As seen with SILVER CITY in 2004, SWING VOTE in 2008, and THE CAMPAIGN in 2012, timely political comedies usually seem to pop up during election years. Written and directed by Jon Stewart and produced by Brad Pitt, this year's IRRESISTIBLE was another COVID-19 theatrical casualty that saw its intended wide summer release relegated primarily to VOD, which was probably the best venue for it (as you can see to your left, Focus Features really went all out on that poster design). It's a generally bland and forgettable attempt at being Frank Capra with a mean streak, and its satirical digs are toothless and obvious. Stewart's old DAILY SHOW colleague Steve Carell stars as Gary Zimmer, a top Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and is looking for redemption. He finds his shot in Col. Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper), an ex-Marine and small-town Wisconsin farmer whose YouTube-captured takedown of Republican Mayor Braun (Brent Sexton) convinces him that he's the next face of the Democratic Party. The town--which runs about 95% Republican-- has fallen on hard times, conservative Col. Hastings doesn't think Braun is getting the job done, and it doesn't take much prodding for Zimmer to convince him to run as a Democratic challenger, calling the folksy Hastings "Bill Clinton with impulse control." Zimmer's machinations get the attention of the media, and the story of a little mayoral election in nowhere Wisconsin blows up enough that Republican strategist and Zimmer's 2016 Trump campaign arch-rival Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne) is sent in with unlimited financial backing to work Braun's re-election.
Carell gets to do a lot of his Michael Scott schtick from THE OFFICE, usually dismissing the townies as easily-manipulated rubes, while Cooper and Mackenzie Davis (as his daughter) do the idealistic, salt-of-the-earth "real Americans" bit when they object to Zimmer launching a smear attack on Braun. IRRESISTIBLE gets its biggest spark from Byrne, who dives into her role with gusto in some extremely vulgar ballbusting with Carell (Zimmer, finding Faith at the local coffee shop: "You know how I knew you were here?" Faith: "Your pussy tingled?"), but for someone as astute with the merging of politics and comedy as Stewart, this really errs on the side of cornball and formulaic, right down to its generic title. It's trying to say something about issues of too much money in politics, but it just never catches fire and rarely finds its inner WAG THE DOG, even with a twist ending that just magnifies the sense of cornpone Americana in the guise of contemporary satire. Stewart's barely-released 2014 directing debut ROSEWATER wasn't very good either, so maybe filmmaking just isn't his ideal medium. The supporting cast features familiar faces like Topher Grace and Natasha Lyonne as members of Zimmer's strategist team, and couple of political talking heads put in cameo appearances, but who knows what to make of Bill Irwin's bizarre cameo as a billionaire George Soros-type Democratic donor that sends things into absurdist DR. STRANGELOVE territory for about 45 seconds. It's a genuinely odd, out-of-nowhere gag that's funny but is wasted in this kind of middle-of-the-road "TV-movie with F-bombs" that uses Bob Seger's "Still the Same" over the opening credits and during a later "Hastings catching up on Braun in the polls" campaign montage. (R, 102 mins)
ROGUE (South Africa/UK - 2020)
It seems like Megan Fox was everywhere in the late '00s, but other than starring in the TMNT franchise reboot a few years ago and joining the cast of Zooey Deschanel's NEW GIRL for a couple of seasons, she's kept a pretty low profile of late compared to her TRANSFORMERS and tabloid overexposure heyday. She's back in a starring role in the action/horror film ROGUE, not to be confused with the otherROGUE, a pretty terrific 2008 Australian killer crocodile flick that didn't get the attention it deserved. This ROGUE deals with a team of mercenaries trapped on a seemingly abandoned farm in the middle of nowhere in Africa after a botched extraction, only to find themselves at the mercy of a very pissed-off lioness who starts picking them off one by one. It's hard to tell what's less believable here: the CGI lioness, or Fox as Sam, the tough-as-nails leader of the black-ops merc unit. Sam and her team were hired by a beleaguered governor after his daughter (Jessica Sutton) has been abducted by an Al-Shabaab terror cell and human trafficking ring led by Zalaam (Adam Deacon). They rescue the girl and two others, but when their chopper arrives only to be blown out of the sky by Zalaam, they're forced to take the girls and run for their lives, ending up at a farm that's been deserted except for one territorial lioness who doesn't take kindly to intruders on her turf.
Director MJ Bassett, best known for SOLOMON KANE and her TV work with episodes of ASH VS. EVIL DEAD and STRIKE BACK (her 2007 survivalist thriller WILDERNESS is an underseen gem), co-wrote the script with her daughter Isabel, who plays one of the other kidnapped girls, but despite its noble intentions in offering a female-focused genre film, ROGUE fizzles with slack pacing, entirely too many predictable jump-scare kills that won't fool anyone who's seen DEEP BLUE SEA, and Fox just not even remotely convincing as a mercenary. Bassett, who most recently directed the surprisingly not-completely-terrible Universal 1440 DTV sequel INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED, does get a fun performance out of STRIKE BACK star Philip Winchester as Sam's wisecracking second-in-command, and his running gag involving the Backstreet Boys isn't bad, nor are a few decently-crafted action sequences that don't rely on the amateur-night CGI. The digital lioness is so awful that it seriously looks like a placeholder effect that someone forgot to finish, and it looks even sillier in a couple of scenes where Fox's Sam tries to negotiate with her woman-to-woman, or rather, bitch-to-bitch to reference the star's climactic quip that falls so flat that if you listen closely, you can probably hear the crickets chirping on set. (R, 106 mins)
Hot on the heels of gems like THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE and BACKDRAFT 2, Spike Lee's hit 2006 bank heist thriller INSIDE MAN becomes the latest unlikely Universal catalog title to be belatedly sequelized by their "1440" DTV division (bring on Scott Eastwood in HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER 2!) with the South Africa-lensed INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED. Of course, no one from INSIDE MAN--Lee, Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, etc--is back, though some characters are mentioned. And you can't help but admire not only how the production designers try to pass Johannesburg off as NYC (at least it's more convincing than Bulgaria) but also the way a character exclaims "It's a copycat heist!" to justify more or less remaking INSIDE MAN with a cast of cable and streaming actors with varying degrees of recognizability. BETTER CALL SAUL's Rhea Seehorn will probably be the most familiar face as hard-nosed FBI agent Brynn Stewart, summoned to work point on a robbery taking place at the Federal Reserve in NYC. She's joined by NYPD hostage negotiator Remy Darbonne (SENSE8's Aml Ameen) as they try to meet the rigid demands of the robbery team's masked leader, who calls herself "Most Wanted" (Roxanne McKee, who's logged time on GAME OF THRONES, DOMINION, and STRIKE BACK). She's after a stash of gold hidden in a secret vault, and both Stewart and Darbonne notice (not quickly enough) that Most Wanted's methodology mirrors that of Dalton Russell, the brains behind the now-infamous "Nazi diamond heist" depicted in Lee's film (and played there by Owen, whose photo is seen numerous times throughout). So instead of diamonds, we've got gold bars, and instead of Plummer's aging Nazi sympathizer--who's passed on in the interim--we get that character's pissed-off son (Greg Kriek) pulling the strings because he wants the rest of his late dad's riches.
There's been flimsier foundations for a sequel, and INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED is hardly the worst of these 1440 titles. Busy TV director MJ Bassett (ASH VS. EVIL DEAD, STRIKE BACK, ALTERED CARBON) began her career as a second-string Neil Marshall with 2002's supernatural WWI chiller DEATHWATCH and 2007's underseen gem of a survivalist thriller WILDERNESS before going on to SOLOMON KANE and SILENT HILL: REVELATION, and she keeps things moving briskly. Seehorn and McKee turn in solid performances, and British Ameel does a decent job of masking his accent by spending the whole movie doing a two-for-one impression of Will Smith and Kevin Hart. The South African supporting actors fare much worse, none of them even remotely convincing as New Yorkers and all of them sounding like Leonardo DiCaprio in BLOOD DIAMOND. INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED is completely forgettable, but maybe worth a half-attentive glance if you liked Seehorn on BETTER CALL SAUL or have enjoyed Bassett's earlier work (definitely seek out WILDERNESS). Just don't think too hard about it, or else you'll be asking questions like "If the original Nazi diamond heist is such a legendary case in law enforcement, and they know it's a copycat case, then why don't they see any of the same shit coming long before it happens?" (R, 106 mins) JARHEAD: LAW OF RETURN (US - 2019)
Hey, remember that 2005 Jake Gyllenhaal movie JARHEAD? Did you know it's spawned three DTV sequels so far courtesy of Universal's 1440 division? There's no real connection between any of the films, though Dennis Haysbert's JARHEAD character made a brief appearance in 2016's JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE. The only sense of continuity offered by the latest stand-alone installment, JARHEAD: LAW OF RETURN, is the return of JARHEAD 2: FIELD OF FIRE writer/director Don Michael Paul, a former B-movie supporting actor-turned-DTV specialist, whose other credits include three TREMORS sequels, two SNIPER sequels, LAKE PLACID: THE FINAL CHAPTER, KINDERGARTEN COP 2, DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY, THE SCORPION KING: BOOK OF SOULS, and the upcoming BULLETPROOF 2, a sequel to the 1996 Damon Wayans/Adam Sandler action comedy BULLETPROOF that will not in any way involve Damon Wayans or Adam Sandler. Like JARHEADs 2 and 3, JARHEAD 4 is more Bulgaria-shot jingoistic military porn, just more forgettable than usual. JARHEAD 3 at least had Scott Adkins. This offers PRISON BREAK's Amaury Nolasco as Sgt. Flores, a career Marine who's a month away from retirement (uh-oh) when he ends up in a covert mission to extract pilot Ronan Johnson (Devon Sawa) when he's shot down and taken prisoner by a Syrian terror outfit headed by the nefarious "The Ghost" (George Zlatarev). The catch: Johnson is the son of a Catholic US senator (Robert Patrick) and a Jewish mother. He married an Israeli woman (Shanti Ashanti) five years ago, obtained dual Israeli citizenship, and joined that country's military via Law of Return, which gives all Jews the right to come to Israel and become Israeli citizens. The Israeli government declares "He's ours!" and assigns the rescue operation to a Mossad agent (Yael Eitan), but a bloviating American general (Ben Cross) yells "This is Benghazi all over again!" to get your Hillary-hating uncle all riled up, and demands US military special ops be involved because of the political ramifications involving the package's father.
What follows are a bunch of dull firefights and a lot of hardass Marine bro-downs, filled with witty dialogue like "Fuckface? He called me a fuckface! Hey, I'd fuck your face!" and "This ain't our first time swingin' at the pinata, lady!" when the female Mossad agent in charge gives a final run-through of the assignment. Because, you know, this is...what they do. Also note how some stock news footage early on shows Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking English, followed by some footage of Iran's prime minister with an English translator speaking over him, yet the slightly-accented translator's words are accompanied by subtitles like it's all pops and buzzes and we can't understand a word with these people. JARHEAD: LAW OF RETURN: come for the formulaic, by-the-numbers action, stay for the bonus One America News Network-pandering xenophobia. (R, 103 mins) Note: Universal 1440 also released the DTV sequel DOOM: ANNIHILATION this week, directed by Tony Giglio (writer of the three Universal 1440 DEATH RACE sequels), but life's too short.
