Category Archives: Reviews

Taxi!

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Here’s the recipe for a summer buddy-cop film. One guy, usually the cop, is as big as a house with an inclination to break things: rules, orders, villains’ faces. The other guy is typically much smaller and much funnier and kind of goofy — and he’s driving the other guy nuts, even as circumstances force them to partner up and take on some bad people.

Sure, May-December cop buddy flicks were have been a cliche since 48 Hrs to Midnight Run to Rush Hour to Men in Black to Ride Along to Central Intelligence to The Heat to the most recent example, Stuber. But given the summer overflow of big-budget sequels, Disney remakes and comic book reboots, this paean to cop films of the 80’s and 90’s seems like a nostalgiac nod to stupidity. And, somehow, most of it works.

It’s hard to overstate how refreshing it is to see a studio movie as silly and self-contained as Michael Dowse’s Stuber. The biggest action scene takes place in a sporting goods store. The Avengers are nowhere to be found. And the hero isn’t fighting to save the planet, just to help pay for the small business he wants to open with his crush (a spinning class geared towards single women called “Spinsters”).

What makes Stuber a fresh approach to a tired genre is that it joins those rare films that are perfectly synced with the American zeitgeist. Just a  You’ve Got Mail came during the AOL boom and The Social Network hit shortly after Facebook became omnipresent, Stuber will likely go down as the first big-studio film to take on ride sharing services. It won’t stomp the competition at the multiplex, but Stuber hits all the topical notes for young viewers: overprotective parents, the crippling addiction to cellphones and the roulette wheel roll that is calling a ride share service.

Much of the comedy credit here goes to Kumail Nanjiani (the HBO series Silicon Valley, The Big Sick). Nanjiani’s deadpan expression to people getting rowdy, drunk and nauseas in the back of his leased electric car could likely carry its own film. But that wouldn’t make for a buddy cop flick, so Dowse cannily casts Dave Bautista as Vic (Guardians of the Galaxy) a cop colossus with anger issues, severe myopia and a temper that sends him through walls like a drunken Kool-Aid Man.

It’s a silly pairing, but silly is the point. This movie, after all, is called Stuber because the protagonist is named Stu and he drives for Uber. Get it? Subtle intelligence takes a pronounced backseat to mindless escapism.

Stuber stumbles when it actually tries to break from comedy cliches with some adult-level violence. As the pair close in on drug dealers Vic is chasing, Stu has to face off against the martial marts actor from The Raid. Even for a comedy this goofy, it’s a plot stretch. Not only does the film skewer the tropes of Hollywood cop films, it embraces more than a few.

But they aren’t fatal flaws, and the pairing of Nanjiani and Bautista is inspired, particularly Bautista. He may be built like a Mack truck, but he displays enough tenderness he may escape Hollywood’s villain circuit.

Stuber is intentionally dumb and a little bit clunky, but Nanjiani and Bautista click, the action sequences are well-filmed and the humor is sometimes brutally funny. In a summer of repetitious travels, Stuber makes for a refreshing escapist ride.

Hearts Versus Skins

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What do you call a movie that is so well-meaning it’s hard to criticize, yet so sporadic in execution it’s hard to be effusive? In this case, you call it Skin in the Game, a nobly-intended thriller about human trafficking that tackles an issue long deserving big-screen Hollywood treatment, but undercut by tropes that veer it into TV crime territory.

“Inspired by true events,” as the film pointedly notes, Skin has the difficult task of spotlighting a vital social topic without descending into exploitative sex and violence . And for the most part, it succeeds, but the low-budget movie occasionally resembles an episode of Law & Order: Vigilante Unit, with cardboard villains and little character arc.

Directed by first-time filmmaker Adisa and written by Steven Palmer, Skin takes a topic Hollywood typically relegates to impoverished nations and brings it stateside, in this case Los Angeles. We are introduced to Lena (Erica Ash), a former prostitute who has turned her life around by dedicating herself to helping abused women out of the sex trade business.

It’s a strong intro, and perhaps the best scene of the movie. Lena, called to a seedy hotel to retrieve a prostitute from an abusive pimp, sets the film’s tone immediately: the language is rough, vulgar, misogynistic and authentic. Violence is to be accepted, not avoided, and Lena’s understanding of that world saves the young woman’s life. It’s an effective prelude to the world we assume we’re about to enter.

Suddenly, however, that tenor changes into a buddy cop thriller when 15-year-old Dani (Sammi Hanratty) is abducted in broad daylight off a suburban sidewalk and finds herself immersed in the human trafficking underworld. To Skin‘s credit, the film takes care to show multiple angles of the trafficking plague, from criminals to victims to the cops trying to sort one from the other. Skin also emphasizes that women can victimize, too; Dani finds herself in a prostitution ring led by the ruthless Eve (Angelica Celaya), a character so vile she’d make a good Bond villain.

After learning police cannot act on a missing persons report for at least 24 hours, Lena and Dani’s mother Sharon (Elisabeth Harnois) take matters into their own hands, triggering the movie’s unsteadiest moments. The women comb the streets like veteran detectives, banter like buddy cops, and threaten to kill uncooperative suspects with a gusto that would make Charles Bronson proud.

Alas, what Skin needs is more humanization. The film explains that Lena and Sharon were once close friends (Lena is Dani’s godmother), but never reveals the fracture that ended the friendship and kept them from talking for years. The film is also strangely lit, sometimes as artificially brightened as a prime time TV show; Skin oddly rejects the use of much shadow for a story about the shadowy world of sex trafficking. And “inspired by true events” is too vague here, particularly for a film on this issue: we get no epilogue about the characters portrayed, their fates, or whether they were even real.

Still, it’s Ash (Starz’s Survivor’s Remorse) who keeps the film propelled and, at times, even riveting. Lena is utterly believable as a woman who entered prostitution unwillingly and paid the price for leaving the profession. She keeps joints in a cigarette case and gumption in her heart; her tough questioning of former colleagues and employers gives Skin its heart, even if it is an occasionally melodramatic one.

Punākha Skin in the Game is hardly going to set the standard for human trafficking films. But given the rarity of movies on the issue, particularly in the U.S., setting the standard may be less important than setting precedent.

Broken or Intentionally Busted?

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It’s can be difficult to watch When They See Us, but it’s certainly not for lack of craftsmanship.  Ava DuVernay’s  direction and writing pulls no punches in laying out the harrowing events endured by the Central Park Five while adding a necessary layer of humanity to their story that challenges viewers to reconsider what it means to find justice in America. This story has never lacked for attention, by media and director Ken Burns, but See brings a heretofore unseen personal side of the tragedy.

In April 1989, five teenagers (four black and one Hispanic) were arrested for the rape and near-fatal assault of a wealthy, young white woman in New York’s Central Park. The victim, Trisha Meili, has no memory of that night. Although there was no physical evidence linking the boys to the attack, Raymond Santana, 14; Kevin Richardson, 14; Yusuf Salaam, 15; Antron McCray, 15; and Korey Wise, 16, were all convicted of the crime. The real identities of all involved were subsumed by the case: Meili became “the Central Park Jogger,” while the boys became “the Central Park Five.” Image result for when they see us

This devastating miniseries restores the individual humanity to the six vulnerable humans at the center of the case. Written and directed by DuVernay, the fact-based Netflix miniseries reveals how the teenagers became pawns in a bigger game. The first episode shows how regular teen lives are destroyed by a simple a decision to go to a park. And we see police coerce confessions from scared kids who just want to go home.

In subsequent episodes, we watch as media create a narrative in which black kids from “a world of crack, welfare, guns” are driven to random attacks on white people, “wilding.” We see the shock on the face of one boy’s mother when she learns that Donald Trump has taken out full-page ads in four newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. Final episodes take us through the brutality of prison time and the grim reality of life as an ex-con.

If those boys had been executed as Trump wanted, they would never have lived to see serial rapist Matias Reyes confess to the crime (providing case-clinching DNA) in 2002, or receive the $41 million legal settlement that Trump has called a “heist.”Related image

In an age of fast-paced, plot-twisting crime TV, the macabre momentum of this series feels agonizingly unstoppable at times: If Netflix’s Making a Murderer taught us anything, it’s the grim, sometimes illegal, measures police will take to make an arrest. And that sometimes slows See too much.

But if there are few shocks in See, DuVernay’s respect for the physical and emotional toll on the kids carry surprising power, even for a media-saturated story. You want to cheer when the wrongful convictions are vacated. But the sight of the now-grown men returning to their childhood bedrooms seems a hollow triumph. Ultimately, See underscores the unsettling question about relationships between police and minority communities: Is the system broken, or is it acting just as it was designed?