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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VEGAS IS FOR LOVERS

2012's Think Like a Man is, by and large, not a very good movie. But it does an absolutely fantastic impression of one, thanks to a game cast of very talented comic actors who don't get very much work in major movies owing to their unbankable skin color, all of them working double-time to flesh out the basic notion of their various characters with depth and personality, giving the film a genuinely appealing "let's hang out" vibe that mostly compensates for its essentialist gender representations and stock romantic comedy plot points. It leaves no indication that we need to care about any of these people any longer, but they're mostly likable enough that a chance to hang out with them even longer isn't an inherently awful idea, and to test that theory, we now have Think Like a Man Too, and oh, fuck me, is it bad.

The cast is all back, but in the intervening two and a half years, one particular member of that cast has seen his movie career erupt: instead of a well-balanced ensemble comedy, the new film turns out to be the Kevin Hart show with an immensely well-stocked backdrop of Taraji P. Henson, Gabrielle Union, Romany Malco, Regina Hall, Michael Ealy, Jenifer Lewis, and so on. Hart's a fine, appealing comic presence and all, but it's a tragic waste to have all those people playing second bananas with one or two featured scenes and a lot of background action; and it's much, much worse for the women. No longer dedicated itself to illustrating the tenets of Steve Harvey's dubious relationship book in dramatic form, this sequel finds the core nonet headed to Las Vegas for the wedding of Michael (Terrence J) and Candace (Hall), where they are excited to hang out for the first time in ages and have naughty fun. Cedric (Hart), having accidentally appointed himself best man, has a particularly elaborate plan laid out for the boys' night, but the girls are right behind, just as soon as they figure out a way to ditch Candace's dour future mother-in-law Loretta (Lewis).

It's not particularly vile or destructive or wicked, or anything like that, but only by virtue of barely existing in the first place. For the most part, Think Like a Man Too - whose grammatically cryptic title is never explained or resolved in any way - consists of scenes of people riffing around in Vegas locations so pornographically product-placed that Caesar's Palace and Paris Las Vegas make more of an impression on the narrative than half of the named characters. Director Tim Story, who has officially not been visibly excited by the material he's making into a film for over ten years now, only really comes alive when the film drops off into extended musical moments: a generic montage here, a pot-fueled fantasy music video set to a rewritten version of the 1990 Bell Biv DeVoe song "Poison" starring all the girls there (the latter of these is, by a crazily lopsided margin, the most inspired, energetic, interesting thing that happens in the movie). Otherwise, he mostly just points the camera at group shots, occasionally providing enough footage for editor Peter S. Elliot to put together some bouncy visual jokes and high-spirited momentum, and mostly soak up the color and noise of Vegas without bothering to situated his characters much within that color.

The characters themselves are provided by writers Keith Merryman & David A. Newman with absolutely nothing original or challenging to do (the film throws a litany of relationship issues that reek with age - their career paths are heading in different directions! she wants a baby but he doesn't! she can't handle knowing how much sex he used to have! - and could possibly be argued to be lazy gender-derived stereotypes, except that engaging with Think Like a Man Too on that level means that you let it win; nothing about the movie demands or benefits from being treated like an actual social document instead of just a lazy summertime cash-in on a surprise hit). That means the actors have nothing original or challenging to, and while some of them are more invested in making an impression regardless - it's like the film tosses us a life preserve any time Henson or Hall shows up - there's absolutely none of the breath of life into stock characters that there was in the first movie. The clichéd, derivative situations are thus left to die on their own, and the film's outlandishly PG-13 idea of Vegas debauchery - the movie desperately wants to play in The Hangover's sandbox, but it hasn't remotely the same killer instinct - is so sanded down and unimaginative that it calls even more attention to how utterly generic every beat of the whole thing is.

We have here a pristine example of... not exactly inspiration vs. mercenary instincts. Think Like a Man wasn't coming from a place of extreme artistic passion, but it was well-meant if ridiculously old-fashioned, and the actors and directors were committed to making it closer to the best iteration of itself than the worst. Think Like a Man Too is a textbook sequel: recycling character beats, tossing in fake conflict, amping up the elements of the first that seem to be the most marketable regardless of whether or not the drama benefits from it. I would be lying if I said that I'd though much, or at all, about the characters since the first movie was in theaters, but having had a chance to revisit them, I'm terribly sad that they didn't have more interesting, invigorating problems in their lives. And I certainly wish that the talents of the cast hadn't been spent in service to what seems, from the available footage, to have been a somewhat irritating working vacation in a glitzy pleasure spot that nobody was hugely enthusiastic to visit.

4/10

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