a playful, zany tone by getting really, really loud and broad, abetted by Zien's self-conscious delivery of almost everything he says in the arch tones of a sitcom catchphrase. The humans are much, much worse: Robbins's performance is a humiliating cartoon of '80s nerdiness, and Thompson plays a ditsy screwball character with such flighty detachment from anything going on in the plot or individual scenes that she appears to be the victim of some kind of terrible head injury. We know from the evidence of her nimble, insinuating comic performance in Back to the Future, just a year prior, that Thompson is not, in fact, the worst actor of the 1980s; but Howard the Duck certainly puts in a strong piece of evidence for the prosecution.

The film's worst element, though, is undoubtedly the title character. There might not have been anyone in the world who could do special effects better than ILM in the mid-'80s, and the Howard puppets are, if nothing else, miraculously well-engineered. There are God knows how many moving parts in the face, and the character is capable of incredibly subtle gradations of expression - we always know exactly what the duck has on his mind, and that's no small achievement. The thing is, though, there is no point at which Howard feels like anything else but a terrific piece of robotics. His textures and his foam rubber beak and the bland overlighting that cinematographer Richard H. Kline dumps on him make it clear, in virtually every shot, that Howard is a device: one that would bowl you over if you saw him at Disneyland, one that would catch your eye as a background character in Jedi; but crucially, critically, one that's vividly off-putting as a movie protagonist. There's no shortage of disastrous missteps in this movie, but what pushes it into the realms of the truly repellent is its amazingly unacceptable lead character, perhaps the only example on record of a live-action figure that falls into the Uncanny Valley.

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THE BLART OF WAR

By no reasonable standard is Paul Blart: Mall Cop a good movie. It is perhaps even a very bad movie, and a largely unamusing comedy. That's even adjusting for the already questionable comic standards of the "fatty fall down" genre, one of the loudest and most obnoxious of all possible subgenres.

So it is bizarre to say, and even more bizarre to think, but I am genuinely horrified by the things that Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 does to the original film, to the dignity of the titular character, and to the basic affability of Kevin James, who isn't funny but usually can be called upon to be likeable and sweet. He is, in PBMC2, a bullying asshole, miles from the puffed-up but still earnest and decent protagonist of the first movie, and this adds a pervasive sour note. But to be fair to the newer, meaner Blart, he comes by it honestly, as a reaction to the film's opening, which under the guise of "absurd comedy" piles a series of arbitrary cosmic cruelties on top of him worthy of an Ibsen play. This adds an additional sour note.

But yes, so after saving the day and winning the girl in PBMC1, we find that Blart's marriage lasted all of six days, until his new bride found herself so repulsed by his body that she couldn't stop vomiting, and so had the marriage annulled. Two years later, Blart's beloved Mama Blart was run over by a milk truck picking up the paper. And for the last four years, he has sat in his solitude, in the company solely of his teenager daughter Maya (Raini Rodriguez), upon whom he lavishes all his frustration and bitterness by micromanaging her life into a socially empty oblivion. Comedy tonight!

The surprising notes of meanness and bitterness extend into the main bulk of the film, which finds Blart rather snottily throwing his weight around (metaphorically; all he does with his actual weight is serve as the butt of low-intensity slapstick), acting like a big deal because of that mall heist he stopped in 2009, and then being humiliated. You know that absolutely wretched shot of Kevin James suddenly turning into CGI and getting kicked across the street by a horse that was in the trailer? In case not, now you do:

The movie is so proud of that horrible, horrible joke, it positions it as the very last gag in the whole movie. Two lines of dialogue spread across a couple of shots are all that stand between this image and the end credits. Spoiler alert, I'd say, but it's more of a humanitarian gesture. The point is, the film detests Blart a little bit. Not the easiest way to feel like you have a way to connect with anybody or anything going on.

The pretext is that Blart has been invited to Las Vegas for a convention of security officers, luckily arriving on exactly the same weekend that a disgruntled gambler named Vincent (Neal McDonough) is executing the theft of several priceless pieces of art from the excellent and glamorous collection at Steve Wynn's twin resorts, Wynn Las Vegas and Encore Las Vegas, home to shopping, fine food, and exciting live entertainment. While staying at the Wynn resorts, recipients of several five star and AAA ratings- beg pardon? A movie? What mov- oh, fuck, 2 Blart 2 Mall, that's right. Well, sometimes the film makes it really fucking hard to tell, particularly when Steve and Andrea Wynn show up for plastic cameos that bespeak the kind of pants-shitting horror people feel when they've never been on a film set before, and the director just yelled "action", and what am I supposed to do wait the movie is filming right now, and goddammit, keep smiling...

Now Blart, having no idea how conventions work, hears of a rumor that he's going to give the keynote speech that night, which adds even more to his insufferable ego, and leads to even worse mortification when he finds out otherwise. Eventually, he does get to deliver a speech, through the usual shenanigans - and by "usual shenanigans", I of course mean "sloppy blackout drunkenness", because this is a kids' film. And when Blart does manage to deliver that speech, he does so with timorous self-doubt that finds its footing and resonates really well with the audience, and that's it, there's no joke, no cringe humor. I was so unbelievably grateful to the film for giving me this one moment that wasn't irredeemably angry or demeaning that I was prepared to stand up and applaud myself. It is an oasis, filled with precious pure water, and in any other film it would be a solid 4/10 moment.

Dealing with a demoralising convention isn't Blart's only problem at the moment. As he does not know, Maya has been accepted to UCLA, and has to decide how to break the news that she's going to movie all the way across the country to her dysfunctionally clingy father; as he does know, she's also been flirting up a storm with Lane (David Henrie), one of the parking valets at the fabulous Wynn Las Vegas res- I am so sorry, I just keep getting confused whether this is a movie or a 94-minute tourism video. Meanwhile, his colorful polyglot coterie of security guard colleagues - including Fuckin' This Guy Ovuh Heeyuh (Gary Valentine), Sassy Black Lady, Mm-hm (Loni Love), and Vaguely Gross Narcoleptic Indian (Shelly Desai) - pal around with him as he needlessly makes an enemy of the hotel's head of security Eduardo (Eduardo Verástegui) by repeatedly, if inadvertently, sexually harassing the man's girlfriend, the hotel's general manager Divina Martinez (Daniella Alonso).

And so Blart struggles on to keep his masculinity intact in a world that keeps telling him he's a lonely fat loser with no purpose in life but to eat himself into a diabetic coma. It's a damn pity that no team of highly methodical yet easily buffaloed art thieves are around for a poor bastard like Blart to stymie with the help of his wacky security guard colleagues and thus regain the respect of his peers, his family, and the person who matters the most: himself.

I swear to Christ, I wish they still shot movies on film just so we could have something to set on fire.

1/10

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THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN'S SOLES

One cannot hear pans of a movie like those which greeted The Cobbler at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere in 2014 without becoming morbidly curious. Not pans. That's not a strong enough word. These were the hushed, strangled whispers of people who had seen something too traumatising to ignore, but also too traumatising to discuss openly. People did not walk out of The Cobbler like pissed-off movie critics; they walked out like combat veterans.

It's easy to assume that's just the usual effect of too much film festival intensifying everything; and even if it wasn't, there's a point where a film simply cannot live up to its reputation, either good or bad. And the opening 40 minutes or so of The Cobbler don't - they're mediocre in the most unentertainingly proficient way. Which is already an enormous disappointment, understand: this is the fourth film directed and (co-)written by Tom McCarthy, whose work has swung from the exquisite this-is-what-quirky-indies-going-right-looks-like The Station Agent, to the beautifully humane political fable The Visitor, to the relative disappointment of the still smartly observed and confidently executed Win Win. For The Cobbler to have been merely "fine", let alone outright mediocre, is already distressing to those of us who patiently wait for the distinctly non-prolific McCarthy (The Station Agent premiered all the way back at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival) to uncork another one of his quiet tales of life in New York anchored on a great character actor. And while I'd like to say that's the problem - The Cobbler eschews the likes of Peter Dinklage and Richard Jenkins for Adam Sandler - it's really not. One could not accuse Sandler of actively helping the film, but he's plainly giving the role and the movie just what they're asking of him.

The film opens with its best scene (though you wouldn't believe that at the time), exactly letting us know that we're in for a magical bedtime story that leans real hard on the kind of twinkly New York Judaism that would make Tevye the milkman groan at the corny stereotypes. It's more innuendo than actual exposition, and its meaning won't be fully explained until the last scene, but it does have the merit of introducing us to the generally dismal, "fuck you" quality to the proceedings from here on out, ending as it does with a dissolve that any first-year film student would tell you means that the little boy in one shot grows up to be the grizzled adult in the next, though it's also immediately apparent that since Adam Sandler isn't 110 years old, that's not what's going on. What is going on is that Max Simkin (Sandler) is a cobbler in a rundown ethnic neighborhood that's in that horrible trough where gentrification gave up, but it sucked away enough of the heart of the place that the locals don't have pride anymore. And Max is no more happy to be alive than any of the quiet souls who shuffle in and out of his... cobblery? I'm sure it has a real name. The point being, the film is jam-packed with mumbling lost souls who murmur lines in a dark haze, and Sandler's expression is never than a notch or two away from "gun in the mouth". At which point I will mention that the film believes itself to be a comedy.

Max discovers quite by accident that he has an enchanted sole-stitching machine: when he wears the shoes he fixes, he takes on the appearance of their owner (and smell, as we learn when he puts on a dead man's shoes). This opens the door to a lengthy chain of moments in which Max, literally walking a mile in other peoples' shoes, learns to appreciate their lives more, and tries to use his new insight to fix their souls, with a tedious awareness of the pun on soles. Having opened that door, The Cobbler races on by to find an even worse one, in which Max almost has sex with a woman while disguised as her British boyfriend, is delighted to find himself a Chinese man with a full-on Engrish accent, and is appalled to learn first-hand that some trans women can still have penises; all of these colorful roles played by game bit actors trying their best to play Sandler playing a sad-sack. It's generally a typical doofusy Sandler comedy, with the stereotyping and the everything-phobia and the unspeakably broken attitude about women. And through all of it, McCarthy directs and Sandler acts in that same funereal register. It's like Click as helmed by Robert Bresson.

All of this sucks, but in a mostly harmless, sleepy way. It's a film to ignore, not a film to hate. And then, a little before halfway through, the film rips off its mask to reveal the pustular zombified supervillain it has been all along. Max, you see, has noted that his mother (Lynn Cohen) has been sad. As well she might be, being a character in The Cobbler. But he has just the thing to perk her up: his dad's shoes have been lying around ever since he left ages ago. And before you can say "ohmygodno, ohmygodno, ohmygodno", zap! Max has taken the form of his dad, portrayed by Dustin motherfucking Hoffman, and he takes his mom out on a sweet, romantic date. Thankfully, she immediately dies before expecting her long-lost husband to return to the marital bed, but the damage has been done. And from the smoldering ruins of decent humanity that this scene has left behind, begins the bleak spectacle of The Cobbler: The Second Half.

Deciding that what his dead mom would really want is for somebody to stop the mad developers from destroying what's left of the fabric of the neighborhood, Max turns himself into a gifted con artist and superhero through the power of his magic shoes, first by scuttling the plans of local thug Leon Ludlow (Method Man, who does the best job of playing Sad Sandler of all the actors called upon to do so), and then, after he kills Leon by driving a six-inch plastic stiletto heel through his jugular - the film still thinks it's a comedy - going after the platinum-blonde psycho pulling Leon's strings, Elaine Greenawalt (Ellen Barkin). And for this he calls upon the help of peppy liberal activist Carmen Herrara (Melonie Diaz, giving the film's solitary performance that even flirts with words like "nuance" or "depth), and his buddy and neighbor, barber Jimmy (Steve Buscemi, a Sandler movie regular, so his presence isn't quite as mind-shattering as Hoffman's). And when he ends her nefarious deeds, which takes immensely little effort and time, there are still over 15 minutes of movie left, which leaves McCarthy and co-writer Paul Sado just enough time left to pull out a left-field ending that I won't spoil, because I can't. For one thing, I don't know how to describe it without descending into an impenetrable word salad. For another, I doubt that you'd believe me. For a third, there's no describing its impact: it only makes "sense" if you have the full weight of the preceding film to call attention to how immensely psychotic it all is.

But oh, that impact is something magnificent. The first 40 minutes of The Cobbler are obnoxious, bigoted, and unfunny; and then it gets worse, as the second 40 minutes are an inscrutable heist movie with an overweening desire to Say Something despite being completely deranged, and absurdly amoral for something nominally about doing the right thing, all while hinging its plot on the idea that every man in New York has the same shoe size. And then it gets worse. The movie plunges down and down, until it ends at its very worst moment. If there was anything in the whole 99 minute farrago to suggest that Tom McCarthy knew what humor was, I would insistently grab onto it as a parody of contemporary popcorn movies, but everything about the staging wants it to be sweet and tender and true.

The Cobbler is a film that is terrible primarily because of its screenplay and its director's astounding mismanagement of tone; it's not incompetent filmmaking. Mott Hupfel's location photography is perfectly serviceable, always in focus with the tripod staying level and everything. Nobody in the cast is bad, though they are often good at bad things. John Debney's and Nick Urata's score is a hilariously contrived nightmare of fake klezmer music, insisting on the merry Jewishness of a film that has gone out of its way to insult every other identity group depicted onscreen, so why not the protagonist's, too? So it's not incompetent filmmaking, but it's pretty goddamn uninspiring and irritating. It's still better than the film deserves.

Here, then, is my concern: it's really hard to talk about The Cobbler without making it sound like a mesmerising, must-see trainwreck. And oh, it is mesmerising. But it is not must-see. I have been taking my bad movie inoculations for years, and that last 15 minutes still left me a gelatinous mass. Of course, I fully expect that some people reading this will immediately hunt the film down, and I wish to publicly and earnestly disavow any responsibility for their choices. To lead people to The Cobbler would be nothing short of a crime. Not as big a crime as having made the film in the first place, but a crime nonetheless.

2/10

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BDSM WEEK: ROSIE CHEEKS

If, for whatever reason, you wanted to make the most ice-cold, vagina-drying, boner-killing movie about sex in all of cinema history, you would first have to confront the fact that Exit to Eden already exists, and it has set that bar inordinately high. It's no surprise, really, that nothing good could should come of a film taking place mostly on a Pacific island commune dedicated to the pursuit of BDSM, in the hands of director Garry Marshall, a man with an inerrant ability to turn everything into a stiflingly obvious sitcom. There's no tinned laugh track that follows the litany of terrible, coming-from-a-mile-away gags presented in Exit to Eden, but it sure as hell feels like there should be. And to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that garrulous, eager-to-please Borscht Belt mentality is just about the worst conceivable fit for an erotic drama about a man too proud to admit that he likes to be dominated and a dominatrix too terrified of being hurt to allow herself to drop her defenses. Which, let's be blunt, is already a pretty groan-worthy set-up for a BDSM story, but when you put that in the hands of a man constitutionally hellbent on making cookie-cutter mass entertainment, you have the ingredients for a truly punishing exercise in the worst kind of dopey humor mingled with the worst kind of prurient fascination with kinky sex.

And that's without even mentioning the way that Exit to Eden pairs its damp love story with a comedy about two sharp LAPD officers trying to stop a diamond smuggler, which I understand to be the entire invention of screenwriters Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunner, a massively misguided add-on to the novel vampire maven Anne Rice wrote under a pen name. I think one could spend quite a long time trying to figure out what, on balance, is the worst thing about the film: its deeply unerotic eroticism, or its more deeply unfunny comedy. The sex scenes are more boring, anyway.

So let's meet our two threads, anyway. The first starts in Australia, in 1974, where a young boy named Elliot Slater (Brian Davila) purposefully gets himself in trouble so the family's busty French maid (Rajia Baroudi) will angrily spank him. 20 years later, the grown-up Elliot (Paul Mercurio) still loves to be punished, but he's had a difficult time articulating that to his potential lovers, which is why he has applied for a most singular program. His friend, Dr. Martin Helifax (Hector Elizondo) is the proprietor of a private island of the coast of Mexico, Eden, which is a combination retreat/therapy center for the personal exploration of sexuality as it relates to domination and submission. Elliot has passed the apparently rigorous psychological profiling necessary to travel to become a "Citizen", or submissive partner, there to be able to live out all his fantasies of being smacked, yelled out, and ordered around.

Meanwhile, Sheila Kingston (Rosie O'Donnell) and Fred Lavery (Dan Aykroyd), partners on the Los Angeles police force, are hot in pursuit of Omar (Stuart Wilson), a mysterious jewel thief who has never been photographed or described, and his right-hand henchwoman, Nina Blackstone (Iman). The first we meet Sheila and Fred, they're disguised as, respectively, a dancer and a DJ at a strip club, which is what we call "foreshadowing" in the screenwriting business. Clomping around in her boa, waving a gun, Sheila cuts in with the first wave of a nightmarishly persistent pattern of voice-over to snottily joke, "I'm a cop. Thought I was a supermodel? Don't feel bad, everyone makes that mistake". Because, you see, Rosie O'Donnell is a disgusting fatty who nobody would ever find sexy. That's the least fair kind of joke ever - and circa-1994 O'Donnell is pretty damn good-looking by every human standard outside of the mainstream American film industry - and Jesus Horatio Christ, is Exit to Eden ever ecstatic to exploit her purported hideousness, standing back with arms wide open to let in all the guffaws as this ungainly, graceless, tart-tongued woman talks like somebody who could possibly be found sexual desirable, en route to putting her in a snug leather bustier from which she pokes out in all the wrong places. It would be infinitely more dispiriting if O'Donnell's performance wasn't so brittle and arch and thus felt like it was feeding the meanspirited humor even more than the script already would have it.

The stories cross paths when Elliot quite inadvertently snaps a photo of Omar in the act of pulling out a packet of black market diamonds, on his way to Eden. The criminals are thus after him, and the cops chase both the criminals and Elliot's film cans, and so everybody ends up on Eden: Elliot to find himself quite besotted by headmistress Lisa (Dana Delany), Nina to enjoy life as a sexually predatory gorgeous woman, Omar to stand around grousing, Sheila to shoot off zingers followed by zingy observations about how everybody is a people, even the ones who like BDSM, and Fred is miserable and uncomfortable and obliged to pretend that he's a janitor to avoid having to partake of the sexuality in any way.

Picking out the worst thing about Exit to Eden is prohibitively hard, but a strong candidate would have to be that awful fucking voiceover, which O'Donnell delivers in a speedy staccato that obviously wants to evoke terse narration of film noir - which it doesn't - only in way that's sassy and robustly comic - which it isn't. Another strong contender would be the absolutely impossible performances given by Delany and Mercurio (the latter having only ever appeared in one film, the sweet-minded "wacky Aussies" comedy Strictly Ballroom, where his callowness and artificial mien were used to more stable effect), stilted and inhuman, so devoid of human warmth that when they doff their clothes to make out and have simulated sex that Marshall and company shoot with a kind of delighted "naughty child peeking between interlaced fingers" remove, it's a little surprising that you can't hear the plastic parts squeaking as they rub together. Seriously, nobody gives a good, or even halfway functional performance in the film (except for Iman, maybe, who also has the broadest major role), but even by the lowered standards here, Delany is shockingly inauthentic and forced. There is no pleasure here, nor self-reflection, nor even a particularly strong command of the English language, based on some of her line readings.

To be fair, Delany is particularly ill-served by the genial comic tone that Marshall spackles onto everything, since hers is the most serious of all roles. Aye, the comedy, that's another thing going spectacularly wrong: at its best, it's desperately obvious and corny, and sometimes it gets worse and adds tone-deaf tastelessness on top of it (e.g. O'Donnell's cringing parody of Iman's speaking voice; the running gag wherein Sheila mocks Fred by loudly describing her period). But the really awful thing is how the broad, surface-level humor collides with the frequent nudity and frank sex talk, reducing everything the braying world of particularly filthy burlesque. It's a leering, dirty movie, though I think entirely by accident; Marshall is not a leering filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination (think of how successfully he denuded the R-rated prostitute comedy Pretty Woman of any genuine sexual edge), just one who wants to make things as safe and accessible to the most basic mainstream audience. In applying that mentality to the defiantly un-mainstream world of BDSM, the perhaps inevitable effect is to titter at it with embarrassment, to linger on it and make it seem outright smutty. I have no stake in the behaviors being depicted onscreen; I do however, prefer not to have to deal with the confusing mental anguish of such featherweight jokes being steamrolled by such crass depictions of clearly artificial fucking.

All of this coalesces into a completely unacceptable, unwatchable cinematic object: only a handful of times does a joke manage to spark enough to generate any kind of energy, and it sputters out again the second that either plot clicks through another generic event, or any of the actors cough up another line through palpable self-loathing (Aykroyd), dogged determination to make anything out of this hellacious mess (O'Donnell), or just plain ineptitude (everyone else). It's a movie whose insipidity keeps being sharpened with every new wrinkle, every new line, and every new banal bit of staging; it feels like the flatness of it all should end up turning into anesthetic mush, but no, Exit to Eden keeps finding new ways to inflict pain. Just like its characters, only there is nothing all pleasurable involved in this act of sadism.

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THE NOT SO GREAT DICTATOR

It's kind of fascinating to know in advance that The Interview is going to be one of the most historically important movies of 2014. Who knows what happens in the future? Could be that everybody's enthusiasm for The Grand Budapest Hotel evaporates the instant that it gets a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Five years from now, Guardians of the Galaxy might look like the beginning of the end for Marvel. In a decade, Boyhood may well be regarded as a clumsily assembled experiment whose gimmickry impressed everybody more than its merits earned. And while all that's going on, maybe the celebrated, iconic action-horror movie Dracula Untold will be fêted as the year's clear standout, its inability to win any major awards viewed by one and all as proof of how they always, always, always get it wrong.

But there will always only be one film that was central to a month-long act of computer terrorism maybe but maybe not originating with the North Korean government, a film that was dropped by theaters and repressed by the studio that paid for it when violence was threatened, until they were shamed by everybody up to and including the President of the United States of America into finally jerry-rigging a desperate last-minute new release scheme. It will either go down in history as one of the most legendarily weird stories in the history of film distribution, or the first time in the soon-to-be common trend of movies getting targeted by terror tactics and bomb threats. But it will go down in history. Not a bad fate for a totally undistinguished juvenile comedy with the nubbiest of satirical teeth.

Written and directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, lifelong friends and dick joke enthusiasts, the movie stars Rogen as Aaron Rapaport, the producer of a fluffy junk news show starring the charismatic and idiotic Dave Skylark, as played by James Franco, one of the key players in the Rogen/Goldberg sandbox (which at some point when I wasn't looking suddenly went to feeling like it's not an exact subset of the Judd Apatow Friends Circle anymore). On the occasion of his 1000th show packaging Dave's moronic celebrity rumor-rmongering, Aaron is about ready to throw in the towel and try to become a decent human being, when the bombshell hits: North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) loves Dave's show and wants to do an interview with him. This is hugely exciting to the crew of Skylark Tonight, and it's even more exciting to the Central Intelligence Agency, which immediately shows up in the form of Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) to lean on Aaron and Dave a little bit until they're willing to agree to assassinate Kim during the interview. This is complicated by two things: first is the supreme incompetence of the newsmen for the task of being international spy-assassins, second is the immediate kinship Dave strikes up with the affable, emotionally fragile Kim, despite Aaron's agitated insistence that this is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect the crazy dictator to do.

There are at least three targets the film sets up, in about this order: the vacuous self-importance of the infotainment industry, the famine-scarred economic wasteland and personality cult of North Korea, and the CIA's infamous history of bungled regime changes. It is perhaps inappropriate to expect a probing satire from the minds behind Superbad and This Is the End, especially when the film makes so little effort to position itself as a satire (like all of the Rogen/Goldberg hootenannies, the twin gods of The Interview are jokes about sex organs and jokes about straight man acting and talking like they enjoy homosexual acts). But it is also perhaps inappropriate to pick subject matter like this and then not act like you've just made a political movie. Of course The Interview is political. It calls out a specific world leader by name in the context of a story that unmistakably proposes that the problem with the United States unilaterally killing foreign leaders and fomenting revolution isn't that it's an immoral war crime to do those things, but that the CIA just isn't all that good at it. Pretending like that's apoliticism is indefensible. Ten years ago, Trey Parker & Matt Stone proved that you could have overt political engagement and dick jokes in Team America: World Police, a movie that I do not honestly care for all that much. But it is noble and ambitious, and The Interview, to its damnable shame, is neither.

Failing at satire or intellectual commitment to the implications of one's premise is bad enough: being a crummy comedy is worse, and The Interview simply isn't very funny. It's an exquisitely perfect example of a movie that dumped nearly all of its best jokes in the ad campaign, and even those are less enjoyable within the context of the film's lazy editing and lax pacing, sucking all the energy out of the goings-on. The film is at its best in the very beginning, when it's easily parodying fatuous celebrity media, and then again once Park's erratic, weird little boy version of Kim Jong-un shows up. But he doesn't appear until virtually halfway through the film, which leaves an enormous black hole of incredibly obvious jokes that frequently run out of inspiration once they've placed the word "ass" in Rogen's mouth. And then at the end, when the film finally gets around to realising the ramifications of the scenario it has built, in at least a limited way, it stops bother to have jokes at all, just violence with enough exaggeration that the filmmakers can maybe hope and pray that they've made it funny.

It's all very draggy, and it feels far longer than an already unnecessarily indulgent 112-minute running time. All films involving these creators have a shaggy, improvised feel, but The Interview is a bit of a shambles: Rogen's snappishness keeps things moving forward, but Franco is close to a disaster, making his enthusiastic schmuck character much more of a smug asshole than the plot requires, and relying on line deliveries with weird inflections that bury jokes. Park and Diana Bang, as Kim's head propagandist, both put a bit of sparkle into the movie, but there's not nearly enough of either of them to justify yet another trip down the Seth & Friends Riffing tunnel, not when the riffing feels as aimless and forced as it does here.

There are many reasons to feel dubious thoughts about The Interview, but its limitations as comedy, particularly in the wake of the much-better-than-it-had-a-right-to-be This Is the End, are the most unforgivable. This is a movie that almost triggered, like, a war, or whatever. It should be possessed of a savage, merciless comic sensibility. Instead, it feels like the outtakes from a film that hopefully was a lot funnier and more energised, because this is just some snoozy, paint-by-numbers shit.

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2011: In which I profoundly regret that I did not write myself a loophole

With 2011's Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, we arrive at my favorite point in the life of a franchise: when everybody stopped caring and lost their goddamned minds. The chief failure of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, made two years prior - and oh, how many different ways that film fails! it is an impossibility to pick the best - is, I think, that it blandly transposed its characters into the most generic possible high school scenario. This is not a problem with Chipwrecked. It is many things, and not a single one of them is good, but it's not generic. It's also thematically incompatible with The Squeakquel, which is all about the pressures and responsibilities of adolescence, while Chipwrecked is about kids struggling to prove their ability to be independent beings from their parents. Perhaps, in this franchise's underexplored universe, chipmunks age backwards, like Benjamin Button. Maybe that will be the plot of Alvin and the Chipmunks 4.

Following the events of the last movie, chipmunk brothers Alvin (Justin Long), Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler), and Thedore (Jesse McCartney) are now living with chipmunk sisters Brittany (Christina Applegate), Jeannette (Anna Faris), and Eleanor (Amy Poehler), all under the care of human Dave Seville (Jason Lee). They are also now one big six-member supergroup of international pop stars, and their familial bond does not hide the charge of sexual attraction that crosses between them in conveniently color-coded and body shape-appropriate ways, but they are not apparently having constant chipmunk orgies, which strains credibility even for a film wherein six of the seven named characters I have so far mentioned in this plot synopsis are talking rodents who sing heavily autotuned versions of actual pop songs to armies of adoring fans.

Watching Chipwrecked, I found my head wandering to the mechanics of all this: are these actually the Chipmunks' and Chipettes' songs in this reality, or are they just prolific, popular cover artists? When they sing e.g. "Vacation" and "Firework", does that mean that the Go-Gos and Katy Perry don't actually exist in this world? And why the hell are they so popular, anyway? Surely all these teenyboppers don't actually have romantic crushes on the chipmunks, please God, though in the last film, Wendie Malick clearly was thinking filthy thoughts about them.

You guys, I think the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies might be stupid.

So, Dave is taking his six adopted children on a vacation prior to their big performance at the International Music Awards, which means a Caribbean cruise on the biggest, newest boat in the Carnival fleet. Carnival Cruise Lines, everybody! The official cruise line of your very good buddies Alvin and the Chipmunks! Why not ask Mom and Dad to book a Carnival cruise right now? On the motherfucking boat, Alvin finds himself chafing under Dave's needlessly arbitrary rules, like "don't break into the bridge and provide possibly life-threatening false information to the passengers", and ends up under strict lockdown to keep him from sending the boat and all souls onboard down to the bottom of the sea. Not strict enough, since Alvin is able to talk the other five, including an increasingly resentful Simon, into helping him climb on a kite to do some parasailing. This goes terribly wrong, and the chipmunks are thrown out to sea, quickly followed by Dave and former record impresario Ian Hawke (David Cross), forced to pay for his sins with the humiliation of wearing a giant pelican suit (likewise Cross).

The chipmunks end up on a tropical island, where Simon is bit by a toxic spider that drives him to think that he's an adventurous French lover, forcing Alvin to adopt the role of "the responsible one" for a change. Meanwhile, the only other inhabitant of the island is the human woman Zoe (Jenny Slate), who has gone nuts from eight or nine years on the island, and now fancies herself the leader of a menagerie containing a talking football, basketball, tennis ball, and so on. For those of you playing along at home, yes, Chipwrecked devotes an enormous portion of its running time to parodying Cast Away. A film older than the target audience for Chipwrecked itself, in 2011.

The whole gamut of ideas animating everything in Chipwrecked once it leaves the cruise ship is so patently, obviously unacceptable on any kind of storytelling level, as an extension of the characters developed [sic] through The Squeakquel and the first Alvin and the Chipmunks, I am obliged to assume that the filmmakers - including director Mike Mitchell, formerly of Deuce Bigalow: Male Giglolo, and writers Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger, returning from The Squeakquel - were simply angry and wanted to ruin the project from within. Certainly, Jason Lee and especially David Cross aren't hiding their boredom and annoyance with the whole shtick of having to interact with noisome CGI rodents to be added later (Cross badmouthed the film extensively after production wrapped); of the onscreen cast, only Slate seems interested in trying to do anything like acting, and it goes spectacularly poorly for her, as she overplays her characters' oddball madness in tremendously non-funny ways while trying to talk to the "chipmunks" with a sugared-up giddiness that's just sad to watch.

And yet, precisely because of the derangement animating it, I don't hate Chipwrecked with the same "burn it to the ground and salt the ashes" fury that I feel for The Squeakquel. It is many horrible things, but at least Chipwrecked isn't lazy. Combining ancient tropes of desert island adventure tales with stillborn pop culture jokes, and a truly daunting number of wedged-in musical interludes, that's not something you can just snap your fingers and do. It takes real ingenuity to figure out how to stuff a horrible Lady Gaga cover into this scenario.

Like its predecessors, Chipwrecked openly telegraphs its disinterest in the mental well-being of the children in its target audience, though with a much more aggressive edge this time: The Squeakquel is a contemptuous film, but Chipwrecked is almost enraged, cycling through one absurd, hallucinatory plot development after the next, tossing out its surrealistically bad jokes without slowing down or pausing, apparently trying to baffle its viewership into a catatonic state from the sheer random, discontinuous illogic of what's happening. Nothing of what happens makes sense, and the plot developments could hardly be more arbitrary, or flag how much they know that they're arbitrary; the CGI is lovingly, exactly detailed to show off just how ugly and gross the character design and animation is. It is awful, hateworthy cinema, not just stupid but eager to behave even more unnecessarily stupid than seems natural. But it is absolutely the farthest thing from boring, and for this franchise, and this genre, that actually feels like a kind of triumph.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2011
-During the pinnacle year for digital 3-D, Martin Scorsese directs the love letter to film technology, Hugo
-The Fast and the Furious franchise of racing movies is reborn as a car-based caper film series in Fast Five
-Producer John Aglialoro's adaptation of the first third Atlas Shrugged is a big enough hit to guarantee two sequels, or something

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2011
-During the pinnacle year for digital 3-D, Wim Wenders directs the dance documentary Pina, perhaps the most perfect use of the new medium to that point
-Asghar Farhadi's A Seperation brilliantly reminds everyone that Iranian cinema exists
-Hungarian icon Tarr Béla retires with the apocalyptic The Turin Horse

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2010: In which Adam Sandler ruins everything

There’s no dignity in spending all of one’s time complaining about how contemporary art isn’t as good as old art, which is why I do it a lot less than I’d like to. And while we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, living through a golden age of cinema right now (those of us living in South America perhaps coming closer than anybody else), there’s undeniably great works of the seventh art being produced in every country every year, with a full assortment of future classics waiting for future generations to linger on them and love them. Grumpy old classicists like myself might grouse over the paucity of masterpiece-level filmmaking of the sort that was thicker on the ground in the late ‘20s, the ‘40s, the ‘70s, or feel free to pick your own favorite filmmaking epoch; but masterpieces are still being made.

Except in one regard. Comedy in American cinema is terrible. Fucking abysmally awful. De gustibus non est disputandum - there’s no arguing taste - but film comedy is dead, and for a full generation there hasn’t been anything to compare to the glorious age of Chaplin and Keaton, or the masterworks of pre-WWII screwball, and the demented anarchy of the Marx Brothers, the cunning of Ernst Lubitsch and his caustic acolyte Billy Wilder, the snappy presence of the last generation of female comedic actors who had full authority and equal power to the men that Hollywood has always been much more comfortable placing in leading roles. There were bad comedies in those eras just as there are good comedies today; but in the present age, good comedy is a rare treasure, while in the ’30s and ‘40s, even a middleweight program-filler was constructed with a love for the craftsmanship of jokes, a sensitivity on the part of the actors, genuinely invested cinematic technique, and a willingness to assume that the audience is intelligent. 80 years ago, a couple of films like that were cranked out every month; we’re lucky to get one movie like that a year nowadays. It is, I concede, entirely possible for someone to love film comedy of the 21st Century and care for older styles not at all. We all know teenagers. But people holding this belief deserve more to be pitied than argued against, though they deserve most of all to be avoided.

This morbidity, never more than a few dark thoughts from the forefront of my mind, has been dragged up in honor of Grown Ups, the 15th highest-grossing film at the U.S. domestic box office in 2010, which makes it the year’s biggest live-action English-language comedy. It is a goddamn piece of shit. Cranked out by Adam Sandler’s Jiggling Boobies, Farts, & Fatties Falling Down Factory, AKA the Happy Madison production company, it is the apex of that man’s art, in so many ways, combining a motherfucking supergroup of Sandler and his buddies Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Chris Rock, along with the inconceivably over-qualified Maria Bello and Maya Rudolph as James and Rock’s wives (Salma Hayek, playing Sandler’s wife I do not think can be called “inconceivably” overqualified, though she’s certainly capable of more than this). It is a story of tacky men being under-matured, to the implausible amusement of the women in their lives, and the nominal amusement of the people in the audience, though finding Grown Ups funny necessitates that one finds it inherently marvelous when fat men talk about eating, old women describe having sexual desires, and old fat women break wind.

The five guys, once the starring lineup of a middle-school basketball team, have all been reunited on the occasion of their former coach’s death. Their walks of life have gone very differently: Sandler’s Lenny is a super-agent with hot designer wife and two disastrously over-privileged children, and the other four just kind of sink into a vague differentiation of not-in-the-real-world problems, like Kurt’s (Rock) feeling that his wife doesn’t respect him, just because he’s a homemaker while she works, or Eric’s (James) mild embarrassment that his wife still breast-feeds their four-year-old son. Bello’s handling of this sub-plot is almost beyond description: faced with the dialogue and infantile female psychology of a script by Sandler & Fred Wolf, she marches right into the thick of things and anchors all of this in a consistent, thoughtfully-built character with feelings and personal history and everything. I don’t know whether this is more or less admirable than Rudolph’s approach to her own microscopically-conceived role, which is to speed-walk through it and make bland faces so the camera stays away from her.

I would slag the film a bit harder for how it presents its women, especially Hayek’s Roxanne, who shifts from prickly career-oriented nag into loving mom and wife with no in-story justification nor even the slightest authentic human emotion underpinning it. But that would be missing the forest for the trees, since that’s how basically everybody is written. Sure, Sandler has given himself the most obnoxiously overblown fantasy life, aware enough that this could read as unpleasant that he and Wolf put in some boilerplate about getting away from Hollywood living and back to nature, but it doesn’t feel like they actually believe it. But Grown Ups is an equal-opportunity misanthrope, scornful of all its characters. The rich ones such because they’re out of touch; the poor ones suck because they’re unsophisticated. The women suck because they’re dumb shrews; the men suck because they’re clueless boys in need of a kindly feminine touch. The old suck because they haven’t died yet. From all this, comedy ostensibly springs, though virtually nothing actually does, especially since the film prefers to divert to unimaginative slapstick whenever the work of writing modestly clever sarcastic asides proves too taxing.

It is a cruel film that mouths platitudes about family and coming together that makes it infinitely more offensive than the cruelty would be if it were left alone. And it is a film that stitches together anecdotes into a plot rather than creates a mechanism that picks up steam of its own accord and produces humor as the inevitable byproduct of its storytelling. This is perhaps the most frustrating and galling thing about the film, and the thing about it most symptomatic of contemporary film comedy. The whole affair turns on the notion that “Wouldn’t it be funny if X and Y did Z?” When “Z” is complex enough, you end up with the likes of Judd Apatow’s movies, shaggy improv that tries to remember that it’s about characters. In Grown Ups, “Z” isn’t complex. “Z” is Kevin James pissing in a pool, Rob Schneider getting his foot shot with an arrow, Kevin James swinging into a tree. Is there some specific trait that makes it funnier for Schneider’s character to be shot in the foot, or for James’s character to piss in a pool? There isn’t at all, though the film leaves open the possibility that “because Kevin James is overweight” is the reason. This is, anyway, the difference between tight, disciplined comedy and shallow gagging. There should be irreducible comedy of this one man being shot with an arrow, because of who he is and where that arrow came from. Instead, it’s most like primitive grunting - arrowfoot is violencelaugh.

This merry horror show of aimless shouting and slapstick and sleepy gross-out humor (15 years after the Farrelly brothers’ heyday, the Happy Madison folks should be ashamed that they couldn’t come up with more outlandishly tasteless breast milk jokes, even in a PG-13 environment) is all shepherded by Sandler’s good lackey Dennis Dugan, who keeps things light and harmless and makes certain to always keep Sandler seeming like the one sane man in a world of insufficiently weird goofballs, and presents jokes rather than sculpting and building them. More importantly, he keeps his eyes and ears focused on the film’s inordinately large product placement library, silently drawing our eyes to KFC buckets and Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and serving with religious fealty the idea that Grown Ups is a consumable product of no greater nutritional value than either of those things, with its only purpose to provide an audience with exactly the experience the audience was promised, right down to the easily predictable heartburn. This is the antithesis of great comedy: great comedy should be impossibly surprising right before it strikes and completely inevitable after it strikes. “Watch the famous people be silly idiots” is not that. It is a stone-faced ritual of the notional form of comedy divorced from the energy or content that would actually make it comic.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2010
-With Iron Man 2, Marvel Studios blurs the line between feature film and two-hour advertisement for other feature films
-3-D reaches its artistic pinnacle in Step Up 3D, wherein bright green frozen drinks fly right the fuck into your face
-A culture's doom is sealed when some nameless Warner executive asks the question, "what if we called it Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1?"

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2010
-Abbas Kiarostami, leading light of the Iranian New Wave, travels to France to make Certified Copy
-The found-footage horror game travels as far as Norway, and André Øvredal's Trollhunter
-Chilean experimental director Raúl Ruiz goes to Portugal to make the last major film of his life, the 4.5-hour Mysteries of Lisbon

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2009: In which children's entertainment can only be regarded as a vile act of contempt for both children and childhood

There is blackness, to begin with. Impenetrable black, with unfocused electric guitar chords slicing through the nothing. And then comes the giggling, shrill and mad, the voice of some otherworldly hellspawn that has seen things that any living thing would pray to never see, to never imagine. And then the voice speaks, and its words come in a taunting sing-song: "We're baaaaack..."

And that is the first thing to happen in Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

It's a more auspicious opening for a horror film than a children's movie, which turns out to be just about right. As one of the most thoroughly unjustified sequels in the history of the moving image, the 2009 follow-up to 2007's miserable Alvin and the Chipmunks manages, somehow, to do everything worse. It manages, somehow to both function as a dull-minded retread while self-consciously "upping" the whole shebang, even introducing a whole new slate of second-tier protagonists, leading to a story that's far more enervating than it's possible to imagine or describe. The design and animation of the titular creatures is still an enormous liability, with their grotesque cartoon-realist faces squatting nastily on the well-rendered fur of their bodies, and the marriage between them and the live-action footage making up the rest of the film feeling positively awful, as actors gamely attempt to interact with characters they clearly don't believe in, in some cases. Appallingly, the only really committed performance comes from David Cross as the recycled bad guy, former record company executive Ian Hawk; he actually digs into the nasty depths of the role and the comic strip logic driving a very peculiar and uninteresting revenge plot. Everybody else is pretty much just staring at the chipmunks with expressions that plainly telegraph the thought process "there? Is that what they're sitting on? And if I put my hand right... here, I should be touching one of them". Especially Kathryn Joosten, an admirable seventy-year-old character actress whose befuddlement at everything required of her in a story-inciting one-scene performance reads with heartbreaking clarity through every over-articulate line reading.

In The Squeakquel - my fingers are going to go numb from typing that word, I can just tell - we find that talking chipmunk brothers Alvin (voiced by Justin Long), Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler), and Theodore (Jesse McCartney) are full-on international rock superstars, giving a benefit concert in Paris as the film opens. With stately inevitability, their human guardian Dave (Jason Lee) is injured and laid up in traction in a French hospital (with the Eiffel Tower looming outside the window, because of course it would be), and the boys' care falls to his kind Aunt Jackie (Joosten). But when she's almost immediately flung backwards down an escalator, in one of the very small number of scenes of slapstick violence I have ever seen in a children's movie that actually made me feel like something immoral was being done in the name of (extremely poor) comedy and (negligible) entertainment, they end up relying on her slacker gamer grandson Toby (Zachary Levi) for all their survival needs.

As if this wasn't bad enough, Dave's one great wish is for the chipmunks to go to high school. That this is fucking insane is not considered for a minute, even for the sake of a crappy joke; not even the bullies and such that show up with inexorable timeliness seem to find it weird that there are five-inch-tall animals wearing clothes wandering the halls. Especially not animals who are presumably worth millions and millions of dollars at this juncture. Also not finding it weird: the school's many girls who coo with sexual delight at seeing their favorite pop stars sharing classes with them. Because that's not creepy, confusing, and totally unnecessary in a movie for six-year-olds.

There are soon enough going to be more species-appropriate objects for the chipmunks' burgeoning sexuality, though: Ian has recently managed to find and swindle three talking chipmunk girls, and hearing that the boys' new school is putting them up as its competitors in a regional music competition, he enrolls his new victims in the same school, hoping to convince the principal (Wendie Malick) to put them in competition instead. With her own fangirlish enthusiasm for Alvin and his brothers, she is reluctant to agree, but the school body demands otherwise, and so the chipmunks are thrust into competition with the objects of their first-ever crushes, all of them conveniently color-coded and designed so that we know instantly who goes with who: sporty girl-Alvin is Brittany (Christina Applegate), brainy, glasses-wearing girl-Simon is Jeanette (Anna Faris), and plump, kind girl-Theodore is Eleanor (Amy Poehler). Point 1: playing the romantic determinism card quite this forcefully is no good for anybody. Point 2: you have to be a staggeringly enormous asshole to cast Faris and Poehler in your voice cast only to run them through all those layers of processing to make them anonymously chirpy and shrieking, devoid of anything that even accidentally resembles personality. It's like buying wagyu beef filets and drenching them beneath a sea of ketchup.

Overprocessed, deeply unpleasant covers of pop songs spin out at routine intervals, while the shockingly thin plot sneaks its way through all of the extraneous nonsense, much of it involving the completely superfluous Toby, designed for no better reason than the give the film enough padding to stretch out to the epic length of 88 minutes. The Squeakquel owes its existence solely to financial considerations, due to its predecessor's unwarranted box office success, and this does not by any means make it special in the annals of cinema; nor does the fact that its creators make no effort to justify its existence even so. Storytelling at even a basic functional level is of no interest to writers Jon Vitti and Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger, nor to director Betty Thomas, and not, I assume, out of ineptitude. Why bother? The first movie was a vicious and vile wreck of terrible characters doing terrible things, and it left little reason to improve either the characters or the incident. Put the characters in, turn their nasty little voices up all the way, and include the same bullshit comedy (though The Squeakquel at least dials back on scatology - there's not one single gag about coprophagy in the whole damn thing), and the money rolls in. Which it did, in abundance. Faced with that kind of can't-lose scenario, and such inauspicious ingredients, who wouldn't just coast on terrible, lazy ideas that don't make sense, like putting talking superstar chipmunks in a public high school, and then cranking through routine plot developments that have no interest in what being a chipmunk among humans might entail, either at the character level or even just as a source for comedy.

It's infuriating enough when this kind of "fuck you, we know you're seeing it anyway" sequel comes out, as happens multiple times every year (we're in a particularly ripe time for such things, but they've been part of Hollywood's arsenal since at least the 1930s); but when it's married to the equally insufferable "fuck your kids, we know you just want to shut them up for a little while" tang of far too much children's entertainment, it becomes positively evil. The Squeakquel is not, on its merits as a work of cinema, any good at all: flatly shot, with obviously confused actors spitting out terrible lines of dialogue and stomping through unmotivated scenes. But what it is and what it represents is far, far worse than just a witless and uninspired children's comedy. This is the living embodiment of the intellectual contempt of a system that views its audience solely as passive consumers, and movies solely as product designed to meet the needs of a checklist. There are objectively worse films than The Squeakquel made every single year, but this is about as close as it comes to a motion picture totally stripped of any value as art or entertainment in any respect.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2009
-Tired of nobody having made the most immersive 3-D spectacle of all time yet, James Cameron provides Avatar
-Disney briefly attempts to roll back American animation's total embrace of CGI with The Princess and the Frog
-Drunk with power, Peter Jackson uses CGI and cloying sentiment to smother The Lovely Bones

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2009
-The late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy is adapted into three rather drab Swedish films starring the magnetic Noomi Rapace
-Proving that Hollywood isn't unique in pitting virtually indistinguishable movie against the next, France produces two entirely unrelated Coco Chanel biographies, Coco Before Chanel and Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
-Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth raises the bar for familial dysfunction in the movies

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DUMB IS AS DUMB DOES

There is one thing that I can say in praise of Dumb and Dumber To, so I might as well lead off with it. It has a certain casual, easy comfort to its style. That is to say, it's a film that picks up the baton of mid-to-late-'90s comedy filmmaking quite effortless and without strain: this is true of the acting as well. Yes, the script is forced to acknowledge that 20 years have gone by since the original Dumb and Dumber, and those years have worn hard enough on co-stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels that it's kind of uncomfortable to look at them goofing around like big kids. But in general, it has the texture, pacing, and energy of a film that might have come out around 1996 or '97. Y'know, right around the time that a Dumb and Dumber sequel would have felt appropriate and natural, and not like a desperate bid for relevance by a whole bunch of people whose careers have been out of gas for years and years - I mean, hell, when was the last film made by brothers Bobby & Peter Farrelly that actually made any kind of real impact?

So yes, as a piece of '90s nostalgia, Dumb and Dumber To - which is the best possible title for it, if I'm going to keep hunting for nice things to say - at least understands and appreciates the '90s, and recycles them effectively. Which is something, I guess, but it would be much, much more if the film's archaeological precision was in service to something with more meat on its bones than this pathetic re-tread, which somehow took six credited writers to cobble together, despite fully half of the content being re-dressed or outright re-used jokes from the original film. The plot, once again, is a travelogue: best friends and dysfunctional idiots Lloyd Christmas (Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Daniels) are back in action after 20 years, during which time Lloyd has been faking a catatonic state as a prank against his buddy. Harry's kidneys are about to fail him, and he's discovered that a fling 22 years ago with the legendarily promiscuous Fraida Felcher (played in the present by Kathleen Turner, whose admirable openness about taking this role for pragmatic reasons does not make it any more pleasant to watch such an iconic star make her big comeback as the butt of such mean-spirited jokes as the film blandly lobs her way) led to a daughter. Hoping that she'll donate an organ, the man-boys truck out to find where she ended up after Fraida put her up for adoption, only to end up on the wrong side of a conniving stepmother (Laurie Holden) and handyman (Rob Riggle), hoping to kill the girl's adoptive father (Steve Tom) for his millions and his world-changing new invention. It then takes another road trip out to El Paso, to crash a weak-kneed parody of a TED conference where the daughter, Penny (Rachel Melvin) is accepting an award on her father's behalf. And along the way, Harry and Lloyd are virtually always dumb, when they are not dumber.

It's impressive, after so many years since his heyday, to find that Carrey (51 at the time of shooting) still has the ability to wheel his head around like a whirligig, and flex seemingly every single one of his facial muscles in a different direction all at once (though I must confess to never having found that shtick funny when it was new, and I'm surely no more inclined to it now). And he and Daniels fall instantly into the most relaxed, natural rhythm of feeding off of each other, reacting and leading, stretching moments until they're about to break, and playing the duo's bits and routines with the timing of ballroom dancing and table tennis combined. But mechanically impressive comic acting is all for naught if there's no comedy to back it up, and Dumb and Dumber To is a skeletal wasteland of uninspired, witless non-humor. The Farrelly's humor hasn't felt boldly trashy or dangerous in many, many years, and the calculated packaging of outrageous behavior is the exact antithesis of the sneering, anarchic obnoxious that made them the most successfully edgy mainstream comic filmmakers of the '90s. Dumb and Dumber To is everything and anything but outrageous. It tries, but the same old gross-out sex jokes and low-key bodily fluid humor feels ossified and underwhelming now. Even as someone who never found Dumb and Dumber worth much of anything, I can recognise that film's brazenness; its sequel is a calculated marketing effort, and that shows through every belabored gag set-up and lazy one-note joke bloated out beyond its appropriate limitations.

I don't know that it's surprising that this is where '90s nostalgia leads us: the flailing, overly self-aware pop culture of that period was hardly interesting the first time, with its desire to make everything extreme and loud clashing with the era's unusual facility with recycling. Trying to revisit Dumb and Dumber is self-defeating: one generation's brash newcomer is the next generation's quaint old-fashioned piffle. And this is precisely the pit into which Dumb and Dumber To falls: it combines boringly obvious jokes and plot developments with a misguided hope that bratty attitude and yelling will somehow give it all a sharp comic edge, and this bond doesn't hold even a little bit. It's easy to imagine far worse belated sequels than this, but in terms of being pointless and pathetic and obvious in its elevation of mercenary over artistic concerns, it's hard to name a recent sequel that has been more thoroughly unwanted, unneeded, and disposable.

3/10

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