Son of a Gun

PREVIOUSLY: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

After being found guilty of a minor crime, JR (Brenton Thwaites) befriends and helps hardened criminal Brendan (Ewan McGregor) escape from an Australian prison. Brendan takes JR under his wing for a gold heist. But tensions flare between the two when JR develops romantic feelings for Tasha (Alicia Vikander,) a woman who has been human trafficked by the criminal organization they’re working for.

This movie wasn’t bad. Especially compared to some of the dreck I’ve had to watch recently and some I have incoming. It was just kind of forgettable and disappointing.

The opening sequence in the prison really is the most tense and compelling part of the movie. After some back-and-forth, JR has been forced to accept Brendan’s offer of safety, which comes with strings attached. You’re just starting to wonder how this is going to play out for the next three to six months they’re all stuck in there together. Then, boom, it hits you with that SIX MONTHS LATER title card, and we skip straight past it. You don’t need to worry your pretty little head about it. The movie is convinced the prison sequence was just a prologue to the real story that happens on the outside, but the rest of it is so cliché-ridden and boring in comparison.

The prison break sequence is also pretty good. But after that it just becomes another heist movie, with nothing to make it stand out. It’s unfortunate.

The movie’s really trying to say something about fathers and sons, and it just never quite comes together. JR had an abusive dad, and Brendan slots right into that role for him. He protects JR, but also JR had better do exactly as he says or there’ll be consequences. JR, who’s never had a healthy relationship with a father figure, accepts all this very easily. Until he meets Tasha and decides he wants to start a life with her away from all the crime. But by now he’s in too deep with Brendan to just walk away.

They fight, then they make up, but as the movie progresses, it seems like the tension between them is building and building as JR resents Brendan’s control and Brendan snaps at JR for testing his limits. Surely this can only end in bloodshed for one or both of them. Surely the son will have to kill his abusive father to get away, or the father will kill his son before he lets him go.

Nah. In the end, after Tasha ditches them, Brendan decides they’ll flee the country by escaping on the high seas. Once they’re in the sailboat, Brendan pulls a gun on JR and tells him ominously that it’s the end of the line for him. Oh, don’t worry, he’s not going to kill him. He’s just going to send him back to shore with a fraction of his fair cut. He was using him all along, but he’s not going to kill him.

But then JR reveals that in spite of him tagging along like a lost puppy this whole time, somewhere along the way he made up with Tasha offscreen and together they double-crossed Brendan. I guess this is supposed to be the twist that heist movies sometimes have that recontextualizes everything? It doesn’t. It’s incredibly predictable, and leaving it all offscreen just feels like a lazy “gotcha.”

Tasha has all the money, and she can see them from her position on the shore. If Brendan shoots JR, she’ll call the police.

Enraged that the student has now become the teacher, Brendan tackles JR into the water. We learned earlier that JR doesn’t know how to swim, and this is also tied up in his trauma about his abusive father. Well, JR still has not found the time to learn to swim. After thinking better of it, Brendan pulls JR back onto the boat and resuscitates him. JR says they’ll tell him later where his half of the money is. Brendan lets him go. JR and Tasha embrace on the shore as a song I swore was going to be “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri plays us all the way out to the credits, a truly jarring change from the rest of the movie’s soundtrack.

Brendan is later recognized as a criminal on the run. He’s arrested and sent back to prison. There, he looks fondly on a picture JR has sent him of a pregnant Tasha, and looks up at the sky through his cell window, the sun shining down on him, the picture of a redeemed man.

The problem with that ending is, the movie’s too focused on everything else to really believably develop their relationship so it gets to this point. It’s too caught up in having us wonder if Tasha’s going to betray JR, and what’s going on in the war between Sam (Jacek Koman) and Brendan, and what about the family of their buddy who got killed, and will there always be one more job, and how are they going to flee the country. It just doesn’t keep all those balls in the air very well. The ending is trying to be both a surprise and an emotional catharsis, but it just never gets there in either case.

I don’t buy that JR has finally become savvy enough to lull Brendan into a false sense of security while he steals from him right under his nose. I don’t buy that Brendan would let JR live once he found out. I don’t buy that in the end, he loves JR more than the money.

I do believe that Brendan is a very complicated character, and easily the highlight of the movie is Ewan’s portrayal of him. He’s a cutthroat criminal, but he also has his own set of morals and sense of honor. He does clearly have a kind of fondness for JR, torn between pulling him into a life of crime and protecting him from that life. There are lines he won’t cross. He doesn’t trust women because the only woman he ever loved turned him in or something. But also he doesn’t abide rape or the shooting of innocent hostages. But also he’s not above torturing people if they stand in his way. And also if you double-cross him, you’re extra dead.

Do you see what I mean? With the tension between him and JR slowly building as JR chafes under his control, it just wasn’t believable to me that he’d gotten to the point where he cared enough about JR’s happiness to just let a betrayal slide. He’d just cheated JR out of his fair share, or thought he did. Finding out that JR had taken everything would have been his breaking point, I thought, and this all ends in tragedy. Not so. JR outmaneuvers him and Brendan can respect that, I guess. It feels very contrived. JR gets his second chance and Brendan rots forever in prison. Because he definitely got more than a few decades after this latest crime spree, and he’s not gonna get yard privileges ever again after he escaped in a fucking sightseeing helicopter he got his little buddy to hijack. But it’s okay, because Brendan has learned to love and trust people again. Somehow. Oh, well. Maybe our anger management issues were the real prison all along.

Pretty much the only thing that makes it work even a little is Ewan’s performance. By turns charming and terrifying, he plays Brendan with an edge and only an occasional depth of emotion. There’s no doubt he could snap and kill someone if they get on his bad side. But particularly with that scene in the prison early on–where he ushers JR back to his cell and urges him to keep moving as his buddies kill JR’s would-be rapist–there’s a calm, fatherly assurance that I wish we’d gotten to see more of. There’s another glimpse of it when he tells JR before the heist that he’ll need to get in the hostages’ faces, wave his gun around, and yell that he’s going to kill them. JR looks freaked out. Brendan quietly tells him to make them believe him. Unspoken is the fact that if they believe him, they’ll do as he says and he won’t actually have to kill anyone. That kind of calm, perversely comforting advice could have been utilized more instead of some of the other dialogue choices we get. I would have found JR’s dilemma of being emotionally torn between Tasha and Brendan way more compelling, and I would have believed that Brendan really might have cared enough about JR to let him go.

Speaking of the dialogue, there’s a running theme of JR being Brendan’s monkey. It starts with the aforementioned scene of Brendan explaining how the heist’s gonna go: They’re gonna get someone inside first, who’ll then hold the employees hostage on his own before getting them to open the door for the rest of the team. He describes this person as “the monkey,” dancing around and getting their attention. JR asks who the monkey’s going to be. It’s him. Brendan apparently meant this literally, because while all the other guys partially cover their faces with gaiters, JR gets a full rubber monkey mask. A chimp, specifically. This is important for later.

After Brendan, JR, and Tasha escape from the mob, JR tells Brendan he’s sick of all this and that he can find himself a new monkey. Okay, we get it. After all three of them get in a physical altercation that ends with Brendan choking JR, Brendan then takes the time to further explain a very labored metaphor: There are two kinds of monkeys–chimpanzees, who’ll fight to the death if they have to; and bonobos, who just fuck each other all day. JR’s like, Right, lovers and fighters. Yeah, we get it. Brendan says that the bonobos, in spite of the constant fucking, are going extinct, and JR better figure out fast what kind of monkey he is. These hardened criminals play this scene with completely straight faces while drinking after a very intense fight. There’s also a painting of a chimp on the wall behind Brendan. We get it. And it’s right around here the script kinda falls apart, and not just because chimps and bonobos are both apes and not monkeys at all.

It fucking comes in again at what’s supposed to be the big emotional resolution. Brendan has saved JR from drowning even though JR has taken everything from him. He fondly calls JR an idiot. JR proudly declares that he’s a bonobo. Brendan asks if that makes him a chimp. Oh my god, WE GET IT.

The very last line they leave us on is JR, in a note to Brendan back in prison, telling him where his half of the gold is for when he gets out (lol.) It’s written on the back of the picture of Tasha showing off her pregnant belly. JR’s voiceover says, “Here’s some proof that the bonobos aren’t dying out.” Brendan looks beatifically up to heaven. The end. Ta da! They really thought they were doing something with that. I could have done with more complicated emotional bonding instead of the monkey parable.

In case you don’t believe me about the song or the monkey theme being the button they leave us on.

For the past few years, I’ve found it really interesting when movies decide to show their characters watching another movie. Specifically, I’m fascinated by which movies filmmakers choose to spotlight in their own films. (See The Bride of Frankenstein and Breaking Dawn; I do know in that case it’s because Bill Condon is doing a nod to his Gods and Monsters biopic of James Whale, the last time he ever earned unjustified critical acclaim, but I was still stunned by that decision.)

Sometimes it’s just the vibes of another scene that match the feelings of the character in the movie we’re watching. Sometimes it helps set the place or time. Sometimes it’s a metatextual commentary for those who are familiar with the movie-in-the-movie, that aligns thematically with what they’re currently watching. Sometimes it’s a simple little nod to a mentor or inspiration. Sometimes it’s a fictional movie, made specifically for the real movie. Sometimes it’s just something in the public domain or whatever they could get the rights to. There are lots of reasons why a filmmaker might show a brief snippet of another movie in their movie. Usually there’s not a deep reason for what they pick, but I’m still fascinated by the process anyway.

Of course, sometimes, whatever intention the filmmakers had doesn’t work out. Often, this is because you’re watching a subpar movie that goes out of its way to remind you that other, better movies exist, and you could be watching one of those right now instead. Hubris of the highest order. As the guys on Mystery Science Theater 3000 always said, “Never remind people of a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie.”

Well, Son of a Gun doesn’t do that.

The partnership between Brendan and JR has grown incredibly strained. They’re holed up in a motel as they wait for the right time to flee to international waters. Brendan is showering with the bathroom door open. JR is sitting in a chair in view of the bathroom doorway. He moves from the chair to one of the beds and turns the television on. For context, when the television or radio has been turned on every time previously in this movie, it’s been a news report on the last known movements of the criminals. This is an established pattern, priming us for suspense as JR grabs the remote and flicks the TV on.

At the sound of the TV, Brendan pokes his head out from the bathroom and snaps that he told JR to sit where he could see him. JR limply insists that he’s just watching TV, then caves and moves back to the seat Brendan assigned him, turning the TV so he can see it from there.

We can hear part of the movie playing and see a brief glimpse of the screen before JR turns it away. It’s not the news. It’s not another crime or suspense movie. It’s not something ironic like a sitcom with a loud, grating laugh track. It’s not even a nature documentary about their precious monkeys. It’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Not the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version. No silhouettes at the bottom of the screen. It’s the full theatrical cut, presumably. Specifically, it’s the “We need a Santa Claus on Mars” scene. JR is pissy because Brendan demands he sit where he can see him…while he watches Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. And then the scene just ends. Fascinating. I have no idea what it means, but it’s fascinating.

Maybe I was a little hard on this movie. There are heist films I enjoy, but as a genre, they’re not usually my thing. This was the debut of director and screenwriter Julius Avery, and it was ambitious. As stated, I think the extended “what kind of monkey are you” metaphor needed to be excised. It ends up being more unintentionally funny than anything.

While I found the beginning particularly strong, the movie ultimately has too much to say and doesn’t know how to say it effectively. It’s trying to do two themes: The escape from the cycle of being caught in a life of crime, as well as the complicated dynamic between fathers and sons. It ends up doing justice to neither.

COMING UP NEXT: MORTDECAI

A Million Ways to Die in the West

PREVIOUSLY: AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

After getting dumped by his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried,) Albert (Seth MacFarlane) meets and falls for Anna (Charlize Theron,) a gunfighter who’s secretly in an abusive marriage with Clinch (Liam Neeson,) the most fearsome outlaw in the territory.

The number of scenes shown in the trailer that are not in the final theatrical cut is truly horrifying. This movie might have been a tiny bit forgivable if it had been a half hour shorter. There is no reason on earth, aside from Seth MacFarlane’s ego, that it needed to be two hours long. The fact that they shot significantly more than that is astonishing.

Up front, I’m going to get out of the way that I was never a Family Guy person, or a Ted person. I’ve just never really watched Seth MacFarlane’s work before, but from the general impression I’ve gotten through pop culture osmosis, it hasn’t seemed like my brand of humor. And I am here today to confirm that my hypothesis was correct.

This entire movie is just Seth MacFarlane pointing out over and over that the Old West was, in fact, a bad place. I’d say, “That’s it, that’s the joke,” except it’s not even really a joke? It just is.

I know this movie came out a decade ago and even that relatively short amount of time is enough for certain things to age poorly. But while it had its fans, it was pretty roundly trounced by contemporary critics. So while there’s no accounting for taste, I think most of my criticisms are valid.

Aside from my lack of appreciation for the “comedy,” this movie is broadly racist and insidiously misogynistic. And yeah, I know Seth MacFarlane’s whole thing is doing edgy, offensive, shocking humor. And oh, I will get to that. But the whole plot, such as it is, really made me uncomfortable given how straight they play a lot of it.

Seth MacFarlane as Albert is a Nice Guy* (TM) (*he’s not) and it’s not fair because nice guys finish last. Don’t worry, Charlize Theron tells him sadly, the smart girls figure out how to appreciate nice guys eventually. Because she’s trapped in an abusive marriage. Thanks, I hate it.

They kept making Charlize Theron refer to herself as a “girl.” She was thirty-nine years old at the time of release.

At one point, she tells this pathetic loser, “Albert, you’re a catch.” and I let out my only laugh of the movie: A single, derisive “Ha!” Now that’s a joke!

The number of times Charlize Theron was forced to genuinely belly laugh at Seth MacFarlane’s sexual innuendo non-jokes made me angry on her behalf.

At one point Seth MacFarlane friendzones Charlize Theron and they play it dead fucking straight.

Liam Neeson eventually shows back up to come get his wife, and it really undercuts his menace–i.e., that he’s going to kill Seth MacFarlane–when the entire movie has been about how anyone can just randomly drop dead of any cause at any time.

But don’t worry, the menace gets amped up again when he threatens to rape his wife and kill her dog. Fun!

Right after old-timey child marriage is played for a joke, Seth MacFarlane says he’s very disappointed in Charlize Theron for feeling ashamed of being an abused child bride. He thinks she owed him that information after knowing him for a week. We’re meant to side with him.

Seth MacFarlane’s friend has a joke about how his sex worker girlfriend’s vagina is too ugly and loose for his liking. Seth MacFarlane, I will hunt you down.

Seth MacFarlane reuses a joke from another thing he already did where “Mila Kunis” means “fine” in another language. I would feel so uncomfortable if that was a joke my boss used more than once.

Charlize Theron throws herself into Seth MacFarlane’s arms right after he told the bad guys it was fine by him if they shot her because she lied to him, and after a few more old-timey racisms for yucks, the last big laugh they feel confident leaving us with is: More Sheep.

Men will make a cringy, unfunny vanity project masquerading as a movie about how they deserve to have their girlfriends show up for them instead of going to therapy.

Charlize Theron is a badass gunfighter who’s also willing to resort to dirty tricks when she has to, but she just doesn’t have the self-esteem to try to escape her abusive husband until she meets a nice guy like Seth MacFarlane who teaches her she’s worthy of being respected* (*victim-blamed) after all. Puke. And of course, she can’t save herself. He has to be the one to save her. Because women shouldn’t be with tough guys who shoot people for fun, they should be with nerds who know too much about poison who will murder them nonviolently when the relationship turns sour. Yike.

Lucky Liam Neeson, lying dead in the street, I thought to myself at the end. He doesn’t have to listen to Seth MacFarlane talk anymore.

Humor is subjective, I get it. For example, there is a copious amount of toilet humor in this movie. That’s very rarely my thing. Never has been, probably never will be. I’m just probably not going to laugh at Neil Patrick Harris almost shitting himself to death in the street, no matter what. That’s fine.

I’m not just sitting here pearl-clutching over “offensive” humor. But I am very much in the camp that thinks the more potentially offensive the joke, the more care needs to go into it. There needs to be a reason for using that topic if you’re going to try to make me laugh.

While not as pervasive and uncomfortably earnest as the “romance,” there are plenty of racist jokes sprinkled in. As tempting as it was to compare this western comedy unfavorably with Blazing Saddles, I felt that a parallel was too obvious and I planned to try to refrain. But Seth MacFarlane went ahead and made the decision for me.

At the fair, there’s a hideously racist shooting game. Instead of customers shooting at images of animals or inanimate objects like cacti or balloons, it’s a “runaway slave” game. Not that it really matters, but this movie takes place seventeen years after the end of the Civil War. Normally I wouldn’t bother pointing this out, but they explicitly tell us several times that this movie is taking place in 1882.

For some reason, the racist caricatures that the white main characters shoot without any comment or reaction except for Seth MacFarlane acknowledging that they are, in fact, racist, tested poorly with audiences. To make it better, the real final joke they leave us on between the “The End” title card and the end credits is to bring back the “runaway slave” shooting game, just in case we mercifully forgot about it, and then remind us that Django Unchained exists. See, all that racism was a-okay, because Jamie Foxx agreed to show up for a cameo at the bitter end, long after most people who were truly upset by this would have walked out.

And, as a treat, there’s a post-credits scene. As Jamie Foxx walks away, he requests that a white woman be brought to him. Seth MacFarlane, how absolutely dare you. You are not fit to spit-shine Mel Brooks’s shoes.

Do I really need to do this? I feel like Blazing Saddles has been discoursed to death in recent years. Fine, one more time in case you missed it:

Blazing Saddles has a reputation among a certain group of people, who love it because it’s a movie where white people say the n-word a LOT. The message this group tends to take away from the movie is that it’s okay to be racist if you claim afterwards that it was a joke.

For everyone else with a modicum of media literacy, Blazing Saddles was a radically anti-racist movie for its time. Bart is by far the most competent and likable character in the movie. He’s smart, brave, and kind; any town in the Old West would have been lucky to have him as their sheriff. The joke is that racism blinds people to the truth, prejudice as a concept is absurd, and the dumb racist townsfolk are dumb. The use of the n-word is meant to be shocking, but it’s also used in a way that makes us deeply empathize with Bart as he constantly, easily outwits the racists.

It’s also important to note Blazing Saddles‘s place in cinema history. After decades of westerns being constantly churned out by Hollywood, Blazing Saddles was the nail in the coffin after genre fatigue finally set in. It mercilessly made fun of the clichés everyone was sick of, and explicitly pointed out for the first time (loudly and repeatedly) that probably a lot of those white protagonists we had been rooting for were racist. Obviously, westerns still get made and they still have their fans, but they’ve never recovered the glory days they had before Blazing Saddles. While the language may understandably be too much for some people, Blazing Saddles still has an undeniable legacy.

The racist jokes in A Million Ways to Die in the West start and end with, “Ha ha, people used to be racist.” Sometimes Seth MacFarlane will merely comment that the joke is racist, and sometimes he won’t. And then we move right along and are still expected to root for these people. The only prejudice Seth MacFarlane is interested in dismantling is the prejudice against misogynistic white nerds who wonder why they can’t keep a girlfriend when they just have such a sparkling personality.* (*Lengthy self-centered pity parties that tiptoe dangerously close to incel talking points.)

All of the other bit players are way funnier than Seth MacFarlane. I did mostly like Albert’s best friend Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) and his girlfriend Ruth (Sarah Silverman.) Ruth is a sex worker who wants to wait until marriage before she has sex with her boyfriend. He eventually pushes the issue once her lack of sexual interest in him starts to affect his self-esteem (egged on by Seth MacFarlane,) but for most of the movie, he’s perfectly willing to wait until she’s ready because it actually means something when she’s with him. And I know this is supposed to be a joke and we’re all supposed to point and laugh at the cuckold, but honestly I just found this pretty sweet? Like, good for Ruth. She found a guy who adores her for her and respects her. Except for when they finally do it and the first thing he says is that she has a loose vagina. Because she’s a sex worker. Boo, tomato, tomato.

They also both unceremoniously disappear from the movie for a while. You can eventually spot Edward and Ruth at the dance. It’s the first time they’ve shown up in like half an hour, since Seth MacFarlane left his friends behind to die in the aftermath of a bar fight. They haven’t seen or spoken to each other since Seth met Charlize Theron. Good to know Edward and Ruth are still alive, I guess. They’re promptly gone again from the movie until the end when Liam Neeson shows up to threaten everybody.

Amanda Seyfried, Seth MacFarlane’s ex-girlfriend, immediately takes up with Neil Patrick Harris. This, bafflingly, is what most of the two hours of this movie chooses to focus on: Seth MacFarlane’s hurt feelings over his girlfriend ditching him.

There’s a joke about Neil Patrick Harris leaving his mustache hair behind after he goes down on Amanda Seyfried, and then Seth MacFarlane walks off the screen, then walks back to his mark, and explains to us that that is what he meant, because he didn’t want it to be misinterpreted as a comment on Amanda Seyfried’s pubic hair. I wanted to curl up into a ball and die.

Also, after that skin-crawling bedroom scene between them, am I really meant to believe that Neil Patrick Harris’s character is the type to go down on a woman? Jesus, I hope Amanda Seyfried got hazard pay for this role.

So what do you know, aside from Charlize Theron calling Seth MacFarlane a catch (which was meant completely sincerely, I cannot emphasize that enough,) I did not laugh one single time. Not a chuckle, a chortle, or even a whimpering smirk. Seth MacFarlane promises to treat his horse to some “horse whores” for getting him out of trouble. He says his horse can fuck a cow, if it likes. I presume I was supposed to laugh at that and not instinctively cringe away from the screen with a cartoonishly large frown on my face.

I had the impression at the time of release that this was a pretty bad movie, but I had no idea what a miserable experience it truly was.

As seen in the trailer, there’s a scene where Seth MacFarlane gets smashed and decides to ride his horse over to his ex-girlfriend’s house. I think “drink and ride” scans better and is more accurate than “drink and horse.” You don’t say, “drink and car.” Fuck you, Seth MacFarlane, you fucking hack.

Forty minutes in, the precisely two musical themes the movie has that it plays over and over that are not quite “Old Man River” and not quite “I Wish I Was in Dixie” had driven me fully into madness.

The one single nice thing I can say about the movie is that “If You’ve Only Got a Mustache” really is an earworm. But it’s not an original song. It was a real old-timey song about mustaches they just yoinked. It was written by Stephen Foster, the same guy who wrote “Oh! Susanna.” And they’re sitting there talking about how things were so primitive, there were only three songs back then. Fucking Mozart lived and died a century before this movie took place. Shut the fuck up, Seth.

There are other celebrity cameos besides Jamie Foxx. And at least that one had a purpose, as ignoble and belated as that purpose was. The rest of them I’m still not sure about. Ryan Reynolds is here to shrug and immediately get shot by Liam Neeson. I don’t understand what the joke is?

I guess the one most resembling a joke is Gilbert Gottfried’s brief appearance as Abraham Lincoln, in a flashback, speaking at Seth MacFarlane’s graduation ceremony. Just before cutting away, Seth MacFarlane whispers to his friend, “I don’t think that’s the real Abraham Lincoln.” I might have actually laughed at that one if it wasn’t near the end of the movie at a point where my goodwill had been entirely drained.

Christopher Lloyd shows up for the longest cameo, which is just a Back to the Future reference. Hey, did you guys forget that the Back to the Future movies exist? You could be watching those right now instead. Bet you’d take that cowboy movie over this cowboy movie any day of the week.

Ewan McGregor’s “Cowboy at the Fair” was not there in the two previous shots of the same group of people. He simply magically appears in the same spot another actor was standing just a moment before. It’s eerie.

Seth MacFarlane points into the crowd to demand why they’re laughing at something that isn’t a joke. I could ask Seth MacFarlane fans the same question.

“I don’t know. He was laughing.” is Ewan’s single line. The guy with the mustache who really wanted to see the dollar bill outperforms him. His affable grin drops off his face when Ewan sells him out. I found that guy delightful. I wish the movie was about him. His name is Rodney Carrington, according to IMDb. I don’t know anything about this man. Apparently he’s a comedian/actor/country singer? Again, why wasn’t this movie about him? He has more charisma in his brief appearance than Seth MacFarlane has in the entire movie.

Ewan just has his regular Scottish accent. Liam Neeson just has his regular Irish accent. Apparently this is also supposed to be funny because we don’t imagine cowboys talking in European accents, but, like, there were European cowboys? Including some pretty famous ones? Oh, who gives a fuck.

Are we meant to simply recognize Ewan McGregor? Is that the joke? I thought for sure they were gonna shoehorn in his cameo for a scene with Liam Neeson and do a Star Wars reference that would make me want to turn off my television and walk straight out my front door into traffic. That’s what I’d do, if I were hack. Otherwise, simply, “Hey, that’s a guy I’ve seen somewhere else” is not a joke?

Again, I can see the appeal of a walk-on or a cameo for some quick cash for like a day of work. Apparently Ewan was shooting a movie in the area and agreed to swing by. But it remains so strange to me how many of these Ewan McGregor has in his filmography at this point. How many people does this man owe favors to?

Why did you show up in this movie to have one line and thus compel me to watch it by your mere presence, Ewan McGregor? What sin have I committed to deserve this? Why must I suffer for my persistent curiosity to see just how bad movies can get?

COMING UP NEXT: SON OF A GUN

August: Osage County

PREVIOUSLY: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER

In the film adaptation of the play of the same name by Tracy Letts, generational trauma is hashed out when the Westons reunite after the sudden death of the family patriarch.

I feel like the trailer makes the movie seem more fun than it is. I mean, there are moments of levity, but it’s fun like watching The Jerry Springer Show is “fun.” It’s mostly pretty harrowing, when you get down to it.

Really, it’s less a movie and more an exercise in everybody else in the cast standing back to let Julia Roberts but mostly Meryl Streep ACT.

Despite clear directions to let those two shine, the performers with smaller roles all still manage to steal the show at some point or another. For my money, the real star here is Juliette Lewis.

I watched this on Tubi, and during the commercial breaks, I did some cursory research to confirm my memory and the general vibes I was getting from the movie. Julia Roberts was indeed nominated for Best Supporting Actress for this role for the Oscars that year, and Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Actress, but neither won. So then out of curiosity I looked up who their competition was (Cate Blanchett won Best Actress for Blue Jasmine [fancy seeing you here again, Woody Allen] and Lupita Nyong’o won Best Supporting Actress for 12 Years a Slave.) That was when I realized that this was the 2014 Oscars ceremony. The one with the Ellen selfie, which Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep were both in. And that sent me on a whole existential spiral, as that photo does every time I remember it exists. I haven’t bothered to watch the Oscars in years, but I was watching that night. Trying to get the “ultimate selfie” to break the retweet record previously held by Obama’s reelection celebration seems so weird and pathetic now, but it did kind of blow my mind when I saw it happen on live TV. I wanted to stay up for the ceremony because I liked Frozen a lot and correctly expected “Let It Go” to win Best Original Song. Yes, this was the same ceremony in which John Travolta introduced Idina Menzel as Adele Dazeem. Truly, one for the cringe history books. Ten years ago. It feels like another lifetime. It does kind of seem like things were simpler? That wasn’t necessarily for the better, counting how many openly abusive creeps in Ellen’s selfie alone have since been outed. But, like, social media was still new and shiny and fun for most people. The stakes of just existing felt lower. People seemed less angry and ready to fight about everything all the time? Anyway, back to the movie where everyone ceaselessly shouts at each other.

I haven’t seen the play, but I read it. And I liked it more than the movie. I have to imagine it would work better as a play. The movie is a fairly faithful adaptation, also written by Tracy Letts. But I just think this is one of those stories that works better when the characters are in the same room as the audience, where you feel connected to the moments of intimacy; where there is no screen shielding you from the tension building in real time, and you can see all of the actors reacting to each other constantly on a stage instead of having to break it up by cutting around between claustrophobic shots to fit them all in.

I don’t know, it wasn’t bad? But as I was reading the play, my jaw dropped at every reveal. I wonder what my reaction would have been to this movie if I’d gone in blind, if it would have hit harder. As it was, it felt both over the top and inauthentic. The dissolution of a family is definitely unpleasant to witness and I know it still manages to hit uncomfortably close to home for some people. But I would be curious to see a staged production to compare how different it feels.

COMING UP NEXT: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

Jack the Giant Slayer

PREVIOUSLY: THE IMPOSSIBLE

In this 2013 retelling of the Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale, Jack (Nicholas Hoult) tags along with a rescue party to climb up a beanstalk to the fabled land of giants in order to save Princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson.) His fellow rescuers include one of the king’s best guards, Elmont (Ewan McGregor,) and Isabelle’s evil fiancé, Roderick (Stanley Tucci.)

I thought for sure the trailer was going to say, If you think you know the story, you don’t know beans. “Jack” is better, I guess. I think people were still saying that phrase at the time. Still cheesy but brings the focus back to the main character. Fine. My version is funnier.

Also, oh my god, a third pedophile director? Fuck. I remembered this movie existed and that Ewan was in it, but I had no idea this was a Bryan Singer picture. Jesus Christ. At least, unlike Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, Bryan Singer isn’t really getting work anymore. For now.

I almost saw this movie in the theater on a date, but I didn’t. My date suggested it, but I wasn’t on the Ewan McGregor Wheel of Pain yet. I was still on a Wicked kick, so I said I wanted to see Oz the Great and Powerful. Huge mistake on my part. The guy invited me to his Bible study afterwards. We did not go out on another date.

This was a wild weekend double feature. Watching this movie right after The Impossible? Some of the most extreme tonal and emotional whiplash I’ve experienced during this project.

Jack, a lowly farm boy, has a chance encounter with Princess Isabelle, who is arranged to be married to her father’s evil advisor, Roderick. She meets Jack when she escapes the palace one rainy night. As they talk, a magic bean beneath Jack’s floorboards gets wet from the rain. It instantly sprouts into a giant beanstalk, taking Jack’s house and Princess Isabelle high into the sky. Jack volunteers to join the rescue party to save the princess. According to legend, the hostile giants that live above the clouds had come down once before, and the only thing that drove them back was a magic crown forged by one of Isabelle’s ancestors. The crown has been stolen by Roderick, who intends to use it to control a giant army. Jack, Isabelle, and Elmont–the only surviving royal guard–work together to defeat the giants and defend their home.

The CGI is real bad, and there’s plenty of it. It’s giving cutscenes from Mystery of the Druids, the infamous videogame from 2001.

A fun–if potentially dangerous–drinking game to play while watching this movie is to take a shot every time you recognize an homage to another fantasy movie. Here are some of the ones I noticed in a very short period of time:

• Ewan McGregor says he “has a bad feeling about this.”
• Ewan McGregor says “high ground.”
• A bald character’s name is revealed to be “Bald.” Very George Lucas naming the fat guy “Porkins.”
• The main characters get lured into a net trap by food.
• They manage to cut themselves out just as they get ambushed.
• The creature that caught them is planning to make them the food.

Roderick and his lackey Wicke get sent off in another direction with only the royal guard Bald to accompany them. Once they’re alone, Roderick kills Bald for absolutely no reason. We already know he’s evil. Is it just because he likes being evil?

Wicke then gets bitten in half by a giant. Goodbye, Ewen Bremner. Always a pleasure to see you here. I thought you were going to be forced to be lame comic relief for way longer than you were.

At this point in the movie, it’s all CGI giants from here on, and the bad effects are impossible to ignore any longer. This movie made almost two hundred million dollars at the box office, but it was still considered a flop because it basically broke even. Where the hell did the money go? Why does the CGI look so bad? I was around and watching movies at the time. I know what contemporary movies looked like, and these effects are really, really unfortunate. This might have been acceptable for a made-for-TV movie, but not a theatrical release. If you watch the end credits, the visual effects section goes on for so long. There were so many people working on it! Were they all just super crunched for time? That’s probably the case. Apparently, the giants required an especially lengthy, multi-step motion-capture process before animation could even begin, resulting in the film’s release getting pushed back several months. It still wasn’t enough time.

There are giants actually named “Fee,” “Fi,” “Fo,” and “Fum.” They were really that lazy.

Stanley Tucci casually refers to the Vikings discovering America. Cool, so this canonically takes place in our universe. Stanley Tucci is going to lead the giants to conquer the New World and kill the Native Americans before the human Europeans can get around to it. I am begging fantasy stories to stop telling us that these events are happening on planet Earth.

I do think it’s pretty funny that while the king is waiting with baited breath to see if his daughter will come down the beanstalk alive before an army of giants does, the commoners have given themselves the day off and a fair has spontaneously sprung up at the base of the beanstalk. I like that.

Elmont sends Jack and Isabelle down the beanstalk to safety, while he stays behind to try to get the magic crown. He manages to get Roderick separated from the giants and the two of them fight. The giants are still within earshot. They are forced to obey whoever is wearing the crown. Why are the giants not forced to obey Roderick when he screams for them to help him? It seems like the leader, the Bill Nighy giant, was knowingly taking advantage of some kind of loophole, but what was it? Unclear. Anyway, Stanley Tucci’s dead and we still have forty minutes left.

Down on the planet’s surface, the king orders the beanstalk to be cut down after the only sign of life from the sky is a falling giant pancaking into a crater next to the beanstalk. It begins to sway as Jack and Isabelle are still too high off the ground to be seen. Immediately after Roderick dies and the crown gets swiped by the Bill Nighy giant, Elmont turns to see the top of the beanstalk starting to tip over.

Okay, I know if he stays where he is, he thinks he’s stuck in the land of giants forever and he’s facing certain death either way, but running and jumping onto the tippy top of the beanstalk as it starts to fall is right up there with jumping onto the tiny poisonous-millipede-delivering droid in Attack of the Clones. What an idiot.

Did no one take any precautions to evacuate anything when the king decided to cut the beanstalk down? Did they really all just think, “How high up could it possibly go?” and not worry one bit about which direction it might fall in? Like, I get it, a giant suddenly falls from the sky in front of you and you gotta sacrifice your daughter for the greater good, but there will be no greater good left if everyone gets crushed by the falling beanstalk. You gotta think these heroic sacrifices through!

Jack, Isabelle, and Elmont all miraculously get down the beanstalk safe. Isabelle is reunited with her father. He insists she change into her suit of armor before they ride back to the castle.

On the one hand, I enjoy a strictly unnecessary costume change, and I like that the feisty princess with the overprotective father has a suit of armor. I appreciate that Isabelle’s armor is full coverage, with no boob plating. The protection goes part of the way up the neck. That’s nice. All of those details feel like such a rarity for women’s armor in fantasy. However. Is it really that practical with such a snatched waist? Can she comfortably breathe in that thing? God forbid she gains a couple of pounds. I mean, she does look super hot, but if a blade pierces that plate, it has absolutely no air cushion before it goes straight into her kidney. Also, I get the importance of accessorizing, but does the princess really need a necklace over her golden armor? She’s already wearing a crown, the necklace just feels a bit gaudy.

The giants find the extra magic beans that Roderick had on his body, and they get the beanstalks to grow down (?) and they promptly arrive on the planet’s surface. Jack follows the royal party to warn them, and there’s a big chase sequence back to the castle. Bill Nighy giant grabs onto the drawbridge just before it can be fully raised, but he slips off, landing in the boiling oil moat after getting pelted with arrows in the face, all within two seconds. His death feels very sudden and anticlimactic. There are still twenty-four minutes in the movie.

Lol, just kidding, he gets better. Sure seemed like he was dead forever a second ago.

Again, does the magic crown mind control power just go out when it seems like the wearer might be dying, whether they actually are or not? Because again, the other giants just look disdainfully down at Bill Nighy giant as he screams at them for help. And they could definitely hear him. He was right in front of them! It kind of seems like the more desperate you are, the stronger the power should be? Like, if you mean it more the order is harder to resist? Or something? Should the crown work for giant-on-giant mind control at all? This mythology is confusing.

There’s a scene during the giant siege on the castle in which the humans set up mounted arrow machine guns. Very cool. They apparently take a very long time to get set, and they don’t last long at all. One of the giants takes them out with a slingshot. That’s ironic; a possible reference to David from the Bible famously using a simple sling to kill a giant. In this movie, a giant uses a sling to kill a dozen men in one shot. Fun.

Bill Nighy giant swims underneath the castle and bursts up into the room where Jack and Isabelle have been sent to go light the signal fires to warn the other human kingdoms. He grabs Isabelle and is about to eat both her and Jack, but before he can, Jack drops the last remaining magic bean down the giant’s throat. A final magic beanstalk explodes from inside him.

They made sure to keep reminding us that Jack had one bean left and was being very careful to keep it safe, so I knew it would be important later, but boy did that not pay off the way I expected at all. Gross.

This is cute, though: The inciting incident is Jack’s house getting destroyed by a beanstalk, and the climax is Isabelle’s house getting destroyed by a beanstalk.

Isabelle and Jack get the magic crown back and force the giants to return to the land in the clouds. They get married, have children, and live happily ever after. The story of Jack and the beanstalk gets passed down over the years up to now, when the magic crown gets conflated with St. Edward’s Crown, which is on display for a group of touring schoolchildren in the Tower of London in the present day. A boy with a satchel similar to Roderick’s studiously takes notes, then looks up at the crown and grins in a sinister manner, before the adult in charge calls for “Roddy” to catch up with the group. He hurries along. The camera pans up from modern day London all the way through the clouds to the land of the giants, still above them. The end.

I am incredibly confused by the ending. What did I say earlier? Show some restraint. Magical realism is different from broad fantasy, goddammit. Who’s the kid supposed to be? Is it just about the power of a good story, or was that supposed to read as ominous, like a set-up for a sequel that never happened? Would it take place in the modern day, with a reincarnated Roderick once again stealing the crown that simply doesn’t work when you most need it to? Would that movie be a heist from the Tower of London, and it turns out the divine right of kings was really just a metaphor for the ability inherent in the crown to control the will of giants, which have existed all along?

I know I had a lot of criticisms, but I really didn’t hate this movie. It was fine. I didn’t particularly like it, but it’s not like I was writhing in pain while watching it. Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, and especially Ewan McGregor really elevate the material. Ewan is absolutely serving here. He’s playing a big damn hero with zero romantic subplots or moral complications, pure motivations through and through, fully confident Dungeons & Dragons paladin, with spiky hair and a kicky goatee? He is in his element here, and it was an absolute delight every time he was on screen.

Aside from the bafflingly poor visual effects, the wonky pacing, and the weak script, the main problem I had with the movie was its tone. It really seemed like it didn’t know who it was for. It’s a live-action retelling of a classic fairytale that Disney hasn’t touched yet, with a bit of comic relief and a sweet little romance at the center of it, so at first blush, it seems like it’s for kids. But there are so many truly gruesome elements and violent deaths. I would not show this movie to a small child I was responsible for. It’s not for the sweeping fantasy romance girlies because while the romance is just fine, Isabelle is a pretty one-note “not like other girls” girl, Jack is nice but kinda boring, and the romance itself takes more of a backseat for most of the movie.

It seems like it’s mainly aiming for teenage boys and fantasy action men, what with those gory deaths and lengthy battle scenes. The Bill Nighy giant has two heads. One of the heads is nonverbal through the entire movie, until he says “Fuck” right before his skull gets crushed by the beanstalk bursting out of his torso. His eyeball pops out at the camera. (This was towards the tail end of the resurgence of the theatrical 3D craze. I was there. I remember the dark times.) And that’s fine. The boys need fairytales for them, too. But with the menace of the giants so dependent on the quality of the special effects, the fact that it’s so underwhelming makes it seem more cartoon-y and really ends up cheapening what could have been a darker fairytale retelling.

It seems like it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to be edgy enough for the adults but not too edgy for the kids, and it ends up being for nobody. It treads a lot of well-worn ground with nothing new to show for it except an ending that implies things I’m still scratching my head over. I called out the Star Wars references because it’s funny to me that Ewan keeps showing up in other movies that are like, “Hey, remember Star Wars? Please be reminded that Star Wars exists but also please stay invested in our different story with Ewan McGregor playing a completely different character, without thinking about how you could be watching Star Wars right now instead of our definitely very good movie that is capable of standing on its own. Thanks!” But Star Wars is in good company here. Jack the Giant Slayer references everything from King Kong to The Princess Bride to Ever After to The Lion King (?). And your time would be more wisely spent watching any of those better movies it kind of reminds you of.

I love a fairytale retelling that leans in, just a little, to its darker origins. I am a fantasy romance girlie. If I could look past who directed and produced this movie, I should have been able to find a lot to enjoy in it. As it was, it was pretty middling. I still regret seeing Oz the Great and Powerful, but I don’t regret missing this one in the theater ten years ago.

COMING UP NEXT: AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

The Impossible

PREVIOUSLY: HAYWIRE

Based on the true story of the Belón family, The Impossible is a 2012 disaster film. A European couple and their three sons, who were on vacation in Thailand when the 2004 tsunami hit, struggle to survive and find each other in the aftermath.

I didn’t realize this was Tom Holland’s live-action film debut. I was so impressed with him. He turns in an absolute star-making performance. I think this kid is going places!

Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor both turn in career-high performances as well. For most of the film, Naomi’s character is in shock, unconscious, or delirious, and yet so much still hinges on her. Her character believes that she and her eldest son are the only survivors of their family, and her determination to survive her serious injuries for his sake is unmistakable, even when she can barely talk. Ewan, one of cinema’s great criers, does not disappoint as he struggles and sometimes fails to not fall apart while seeking any sign of his missing family members.

The tsunami scene is absolutely harrowing. It’s the kind of phenomenon that you’ve heard explained, but it’s hard to imagine if you haven’t witnessed it firsthand. Just picturing a massive wave sweeping you away is the stuff of nightmares, but I don’t think it’s ever fully sunk in for me before how violent and long and incredibly horrific it would be. That entire sequence had me stress-crying.

This is the kind of film that’s hard to watch, but I’m very glad I saw it.

Some have criticized this film for whitewashing and for cinematic disaster tourism. I don’t think these criticisms are exactly fair. First of all, yes, this is a story centering a European family visiting Thailand. While I think there should be more well-known stories from native Thai people, this is what really happened to one family. Is it super marketable, with pain and trauma, but with an ultimately happy ending? Yes. But it did happen to them, and I don’t think it’s fair to tell them to shut up and not share their story at all because Thai stories are not elevated in the same way. We can have both kinds of stories!

Second, while this film does focus on one family, we see heartbreaking glimpses of others. Most of them are other European tourists, true. But we also see members of a Thai village going out to look for survivors as soon as the water clears. We see the workers in the hospital, undoubtedly physically and emotionally exhausted, struggling with language barriers, still providing the best care they can under desperate circumstances. As Henry wanders the wreckage screaming for his missing wife and son, we see mementos washed up in the sand around him: ID cards, photos of native Thai people, abandoned in the surf. We are left to imagine the dark fate that befell their owners. We see unaccompanied Thai children on the bus Thomas and Simon were on, staring wistfully as the two boys reunite with their older brother. As the family is evacuated from Thailand at the end, they file past rows of corpses waiting to be identified, past distraught survivors looking for the names of their loved ones on lists of the injured.

Just before the plane takes off, Lucas removes the name tag the hospital worker stuck on his shirt when he was separated from his mother. Henry pulls from his pocket the piece of paper with the names of his friend’s missing wife and child, and realizes it was written on the last note the man’s wife left for him. Maria sees the wrong name written on her arm in permanent marker. The second-to-last shot of the movie is looking through the plane window at the absolute devastation they’re leaving behind.

It all adds up to an unmistakable message: The Bennetts are, indeed, inordinately fortunate. We just sat through a whole movie where they nearly died and got separated and then kept missing each other. They were surrounded by countless other families, both native and fellow tourists, that were not as privileged or lucky, and the family taking stock on the plane reminds us of how many near misses they had. The movie is called The Impossible, for crying out loud. Because the odds were so dramatically against them.

I didn’t find it lurid or voyeuristic. I found it a deeply personal, subjective account of a massive tragedy, with empathetic glimpses into the other stories around them that weren’t theirs to tell.

One of the scenes I keep thinking about is when Maria, Lucas, and Daniel are rescued by the men from the village after the waters have receded. Lucas and Daniel can walk under their own power, but Maria’s leg has been badly injured. The men are not equipped to carry her at the moment, but they know getting her back to their village as soon as possible is a necessity. One of the men has no choice but to drag her.

Maria screams in pain as her injured leg is jostled and dragged over debris. Her son watches helplessly, trying to comfort her and failing. Whenever she catches her breath for a moment, she begs the man to stop. It’s a scene that is so incredibly visceral, it’s tempting to look away.

Throughout this, the man is bent over her as he pulls her along, speaking calmly to her in Thai. Maria can’t understand him, and for a while, doesn’t stop to listen. But as her strength fades, she stops screaming and manages to just look up at him. She realizes, as their eyes meet, that he’s crying too. There’s a very long shot, from her perspective, looking up at the man’s face, as he speaks to her in a language she doesn’t know. But for a moment, they cry together, before Maria loses consciousness.

Others have corroborated the Belón’s version of events. Largely, people helped each other when they could. Although the Thai people had just lost everything, they did not hesitate to help those who were obviously tourists.

This is not a film that was trying to tell a comprehensive story of every person affected by the tsunami. That was beyond this movie’s scope. But I think those writing this movie off as myopic are missing the point. Like I said, I think there should be more mainstream movies made by the people who didn’t get to fly back home and had to rebuild their entire lives after the immediate crisis ended. But I don’t think the lack of those movies means this movie shouldn’t exist.

I really don’t know how one could watch this film and not be moved. This is one of the most technically and emotionally ambitious movies I’ve watched in a long time. After the latest slump, this film was breathtaking and raw in a way very few movies are.

COMING UP NEXT: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER

Haywire

PREVIOUSLY: SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

In this action film from 2011, Mallory (Gina Carano) is a black ops contractor who is betrayed by her employer (Ewan McGregor.) She sets out to unravel the conspiracy of why she was set up, so she can beat the traitors to the payback punch.

Hey, did you know that Gina Carano and Ewan McGregor once played exes trying to kill each other a solid decade before they were both involved with Disney’s Star Wars, before Gina went fully off the alt-right deep end? I didn’t! And my life is no richer for knowing it now.

Before I get into anything else, this is one of those films that only shows the title at the end. It has such a generic title anyway that was clearly decided on during post-production, and as the movie starts, it just kinda feels like you’re watching a movie without a name? I needed it to slam me headfirst into the title if it wanted me to remember it. I had to keep looking this movie up as I was writing and organizing my notes. I usually do that at some point to make sure I got all the details right, but I had to do it constantly with this one because the fucking title will not stick in my brain. Haywire. It’s Haywire. Let’s see if you remember it at the end of this review without having to scroll back up.

I thought about doing a full plot summary, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary. I did have to write it all out anyway because the framing and timeline of this movie are so needlessly confusing.

It begins in media res, with Gina Carano meeting Channing Tatum (I have already forgotten all the character names I caught while watching the movie so I’m not going to bother with them) in a diner. They have a conversation referring to a job that went bad. Gina thought she was meeting Ewan McGregor here, but Ewan sent Channing to bring Gina to him instead. Gina refuses to go with him. They fight. Gina wins. She takes another diner patron, Michael Angarano, hostage and carjacks him. He takes this very well. He is extremely cool with getting carjacked. Gina doesn’t bother asking him how his day is going, or how the course of his life led him to this particular diner on this fateful day. She just launches right into, “Yep, that’s me. I bet you’re wondering how I got into this situation” and the movie flashes back. But it also keeps flashing forward to her telling the story in the car to a bizarrely chill rando before flashing back again, and it does that at least a few times before Gina in the car skips over an uneventful travel montage that doesn’t really matter to, “And then I got screwed over again in the diner, and then I carjacked you and started telling you my life story for murky reasons that are never made super clear and don’t really end up mattering anyway, and that brings us up to now.” And then the last third of the movie plays out in real time.

Oh, I hated this movie’s structure. When they’re done well, framing devices cutting in and out can be extremely effective. Some of my favorite movies have them. The Princess Bride, Arrival, Moulin Rouge!. Citizen Kane. This movie is not Citizen Kane.

If an action movie is focused on just being an action movie–no romance, no drama, nothing else to cling to–just pure action set pieces for the audience to goggle at, my brain tends to turn itself off. I don’t know why it does this. I know, logically, that fight scenes are as heavily choreographed and practiced as dance scenes, and I love dance scenes. I love dance/fight combo scenes. The opening of the original West Side Story is one of my favorite scenes of all time. But just fighting? The second verisimilitudinous punches start flying, my eyes roll all the way back in my head by themselves because I just have a hard time appreciating most action movies unless there’s some emotional anchor that I have to cling to. I have to care about at least one of the characters fighting with people. It’s an absolute necessity for me. That’s the only way I can make it through an action movie without struggling not to dissociate from boredom. I cannot gel with movies that just go, “Look at these attractive people run fast, drive fast cars, and hit each other real hard. You’re welcome.” I’m already asleep.

So this is probably a me problem, but the structure of this movie did not help me out at all. Gina’s already in a jam with a character we don’t know yet. She and Channing Tatum talk vaguely about a job gone wrong. The conversation gets tense but seems to be calming down again when Channing just throws a mug of hot coffee in her face and the fight is on. I have no emotional tether yet. I don’t even know what’s going on. Maybe, like Michael Angarano, we’re supposed to immediately feel defensive of Gina because she’s a lady and Channing Tatum is a large man who attacked her unprovoked.

The only problem with that is–aside from the fact that she was most famous for being an MMA fighter and not a regular defenseless random woman at the time of the movie’s release–is that I watched this for the first time in 2024. Now, I don’t advocate violence against anybody. But I’d be lying if I said Channing Tatum throwing hot coffee in transphobe/election-denier/antivaxxer/Holocaust-trivializer Gina Carano’s face out of fucking nowhere was not at least a little bit unintentionally funny. It was just a teeny tiny bit cathartic whenever someone got a good swing on her. I know it’s just pretend and everyone was fine, so I don’t think there’s any harm in me finding this mildly amusing. When the actress I’m supposed to be rooting for against all odds is in real life filing a lawsuit funded by Elon Musk against Disney for rightfully firing her for spewing her egregiously hateful views, any instinctive “Oh no, a fellow woman in danger!” reaction I might have had has been pretty thoroughly dampened.

And then it goes from that to launching us back to how this all started, and I just could not care less. I don’t care about Gina, I barely care about this dumb kid who’s fine with letting the strange woman who snapped Channing Tatum’s arm in half borrow his car with him inside it. There’s no emotional development or clarity or recontextualization to be had here. It only muddies the waters further by presenting what should be a relatively simple story completely out of order, and in the end, even after all my diagramming, I’m still not sure if I fully understood the sequence of events.

So anyway, long story short, this is an action movie, where people hit each other a lot and I have no one to root for, and two-thirds of it are being told out of order to someone else after the fact. Oh no, my attention span.

The dialogue was pretty bad. Ewan refers to someone at one point as a “curious character.” People don’t talk like that. No one felt like they were having a real conversation in between all the fighting. Just brutally utilitarian plot delivery. “I am going to go to [LOCATION] to meet [CHARACTER] and try to determine [FACT]. I will see you at [SECOND LOCATION] at some later date.”

This is also not helped by the way Gina Carano talks. Her delivery wasn’t flat, exactly, but she did say every line in exactly the same way. The cadence and emphasis was the same every single time, no matter what she was saying. It was weird. It did nothing to aid me in fighting like the devil to keep from gently nodding off.

There’s some really egregiously obvious ADR with her, too. There’s one scene in the trailer that’s in the finished movie. In the car, she says in response to Michael Angarano, “Oh, yeah.” The volume on that is much louder than any of the rest of the dialogue in the scene, and it doesn’t match her lip movement at all. I think that was the most noticeable one–right at the start of the movie, too–but it did pop up again here and there. Were they trying to fix the delivery? It didn’t work.

I don’t think I cared for the sparse soundtrack, either. I know only diegetic sounds are supposed to make fight scenes feel more realistic and visceral. I just don’t think it usually works for me. Again, I need something. I need to already be on the edge of my seat. It just didn’t feel very intentional, the way they did it. It kinda seemed like the score didn’t get all the way done in time so they had to go without in some scenes.

And I have a bone to pick with the editing. All of the scenes but especially the fight scenes are cut so rapidly. Yes, I know, that’s how action scenes are almost always cut. I know it’s supposed to go at a fast pace. But this movie also cuts back and forth from so many different random angles for seemingly no reason. And I’m sure this was intended to get us as many views of the fight choreography as possible. But it made it harder for me to keep track of the action because the editor kept flinging me to the opposite side of the room I was just on and everything is flipped now, and before I can even process it I’m launched back to the spot I was before and everything’s flipped back the first way, but then I’m smashed into another closer shot from a third or fourth completely new angle and I have to figure out where everyone is in relation to each other again, and then back and forth between maybe five or more shots total in extremely rapid succession until the scene finally ends. Mostly it just made me disoriented and kind of dizzy, which was a less welcome change from confused and bored than you might expect.

I do have one single nice thing to say about this movie. It doesn’t really matter to the plot at all, and would have made no difference if it was cut, but it’s mentioned a few times that Gina and Ewan’s characters were in a relationship for about a year but broke up six months ago. Late in the movie, Gina has gone to her dad’s–Bill Paxton’s–house to set a trap for Ewan, Channing, and their other guys. For some reason, Ewan is extremely confident that Gina did not get there before them. And he also does not ever consider simply taking Bill Paxton hostage at any point, even when it becomes apparent that Gina is already there and has started playing Alien in the vents with his men. For a double-crossing black ops mercenary, he sure does seem kinda stupid.

But anyway, the nice thing: Ewan shows up at Bill Paxton’s house pretending to be someone he’s not, because whether or not Gina has told him the whole “he tried to get me killed” part, he’s sure Gina has told him at some point she works for and/or has dated a guy named “Kenneth.” He asks Bill Paxton, point-blank, if she’s ever mentioned anyone named Kenneth before. Bill Paxton says no. Ewan (as Kenneth) seems genuinely taken aback. He says, “He was her boss and they were in a relationship for over a year, and she never said anything about him to you?” He seems almost hurt that his ex-girlfriend never even mentioned him to her father in passing, even though he’s here to try to kill her himself this time for reasons. It was the one humanizing, flash of genuine emotion that I could cling to like driftwood from a sinking ship. Thanks as always for showing up today, Ewan. Sorry she left you to drown on the beach from Grease with your grotesquely broken leg trapped between two rocks as the tide was coming in.

Review over. Can you remember the name of this movie? Me neither.

COMING UP NEXT: THE IMPOSSIBLE

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

PREVIOUSLY: PERFECT SENSE

In this romantic dramedy released in 2011, based on the book of the same name by Paul Torday, a charming Yemeni sheikh seeks help from a bunch of British institutions to bring his dearest dream to fruition: To create a salmon run for leisure fishing in his desert country. Financial advisor Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) and fish scientist Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) start to develop feelings for each other as they work to accomplish this impossible task.

Oh, man. I really, really did not enjoy this.

I liked the book okay, I think? Not one of my favorites I’ve read for this project by a longshot, but I also didn’t hate it. I didn’t struggle to read it, but it also didn’t really stick with me.

The book is a satire, I guess, but mostly it doesn’t know what it wants to be. A satire, a spiritual tract, a journey of self-discovery, a tragic love story? It’s all of those things and none of those things, because it doesn’t really commit to any of them.

The movie changes quite a few things from the book, and I think most of it was for the worse. Spoilers for both the book and the movie follow.

Both Harriet and Fred are in relationships when they meet. Fred is stuck in a loveless marriage with an absolute frigid bitch of a wife (who’s even worse in the book, if you can believe it.) In the book, Harriet is in a long-term, blissfully happy relationship with a soldier named Robert. She’s known him for years. They’re engaged. In the movie, they’ve known each other for three weeks. They remind us of that over and over. The relationship was just sort of maybe starting to get serious when Robert gets deployed. In both versions of the story, his and Harriet’s correspondence is interrupted before he’s officially declared missing in action. But in the book, it makes sense why she acts like an obsessed, grieving partner. Because she is. In the movie, a guy disappeared who she’s known for three weeks. Yes, it’s sad and I’d expect her to be sad, but the way she behaves is incredibly intense over a guy who just got the “boyfriend” designation.

Meanwhile, Fred is such an absolute bitch to Harriet for so long in the movie. I get it, he has contempt for the project, but pretty much the second he has a real conversation with her in person in the book, he thaws. And I know the “I can’t stand your guts” to “I can’t live without you” journey is very much a trope in romance and that’s what they’re trying to do. But the vitriol is so completely one-sided. She just keeps up a patient smile at his derision and it’s just off-putting. She’s not in charge here. Why is he so determined to take it out on her personally?

In the book, by the time Robert is missing in action, Fred is tripping all over himself to console Harriet. Subconsciously, he definitely sees an opening, but he doesn’t allow himself to admit it. It is clear by then he has grown incredibly fond of her, and he is genuinely supportive.

By that point in the movie, Fred is still calling her “Ms. Chetwode-Talbot,” leaves a lengthy message on her answering machine asking when she’s coming back to work, and shortly afterward shows up at her home uninvited and unannounced. Even though it turns out his intentions are pure, it’s still…a lot. But even more a lot is the fact that Harriet snaps and calls him unfeeling and says that anyone without autism would know better than to behave the way he does. Seriously, she accuses him of being socially maladjusted and unempathetic because he must be autistic. And he’s like, “Oh, that’s okay, I do have autism, so you telling me I lack basic human decency didn’t hurt my feelings because autistic people don’t have those.” And it’s also unclear if he’s joking? If he is joking about being autistic, is he making a joke at his own expense or at the expense of autistic people? He repeatedly says he’s not good at jokes. The lack of a sense of humor is supposed to be a thing from the book, and it does not land here at all. What the fuck. I am not rooting for these two crazy kids.

More than expecting us to sympathize with two poorly written protagonists who are demonstrably bad people, the technical aspects of the movie began to grate on me. The framing of some shots is odd. Specifically, there’s a shot of Fred’s boss in his office teleconferencing on his laptop. For parts of the scene, the camera is out in the hallway, partially looking in through the office door. This takes up the right half of the screen. On the left side of the screen, we can still see down the hallway, with individual people walking back and forth. It’s such a strange composition. I’m from a culture that reads left-to-right, so I’m part of a sizable population that tends to look at the screen left-to-right as well, especially when there’s motion drawing my eye there. I kept watching the left side of the screen, expecting the shot was framed like that because someone was about to come down the hallway and enter the office. But no. Our attention was supposed to be solely on the office the whole time. So why was it shot like that? I have no idea. That’s just one example that sticks out the most to me.

There are several shots that are wide shots for no discernable reason. There are more shots where things are framed strangely and your eyes get tricked into going to the wrong place on the screen from where the point of focus should be. The compositions of shots don’t line up with each other but then they do but then they don’t again. Over and over, something about what we’re looking at just feels a little bit off. It feels bizarrely amateur for a film directed by Lasse Hallström, who’s been in the business for decades and has been nominated for best director Academy Awards multiple times. But then, this movie was nominated for three Golden Globes, so what do I know.

The editing also has this “off” feeling sometimes. It cuts to reaction shots over and over in a way that feels like they’re either stretching for time or the editor kept getting called out of the room and forgot where they were and ended up reinserting the same B-roll footage in multiple places at random by accident.

There’s a scene where Harriet and Fred are having lunch, and it’s a regular shot/reverse shot, back-and-forth close-ups on their faces. These shots show part of the back of the other person. While the camera’s focusing on Fred’s face, he lifts his glass and takes a drink. The shot switches back to Harriet. While she’s talking, we see the back of Fred out of focus. He sets his glass down. The shot cuts back to Fred’s face. He magically still has his glass up near his face. He sets it down again.

This is such a common, unimportant continuity error that it shouldn’t even be worth mentioning. It shouldn’t be that noticeable. Except that both times he sets the glass down, the Foley artists added a thunk noise when the glass hits the table, and the sound editors put it in twice. Back-to-back, thunk, thunk. So they must have noticed the continuity error, and then chose to draw attention to it. A baffling series of minor decisions indicative to the not-quite-right, almost uncanny feeling that permeates the whole movie.

Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor have no chemistry. Worse, they have anti-chemistry. The wonky framing and editing and bad script aren’t doing them any favors, for sure. But Ewan is still so stiff with her way past the point where they should at least be friends. I don’t know if he’s still trying to play the uptight scientist who doesn’t know how to do feelings, but it reads like he just doesn’t care about her. And Emily seems like she can’t stand him. Even when she puts on a sweet tone, there often seems like there’s an underlying layer of…condescension? Contempt? It feels like speaking civilly to him is a physical strain on her. I don’t know how to describe it, but I would wilt if someone talked to me in that tone of voice. I don’t for a second buy that these two are falling in love with each other. I don’t buy that they can stand to be in the same room as each other.

Back to the general lack of quality control, there’s exactly one scene with subtitles, and the subtitles are almost unreadably tiny.

That scene sets up the sheikh as the target of an assassination plot. Fred takes down the assassin by casting a lure and hitting him in the ear with a fish hook, and this is played dead straight. At least the book was halfway funny.

Then they do the stereotypical Brown Person Life Debt. Fred saved the sheikh’s life, so someday, the sheikh must repay the favor. In the book, both Harriet and Fred stand by and do nothing and someone else has to jump in and save the sheikh.

The end of the book is completely different. First of all, in the book, Robert is dead. Harriet mostly leaves the project and still corresponds a bit with Fred, but they never get together and likely never even see each other again.

In the movie, Robert is miraculously the only survivor of his unit with no explanation. We hear about it over the phone. Almost as if that difference was lazily contrived. I know they had to change how long he and Harriet had been together and also they couldn’t kill him if they wanted to change it so Harriet and Fred got together in the end, but it just seems so forced and it happens so late in the movie. The press officer covers up the fact that he survived and “surprises” Harriet with a photo op. He dated this chick for less than a month months ago! Why is he not being flown back home to his mother?

Earlier, Harriet finally admitted to Fred that she was mourning the idea of Robert more than Robert himself because he seemed so nice but she never got the chance to know him. And it turns out the punchline to that is that this guy she’s been pining away for is actually maybe kinda racist. Those Arabs always get their money, says the guy who was almost killed fighting in an oil war. And then the next morning Fred tells him it really sucks that he wasn’t killed in action along with the rest of his friends. Again, what the fuck. What a dick. Our hero, everyone.

Like the book, the movie ends with a catastrophic flash flood, destroying the nascent salmon run right after the fish are released for the first time. But in the book, the flash flood is a freak accident. Fred says that after all that money, all that planning, he was most focused on getting the fish acclimated, and the engineers in charge of building the run never thought to add in fail-safes in the event of flash floods. Good old simple human error, hubris, man vs. nature, etc., etc. The prime minister (not the foreign secretary,) the sheikh, and the same loyal servant who saved the sheikh from the assassin earlier are washed away in the flood and killed. Fred, again, is useless.

In the movie, those filthy terrorists, men who only know how to destroy, are responsible for the flood because of sabotage. See, this time, Fred is perfect, and establishes contact with Chinese engineers who will take flash flooding into account. So something like this could only happen because some men are inherently bad. No one important is killed in the disaster. The sheikh survives because Fred is there. The sheikh repays his Brown Person Life Debt and saves Fred, and then Fred saves his life again. So presumably they’re not square and the Brown Person Life Debt has just been reactivated. And after all that, for all his mystical, spiritual talk, the sheikh is like, miracle shmiracle. Maybe, he thinks aloud, the terrorists had a point, actually.

No, movie. You do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to ISIL.”

In the end, Harriet ditches the war hero she dated for three weeks. She doesn’t give him a second look back after he tells her she was the “only thing” that kept him going in the war but now she doesn’t owe him anything. Fred’s a dick to her some more while she does some last-minute agonizing over the shoehorned love triangle, and it’s all still incredibly awkwardly framed and edited. But then it turns out the fish survived the destruction of the run, and the fish are a metaphor for Harriet and Fred’s love. Fred says they’ll try again and rebuild, and this time, they’ll try to do it with less colonialism. Maybe the terrorists won’t destroy it again if they make the terrorists feel included in the rebuilding. I foresee no problems here, this will all turn out fine this time.

Harriet and Fred hold hands as Harriet’s boyfriend realizes he’s officially her ex-boyfriend and drives away alone. I don’t think Harriet and Fred ever actually kiss on the mouth in the movie. I wonder if that’s because Emily and/or Ewan refused to do it. I wouldn’t find it surprising if that turned out to be the case. Big yikes. I am uncomfortable.

The last shot of the movie is looking at another “funny” IM conversation between the press officer and the prime minister. They’ll still be able to spin this to their advantage, and the stupid foreign press secretary is going to get a demotion to Fred’s old department for having the audacity to survive the disaster. Ta da! The end.

Ugh. You know, I feel like the book had a bit of an identity crisis going on, but at least it had something it wanted to say. I’m not sure how well it got the message across, but it certainly had ideas it believed in.

This movie…basic incompetence aside, I don’t think it has any idea what it’s trying to say. Except for undoing the anti-colonialism messages that the book makes impossible to miss. Which was like, the whole point of the story? The whole point is that Harriet and Fred don’t get together. The whole point is that they both end up alone. The whole point is that they put in all this work and it failed anyway. The whole point is that there are some things money can’t buy. The whole point is that for a single shining moment, it looked like it might actually work, and humans can make miracles come true. And yet, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. Don’t go chasing waterfalls.

The movie looks at the moral of the story and goes, “Nah.” They decide to make the main characters unlikable; take out all the comedy and satire; make it a dry, pointless slog to nowhere; and then have them succeed anyway because happy endings test well. It’s sloppy and vapid.

Beginners and Perfect Sense made me believe in love again. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was one I was actually looking forward to at the start of this project, and boy did it turn out to be a haymaker to my burgeoning sense of hope.

COMING UP NEXT: HAYWIRE

Perfect Sense

PREVIOUSLY: BEGINNERS

In this 2011 romantic drama, a chef, Michael (Ewan McGregor,) and an epidemiologist, Susan (Eva Green,) fall in love as a mysterious pandemic sweeps the globe. It starts with strange psychological effects, followed swiftly by the loss of smell before the other senses.

I have had to put up with a lot of shit as the effects of Long COVID have torn their way through my body. It’s affected my vision, hearing, and nervous system. There were about three months straight where it just felt like I was constantly on fire. But I am very grateful that of all my symptoms, I never lost my sense of smell or taste. I really think that as my entire mind and body betrayed me during the worst of it, not even being able to enjoy the food I could keep down would have absolutely tipped me over the edge into losing the will to live.

I’m also grateful that this isn’t one of the movies I stumbled upon during my little voyage in rediscovering the joys of cinema during quarantine. I think it would have sent me into a full hysterical meltdown. Even now, some parts of it hit a little too close to home.

The critics at the time were largely lukewarm to negative on this one, and I wonder if any of them would have a different opinion revisiting it after 2020. I think it would have struck me very differently if I’d seen it at the time of release. But after living through a pandemic with some echoes of this fictional one, I found it impossible not to feel at least a little affected by this movie.

There are spoilers from here on out. I do recommend watching this movie. You can always watch it then come back and read the rest if you don’t want to know the ending now.

One complaint a lot of viewers seem to have is that this isn’t a character-driven piece. I don’t think it’s supposed to be. This movie is more about society and the world at large than it is about the individual characters. But I did also come to care about the characters. I thought Ewan’s performance in particular was really heart-wrenching. I was very distraught after the third-act break-up. I was on the verge of tears, heart pounding, the whole thing, hoping they’d have time to reunite and make up before all of their senses were gone.

We know as much as we need to know about the characters. They’ve done bad things. They feel unlovable. They’re lonely. And even as the world repeatedly falls apart and reshapes itself around them, they find each other. And as long as they know the other’s there with them, it’s enough.

This one had some familiar faces from back in the old days. I know I don’t normally point out the many people Ewan has worked with more than once because it’s not that interesting, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it made my brain light up a little this time. Ewen Bremner from Trainspotting (and Black Hawk Down, I guess) is here, and so is Denis Lawson, Ewan’s uncle. I was wrong in thinking Solid Geometry was their only film collaboration, though I am still glad I was able to track that one down. It was just nice, seeing these guys together? This film is also directed by David Mackenzie, who’d previously written and directed Young Adam. I liked this film way more.

The ending felt very abrupt. I do think that if it had gone on any longer in the same pattern, it would have risked getting too repetitive. The cycle managed to keep me on the edge of my seat for as long as it lasted, and I think it’s always better to leave the audience wanting more instead of boring them. Ending it before people lose their final sense of touch was both a surprise and a way to end the movie on the hopeful note it strived for. Because that’s the really beautiful thing about this movie (besides Max Richter’s breathtaking soundtrack:) The thesis is that life goes on. People find new ways to adapt and cope. For as long as people survive, we will find a new normal. A testament to the human spirit, etc., etc. And I’m glad it was sad but not cynical and depressing the way Young Adam was. It’s incredibly bittersweet, and again, must hit different for the people who dragged themselves through Long COVID and still get up and go on with their lives every day.

I was hoping and maybe expecting that the cause of the disease would be discovered, or it would start gradually going away on its own. The fact that the epidemiologists have no idea what’s actually causing the symptoms lends itself to some light sci-fi or magical realism elements, and I kept thinking that would be explored at least a little more. I was waiting for some last-minute War of the Worlds-style twist, where all seems lost but humanity is saved at the eleventh hour by some fluke completely out of our control. But it doesn’t. The world goes silent and dark, and shortly after, the movie ends, with one last reassurance that things will still go on. People might not get the answers they need, but they will still love each other and find ways to communicate their love for as long as they are able. Because that’s what humans do.

Wow. Two emotionally complex, unique, well-made, heartfelt movies back-to-back. I don’t even know if that’s happened before. But oh thank god.

You’re right, Perfect Sense. Life is pain, but the human spirit remains indefatigable. I can do this.

COMING UP NEXT: SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

Beginners

PREVIOUSLY: JACKBOOTS ON WHITEHALL

In 2003, as thirty-eight-year-old artist Oliver (Ewan McGregor) falls in love with an actress, Anna (Mélanie Laurent,) he remembers the relationships he shared with his deceased parents–especially his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer,) who came out as gay shortly before he died.

Oh, thank god, this was lovely. I desperately needed a movie like this, especially after the last one.

The events of this movie were apparently inspired by writer/director Mike Mills’s real life, and you can tell. It all felt incredibly earnest and authentic. Mills’s father came out as gay shortly after Mills’s mother died. The complicated feelings that must have come with that bombshell are portrayed with such clarity: The desire to love and accept your father for however much time he has left, while also recontextualizing what you thought you knew about your parents and their relationship, and being haunted over the unfairness that your father is living his best life now because your mother died in a loveless marriage. It’s beautiful and devastating.

The way it establishes snapshots in time felt so intentional. It was providing context for why people are the way they are and why they do the things they do, but it also felt like it was sharing memories. The film feels so generous. Oliver is sharing the story of the loves of his life with us.

Some of this I could personally relate to and some of it I couldn’t. I for sure felt the loneliness, self-sabotage, and fear of reliving your parents’ mistakes. I definitely cried a few times. (That Velveteen Rabbit quote about being loved the most when you’re old and worn out got me real good. It probably says something about me that the fucking Velveteen Rabbit was my favorite story for a while as a child. “The Sads” indeed.) I think there’s something here for most people. But I don’t think a lack of relatability will ruin the movie for you or anything. Like I said, it feels so open and personal. It’s clearly someone’s story, it doesn’t necessarily have to be your story.

As far as criticisms, I really only have one. As written, Anna falls a bit into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, especially when Oliver first meets her. But Mélanie Laurent plays her as so grounded, she still feels like a real person.

A tiny detail I noticed that delighted me was that the actor playing Young Oliver, Keegan Boos, had a tiny mole painted on beneath his right eye, to match Ewan McGregor’s. I’m extremely impressed with that level of attention to detail.

All of the actors are great. This is the role that finally won Christopher Plummer an Academy Award. But the real star of the movie is Cosmo the dog as Arthur. A consummate performer and a good boy. I’m obsessed with him. Subtitle humor is one of my favorite kinds of under-utilized comedy. I’m pretty much always delighted by it, and I can’t believe I’ve never seen a movie that has subtitles for a dog before. It was one of my favorite creative decisions of the film.

I can’t decide if the movie’s more happy or sad, or hopeful or not, but I think it’s some of all of those things and more. It’s one of the most authentic portrayals of love I’ve seen on screen in a very long time. It’s bittersweet but also comforting. It was absolutely beautiful.

What a breath of fresh air. I highly recommend this one. Movies like this are the reason I’m still doing this. It’s been so long since I stumbled across a lesser known gem that I wouldn’t have discovered on my own, but Beginners made the last mediocre-to-bad stretch worth it.

COMING UP NEXT: PERFECT SENSE

Jackboots on Whitehall

PREVIOUSLY: NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS

An animated/puppet satire released in 2010, Jackboots on Whitehall asks the question: What if the Nazis invaded England, and what if the English had to turn to the (gasp) Scottish for help?

Wow, cool. Another satire where they forgot to have a point. Another comedy where they forgot to put in the jokes. I swear there are plenty of British comedies I laugh at and enjoy. Ewan McGregor just keeps starring in the bad ones. I really don’t think I’m the problem here, considering this movie cost $6 million to make and only earned $20,776 back at the box office. Possibly the worst bomb I’ll ever watch for this project, and I really can’t say I’m shocked.

I haven’t seen Team America: World Police, because I was still a baby when it came out and my parents wouldn’t let me watch it, and by the time I got old enough (say, in 2010,) it seemed passé. I may watch it out of curiosity now. But in 2010, a World War II movie clearly trying to ride Team America‘s coattails six years later and doing it worse was pretty much destined for failure.

The character models and animation are good old-fashioned nightmare fuel. The expressions don’t change and the mouths barely flap open. It looks cheap and bad. If that was the best they could do, they should have just leaned into having it look like children playing with dolls. All of the male dolls look like they’ve been carefully crafted by hand. They still look bad, but it’s clear some effort went into them. The fuckable women all look like Bratz dolls that have been made over by a pervert. It’s instantly off-putting, and that feeling only deepens as the movie goes on.

Again, it says it’s a satire, but…what is it satirizing, exactly? What are the jokes? Where are the jokes? Are we supposed to laugh because Timothy Spall is fully unintelligible on some of Churchill’s lines? (To be fair, those moments are the only ones where I even cracked a smile.) Are we supposed to laugh because it’s dolls that are blowing each other up? It’s (mostly) not taking itself seriously, but it really does seem like they left blank spaces in the script for jokes they would come up with later, and then they just never filled those in.

The jokes that are there made me frown. Chris (Ewan McGregor) travels alone to seek help in the mysterious land north of Hadrian’s Wall, which turns out to be Scotland. The English were totally right all along, actually, and Scotland is a horrific hellscape inhabited by bloodthirsty barbarians. Just as Chris is about to be brutally murdered, the Scotsmen see his freakishly large hands and realize he’s one of them, separated at birth. Chris is taken to meet their leader, Braveheart, who is here, and alive, in the 1940s. Chris is surprised, and says there were rumors that Braveheart was actually Australian. Do you get it? Because he was played by Mel Gibson in the movie.

Chris tells Braveheart they need him, “and his lethal weapons.” Braveheart responds, “Do you need Lethal Weapon 1, 2, 3, or 4?” Do you understand? Because Mel Gibson was in those movies, too. I want to die.

Ewan McGregor gets to do the Braveheart “Freedom!” yell from a recording booth while his Ken doll lifts a sword. They added a lot of reverb to it in post. Is this anything? I’m afraid I’m making it sound more entertaining than it is.

In the end, the final “punchline” is some more good old-fashioned racism against Scottish people. Ha, ha? Ewan, what are you doing?

There’s way too little story here to stretch for an hour and a half, but somehow they managed. You’re better off watching the “Scotch Mist” episode of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace if you want some anti-Scottish humor that actually lands.

I didn’t even bother doing a Bingo card for this one. That’s how much nothing happens and how bleak it was.

This was another legendarily low valley in Ewan McGregor’s filmography, but it can only go up from here, right? Right???

COMING UP NEXT: BEGINNERS