Last Vegas - DVD Review

Starring Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, Mary Steenbergen, Romany Malco, Jerry Ferrara, Roger Bart, Joanna Gleason and Michael Ealy.
Directed by Jon Turteltaub.

★★

A movie with this cast would have been the must-see movie of 1989. Nowadays we know what we're going to get. Its humor is broad and safe. It reminded me of when Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas had their one last hurrah in 1986's Tough Guys. Nothing too demanding, and a lot of that may be because Hollywood has no idea how to write good parts for older people unless it involves dying.

So these four Academy-Award winners play four old friends who reunite for a bachelor party when the one of them who's never been married is finally getting married. Douglas is the lifelong playboy marrying a woman half his age; DeNiro is the widower who's closed himself off from life; Freeman's the bored grandpa who's tired of taking it easy after his stroke; and Kline is the persnickety one whose wife tells him he can have a freebie if he wants (as long as he doesn't tell her about it.)

So they party, they get drunk, they each have their epiphany, and we probably would have been more entertained listening to the four of them swap movie-making stories for two hours.

The LEGO Movie - Movie Review

Starring the voices of Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman, Will Arnett, Liam Neeson, Nick Offerman, Alison Brie, Charlie Day, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill.
Directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller.

★★★★

Everything is awesome about this movie on so many levels. The message, the humor, the subtext, the characters, the creativity... All of it works.

Chris Pratt, who plays the guileless Andy on NBC's Parks & Recreation, brings that same dim-bulb wonderment to the voice of Emmet, a construction worker in Legoland. Emmet is chirpy, positive, and part of a team, a team that Reads The Instructions and builds buildings. The movie has this shrewd animation style that looks like it's a combo of stop-motion and CGI (I'm guessing it's more CGI than stop-motion).

This Lego universe is run by President Business (Will Ferrell), head of the government and most coroporations. Behind closed doors, he's Lord Business! (Think Chancellor Palpatine and Darth Sidious). Lord Business is determined to control everything, and he has a doomsday device called the Kragle which will allow him to usurp freedom forever. Ah, but there's this prophecy that someone called the Special will come forth with a Piece of Resistance and stop Lord Business.

Emmet accidentally stumbles upon the Piece of Resistance, and he becomes the unwitting fulfiller of prophecy. An underground resistance movement hails him as the Special, even though he's not smart or unique in any discernible way.

This movie isn't left- or right-wing, it's probably the most centrist pro-liberty movie ever made. It celebrates community not conformity, knowing when to break out and when to be safe, respect for yourself and others, and above all, it's good to let your imagination run wild.

Part of the freedom of this movie is how much it's able to borrow from others to create something new.  Characters from Star Wars and Harry Potter pop up, and one of the main supporting characters is Batman. The evil micro-managers that serve Lord Business look and behave an awful lot like the squid-robots from The Matrix. (Micro-managers! Ha! Surprised there weren't two henchmen named Sarbanes and Oxley).

It truly is a "whole family" movie. Plenty of laughs for kids and adults. Surely the front-runner for Best Animated Film of 2014, the other candidates sight unseen.

Oblivion - Movie Review

Starring Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Melissa Leo and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.  Directed by Joseph Kosinski.

★★★

This movie reminded me of three other sci-fi movies.  One was Wall-E, and the other two I don't want to mention simply because it'd give away some second-half developments if I did.

Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a technician working clean-up crew on Earth in 2077.  A long time ago, or a few years from now, some aliens destroyed the Earth's moon, and it killed half the planet.  Then the aliens invaded, so the countries of the world launched their nukes.  Now the Earth is a wasteland, and most of humanity that has survived has moved to Titan, one of Saturn's moons.  Meanwhile there's a giant triangular space-station in the sky called the Tet that overseas the conversion of Earth's ocean-water to fusion energy.  Once the water's dried up, the Tet and the last of humanity will abandon Earth for good.

Jack and his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the only two humans on Earth's surface (or are they?) and each morning, he goes out to repair the drones that protect the fusion converters from the "Scavs", the aliens left behind that steal or sabotage any machinery they can find.

Jack flies the ship; Victoria serves as eyes-and-ears back home, and she then relays any information to Mission Control, played with a suspiciously honeyed accent by Melissa Leo.

Here's a catch though: Jack and Victoria had their memory wiped before their five-year mission. If they ever captured by the Scavs, they'll have no information to be pried out of them.

All of this is fine and good.  The movie takes its time with setting up the world and the rules.  Jack puts on his uniform each day to go fly; Victoria puts on her dress and heels before she mans her desk.  Since the air is breathable, I wondered why Jack wore his uniform, and as for Victoria, wouldn't she do her job in pajamas most days?

Now everyone who saw the preview knows that Morgan Freeman will show up eventually and the twists will begin.  I think it's just before the halfway mark when he lights his cigar in the dark to show Jack that he's not the last man on Earth after all.

This movie has more twists, none of which are surprising, but it's still a pleasurable experience because the story is told so well.  So if you go to see Iron Man 3 and it's sold out, this isn't a bad alternative.

Olympus Has Fallen - Movie Review

Starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Melissa Leo, Rick Yune, Dylan McDermott, Robert Forster, Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser and Ashley Judd.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua.

★★3/4

Die Hard in the White House!

I actually saw a few people in my Twitter feed compare it to a Die Hard sequel (mostly favorably) before I went to the movie, so that was in my head.  And they're right.

Olympus Has Fallen is a straightforward action B-movie where one man has to take on a small army of terrorists who've taken over the White House, and they're holding the President, VP, Defense Secretary and a few other notables in the safehouse bunker underground.

One man, ex-Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Butler), makes his way into his former place of employment before the terrorists manage to lock it down.  Now he must kill off the stray guards that go looking for him as he searches for the President's son, unaccounted for and somewhere in the White House.

Meanwhile the head of the terrorist group (Rick Yune) sends demands to the Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman), acting president while POTUS and VPOTUS are hostages.

The whole thing takes place over the course of 24 hours, so a lot of it is at night, where fight scenes can hide more in their choreography. It amused me how often Mike and the other guy would have their guns knocked away so they'd fight with fists and kicks until one of them found a knife or something.

There were a couple plot points that were so stupid - and I mean so stupid! - that my brain had to actively fight and wrestle with them to not kill my enjoyment of the movie. If you tell me a failsafe, and I can instantly think about how to get around it and exploit it to kill millions, why did this potential exploitation never occur to anyone in the White House, Pentagon, contractors...?

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) fills the supporting roles with plenty of champions.  I really liked how Melissa Leo (Academy-Award-winning actress...) threw herself into what could have been a throwaway role as the Secretary of Defense. (She was probably thinking, "I probably won't be in too many more action movies, so I'm going to have fun!")  You want the Speaker to be a man with gravitas? You don't mess around; you just get Morgan Freeman.

The body count is high, and the bullets fired are plentiful. Fuqua really doesn't mess around.

I can already see a sequel where Mike Banning is just visiting Buckingham Palace...

Dolphin Tale - Movie Review

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Starring Harry Connick Jr., Ashley Judd, Nathan Gamble, Morgan Freeman, Kris Kristofferson, Frances Sternhagen, Cozi Zuehlsdorff, Austin Stowell and Ray McKinnon. Directed by Charles Martin Smith.

The first question on many a mind might be, "What is Morgan Freeman doing here?" The answer is two-fold. 1.) He doesn't show up til the 65-minute mark, so it must've been decent pay for just a few days' work, and 2.) Have you seen how it's doing at the box-office? May have been pretty shrewd on his part.

This is the kind of pleasant for-kids cute-animal movie that could have just as easily been ABC's Disney Sunday Movie in 1988. A dolphin loses her tail but due to two kids who care and some kind adults, they figure out a way to make her a prosthetic tail.

Every moment is played broadly. The main kid, Nathan Gamble, has that shy hesitancy common in boys, but is it really so common before every single choice laid in front of him? I got tired of the delayed reaction to everything for comic effect. But the adults have that style too. Kris Kristofferson is the twinkly-eyed grandpa who exists solely to dispense one-liner wisdom. Harry Connick Jr. and Ashley Judd are individually single parents who might, might, have something blossom into a G-rated romance by the time this movie's done, and they have to have those exasperated pauses after everything.

Then there's this subplot about the kid's cousin going off to Iraq and coming back disabled. He doesn't lose his leg but we gather there's enough nerve damage there to where he'll never be able to fulfill his dream of swimming in the Olympics. And this wounded vet and the other wounded vets at the hospital are all rooting for this... dolphin... to accept her prosthetic tail. Just seemed grotesque to make a soldier's plight secondary to a dolphin's plight.

Now this is a harmless, inoffensive, heart-warming, blah-blah-blah family film. I got bored, even with Freeman there. They could have trimmed ten minutes easily by picking up the pace and needed to trim twenty overall. Its RotTom rating is 83%, so I know I'm in the minority.

When the dolphin dove right at the screen at the end, I remembered, "Oh yeah, they released this in 3-D too." Makes about as much sense as releasing Moneyball in 3-D.

Side note: This is the third time Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd have done a film together. They also starred in Kiss the Girls and High Crimes, both murder mysteries.

Wanted - DVD Review

WANTED (***) - Starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann and Common.
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov.

This wild ride of a movie is based on a comic book series, and if you didn't already know that the first few minutes into the movie, you'd know it based on how stylized the whole thing is. The movie isn't trying to be realistic, but it is trying to be fun, putting Fight Club, Matrix and Harry Potter in a blender and hitting Frappe.

James McAvoy, a long way from Mr. Tumnus, is our hero Welsey Gibson, such a loser than his name in Google gets no hits. Although my theory is that the Fraternity was rigging his computer to do that, because Welsey Gibson actually yields 142,000 hits (the first few related to the 'Wanted' character, but if the movie addressed that, it would be eating its own tail.)

He finds out his long-lost father died yesterday, and he was one of the best assassins in the world. He finds this out from a beautiful woman named Fox (wink!) who instantly gets into a gun fight with the man who killed his father. She then brings him to the Fraternity, a secret organization of assassins run by a mellifluous man named Sloan, played by the almighty Morgan Freeman.

Bullets fly in this movie like they have a mind of their own, like they could hover in mid-air and then change direction in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Blood splatters nicely against white walls, and the action scenes get the blood pumping.

This movie dared bill McAvoy first even though Jolie and Freeman are the big names, but this is where McAvoy really comes into his own, for my taste, as a movie star. Yes, he was very good in Atonement, and he was very different in Narnia, but I can remember him better from this. It's fun to watch him go from pathetic office drone to top-notch rootin'-tootin' shooter.