JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM (US - 2019) Directed by Chad Stahelski. Written by Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins and Mark Abrams. Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Barry, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, Anjelica Huston, Mark Dacascos, Asia Kate Dillon, Lance Reddick, Tobias Segal, Said Taghmaoui, Jerome Flynn, Jason Mantzoukas, Cecep Arif Rahman, Yayan Ruhian, Margaret Daly, Randall Duk Kim, Robin Lord Taylor, Boban Marjinovic, Susan Blommaert, Unity Phelan, Roger Yuan. (R, 131 mins) An unexpected sleeper hit in theaters in 2014 after being given an 11th hour reprieve from VOD excommunicado, JOHN WICK provided Keanu Reeves with another iconic character that's single-handedly carried him through an otherwise rough career patch: a retired hit man who walked away from his old life to be with the woman he loved, unleashed as vengeance personified after the son of his former employer steals his car and kills his puppy Daisy, the final gift given to him by his wife before she succumbed to cancer. 2017's JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 was even better--a gonzo, comic-book-inspired actiongasm that cranked up the stakes, the inventive world-building, and ended with its hero embarking on a run for his life with seemingly the entire world in pursuit. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM (that title's a bit of a mouthful) opens just seconds after the ending of CHAPTER 2 as Wick, branded "excommunicado" by the High Table of the organization after killing double-crossing Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) on the consecrated grounds of the NYC branch of the hotel-for-assassins The Continental, is given a one-hour head start by Continental manager Winston (Ian McShane) before a $14 million mark is opened on Wick and offered to every professional assassin in the world.
Unable to get out of the city and dodging bullets, knives, and various other lethal weapons everywhere he goes, Wick calls in a favor and seeks safe passage from The Director (Anjelica Huston), a Russian ballet instructor and enigmatic figure from his past. Meanwhile, the High Table sends The Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon), an ice-cold problem-solver whose job is to enforce appropriate punishment to any of those who aided Wick in his escape, including Winston and The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), both of whom are given seven days to get their affairs in order before they're relieved of their duties. The Director gets Wick on a boat to Morocco, where he visits the Casablanca branch of the Continental, run by former colleague Sofia (Halle Berry). This leads to a meeting in the desert with a High Table elder (Said Taghmaoui), who offers Wick his freedom if he goes back to NYC and eliminates Winston, who's been deemed unreliable after failing to properly handle the D'Antonio debacle. Waiting in NYC is Zero (Mark Dacascos sighting!), a sushi chef and ambitious assassin ordered by The Adjudicator to kill Wick.
With Reeves and director Chad Stahelski returning, there's certainly a nice, lived-in feeling of comfort with the increasingly complex world of JOHN WICK. But like almost all franchises on its third go-around, CHAPTER 3 does start feeling like it's spinning its wheels at times. Derek Kolstad, the screenwriter of the first two films, is also back, but there's three additional credited writers, a telling indicator of how cluttered and structurally chaotic this often seems. After an electrifying opening half hour, the repetition starts creeping in, and there's only so many ways Wick can blast a bad guy in the head at point blank range before it starts to become a blur (Stahelski seems particularly indebted to Gareth Evans' THE RAID 2, right down to the presence of Cecep Arif Rahman and Yayan Ruhian as two of Zero's chief flunkies). But just because it isn't as fresh and inspired as its predecessors doesn't mean there isn't a lot to enjoy: the knife fight is terrific; a long gun battle with Wick, Sofia and her two loyal, ass-kicking, crotch-biting dogs vs. the army of Casablanca crime boss Berrada (Jerome Flynn) could almost be its own stand-alone short film; an amusing shout-out to Andrei Tarkovsky; an eye-piercing that's right up there with Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE; Lance Reddick as the NYC Continental's unflappable concierge getting to blast shotguns as he helps Wick take on some of Zero's guys; and Dacascos has a lot of fun as Zero, who's assigned to kill Wick but can't stop being a gushing fanboy whenever he's in his presence (and he gets not one, but two opportunities to remind Wick "You see? We're the same!"). But after a pair of creative, inventive action sagas, CHAPTER 3 is still enjoyable but the fatigue is there. The stylish elements and the colorful look just feel recycled from CHAPTER 2, the whole Casablanca detour doesn't serve much of a narrative purpose other than bloating the running time (and Berry's role is little more than an extended cameo), and the increasingly epic nature of the action sequences necessitate using more noticeable and less convincing CGI as a crutch as the JOHN WICK franchise starts resorting to FAST & FURIOUS-esque silliness. The door is left open for an inevitable CHAPTER 4, so I'm predicting here and now that John Wick will be in space or at the very least battling a cyborg by CHAPTER 6.
Pascal Laugier's 2008 film MARTYRS was pretty much the last word in France's "extreme horror" craze that gave us Alexandre Aja's HIGH TENSION, Xavier Gens' FRONTIER(S), and Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury's INSIDE, among others. It was an impossible film to top, so Laugier didn't even try, instead following it up with the creepy and comparatively restrained 2012 Jessica Biel thriller THE TALL MAN. For his first film in six years, Laugier revisits some less extreme but still quite disturbing MARTYRS-esque themes with INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND. Upon a cursory glance, it's easy to dismiss GHOSTLAND as a torture porn throwback, but it's got more on its mind, and weaves its story in such an intricately constructed way that you'll never see how it's planning to pull the rug out from under you. In an extended flashback, single mom Pauline (legendary French singer Mylene Farmer) is traveling with her two teenage daughters--elder and bratty Vera (Taylor Hickson) and younger and bookish Beth (Emilia Jones)--to the rural Canadian home of a late aunt who left her middle-of-nowhere home to them. They're passed on a deserted country road by an ominous, barreling ice cream truck en route, which means it won't surprise any seasoned horror fan to learn that the two people in the truck are the ones behind a home invasion later that night. Despite being brutally terrorized and beaten, Pauline manages to get the upper hand and kills both of the attackers. Cut to 16 years later, and Beth (now played by Crystal Reed) has followed her dream of becoming a writer and is now a bestselling horror novelist with a husband and young son. Her latest book Incident in a Ghostland is earning rave reviews with its semi-autobiographical depiction of what happened to her family that night. After an hysterical phone call from Vera (Anastasia Phillips), Beth returns to her mother's home to find a volatile situation: Pauline drinks too much and she's forced to keep the dangerously unstable Vera in the basement with padded walls, still haunted by the events of the past, prone to meltdowns and lunatic rants about how "they're still here."
Indeed, the nightmare is not over, and to say any more would involve significant spoilers, but rest assured, INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND isn't going where that synopsis would lead you to believe. What transpires is alternately intense, terrifying, and often upsetting, not on the "next level of existence" where MARTYRS went, but certainly just as bleak and harrowing in its own way. Laugier's depictions of the horrors his characters endure is unflinching and fearlessly acted by his stars, and as a result, like MARTYRS, GHOSTLAND isn't going to be for everyone. It's an unsettling examination of abuse, trauma, and coping mechanisms that isn't afraid to go to some very dark places. This is Laugier's fourth feature film, and all have been excellent, and even though INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND will inevitably acquire a cult following, it'll likely be overshadowed by an on-set accident involving Hickson. Laugier was directing her to pound her fists on a glass door and he kept telling her to pound harder when the glass shattered and she fell forward. A piece of glass caught her cheek as she fell and opened a huge gash on the left side of her face that required 70 stitches, leaving her permanently scarred. She subsequently sued the producers for negligence and failure to provide a safe working environment, and the case is still pending at this time. That aside--and no movie is worth what Hickson has gone through--INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND is an excellent horror film that's worth a look. (Unrated, 91 mins)
KINGS (China/US/France/Belgium - 2018)
Shot in Los Angeles, KINGS is the first English-language work from Turkish-born, France-based filmmaker Deniz Gamze Erguven, and it's the kind of misguided, laughably contrived, embarrassingly tone-deaf disaster that almost always sends an acclaimed foreign auteur on the first flight back home, never to try their luck with the US market again. Erguven won a significant amount of acclaim with her debut, 2015's MUSTANG, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. With KINGS, Erguven takes a look at the 1992 L.A. riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict, trying to go for a hard-hitting immediacy by mixing in archival footage from the time but also never settling on a tone. The film is an impossibly awkward mishmash of social commentary, arthouse pretension, and slapstick comedy, culminating in a climax that cuts back and forth between the tragedy of a supporting character bleeding to death in the backseat of a car while two others engage in Three Stooges-style antics to free themselves from the parking lot light post to which they've been handcuffed. Who is this film's intended audience?
A legitimate contender for the worst film of 2018, THE CON IS ON is a would-be screwball comedy put through a '90s post-Tarantino filter complete with QT vets Uma Thurman and Tim Roth heading the cast. Dumped on VOD by Lionsgate after three years on the shelf, THE CON IS ON (shot as THE BRITS ARE COMING) manages to go its entire miserable 95 minute duration without anything even resembling humor, leaving an overqualified cast mugging shamelessly as they feebly try to make something out of nothing. Married British con artists Harriet (Thurman) and Peter Fox (Roth) have made off with a fortune belonging to lethal international assassin Irina (Maggie Q). They make their way to L.A. and stage an accident to get a free room at the Chateau Marmont, where they get the idea to swipe a priceless ring from Peter's ex-wife Jackie (Alice Eve), whose pretentious film director husband Gabriel (Crispin Glover) is having affairs with both his clingy personal assistant Gina (Parker Posey) and terrible actress Vivien (Sofia Vergara), the sultry star of his latest film LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR. Throw in a subplot with Harriet posing as a "dog whisperer" and Stephen Fry as a pedophile priest and opium smuggler and you get...well, nothing.
Directed and co-written by James Haslam, whose previous film THE DEVIL YOU KNOW was shelved for eight (!) years before its 2013 release and only resurfaced because it featured an unknown-in-2005 Jennifer Lawrence in a supporting role (also, should it have been a premonition that he's the stepson of Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the perpetually hapless Cleveland Browns?), THE CON IS ON abandons its stars in one unfunny situation after another, leaving them little to do but fall back on various vulgarities or, in Posey's case, flail around and generally embarrass herself. It's apparently supposed to be funny that Harriet and Peter are such unrepentant misanthropes, but isn't it key to any kind of screwball comedy that the central characters have some element of charm? Thurman is glamorous enough but Roth looks genuinely defeated by the futility of the whole endeavor, and it's the kind of film that thinks an establishing shot of an Asian dry cleaning establishment should be accompanied by the sound of a gong, a punchline that was past its sell-by date roughly around the time of THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU. Considering the quality of its cast, THE CON IS ON is shockingly bad. The only reason this is going to get any attention at all once it hits streaming services is for a brief and largely-implied but admittedly surprising sex scene that features a topless Thurman and a salad-tossing Maggie Q, but it's hardly worth enduring the entire film. There's also a brief Melissa Sue Anderson sighting, if any LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE or HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME superfans give a shit. (R, 95 mins)
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (US/UK - 2014) Directed by Bryan Singer. Written by Simon Kinberg. Cast: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Halle Berry, Ellen Page, Anna Paquin, Peter Dinklage, Nicholas Hoult, Shawn Ashmore, Fan Bingbing, Omar Sy, Evan Peters, Josh Helman, Daniel Cudmore, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Michael Lerner, Mark Camacho. (PG-13, 131 mins)
Director Bryan Singer's return to the X-MEN universe for the first time since 2003's X2 is a loose adaptation of a 1981 storyline in The Uncanny X-Men and brings together both the original cast and their X-MEN: FIRST CLASS counterparts in a gathering the likes of which we haven't seen since Yes' 1991 album Union. Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg somehow manage to keep the multiple plot threads coherent for the most part, though if you aren't up to speed on your X-MEN lore, there's a good chance you'll be a bit lost here and there, as DAYS OF FUTURE PAST serves as a sequel to both 2006's X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and 2011's X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.
Opening in a dystopian future where robots known as Sentinels are waging war on mutants, DOFP has Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) sending the consciousness of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973 so he can stop the assassination of Sentinel creator and Nixon cabinet member Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) at the hands of Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). As it plays out in their current timeline, Trask dies a hero, and Mystique is captured, with her DNA being used to help create the mutant-hunting Sentinels killing them in the future. Wolverine is advised by Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) to track down their younger selves in 1973 for assistance. Young Xavier (James McAvoy) is a despondent recluse being cared for by Hank/Beast (Nicholas Hoult) in the decrepit Xavier School, while young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is being held in a enclosed prison deep beneath the Pentagon. Wolverine, Xavier, and Beast enlist the aid of Quicksilver (Evan Peters) to infiltrate the Pentagon and extract Magneto in what's probably the film's most inspired sequence, boasting an unforgettable use of Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle." Once freed, it doesn't take Magneto long for his evil ways to take control, often working at cross purposes with Mystique, who has her reasons for killing Trask, who isn't the noble altruist that history has purported him to be.
The wild plot also works in the JFK assassination, the Watergate tapes (Mark Camacho is a peculiar-looking Nixon), SANFORD AND SON, and some time-travel comic relief as Wolverine adjusts to life in 1973. Other than Jackman's Wolverine, who acts as a bridge between the two casts, the focus is more on the FIRST CLASS end of things, with the original cast not having a whole lot to do after the opening sequence other than pop up periodically to remind the audience that they're still there as they bide their time until a climactic showdown with some Sentinels. McKellen and Stewart look dour and concerned, Page's Kitty Pryde (it's Kitty, not Wolverine, who goes back in time in the comic book source story) does little more than rub her hands on future Wolverine's temples as she guides his soul into the past, Halle Berry's Storm has maybe three lines of dialogue, and a prominently-billed Anna Paquin returns--if you can call it that--as Rogue, a central character in the first film but now reduced to a two-second walk-on without even a clear view of her face (Singer decided to cut all of her scenes, but they'll be included on the Blu-ray release). Other than Wolverine and a brief face-to-face with young and old Professor Xavier, there's no interaction between the originals and the First Class. Jackman, McAvoy, and Hoult make a great team, and Peters almost manages to steal the film with his Quicksilver antics (after the brilliant Pentagon escape sequence, you'll wish Peters was in the movie more). The X-Men vs. Magneto vs. Mystique vs. the Sentinels showdown on the White House lawn is a superbly crafted set piece, even if one element makes it bit too reminiscent of the stadium destruction from Bane in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. It's not perfect, and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER is looking even better as the year goes on, but X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is an ambitious return to the franchise for Singer, and it gets the job done as enjoyably huge big-screen summer entertainment.
Directed by Brad Anderson. Written by Richard D'Ovidio. Cast: Halle Berry, Abigail Breslin, Morris Chestnut, Michael Imperioli, Michael Eklund, David Otunga, Roma Maffia, Justina Machado, Denise Dowse, Jose Zuniga. (R, 94 mins)
It's always frustrating to watch a film that's solidly, briskly, and efficiently doing its job only to have one illogical decision snowball into a calamitous chain reaction that causes the entire thing to crash and burn. That's exactly what happens with THE CALL, a high-concept suspense outing from director Brad Anderson, a long-ago indie darling (1998's NEXT STOP, WONDERLAND, 2000's HAPPY ACCIDENTS) whose 2001 cult classic SESSION 9 led to him finding his niche with thrillers like 2004's THE MACHINIST and 2008's TRANSSIBERIAN. Anderson mostly does hired-gun TV work these days (FRINGE, TREME, BOARDWALK EMPIRE, THE KILLING), and his last film, 2011's VANISHING ON 7TH STREET, was easily his worst, but for about 2/3 of its running time, THE CALL finds Anderson in fine form and reinforces the idea that genre films of this sort are indeed his true calling. But around 65 minutes in, THE CALL makes a fatal mistake from which it never recovers.
Overcoming an initially distracting wig, Halle Berry delivers a strong performance as Jordan, a veteran 911 operator at "The Hive," the centralized complex for Los Angeles emergency services and first responders (sample clumsy exposition from wide-eyed trainee: "Why do they call it 'The Hive?'"). In the opening sequence, Jordan is on the line with a teenage girl who's home alone and trying to hide from an intruder when a brief lapse in judgment ultimately leads to the girl's death. Six months later, still shattered by the mistake (the girl was hiding, the call was disconnected and the intruder was about to give up and leave, but Jordan hitting "redial" inadvertantly alerted him to the girl's location) and unable to forgive herself, Jordan pops Diazepam and works as an operator trainer behind the scenes. She's forced back onto the console when a 911 call comes in from 16-year-old Casey (Abigail Breslin), who's been abducted from a mall parking garage by a mystery man (DTV fixture and Uwe Boll vet Michael Eklund) and stashed in the trunk of his car. It's here where THE CALL really starts cooking, as Anderson and screenwriter Richard D'Ovidio focus on Jordan digging deep within herself to find the confidence to talk Casey through what's happening to her and using her wits to help her alert other motorists to her plight. Since Casey is using the disposable phone left behind at the mall by a friend who had to leave, the police can't pinpoint its location. Jordan instructs Casey to kick out the taillight and stick her arm out of it and wave. When Casey finds some paint cans in the trunk, Jordan tells her to pour the paint out of the taillight opening. At a stoplight, a motorist in the next lane (Michael Imperioli) gets a funny feeling about the missing taillight and the paint and when he tries to intervene, he ends up in the trunk of his own car with Casey when the kidnapper realizes the police are on to his vehicle and switches cars.
THE CALL is moving along at a nice clip and going just swell when it suddenly gets an urge to fix what isn't broken. It's working because the tension builds by keeping its characters interacting while trapping them in their own confined, claustrophobic spaces (Casey in the trunk, Jordan at her desk). But when Jordan ends up talking to the kidnapper and realizes that it's the same perp who killed the teenage girl six months earlier, THE CALL makes the conscious decision to shit the bed by having Jordan leave "The Hive" and take this 911 call...personal. When the cops--including Jordan's understanding, supportive boyfriend (Morris Chestnut)--get the kidnapper's identity from a partial print on a shattered chloroform bottle near his abandoned car, they visit his house and his clueless wife (Justina Machado) and find the motive for his behavior and his possible location in a photo. When a trip to that location turns out to be a dead end (they don't even turn the lights on--Chestnut walks in, looks around, and says "This is a dead end," and leaves), Jordan is unconvinced and drives out there herself. At 2:30 am. With just a flashlight.
And with that, what was a somewhat implausible but thoroughly entertaining, crackling thriller with strong, believable characters (it's also great fun watching Eklund go from cool and confident to a twitchy, blubbering mess as his day encounters one unforeseen obstacle after another) abruptly turns into a trashy, exploitative horror film with Eklund's psycho having a secret underground torture bunker where he scalps his victims and makes out with a mannequin head and touches himself because, after his turns as a post-apocalyptic cannibal in the atrocious THE DAY and a post-apocalyptic necrophile rapist in the loathsome THE DIVIDE, this is apparently what Michael Eklund does. Of course, Jordan discovers the subterrenean SAW/HOSTEL death dungeon and decides to rescue Casey, who's strapped to a table and stripped down to her bra for no other reason than to show us that, yes, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is growing up and now has ample cleavage. The jarring shift in tone is a tacky metamorphosis that ruins an otherwise exemplary nailbiter and would reek of studio exec interference and reshoots were it not for the film's last shot of Berry's Jordan pulling a Roy Scheider and using Eklund's catchphrase ("It's already done") against him. The last third of the film is a train wreck (I haven't even mentioned Casey's eye injury being badly CGI'd; really, everything has to be CGI'd now? We can't even apply practical makeup and a small prosthetic to simulate a swollen eye anymore? I'm just glad ROCKY and RAGING BULL were made when they were), but the final five minutes in particular, are so utterly, stupidly senseless and at odds with everything we've seen and learned about these characters that when the closing credits roll, you just sit there slack-jawed at the implosion of what was a pretty good movie. At one point during their phone conversation, Jordan promises Casey that she'll get her through this and that they'll go see a movie together that weekend. What a nice, believable, well-rounded ending that would've been. Instead, apropos of nothing and against all established logic, it culminates in vigilante vengeance, a cheap laugh, and red meat tossed out to the audience.
Directed by Peter Farrelly, Steven Brill, Will Graham, Steve Carr, Griffin Dunne, James Duffy, Jonathan Van Tulleken, Elizabeth Banks, Patrik Forsberg, Brett Ratner, Rusty Cundieff, James Gunn. Cast: Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Common, Seth MacFarlane, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber, Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, J.B. Smoove, Emma Stone, Kieran Culkin, Richard Gere, Kate Bosworth, Jack McBrayer, Aasif Mandvi, Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Uma Thurman, Kristen Bell, Bobby Cannavale, Leslie Bibb, John Hodgman, Katrina Bowden, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jimmy Bennett, Patrick Warburton, Matt Walsh, Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Gerard Butler, Halle Berry, Stephen Merchant, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, Terrence Howard, Elizabeth Banks, Josh Duhamel. (R, 94 mins)
The extremely R-rated sketch comedy MOVIE 43 boasts what might be the most overqualified cast ever assembled for the sole purpose of thoroughly embarrassing themselves. The project was headed by Peter Farrelly, who gathered eleven other directors and a total of 18 writers to put together what probably seemed like a good idea in theory: get an incredible amount of A-list movie and TV stars together for a modern take on raunchy 1970s sketch comedies like THE GROOVE TUBE (1974), IF YOU DON'T STOP...YOU'LL GO BLIND (1975), CAN I DO IT...TIL I NEED GLASSES? (1977), JOKES MY FOLKS NEVER TOLD ME (1978), and the subgenre's standard-bearer, THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE (1977). It's hard to believe that this much talent could be squandered so badly, but MOVIE 43 only has a couple of good ideas and a total of about five decent laughs throughout. I don't think it's being too demanding to have expected a little more than that. A joke occasionally lands and only sticks out because what's around it is so depressing and dismal. Entire segments go by where you can't help but ask yourself "What was the endgame here? What is the joke?"
Farrelly handled the main storyline, which has Dennis Quaid as a washed-up director in skinny jeans and a Justin Bieber cut barging into studio exec Greg Kinnear's office and pitching him an idea for a sketch movie. And that's the premise. So, we get Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman on a blind date, where she discovers that he has a scrotum dangling from his neck. Things briefly pick up with an interesting idea that's one of the very few examples of MOVIE 43 doing something edgy and daring: Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber play homeschooling parents who want their teenage son to have the complete high school experience, so they regularly subject him to bullying and insults for starters, then throwing a huge party and not inviting him, culminating in Mom trying to make out with him and Dad making a pass at him, all to give him that special "awkward first time" opportunity that all teenagers should have. It's a funny idea, but the writers and segment director Will Graham don't really know where to take it, so it ultimately fizzles, but it's one of the only examples of MOVIE 43 trying to do something. Next, it's Anna Faris asking boyfriend Chris Pratt to "poop" on her (not even the great J.B. Smoove of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM can save this one, telling Pratt to eat beefy bean burritos with guacamole to "add some color" to it). Supermarket checkout clerk Kieran Culkin and ex-girlfriend Emma Stone have an intense erotic conversation, unaware that the intercom is picking it up and it's being pumped through the store (Stone: "Do you still like fingers in your butthole?" Culkin: "I want to give you a hickey on your vagina"). Then, Richard Gere is the CEO of a company facing lawsuits over their "iBabe" music player, which is a life-sized replica of a woman, prompting teenage boys to mutilate their penises because of a cooling fan that's in the "lower quadrant." I think the joke is that none of the execs except Kate Bosworth saw that this would be a problem. Next up, Robin (Justin Long) is at a speed date when Batman (Jason Sudeikis, who has a few amusing lines) shows up to cock-block him. Kristen Bell is Supergirl, Uma Thurman is Lois Lane, and Leslie Bibb is Wonder Woman. Then there's a painfully unfunny commercial about "Machine Kids," that shows people getting mad at vending machines, ATMs, and copiers and being told that little kids are inside operating them (I don't know what the joke is, either).
Chloe Grace Moretz is at boyfriend Jimmy Bennett's house when she gets her first period, prompting Bennett, older brother Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and their dad Patrick Warburton to freak out. Then there's a Tampax commercial with a CGI'd shark eating a female swimmer (because of the blood and the...yeah, you know). Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville are roommates who kidnap a foul-mouthed leprechaun (Gerard Butler's face CGI'd on to a smaller body) in a segment directed by Brett Ratner (it's a cliche to bag on Ratner at this point, but when there are four people credited as "Brett Ratner's assistants" for a contribution this miniscule, he's pretty much asking for it). Things get better for a short while with Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant on a blind date that turns into an increasingly ridiculous, rude, and politically incorrect game of Truth or Dare. It's another example of a solid idea without a punchline, but there are some amusing gags and this particular segment is comic genius compared to the several that preceded it, even with Oscar winner Berry mashing guacamole with her (stunt) breast and inserting a turkey baster filled with hot sauce into her vagina. Terrence Howard is the coach of a black college basketball team in 1959, where his game plan is essentially "You're black...they're white. This ain't hockey!" It's a one-joke premise that wears out its welcome fairly quickly, but it's not awful and it's nice to see segment director Rusty Cundieff (FEAR OF A BLACK HAT, TALES FROM THE HOOD) working on the big screen again. MOVIE 43 finally ends with a laughless offering from the otherwise dependable James Gunn, with Elizabeth Banks (who directed the Moretz/period segment) battling a jealous, gay, masturbating, animated cat named Beezil for the affection of boyfriend Josh Duhamel.
Other than the Watts/Schreiber "Homeschooling" and the Berry/Merchant "Blind Date," there's not much humor to be found in MOVIE 43. It's more concerned with shock value, which can be funny, but there's just nothing for these people to work with here. If they wanted to be edgy, the filmmakers needed to bring more to the table than diarrhea, menstrual blood, and a nutsack dangling from Hugh Jackman's neck. Even something as simple as having Gere make a gerbil joke would've demonstrated that they were trying and anything was fair game. But really, 15 years after THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and we're still getting "jizz as hair gel" jokes? Is MOVIE 43 as apocalyptically bad as many critics have said? Is it "the CITIZEN KANE of bad movies"? No, not even close. Oh, make no mistake...it's terrible, and easily one of 2013's worst films, though I'm sure it won't be the worst. I laughed a few times and it's still better than, say, any spoof movie by Friedberg & Seltzer, the Antichrists behind DATE MOVIE and MEET THE SPARTANS. No, MOVIE 43's biggest crime is amassing an IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD-sized cast (and JERSEY SHORE's Snooki) and thinking the shock and the novelty of these people making genitalia and bodily-function jokes would be enough.
MOVIE 43 was shot over a period of three years, and worked on whenever actors or directors had time in their schedules. The version released overseas omits the wraparound segments with Quaid and Kinnear and substitutes it with three teenagers scouring the internet for something called "Movie 43," reputed to be the world's filthiest film. That at least explains the title, which means nothing in the context of the US release. Two additional segments were shot but ultimately not included: one directed by Bob Odenkirk, with Julianne Moore and Tony Shalhoub as parents being interviewed about their missing daughter (funny!) and one with Anton Yelchin as a necrophiliac, which begs the question of how bad they must've been if they were deemed unworthy of MOVIE 43. I'm sure those will end up on the inevitable "Unrated and Unacceptable!" (or some such nonsense) version on DVD/Blu-ray, but for now, the biggest winners of MOVIE 43 have to be Julianne Moore, Tony Shalhoub, and Anton Yelchin.
Thanks to John Charles for the tip on the alternate version.
