You could probably count the number of good comedy sequels on one hand and it should come as no surprise that ZOOLANDER 2 wouldn't be one of them. Arriving 15 long years after the original was a minor hit on its way to becoming a cult movie on DVD and cable, ZOOLANDER 2 has nothing new to offer except more noise and more cameos, feeling the need to repeat or reference nearly every gag from the first film before its threadbare plot kicks into gear. In the years since the first film, the world's top male supermodel and total idiot Derek Zoolander (director and co-writer Ben Stiller) is a hermit (or, as he calls it, "a hermit crab") in isolation following the death of his wife (Stiller's wife Christine Taylor) in a freak accident involving the giant, book-shaped Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good falling on her because Zoolander had the building made from the same materials as books (that joke lands even worse in the movie than it does in synopsis form). After having his son Derek Jr taken away from him when a viral video leaks of Zoolander melting down as he tries to cook spaghetti in a toaster ("How did Mom make make the noodles soft?" he screams), Zoolander retreated from the world much like LITTLE FOCKERS' Ben Stiller has retreated from comedy. Unfortunately for everyone, Zoolander and sidekick Hansel (Owen Wilson) are pulled back onto the runway by hipster designer Don Atari (Kyle Mooney), who needs them for the "Old and Lame" (Zoolander pronounces it "Laa-may") part of his Rome show. Zoolander and Hansel are soon drawn into an investigation by Interpol agent Valentina Valencia (Penelope Cruz, who followed this triumph with THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY), which leads to the return of evil fashion megalomaniac Mugatu (Will Ferrell, who doesn't even appear until an hour in) and his plot to find and kidnap Derek Jr (Cyrus Arnold), who carries the Fountain of Youth bloodline of "Steve," humanity's first fashion model, booted out of the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, and subject him to a "ritual fattening" to make him an embarrassment to the Zoolander name.
It's really difficult to describe how astonishingly unfunny ZOOLANDER 2 is. The only reasonably big laugh comes from one line Mugatu has as he holds a black mass over a lava pit to sacrifice Derek Jr (dubbed "the fat little Chosen One") so the world's top fashion names--Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger, Valentino, Mark Jacobs, and Alexander Wang appear as themselves--can bathe in his blood Bathory-style: "Check out Tommy Hilfiger's spring line, brought to you by white privilege!" Elsewhere, nothing works. Stiller and his co-writers (including co-star Justin Theroux) really overestimated the level of sentiment we feel for these characters. Was anyone demanding a ZOOLANDER sequel? With nothing new to add, Stiller's Hail Mary is to pile on endless cameos, where the recognition of a famous person is, in and of itself, supposed to be funny. It's like a long SNL skit or Jimmy Fallon bit where someone just unexpectedly pops up and we're supposed to be entertained by the mere sight of a celebrity. Some of them play characters (Kristen Wiig and Fred Armisen have minor roles and Benedict Cumberbatch is an androgynously hermaphroditic supermodel named "All") or appear as distorted versions of themselves (Kiefer Sutherland plays himself as part of Hansel's dozen-person orgy collective; Sting plays Sting as an Obi-Wan Kenobi of the fashion world, who only speaks in Police or solo Sting-related song lyrics), but most just appear and that's supposed to be the joke: Justin Bieber, Billy Zane, Susan Boyle, Willie Nelson, Joe Jonas, Olivia Munn, Skrillex, Naomi Campbell, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Susan Sarandon, Christina Hendricks, M.C. Hammer, John Malkovich, Kate Moss, A$AP Rocky, and others. It also might set the record for cameos by TV news figures, including but not limited to Katie Couric, Jane Pauley, Joe Scarborough, Soledad O'Brien, Don Lemon, Matt Lauer, Dan Abrams, and, my God...et tu, Jim Lehrer? You get to see Tommy Hilfiger quipping "Tommy likey" as he watches Valentina and Mugatu henchwoman Katinka (Milla Jovovich) wrestling in a 69 position, and there's rimshot-worthy groaners like Derek going undercover and saying "Every bathhouse I've ever worked at had a rear entrance." ZOOLANDER 2 is appallingly bad. It's ANCHORMAN 2 bad and it's Adam Sandler lazy. It's Stiller and a bunch of his friends fucking around on Paramount's dime. Movies like this are a special kind of bad. It would be one thing if ZOOLANDER 2 tried and failed, but all it does is show up because it doesn't come from a place of inspiration. ZOOLANDER did. ANCHORMAN did. But their sequels came from a far more cynical place. No effort was put forth because none was necessary. And because the movie was shot at the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome, it seems that the primary motivation was paid vacations all around. No one involved in this thing gives the slightest shit about it. You shouldn't either. (Unrated, 102 mins)
RISEN (US - 2016)
One of the few offerings from the faithsploitation scene to stifle the preaching and attempt to reach out to secular audiences, RISEN treats the days following Christ's crucifixion as though it's LAW & ORDER: RESURRECTION. This isn't an original approach--Damiano Damiani's 1987 film THE INQUIRY starred Keith Carradine as a Roman soldier sent by Pontius Pilate (Harvey Keitel) to investigate a missing persons case where the missing person happens to be Jesus. THE INQUIRY was remade in 2006 as THE FINAL INQUIRY, an Italian film picked up for the US by Fox Faith and starring F. Murray Abraham, Max Von Sydow, and Dolph Lundgren. RISEN is more or less another de facto remake of THE INQUIRY, with cynical, agnostic tribune and war hero Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) assigned by Pilate (Peter Firth) to find the missing body of the prophet Yeshua (Cliff Curtis), who vanished from his sealed tomb three days after being crucified. Clavius and Lucius (HARRY POTTER's Tom Felton), the rookie tribune assigned to accompany him, tear Jerusalem apart searching for Yeshua's missing apostles and other accomplices (including Mary Magdelene, played by Maria Botto), until Clavius goes rogue and accompanies the remaining eleven apostles on a journey to meet the resurrected Yeshua. Of course, the film is ultimately all about making Clavius a believer, but director/co-writer Kevin Reynolds has plenty of real movies on his resume (ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES, WATERWORLD, 187, and the acclaimed History Channel miniseries HATFIELDS & MCCOYS) to not let the sermonizing take precedence over the story. Shot on Spanish and Maltese locations, RISEN looks great, though some discount-rate CGI is an occasional distraction, most notably a boat ride that seems tragically reminiscent of the greenscreen work in IN THE HEART OF THE SEA. The biggest problem is the film's ponderous pacing and a one-note performance by Fiennes, whose voice barely rises above a mumble until he finally meets Yeshua, who's very charismatically played by veteran character actor Cliff Curtis. Fiennes (when's the last time you went to see a Joseph Fiennes movie?) just doesn't have the screen presence to carry this, and it really seems like he got the job because his asking price was the most Sony was willing to spend for their faith-based Affirm Films division. The sincere RISEN deserves some credit for being the one of the least sanctimonious examples of faithsploitation and it gets quite good once Curtis' Yeshua finally shows up, but it just misses the mark. (PG-13, 108 mins)
THE PROGRAM (France/UK - 2016)
Not to be confused with the 1993 James Caan college football drama that inspired dumb teenagers to lie in the middle of the road and get killed, THE PROGRAM is a well-acted but choppy chronicle of the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. Based on the book Seven Deadly Sins by Sunday Times sports reporter David Walsh (played here by Chris O'Dowd) and scripted by frequent Danny Boyle collaborator John Hodge (SHALLOW GRAVE, TRAINSPOTTING), THE PROGRAM too frequently feels like an adaptation of a Wikipedia page, glossing over details and assuming you know enough to fill in the blanks (shot of Armstrong getting married, wife never seen again). It also can't decide whether to focus on Walsh, Armstrong (a terrific performance by Ben Foster), or Floyd Landis (Jesse Plemons). Landis, a cyclist on Armstrong's team, enters the story midway through and quickly grows embittered over the way Armstrong gets all the glory, especially when trainer and chief Armstrong enabler Johan Bruyneel (Denis Menochet) has to sell a number of the team's bikes to pay for everyone's performance-enhancing drugs. They're all part of the "program" designed by dubiously sketchy Italian doctor Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet), and the film details all the ways Ferrari and Bruyneel pump the cyclists full of drugs and the elaborate methods employed to cheat mandatory drug testing. THE PROGRAM opens like a standard Armstrong biopic, then shifts to Walsh as he grows incredulous of Armstrong's seemingly superhuman abilities after a grueling battle with cancer. But it's the Landis subplot that more or less dominates the last third, with the perennially-sidelined cyclist busted in a random urine test while Armstrong smugly beats the system and uses his celebrity and his "cancer shield" to render himself untouchable.
For a while, it seems like Hodge and director Stephen Frears (once a great filmmaker, now a comfortably jobbing journeyman) might go in an ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN/SHATTERED GLASS/SPOTLIGHT direction as Walsh tries to expose the culture of doping, fighting his editors at the paper and everyone else seeking to protect Armstrong's heroic image, getting doors slammed in his face and getting the cold shoulder from his colleagues when Bruyneel bullies them and threatens to cut their access if they continue to associate with Walsh. But Hodge and Frears introduce him as basically a co-lead character, then almost instantly sideline him for much of the film. There's too much ground to cover, and it probably would've worked better as an HBO or FX miniseries, where characters and conflicts would've had time to build and be fleshed-out in a more organic way. The film's flaws don't negate the excellent work of Foster, who doesn't really look a lot like Armstrong (though he gets some help from minimal makeup and trimmed eyebrows), but disappears into the character to such an extent that he becomes Armstrong by the end, uncannily nailing his body language and speech patterns. THE PROGRAM doesn't shy away from presenting Armstrong as little else than an egomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath, but it also seems too rushed and lets the committed actors down (Dustin Hoffman also turns up for a couple of scenes as bridge champion and investor Bob Hamann, though he seems to have wandered in from another movie). Shot in 2013 and unreleased until early 2016, THE PROGRAM would seem like a talked-about, awards-season gimme but debuted on DirecTV before hitting VOD and a small handful of theaters, ensuring that Foster's award-worthy performance will be lost in an utterly average movie nobody's going to see. (R, 104 mins)
The 2014 Toronto Film Festival didn't go very well for Adam Sandler. Seemingly in response to criticism about his juvenile and increasingly lazy star vehicles that just give him an excuse to hang out with his buddies, Sandler tried to get serious with two smaller films, both of which were unveiled at Toronto: JUNO director Jason Reitman's dysfunction drama MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN and Tom McCarthy's THE COBBLER. McCarthy's made some respected and acclaimed indie films, such as THE STATION AGENT (2003), THE VISITOR (2008), and WIN WIN (2011), and Sandler would seem to be in good hands with either director if he was seeking an indie-cred reinvention. But whatever mojo Reitman had circa UP IN THE AIR is gone, as MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN was a ridiculous CRASH knockoff that got laughed off the screen with its "Old Man Yells at Cloud" attitude about social media and modern technology and eventually opened in theaters to the tune of a $700,000 total gross while asking the tough questions like "What's with all the selfies and the texting and the porn and the jerking off?" THE COBBLER got an even more toxic response. Earnest and schmaltzy to a fault, it plays like an excessively sappy take on the kind of middling, klezmer-scored, high-concept trifle that Woody Allen might churn out to lighten the mood between dramas. Acquired by Image Entertainment and relegated to a few theaters and VOD, THE COBBLER grossed just $24,000 and is somehow worse than any of Sandler's phoned-in Happy Madison joints.
The dumb concept might've provided passable entertainment had McCarthy been able to settle on the right tone. Instead, he veers wildly from comedy to fantasy to drama, with Sandler doing his best to keep up as schlubby Max Simkin, a fourth-generation cobbler in a Lower East Side neighborhood that's struggling to hold off gentrification. Weighed down by Allen-esque Jewish neuroses, deserted by his father (Dustin Hoffman), and living with his dementia-addled mom (Lynn Cohen), Max wishes he'd made different choices in life but just plugs away in his mundane existence. That is, until he discovers an old stitching machine in the basement that enables him to literally walk in someone else's shoes: when he slips on shoes that have been repaired using the antique stitcher, he turns into the person who owns the shoes. At first, he uses his new trick to mess with Jimmy (Steve Buscemi), who owns the barber shop next door, but then he's dining-and-dashing by switching into another pair of shoes in the restaurant's men's room and trying to get in the shower with the hot girlfriend of local DJ Emiliano (THE GUEST's Dan Stevens), and while wearing the shoes of neighborhood gangster Leon (Method Man), he threateningly steals the shoes of another (Joey Slotnick) because he wants to get that guy's sports car out of the parking garage and speed throuogh the streets. There's probably a ton of ways that shoe-stealing scene, relying on Leon being a stereotypical thug, could've been subversive and funny, but McCarthy treats the joke the same way a regular Sandler director would and it lands with the expectedly uncomfortable thud. THE COBBLER gets hopelessly maudlin as Max slips on his dad's shoes to stage a reconciliation with his mom, but he soon decides to use it to stop gentrification in his neighborhood, with Leon in cahoots with a corrupt property developer (Ellen Barkin, who can play this kind of bitch-on-wheels character in her sleep) to run elderly holdout Mr. Solomon (Fritz Weaver) out of his building so they can tear it down. This all leads to a twist ending that, among other things, somehow turns THE COBBLER into a superhero origin story ("You are the Guardian of Soles. You are the Cobbler" is probably the single worst line of dialogue Hoffman's been forced to utter in his 50-year career). In his defense, Sandler really isn't the problem here, nor was he the issue with the overwrought MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN. It's almost like he's acting out by defiantly choosing the most terrible serious scripts he can find so people stop giving him so much shit about paid vacations like GROWN-UPS 2. (PG-13, 98 mins)
THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST (Germany/Austria - 2013; US release 2015)
Though he'll always be the director of 1988's PAPERHOUSE and 1992's CANDYMAN, Bernard Rose's freefall into Roland Joffe depths of irrelevance continues with the laughable Niccolo Paganini biopic THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST. Rose directed 1994's well-regarded IMMORTAL BELOVED, anchored by a great Gary Oldman performance as Beethoven but here, he's saddled with violinist/PBS crossover sensation David Garrett as the maverick 19th century classical great Paganini. Garrett can obviously play but he can't act and as a result, there's a massive void in the center of the film that's impossible to fill. But really, Garrett is just one of many insurmountable problems with THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST: Rose wisely offers his inexperienced lead some support with veteran professionals, almost of whom decided to bring their D-game. In the worst performance of his career, Jared Harris is Urbani, a vaguely demonic figure in a ludicrous top hat who has Paganini sign a contract in exchange for fame and fortune. Rose seemingly treats the metaphorical "deal with the devil" as historical fact, and it leads to all manner of self-destructive behavior on Paganini's part. Rose has no interest in exploring Paganini as a character and simply bulldozes through the exposition--in rapid-fire succession, Paganini goes from unknown violinist to superstar to father of a five-year-old boy to hopeless opium addict. That's all in the first 12 minutes. Then the kid disappears, and we see him again 100 or so minutes later, then five minutes after that, he's a decade older. Then Paganini is on opium again after no signs of drug abuse for 90% of the movie. At times, it seems like a long "Previously on..." recap for a TV series that doesn't exist.
Goaded by Urbani, Paganini treats everyone like dog shit, callously bankrupting the London benefactor (Christian McKay gives the only thing resembling a performance) who tries to help him expand his audience, breaks the heart of Charlotte, the benefactor's daughter (Andrea Deck), and demands financial compensation to play for the King of England. He takes the stage hours late like some 19th century Axl Rose, and is targeted by an ever-present group of religious protesters--led by the prudish and perpetually haranguing Primrose Blackstone (Olivia d'Abo)--that also functions as a Greek chorus for the plot. Everything about THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST is wrong-headed: casting a violinist with no acting experience and a complete inability to correctly pronounce the name "Charlotte" instead of a real actor who could maybe learn to mimic the violin performance scenes; Harris playing Urbani with a Mephistophelian scowl more befitting a silent movie villain, and with a bizarre vocal affect that can best be described as "SLING BLADE starring Peter Lorre"; Joely Richardson as a rough, cigarillo-smoking journalist with Carrot Top's hair, getting catty with Charlotte over Paganini's attention; giving the great Helmut Berger prominent billing but nothing to do...I could go on. Boasting some nicely ornate interior production design, THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST is otherwise appallingly bad and just more proof, along with the little-seen 2014 found-footage horror film SX_TAPE, that Rose just has no idea what he's doing anymore. He's made some accomplished films and a couple of his early ones could arguably be called great, but while he keeps busy, he's done nothing noteworthy since his 1997 version of ANNA KARENINA with Sophie Marceau. Rose is prolific but his consistently barely-released or completely unseen films fly so far under the radar that it's easy to forget he's even still around, let alone cranking out six movies in the last five years. In the end, THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST, released on just ten screens in the US by Freestyle two years after flopping in Europe, seems like as much of vanity project for Garrett as Klaus Kinski's humbly-titled 1989 Paganini chronicle KINSKI PAGANINI. Garrett, also one of 26 credited producers, gets to show off his chops numerous times, his Paganini beds a slew of comely women, and his female fans are always shown fanning themselves as they mob him like he's One Direction, accompanied by sounds of Elvis and Beatlemania crowd shrieking. And in a bizarre onscreen credit worthy of infamously self-aggrandizing neoclassical metal Paganini disciple Yngwie Malmsteen, there's even a special acknowledgment from the producers thanking Garrett for his work on the film. Does that mean he's thanking himself for starring in a movie that he co-produced? Isn't that like a Malpaso production thanking Clint Eastwood for showing up? (R, 123 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)
