This ain’t no damn video game.

Ride Along

(2014)

I’ve been blissfully ignorant of the steady rise to stardom of Kevin Hart (although I have seen Meet Dave, if that counts), but on the evidence of Ride Along his hyperactive banter, with a winning strain of self-deprecation, needs to find significantly better material if he’s to endure. Although in the US, with the box office tally of this movie, you’d be sure he had already arrived. As ever, comedy is Hollywood’s thorniest international export, and it made negligible outroads internationally (a meagre 12% of the total gross). Discussing takings at the start of a review is a sure sign of shortcomings and Ride Along’s biggest is that it’s bereft of inspiration, essentially refitting The Hard Way in a tepid and perfunctory manner.

The pairing of Michael J. Fox and James Woods in that movie was inspired, a choice that naturally elevated the material; you could see the contempt oozing from Woods’ every pore, and Fox (even more diminutive than Hart) has always been game to send himself up. Hart and Ice Cube, as high school security guard Ben Barber who dreams of joining the force and hardened police detective James Payton respectively, have a reasonably edgy chemistry. Payton doesn’t want to know about the mosquito buzzing in his ear, and is set on doing everything he can to dissuade him from becoming a police officer, particularly since Ben is dating his sister (Tika Sumpter). Cube is a an okay straight man (there’s no point testing his very limited range), and works well bouncing abuse off Hart, but he flounders in pretty much any “proper” acting scene. Likewise Hart, who bears a surprising resemblance to Fred Ward from some angles, goes off on some half decent riffs, but when a scene calls for serious interaction it becomes clear he’s playing as if he’s the only man in the room, a common failing of the stand-up writ large.

The plot is collection of formulaic set pieces, familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of mismatched buddies (not even cops) movies; one (uptight, serious) starts out hating the other (a fantasist) but gradually, through the course of their time together, learns he has good qualities and thaws accordingly. Meanwhile, the dreamer proves himself (even possibly that he is a real man after all); The Hard Way commendably eschewed this. Woods still hated Fox at the end. Here, Payton wants to bring down some Serbian arms dealers and their boss and, of course, Barber ends up providing him with unlikely help.

The picture is at its negligible finest during Hart’s showboating moments; confronting a biker gang over a disabled parking space, visiting a gun range, dealing with a crazy guy at the supermarket. And the old standards of mistaken circumstances and impersonation that serve him best. Accompanying Payton to a bar for what he assumes is another 126 (annoying calls used to put rookies through their paces), Barber believes a genuinely dangerous scenario to be make-believe. Likewise, his impersonation of Omar (“I thought Omar was 6’ 4”?”). It’s a scenario that’s been seen played out many times before, and done much better, but its mildly diverting.

Cube had etched himself out a regular spot in Januarys in the US, amassing a serious of successes that far exceeded their modest budgets, but this had tapered off of late; Ride Along is a shot in the arm for him. The best I can say is he does good reaction shots, angry or bewildered, mostly to Hart’s antics, and even has a fourth wall moment when Ben, behaving as if a warehouse shootout is a video game, goes searching for ammo on the floor and finds it; James looks disbelievingly into camera.

If there’s anything of thematic note to discuss about this movie, it’s the presentation of the fantasy escape world of video games as equal and worthy in to “real life” experiences (you know, the ones where Ice Cube exists as a cop); Ben’s knowledge, derived from Taliban crushing computer games, repeatedly comes in handy, against all odds and probabilities, leading to vital clues and leads. And rousingly, Ben’s game nerd buddies (“Thank you, Assface”) rally to help our heroes in the third act. Is this an attempt to swing the scales back in favour of the raging geeks? It’s a curiously valedictory message to send out, that sitting in front of a screen playing games all day is valuable and equips one for interaction with the great outside more than we would guess.

On the support side, I doubt any of the players are here for the love of the art. John Leguizamo can’t afford to be picky, while Bruce McGill and Laurence Fishburne always bring something to not necessarily very good material. Tim Story directed this; the guy Fox let shit all over The Fantastic Four not once, but twice (but hey, looking at the bottom line, which was Fox’s only criteria, it made sense; the kind of sense that got John Moore aboard Die Hard 5). Story’s got his second unit doing overtime again, which is to say this is barely directed. It’s a collection of shots stapled together. Right from the pace-deflating music that punctures the engaging opening title design its clear this will be a botch job. There’s no reason a comedy vehicle can’t have a good director, although it’s also the case that they rarely tarnish the reputation of bad ones; the Rush Hours made even Ratner look competent. I’m sure Story will ensure Ride Along 2 is every bit as scintillating as the first.

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog