War Dogs

War Dogs sees director Todd Phillips aiming for his The Big Short moment. Which is to say, a filmmaker known for comedies (as The Big Short’s director Adam McKay was) attempting to go serious with a piece about a timely and contentious issue, sold under the façade of a bro-tastic comedy. Peel away that shell, is there a similarly brilliant, fierily polemical piece of Oscar-worthy gold? No, but there is ample evidence that Phillips has a strong dramatic picture somewhere in him.

The subject is war, circa the second term of George W. Bush. After putting an end to those controversial no-bid contracts you might’ve heard about on the news at the time, the U.S. military started purchasing weapons and equipment from smaller outfitters. Meaning, the film posits, that they were willing to buy from any average Joe able to get their hands on guns. The movie tells the true story of two such Joes, struggling Miami twentysomething David Packouz (Miles Teller) and his sleazy childhood pal Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who dove head-first into this market, making millions procuring weapons through methods ranging from shockingly legal to blatantly illegal.

The film is clearly shooting for an outrageous and blackly satirical take on a grim subject, something a prestige filmmaker like, say, Martin Scorsese would deliver (similarities to The Wolf of Wall Street beyond the casting of Hill abound). Well, Phillips frankly isn’t on that level yet. The small narrative and structural touches meant to convey sophistication and respectability are, in fact, elements mostly played out at this point (interspersed title cards, literally made up of lines of dialogue that are spoken aloud soon after, are freshmen-year-film-school unoriginal). The misadventures of the two leads onscreen also don’t seem quite as shocking as the film was probably going for, and aren’t as funny as anything in Phillips’ straight-up comedies. Though to be sure, there are moments that are amusing in a cringe-inducing way.

It’s when the film starts on the commentary that has me at a critical stalemate. There is a definite sincerity to the picture’s disgust with the world it depicts. But it’s decidedly underscored by a striking sense of naiveté. It’s as if the filmmakers, and by extension the film itself, can’t comprehend their subject and their anger at it enough to form the clear, unapologetic viewpoint required for an effective polemic. Then again, I’m not sure if this is a result of a poor grip on their outrage, or if it’s the point of the entire thing, that this world is so tangled and without sense that it’s hard to direct outrage in a single direction.

The latter possibility is reflected in Teller’s performance, a comparatively earnest one showing a mostly decent person lured into temptation (the real Packouz apparently supports the film, so his depiction is the rosier of the two). He’s mostly sympathetic, but there comes a point where the extent of the character’s blindness to the business he’s in mightily strains believability. Also, it’s funny how his conscience never asks the tough questions, and only kicks in when his girlfriend (an underused Ana de Armas) gets on his case. Hill (whose real-life counterpart is suing the filmmakers) is the much more convincing one simply because he’s got absolutely no sympathetic or redeeming qualities at all, and yet is very funny and a mesmerizing presence. His comedy chops are already known, but between War Dogs and The Wolf of Wall Street, Hollywood might have a new go-to guy for scumbag parts.

Sausage Party

A general rule in comedy seems to be that you can do things in animation you can’t do with real people. This is why, say, South Park frequently gets away with being politically incorrect to degrees that might get a real-world comedian in trouble, and vulgar in ways that would land a live-action product an NC-17. 

Sausage Party leans heavily on that assumption. With the P.C. heat being off of it by virtue of being a cartoon (one where the characters aren’t even human), the film goes for every easy joke. A Jewish bagel (Edward Norton) and a Middle-Eastern lavash (David Krumholtz) are bickering side characters, for example. There’s a liquor bottle (Bill Hader) depicted as a Native American shaman, and a Mexican-accented taco (Salma Hayek) who’s also a lesbian (if you can’t connect the dots here, the movie does for you). And Nick Kroll voices a feminine product who lives up to his name in every sense of the word.

None of these caricatures seem to be coming from a mean place; Seth Rogen and his usual gang of collaborators may be dirty, but one thing they are not is mean (with the sometimes-exception of Danny McBride, gloriously so). But many of the gags are so obvious, the physical embodiment of puns that make you groan a little. So are the sex jokes, taking every dirty lark about phallic-shaped food you remember from middle school lunch hour to its logical extreme.

It’s very juvenile stuff. It’s also pretty damn funny.

You could call it Toy Story with food. Only instead of simply adding R-rated jokes to the Pixar-esque premise of sentient objects, it cleverly examines some of the darker and more adult possibilities such a world might suggest. In this case, all the living products in a supermarket believe the shoppers are gods, and that being bought is being chosen to go to Heaven. This bubble is burst, however, when a traumatized returned honey mustard bottle (McBride) relates how this is all a lie. After hearing this, sausage Frank (Rogen) and his bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig) travel across the store to find out the truth, while purchased sausage Barry (Michael Cera) sees it firsthand and tries to make his way back to the store to warn everybody.

Yes, a movie about foulmouthed hot dogs has some things to say about religion, although unless it meets the criteria for fulfilling one's antitheist confirmation bias, it’s probably a little too general to be called satire. Instead, the film is much more spot-on in its takedown of all the tropes of family animation, from the look and plot elements of a Pixar picture, to Disney-like musical numbers, to its caricatures aping the indelicate ethnic villains or comic relief in so much children’s entertainment. Also, with this cast, of course there's plenty of stoner humor, with some truly hilarious drug jokes worked inventively into the plot.

What can I say? Rogen and company have an undeniable charm about them, and it still shines through the faces of anthropomorphic edibles. As a genre parody and as just another excuse to spend 90 joyous minutes with these guys, Sausage Party is a treat.

Suicide Squad

I’m convinced that DC’s budding film universe is, in fact, a skewed, nightmarish alternate reality (an Elsewords universe, if you will). That would certainly explain why its version of Superman, who’s supposed to be the symbol of hope and righteousness, is instead a dour, mopey, hated figure, and why its Batman (Ben Affleck) is an obsessive, near-pathological zealot.

Through this lens, it makes sense that a movie starring the villains feels the most like a regular superhero story, and at least on that level, Suicide Squad is DC’s closest example to a comic book blockbuster done properly. It isn’t much greater than just average-level good, but give them a bit of credit: one picture at a time, they’re getting better, very slowly but surely.

The film takes place in the aftermath of the events of Batman v Superman. As preparation for the possibility of an evil superhuman threat, unscrupulous government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) proposes assembling a team of captured criminals with superpowers or otherwise exceptional abilities. The group consists of: sharpshooting assassin Deadshot (Will Smith), the Joker’s (Jared Leto) screw-loose lover Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), pyrokinetic ex-gangbanger El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Aussie bank robber Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), reptilian Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and martial artist Katana (Karen Fukuhara), all under the command of Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). The team is put to the test when another of Waller’s captives, the witch Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), unleashes her powers upon a city.

The plotting is a big mess. It’s very evident the picture was hacked up and put back together into what was considered the leanest and most marketable final product. So, pieces of backstories and dangling subplots litter the narrative. But at the very least, all the different threads that are there coalesce around a single point, even if it’s as completely simple a storyline as “kill the bad guy." That’s more than can be said for Batman v Superman, which seemed like six or seven different movies playing at once.

The casting is something of a mixed bag. Davis is tremendous, evoking a stubborn, love-to-hate vibe in the audience that’s totally appropriate. And Smith is his usual fun, funny self. As for the rest of the bunch, they’re mostly without a moment in the spotlight to call their own, victims of an overstuffed product cut down to a more sellable feature length. A few (Croc and Katana, especially) even the film seems to forget they're there until it needs their abilities. The weakest points, though, are the antagonists. Delevinge is just not a very good bad guy, as soulless as any empty CGI creation, and Leto’s Joker fulfills all the fears detractors have voiced since his design was revealed. He comes off as little more than the most vanilla of gangster tropes, only one who’s also an annoyingly obsessive Dark Knight fanboy who insists on constantly (and badly) imitating Heath Ledger’s iconic look and voice.

But all eyes were on Robbie’s Harley Quinn heading into this movie (in more ways than one), and the results on the screen leave me a little torn. It’s undoubtedly a funny, compelling performance that suggests she could carry a movie. But the picture treats her rather shabbily, the camera following her body, alternately tight-clothed or barely clothed, with a leering eye. Also, it retains the problematic depiction of her abusive relationship with the Joker as oddly romantic. The depiction could use a lot of work, but it’s a credit to Robbie that she’s able to deliver in spite of the limiting and objectifying parameters the film gave her. 

Suicide Squad’s messiness extends beyond just the storytelling and character unevenness. The structure is like that of a trailer, with manic cutting, random music snippets, and frequent audience priming and buildup, for payoffs that are mostly either delayed or underwhelming. The tone varies between an intense action movie, smartass comedy, black comedy, sad tragedy, and even horror movie with little consistency. Yet, from this mess emerges one thing that has so far eluded the DC films: fun. Loud, dumb, garish, not particularly exceptional or memorable, but fun nonetheless. That alone shows that DC is improving, even if only by increments per picture. At this rate, they might give Marvel a run for its money sometime this century.

Batman: The Killing Joke

The legacy of Batman: The Killing Joke is a complicated one. The 1988 one-shot comic, written by the great Alan Moore before he swore off mainstream work, is controversial for being one of the most violent Batman stories, namely for the personal, sexual nature of its brutality towards the character Barbara Gordon. But it’s frankly that same brutality which makes its depiction of the Joker so unsparing and memorable, along with the haunting, fairly iconic artwork from Brian Bolland. It’s a story that needed an R rating to be translated to the screen the right way, even in animation.

The comic offers a possible origin of the Crown Prince of Crime in a series of flashbacks, while meditating on the hopeless, fatalistic dynamic between the Dark Knight and his greatest nemesis. The narrative for exploring that dynamic, however, involves the Joker committing some truly horrendous acts against Barbara, in a an elaborate plot to psychologically torture her father Commissioner Gordon. Criticism has been leveled against it for not just depicting violence against women, but depicting it solely as the impetus for the Batman-Joker storyline and then promptly moving on from it, despite the fact that Barbara is the victim of the comic’s most heinous suffering.

The film addresses Barbara's (voiced by Tara Strong) raw story deal in the most head-scratching way. It begins in her Batgirl days, with her on the trail of a mobster (Maury Sterling) who has a sick crush on her. The implication seems to be that giving her a blatantly sexist enemy to defeat somehow cancels out the trauma she receives later. That’s wrong-headed enough, but even worse is that the teacher-student dynamic between Batgirl and Batman (Kevin Conroy) is given a sexual tension, culminating in (seriously) a love scene that would be creepy (regular canon casts Bats as more of a parental figure) if it weren’t so laughable. These plot points add nothing but an air of sexism without even addressing what happens to Barbara in the Joker storyline. Or for that matter, anything in the Joker storyline; the first 20 minutes or so seem like a completely unrelated, unremarkable episode of the animated series tacked on to stretch the plot to feature length, only with a little more blood and swearing.

Minus that opening detour (and a happy mid-credits epilogue that defuses the horror about as much as the Ernest Hemingway quote at the end of Seven), however, you’ll find the greatest Killing Joke adaptation one could hope for. Bolland’s artwork comes to vivid, wicked life, retaining enough of the iconic look but changing things ever so slightly so as to burn the images onto the viewer’s brain anew. And Mark Hamill has never been better as the Joker, whom he makes possibly even more horrifying than the comic by bringing gleeful humor to the cruel proceedings. It is, like the comic, haunting, and horrifying.

It’s also, admittedly, just as problematic. In fact, its clumsy and misguided attempt to rectify things with the superfluous Batgirl drama, if anything, only creates more targets for its critics. Still, there’s no denying that a great adaptation of exactly what the comic is lies within this film.

Star Trek Beyond

A truth about Star Trek that holds for every incarnation: It’s good and bad. At its best, it’s capable of smart sci-fi, at different times cerebral and emotive. But the films as well as each individual series have also presented their share of frankly idiotic premises, forced and silly allegory, and flat-out bad stuff. And after two good movies, that truth is catching up with this rebooted series. Star Trek Beyond isn’t close to depths of, say, “Spock’s Brain” bad, but there is a noticeable leveling-off.

Instead of rebuilding continuity, this one returns to a standalone episodic structure that served the old films (mostly) well. But its plotting is as generic, bad-guy-of-the-week as it gets: While on their five-year exploration mission, the Enterprise crew travels into uncharted space in response to an alien distress call. Predictably, they come across a hostile enemy, get stranded and separated on a distant planet, and must race against time to stop an alien menace (Idris Elba) from unleashing an unspeakably destructive ancient weapon on the worlds of the Federation.

And, that’s about all there is to it. Oh, it looks good. There are some creative and uniquely designed environments and spaceships, which make for some exciting battles. But beyond the blockbuster flash, the film has nothing to say, none of the big, interesting ideas (even interestingly bad ones) that are the Trek brand. The closest thing to one is a last-minute twist, but it’s a twist so weak and inconsequential that the movie would have played little different if it were written out of the script.

Rather, director Justin Lin tries to apply his ensemble action-comedy formula he perfected with the Fast & Furious series. The results include admittedly good sequences (the initial attack on and boarding of the Enterprise in particular). But a dirt bike chase in the 23^rd century? It was already ridiculous when they did it with a dune buggy in the Next Generation crew’s kiss-off Nemesis. An even worse sin is making a Beastie Boys song into, quite literally, an integral plot device. Going gleefully silly and over-the-top and relishing in it works for a franchise built on car chases, but it just seems off for Star Trek. Way off.

Another thing that’s true of all Trek is that, like a starship, it’s only as good as its crew. This is why the original 1960s cast still ranks as the best, as they could do the good stuff but also ride out the bad as comedy, and sometimes even turn dreck into gold. This crew, while far from the icons their predecessors were, is pretty damn good, which is good news for Beyond. Pine makes a fun and solid Captain Kirk, if decidedly un-Shatner-like. Also, the cantankerous interplay of Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban), the comedic heart of the series when the late Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley played the roles, is played to the fullest, giving the picture its best source of humor. The cast makes a completely average summer product eminently watchable, which is more than can be said about some of the lowest points this franchise has seen over 50 years.

Ghostbusters

This could have been just another reboot of an old Hollywood property like we’ve seen a million times (and as it turns out, a pretty good one). Instead, it’s awash in a nasty sort of anti-hype after being attacked at every step of its production and marketing, by coordinated online misogyny for recasting the leads as female, or by nominal adults who contend that remaking Ghostbusters with any new players besmirches a beloved piece of their childhood (which really just seems like a sad attempt to legitimize said misogyny).

This sad turn of events is subtly acknowledged by the film itself, with a few barbs in the screenplay whose real targets are quite obvious. Also, Neil Casey’s bad guy in some ways embodies the type of socially inept, woman-hating troll with delusions of sophistication and superiority, not unlike the hordes of forum-dwellers who decided they hated this picture as soon as they heard about it. It does not dwell on the subject, though, and instead bests its haters the right way by being a well-made, well-acted, frequently hilarious movie.

It’s a clean reboot this time, with no narrative connections to the first two films (though references and cameos abound). In it, Kristen Wiig plays a scientist who loses her prestigious professorship at Columbia after a book on the paranormal she co-authored years earlier resurfaces. Coincidently, while confronting her estranged collaborator (Melissa McCarthy) about the matter, an occult-obsessed loner (Casey) begins summoning spirits around Manhattan. So, the two scientists, along with an eccentric inventor (Kate McKinnon) and a subway worker (Leslie Jones) with an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s paranormal history, begin a small operation hunting apparitions run amok.

Even with its high concept and (for the time) impressive special effects, the original Ghostbusters was more understated than people seem to remember. Much of the fun and charm was in simply watching some of the best comedy actors at the high point of their careers interact with each other in situations both normal and fantastical. This new version carries on this tradition, with most of the laughs coming from the four superbly funny leads playing off one another. And they’re not simply gender-swapped versions of the original four. Each character is funny in ways different from their 1984 counterpart, and their interactions are funny in different ways. Despite hitting some of the same plot beats, each set piece is also new and original, never a retread and always funny. And Chris Hemsworth is completely hysterical as their indescribably dimwitted male secretary.

If there’s one thing the original did decidedly better, it’s that it kept a leash on the special effects, using them in funny ways but never overusing them. This one goes a little crazy with them in the final act. One might call it a spoof of overblown, CGI-cluttered action sequences, but it plays a little too straight to cut it as good parody. Fortunately, though, the jokes and banter make it to the other side of the mayhem, and things get back on track quickly with some truly great one-liners in a film full of them.

This Ghostbusters is how a reboot should be done, taking a familiar premise and doing its own new things with it. The result is not only something that doesn’t feel immediately stale, but one of the most fun pieces of entertainment in a summer that’s so far been pretty underwhelming. And yeah, I’ll admit it: after all the unwarranted hate this one got, it feels good to say that.

Finding Dory

Aside from dominating the animated movie game for some time (though Disney’s other animation arm presented a strong challenge for the crown this year with the great Zootopia), Pixar has also been notable for very, very grown-up pathos in a handful of its features. There was the gaping fear of loss and obsolescence pervading Toy Story 3, or the heartbreaking first few minutes of Up. Apparently, many audiences also felt last year’s Inside Out was a bevy of emotions, though while I enjoyed the film, it didn’t quite get to me like it did for some.

As for Finding Dory…well, by and large, it’s the type of joyful, vibrantly animated delight one would expect from Pixar. But pieces of it tread towards strong, even dark emotional territory. The picture nearly gets there, too, before hitting the brakes at the last minute.

In the film, set not long after Finding Nemo, the amnesiac blue title fish (Ellen DeGeneres) starts to regain memories of her childhood and her parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy). To find them, she and her clownfish friends Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) travel across the ocean to an aquarium in California. Unfortunately, once there, Dory is caught, placed in a storage tank, and scheduled to be transferred across the country. While she enlists the help of the park’s residents in looking for her family, Nemo and Marlin hatch a rescue plan, no easy task on dry land.

Brooks is as on game as last time, if a little less comically cowardly, but it’s DeGeneres who carries the film, stepping up from comic relief to singular lead smoothly and effortlessly. Wisely, though, returning characters outside of the main cast are kept down to cameos or framing scenes, keeping things fresh with new faces and locations instead of treading the same waters. Each new scene and sequence is a fun and clever surprise, and every new player a funny addition, the standout being Ed O’Neill applying his perfected gruff deadpan to a broken, seen-it-all octopus. It all moves at a more urgent pace than Nemo due to time constraints laid out by the plot, but never seems too breathless or frantic like so much children’s entertainment.

It’s in the moments between the big, bold, fun stuff, however, that the film delivers arguably Pixar’s most potent emotion thus far. Flashbacks of the young Dory (Sloane Murray) lost and alone, unable to remember enough to even be helped, are devastating, and I’d imagine a little terrifying for younger viewers. In a series notable for its bright, lush colors, these scenes are darker, greyer, and muted, giving them a subtle intensity. And though there are still jokes at the expense of the title character’s short-term memory loss, its depiction is more sympathetic and reasonably realistic (aside from, you know, the fact that she’s a fish instead of a human). It’s often aggravating and dispiriting, but other times, it’s a challenge that feels rewarding to overcome. And yet, that positive feeling is mostly fleeting, for what it most often reveals is a sense that Dory’s quest will inevitably end in disappointment, lost on the innocently naïve fish but not the audience.

Things are ultimately wrapped up conveniently and nicely; toy with our feelings though they have, I don’t think Pixar (or the big mouse that owns them) is ready for a decidedly unhappy ending. And that works just fine, because the picture has so much else to enjoy. Still, after pushing the envelope for much of the movie, one wonders if Finding Dory would have worked as well (or better) if they had gone all the way. I think it would have.