Category: Movie Reviews

As gnarly as things get, Minghella and screenwriter Jack Stanley maintain a keen feeling for farce.

Noam and his family want to tell their story apart from any exploration of the issues that led to the attack or the continuing assaults on Gaza.

Its minor sins are easy to forgive for such a bold, idiosyncratic anti-Western as this, the kind we don’t often get.

This is not so much a film you watch as one you wake up from, shivering. 

The interplay between filmmaker and subject takes center stage here.

“Bone Lake” is still a fair bit of fun, rife with enough unexpected twists and weird tropes referencing other horror movies.

A misfire of a heist movie, featuring Mark Wahlberg in one of his dullest performances.

Ronan Day-Lewis’s feature debut “Anemone” is an ambitious and expressionistic family drama about brothers and fathers, but its obtuse nature leaves the audience feeling estranged.

Certain films are so close to being good, so close to achieving a rare level of brilliance, your anger springs from said work not reaching those heights. Director Neill Blomkamp’s “Gran Turismo,” a crowd-pleasing, genre-bending sports drama, approaches wonder with an odd tepidness; it maneuvers around any modicum of character development by taking all-too simple routes and swerves away from formal experimentatio, opting instead for simple enjoyment.  

And yet, I can’t say I wasn’t invested in every race, lap, and turn. Nor can I say the climax didn’t successfully tug my heart toward an emotional response as the intrepid Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a teenager who rose from gamer to real-life car racer, passed the finish line. 

“Gran Turismo” is an uncommon yet familiar biopic, a video game-inspired narrative with unique strengths and recurrent weaknesses. For one, as Mardenborough likes to say, the property the film takes inspiration from isn’t a game; it’s a simulator. Players can customize vehicles to startling specific details through a seemingly infinite library of parts to imitate a range of makes and models that rival professional drivers (Blomkamp attempts to visualize such realism by having transparent VFX cars envelop Mardenborough whenever he plays). 

Marketing extraordinaire Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) knows the potentiality of such skill: He goes to GT proposing a competition in which the top seven gamers will train to become an actual racer for the Nissan team. He also recruits seasoned veteran crew chief and former driver Jack Salter (David Harbour) as a trainer. Moore’s venture brings heavy risk. And yet, when Jack asks Moore what the marketer gets out of this, Moore doesn’t have an answer. Despite Bloom’s inspired take, the wobbly, incomprehensible motivations of Moore only offer frustration.

Mardenborough’s desires are clearer cut: He wants to work on real cars. His father, Steve (Djimon Hounsou), a former professional footballer presently relegated to menial jobs, wants his son to be practical, lest he end up like his old man, filled with broken dreams. We don’t get much screen time or interiority from any Mardenborough family member. He has a doting, understanding mother (Geri Halliwell) and a partying immature brother (Daniel Puig), but they only fulfill the basic duty of filling out morsels of screen time. At a party, Mardenborough meets Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley), whom he’ll keep up vicariously via Instagram. It’s disappointing that she never evolves narratively beyond being the dream girl on Mardenborough’s screen.

The young gamers turned drivers in the GT Academy are similarly thinly sketched. They’re inchoate obstacles who, once again, merely round out the biopic’s run time. The Academy’s more pressing narrative function is to serve as a site for Mardenborough and Jack’s budding rapport. The latter is skeptical that these keyboard warriors possess the physical and competitive acumen to become professionals. Jason Hall and Zach Baylin’s script plays an exhausting game of keep-away about Jack’s tragic backstory (are we supposed to believe that Mardenborough, a perpetually online teenager, didn’t Google his trainer?). 

“Gran Turismo” doesn’t really kick into gear until Mardenborough moves past the Academy to real racing, where he competes against teams hostile to simulator racers. It’s difficult not to hear characters say that sim drivers will never replace real drivers without thinking about the real-life struggle SAG-AFTRA and WGA face against AI, even if Mardenborough is a real person. Blomkamp portrays people like Mardenborough as plucky outsiders, not unlike the bobsledders in “Cool Runnings.” The film’s use of common sports movie tropes unexpectedly aligning with real-world concerns makes for uneasy tension. 

Those tropes keep the viewer engaged even when the on-screen storytelling doesn’t wholly deserve it. While you’d expect editors Colby Parker, Jr. and Austyn Daines, along with cinematographer Jacques Jouffret, to match real gameplay rhythms and virtual visuals, the freeze frames that tell viewers what lap we’re on crush the pace, and the information provided is often repetitive to the dialogue. 

Even so, tropes are tropes because they work. For Mardenborough and Jack, it’s us against the world. A rivalry between Mardenborough and an ultra-rich racing team adds a dash of tension; a tragic crash gives Mardenborough a comeback story; a harrowing speech by the ever-dependable Hounsou puts the finishing touches on this underdog story and fully invests the viewer in the cares of an unassuming teenager. While “Gran Turismo” has greater issues than what’s outlined here, some nitpicky, others larger in scope—Madekwe as a lead is low-key to the point of invisibility—Blomkamp furnishes just enough cautionary thrills.  

In theaters Friday, August 25th. 

“Back on the Strip,” about a young man who wants to become a magician and the middle-aged ex-strippers who train him to be an exotic dancer instead, is a slapped-together indie comedy. It would probably crater completely and become unwatchable were it not for the charisma of its actors, which is boundless, and the lightheartedness of the entire project: it knows that the purpose of this movie is to make people laugh, no matter what it takes, and that the more shameless the joke or sight gag, the bigger the laugh. 

The five strippers, who were stars in Las Vegas in the 1990s and called themselves The Chocolate Chips, are played by Wesley Snipes (as Luther, aka “Mr. Big”), J.B. Smoove (as Amos, a preacher by day), Bill Bellamy (as Tyriq, a stay-at-home dad to four daughters he sired with his wife, a female bodybuilder), Faison Love (as Desmond, a garage owner who’s gained 100 pounds since his stripping days), and Gary Owen (a white doctor with a breast augmentation clinic who, back in the day, fooled the other four into thinking he was Black; more on that in a moment). Any of these actors has more charm and comic timing in his pinky toe than most actors have in their whole bodies. The film benefits enormously just from having them onscreen, getting the old “band” back together, working through the differences that split them up 25 years ago, and busting each other’s chops with the easygoing intimacy of brothers. 

Unfortunately, the movie isn’t really about them. It’s about Merlin and his career ambitions and romantic problems. Will he win his dream job and dream girl? You know the answer, and the movie knows you know the answer, but it stays focused on Merlin, to the point where “Back on the Strip” turns into a modern equivalent of one of those old movies that cast aging comedians that audiences actually came to the theater to see, but subordinates their clowning to a love story between two comparatively bland leads. The movie gets a lot better once the Chocolate Chips get together again and start rehearsing and reconnecting, and it gives all of the characters a subplot. 

When we meet Merlin, he’s a high school senior in Los Angeles who’s madly in love with his best friend and magic assistant Robin (Raigin Harris), one of those cheerful, poised, beautiful, smart ciphers that lovable, ambitious heroes often have in comedies. Merlin wants to go to Las Vegas and hit big as an illusionist, and tells Robin about his goal. Alas, his performance at the high school magic show is ruined by his own mistakes, then by the treachery of one of his rivals, the leader of a group of all-white self-styled gangsta rappers from Beverly Hills, who pulls down Merlin’s pants and underwear onstage. Thus do we learn of Merlin’s true gift: a member so enormous that when we see it tucked into his underwear, it suggests a two-foot-long kielbasa folded in half.

Flash-forward a few years to Merlin after college: he’s working as a birthday party clown with trio of other clowns and still dreaming of going to Vegas when he runs into Robin again. Unfortunately, Merlin also meets her snotty, condescending boyfriend, who is about to become her fiancé: Blaze (Ryan Alexander Holmes), who says he’s a comedian but is mainly an “influencer” who spends seemingly every waking moment recording himself and his posse and posting the footage online. Merlin’s supportive single mother Verna (Tiffany Haddish) helps her son make his big move to Vegas by calling up her old friend Rita (Colleen Camp), an old stoner who runs a run-down motel with a burned-out neon sign (the only working letters spell out “VAGINA”) and arranges for Merlin to stay there for a week while auditioning for magic gigs and obsessing over his loss of Robin.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “I’ve seen this nice guy-nice girl-rotten fiancé configuration a million times—what about the aging strippers played by a bunch of can’t-miss character actors?”, you’re just going to have to deal with it, because the movie is determined to go through the motions and contrivances of keeping the appealingly performed but boringly written Merlin and Robin from realizing their destiny, right up until the climax, which fans of a certain famous storyline on “A Different World” would have seen coming from twenty kielbasas away even if the characters didn’t have a long scene where they talked about it while watching a rerun. Directed by Chris Spencer, who cowrote the screenplay with Eric Daniel, “Back on the Strip” doesn’t trouble itself with anything it isn’t actually interested in, such as giving the romantic leads real and complicated personalities rather than writing them as a couple of ingenues, or, for that matter, even making you believe that young Merlin is a good or even competent magician. 

In theaters now.