No movie that features someone yelling "That's not Dad's tongue, Caleb!" should be as dull as CRYPTO, a Bitcoinsploitation financial thriller that's destined to be the ROLLOVER of the cryptocurrency era. Martin Duran (Beau Knapp) is a savant-like fraud investigator with the ominously-named Manhattan financial behemoth OmniBank. Despite the support of his immediate supervisor (Jill Hennessy), he pisses off the company's CEO, who busts him down to a local branch in his podunk western New York hometown of Elba, and if you think there's a clever "Napoleon's exile" metaphor there that a smarter film would leave unspoken, don't worry, because the filmmakers actually have Martin say "Exiled to Elba...this is just like Napoleon." He hasn't been back to Elba since his mother's death a decade earlier, and he's completely estranged from the rest of his family--rage-case older brother Caleb (Luke Hemsworth, Chris and Liam's elder sibling), who hasn't been the same since Afghanistan, and their stoical potato farmer father Martin Sr. (a slumming Kurt Russell), who's facing bankruptcy and foreclosure. But something else is going on in Elba, and the more Martin digs into OmniCorp's files, the more evidence he finds that the Russian mob has taken over the town and is using the bank to launder money involving smuggled paintings at a swanky new art gallery, along with a Bitcoin scam run out of a local bait shop, and a human trafficking ring operating along the Niagara River at the US/Canada border.
Martin figures all of this out with the help of his high school buddy Earl (Jeremie Harris), who owns the local convenience store and conveniently moonlights as a hacker with a high-tech command center in his stockroom. About as enthralling as listening to a hipster talk about Bitcoin, CRYPTO is competently directed by John Stalberg, Jr. (his first film since 2010's little-seen Adrien Brody stoner comedy HIGH SCHOOL), but it's so draggy and listless that it never engages until it's too late, and it doesn't take advantage of the potentially politically-charged notion of the blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth Elba townies completely oblivious to all the Russian crime going on right in front of them. Knapp tries to create something with a character who's likely on the spectrum, but the film pretty much drops that aspect after demonstrating some examples of Martin's tendency toward faux pas and misreading signals ("I'll get out of your hair now," he says after questioning his predecessor in his job, a cancer patient undergoing chemo). Hemsworth again demonstrates why he's the perennial third-string Hemsworth, Alexis Bledel has little to do as an art gallery employee and potential love interest for Martin, and Vincent Kartheiser resembles a young Russell Crowe as a Russian mobster incognito as a skeezy Elba accountant. In a role that will never be lumped in with the Snake Plisskens and Jack Burtons of his legendary career, Russell is uncharacteristically bad here, using a weird sort-of Noo Yawk accent that he simply forgets about midway through. At this point, the beloved icon really should have better things to do than schlep his way through one of these kinds of Redbox-ready, Lionsgate/Grindstone VOD clunkers with 38 credited producers. (R, 106 mins) SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ (UK - 2018; US release 2019)
Don't go into the abysmal SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ expecting another fun Simon Pegg/Nick Frost teaming. The SHAUN OF THE DEAD fan favorites have supporting roles and share only one scene together in this tedious and painfully unfunny mash-up of '80s REVENGE OF THE NERDS-style slob comedy and slimy, TREMORS-esque creature feature. Slacker ne'er-do-well Don (Finn Cole of PEAKY BLINDERS and ANIMAL KINGDOM) is read the riot act by his widowed mom (Jo Hartley), who enrolls him in the posh Slaughterhouse boarding school, a beacon of class and upstanding citizenry since 1770. He becomes fast friends with sardonic misfit Willoughby (Asa Butterfield of HUGO), whose previous roommate committed suicide. There's a vicious social hierarchy at Slaughterhouse, and at the top is the cruel Clegg (Tom Rhys Harries), a William Zabka-like asshole who lords over Slaughterhouse with the wink-and-a-nod approval of sneering headmaster "The Bat" (Michael Sheen) and spineless administrator Meredith (Pegg). Don ends up part of Sparta House, the de facto Lambda Lambda Lambda for the Slaughterhouse dorks and dweebs, but their top concern is a fracking tower installed at the edge of the Slaughterhouse property by powerful conglomerate Terrafrack. The Bat is in favor of partnering with Terrafrack, but Sparta House, inspired by a group of shroom-enthusiast environmental activists led by Woody (Frost), take a stand against it, which seems to be the appropriate idea once Terrafrack opens a massive sinkhole that exposes a series of subterranean tunnels and caves that have been home to large, lizard-like creatures that come crawling to the surface and attacking the school.
Directed and co-written by Pegg buddy and Kula Shaker frontman Crispian Mills (son of Hayley Mills, and also the director of Pegg's career-worst A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING), SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ takes over an hour for the creatures to figure in, and when they do, the horror action is so dark that it's nearly impossible to see what's going on amidst the severed limbs and splattery goo. Until then, it's a glacially-paced YA bore that quickly collapses after some occasionally amusing bits in the early going. The film seems significantly longer than 104 minutes, and Mills is far too indulgent to Pegg, who gets entirely too much screen time begging and pleading to get back together with his ex (a Skyped-in cameo by Margot Robbie) in scenes that have nothing to do with the story and everything to do with Pegg mugging shamelessly (eliminating just these pointless Pegg/Robbie scenes could've cut this down to a still-awful but more reasonable 90 minutes). There's little wonder why Sony buried this on VOD with no publicity, but after this and the unwatchable A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING, the real question is how many more times Pegg will keep stepping up to get the green light for his buddy's terrible movies. (R, 104 mins)
A change of pace for B action stars Scott Adkins and Dolph Lundgren, LEGENDARY is an adventure/monster movie of the JURASSIC PARK sort that has loftier ambitions than its visual effects team can match. Adkins is Travis Preston, a renowned cryptozoologist drawn into the search for a giant lizard on an uncharted island off the coast of China. Bringing along his research team, he's met by big-game hunter and arch-nemesis Harker (Lundgren), who doesn't share Preston's scientific curiosity and only wants to bag the creature as a trophy. The two clashed once before when Preston hired Harker as security on a search for a prehistoric bear that resulted in the tragic death of one member of their party when the arrogant Harker's itchy trigger finger sent the bear on a ferocious rampage, for which Preston shouldered the blame and saw it derail his career. Naturally, Preston and Harker butt heads once more as they close in on the fabled creature, who is expectedly unhappy about having its home invaded by uninvited guests. Cue the ALIENS-inspired scenes of characters watching and listening to radar and sonar equipment as one nervous guy yells "300 yards...200...it's coming right for us!" and finally...wait for it..."it's right underneath us!"
Released in 3-D overseas last year, the $12 million LEGENDARY goes straight-to-DVD in the US and suffers from some really wonky-looking creature effects, both in the prologue with the rampaging bear and later with the giant lizard. It's not quite on the level of SyFy or The Asylum, but it's still not ready for prime time as far as a nationwide theatrical release is concerned. Fans of Adkins and Lundgren looking for some NINJA or UNIVERSAL SOLDIER-style action will be disappointed: Adkins was recovering from a knee injury sustained on a previous project and chose LEGENDARY largely because it was light on demanding stunt work and fight scenes as he and Lundgren only have one very brief throwdown. LEGENDARY isn't all that different from a bottom-half-of-a-double-bill B programmer you might've seen in the 1950s, but its draggy pace doesn't do it many favors. Adkins is OK, but doesn't seem at home in these surroundings, while Lundgren, who pops in and out of the movie in a way that suggests the filmmakers probably only had him for a very limited amount of time, seems to relish playing the bad guy by turning in a performance that's somewhat Jack Palance-esque at times. LEGENDARY was directed by the unlikely Eric Styles, who helmed the acclaimed minor 1999 arthouse hit DREAMING OF JOSEPH LEES before completely falling off the radar--his 2000 follow-up RELATIVE VALUES, starring Julie Andrews and Colin Firth, and based on a Noel Coward play, skipped theaters and debuted on Starz, while his 2003 thriller TEMPO (with Melanie Griffith and Rachael Leigh Cook) went straight to DVD. LEGENDARY is Styles' first film since the barely-released 2008 Heather Graham rom-com MISS CONCEPTION, and while it's not terrible, it's pretty slight and forgettable, and really only required viewing for Adkins completists or those with insatiable Lundgren man-crushes. (PG-13, 93 mins) CUBAN FURY (France/UK - 2014)
Despite the success they've achieved together over the years, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost haven't fared as well when they work apart. Pegg has been part of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and STAR TREK franchises, but a rundown of his headlining films reads like a Do Not Buy list handed to employees of a used movies/music joint when the manager decides they've got far too many copies on hand just taking up shelf space: RUN FATBOY RUN, BIG NOTHING, THE GOOD NIGHT, HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE, BURKE AND HARE, and the miserable A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING range from tolerable to godawful, and none of them will ever be mistaken for Pegg's finest hour. Frost had a supporting role in the very entertaining Edgar Wright-produced alien invasion flick ATTACK THE BLOCK, but CUBAN FURY marks his first solo starring vehicle. Sadly, it can be filed on that same list along with all of Pegg's headlining duds, serving as proof that these two are best taken as a package deal (SPACED, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ, PAUL, THE WORLD'S END). Based on an idea by Frost, the makers of CUBAN FURY apparently figured "Nick Frost" and "salsa dancing" would be enough to induce guffawing and the rest would just work itself out. It's a dull, ploddingly-paced and thoroughly formulaic and lazy film that, save for one scene, forgets one ingredient that's key to any comedy: comedy.
25 years ago, Bruce Garrett was a teenage salsa phenom who gave it up after he was beaten up by some hooligans on his way to a championship contest. Cut to the present day, and schlubby Bruce (Frost) is a lathe-designer working for a London engineering company that's just brought in new American manager Julia (Rashida Jones). Bruce and asshole co-worker Drew (Chris O'Dowd) start vying for their impossibly nice boss' affections, and Bruce gets the edge when he finds out she's taking salsa classes. Finally inspired to pick up where he left off 25 years earlier, Bruce summons the eye of the tiger so he can go the distance, fulfill his long-abandoned dreams and win over Julia in the process. CUBAN FURY is a film that appears to be working from a checklist rather than a script, right down to the cock-blocking tactics of the bullying Drew, ludicrous meet-cutes (Bruce and Julia bump into one another in the hallway and get their name placards tangled in their lanyards!), and Bruce seeking the guidance of his grizzled old salsa trainer Ron Parfitt (Ian McShane). There is one funny scene where Bruce and Drew have a dance showdown in a parking garage that gets an easy laugh out of a quick cameo, but other than that, CUBAN FURY is a total snooze, laboriously going through the motions of romantic comedy and spoofy redemption saga. Frost is pretty bland, which is disappointing after his marvelous work against type in last year's THE WORLD'S END, and not even Jones' innately charming screen presence or McShane basically coasting through as a salsa-dancing Al Swearengen are enough to make things interesting. Sure, I guess it's better than SALSA, but CUBAN FURY just never heats up, neither comedically nor in the choreography of its dance sequences. (R, 98 mins)
THE ANGRIEST MAN IN BROOKLYN (US/France - 2014)
Henry Altmann (Robin Williams) is a Brooklyn lawyer with anger management issues. He hates everyone and everything and he isn't in the mood to wait two hours at the doctor's office only to be told that he has a bleeding brain aneurysm. The news comes from Dr. Gill (co-producer Mila Kunis), who's filling in for Henry's regular doctor, and when a belligerent Henry demands to know how much time he has left to live, she impulsively blurts out "90 minutes." Henry then decides to spend the next hour and a half making amends with his family--his wife Bette (Melissa Leo) and his estranged son Tommy (Hamish Linklater), who enraged his dad when he decided to pursue a career in dance instead of joining the family law practice with Henry and his younger brother Aaron (Peter Dinklage). There was a time, shown in some 1989-set flashbacks, when Henry was happy, but that time has long passed. When his other, favored son was killed in a hunting accident two years earlier, Henry imploded and became the raging asshole he is as he faces death. Even on his quest to set things right, he can't resist going off on everyone, with a xenophobic tirade against an Uzbek cabbie, yelling at homeless people, or mocking a stuttering electronics store owner (James Earl Jones). Dr. Gill has her own issues: bad choices in men, burned out with her job, and secretly nursing a prescription pill addiction, she regrets her frazzled "90 minutes" prognosis and embarks on a late-afternoon journey across the borough to find Henry and get him to a hospital, following the trail of pissed-off New Yorkers he leaves in his wake.
Where to begin? Let there be no mystery as to why Lionsgate buried this remake of Assi Dayan's 1997 Israeli film THE 92 MINUTES OF MR. BAUM: it's staggeringly bad. Williams is the kind of actor who turns in his best work when he has a strong director to rein him in, and the usually reliable Phil Alden Robinson (FIELD OF DREAMS, SNEAKERS), helming his first film since 2002's THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, isn't up to the task. ANGRIEST MAN indulges nearly every move from the Williams playbook, but mostly his shamelessly sentimental side from PATCH ADAMS and his motor-mouthed talk-show guest persona with bonus F-bombs. In short, this film permits a completely untethered Williams to run rampant in every possible way and none of them good. Henry Altmann is the kind of character that you could almost see Larry David or maybe even Woody Allen, in one of his mean-streaked DECONSTRUCTING HARRY moods, playing with successful results. Either of them would be capable of writing a better script than the one penned by Daniel Taplitz. Not only are the character arcs predictable, but the dialogue is so stilted, awkward, and unreal that Henry's rants and bile-soaked screeds never work. Henry's anger sounds so forced and unnecessarily verbose that it never once feels natural. When Dr. Gill tries to stop him from jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, Henry yells "What are you? I ask you, what are you? Are you my thorn? My nemesis? Have you no humanity?" Who talks like that? Even 1970s Charlton Heston would've dismissed that speech as pompously melodramatic bullshit. Williams is forced to stumble over dialogue like that throughout. There's also trite and endless third-person narration by Williams and Kunis that accomplishes nothing, and even appearances by the likes of Louis C.K., Richard Kind, Isiah "Sheeeeeeeeeiiiit!" Whitlock, Jr., Jerry Adler, and the great Bob Dishy manage to yield zero laughs. There isn't a single honest moment--either comedic or dramatic--in THE ANGRIEST MAN IN BROOKLYN, and I challenge you to find a worse final scene in a 2014 release than the one presented in this film. Shrill, screechy, shrieking, bombastic, maudlin, contrived, and most damning of all, unfunny, it's a complete misfire from start to finish, easily Robinson's worst film, and probably Williams' as well, though in all fairness, I haven't seen LICENSE TO WED. (R, 84 mins)
Directed by Edgar Wright. Written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike, Pierce Brosnan, David Bradley, Rafe Spall, Michael Sarne, voice of Bill Nighy. (R, 113 mins)
It's been nine years since Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg gave us the sleeper hit zombie homage SHAUN OF THE DEAD, followed in 2007 by the cop/buddy movie tribute HOT FUZZ. For the final part of their so-called "Cornetto Trilogy" (named after the ice cream bar that appears in all three films), we find a more thoughtful and mature team of filmmakers. They were always gifted with a knack for strong characterization that really made the films connect with fans, but THE WORLD'S END is something they couldn't have made a decade ago. It's a film about entering middle age, a time when maybe your best years are behind you and you find your dreams didn't come true. It's about letting go of youth or stubbornly refusing to grow up. It's surprisingly heartfelt and often devastatingly poignant, all wrapped in a hilarious story that involves a sort-of alien invasion and gives Wright and Pegg the chance to once again pay tribute to a beloved genre that had a major impact on them.
In 1990, on the night of the last day of school, five friends attempted a pub crawl of the twelve watering holes in their hometown of Newton Haven. They never finished it, and while they made attempts to keep in touch and remained friends in pairs for a few years, they largely went their separate ways as a quintet and on to their adult lives. Everyone that is, except ringleader Gary King (Pegg), a legendary hellraiser in his youth who now, at 40, continues to behave like it's 1990 and he's 18 years old. He's been in and out of rehab for alcohol and drug abuse, still wears the same Sisters of Mercy tee, drives the same car, listens to the same mix tapes, and hangs out at the same pubs in Newton Haven. Gary wants to, as he states it, "put the band back together," and reunite the old gang and complete the pub crawl. Three of the other four--divorced building contractor Steven (Paddy Considine), high-strung real estate agent Oliver (Martin Freeman), and car salesman Pete (Eddie Marsan)--reluctantly agree to return to their hometown, primarily out of morbid curiosity. The other is Andy (Nick Frost), a corporate attorney who had a huge falling out with Gary in the mid '90s and hasn't spoken to any of the others since. There's vague mentions of an "accident" that was the last straw for Andy, who hasn't had a drink since. Andy wants nothing to do with Gary, but is compelled to go along when Gary repays him £600 he borrowed years earlier and mentions that he just lost his mother to cancer. Feeling sorry for Gary and giving him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he's grown up, Andy surprises the others by showing up for the big night out, set to finish up at the 12th pub, The World's End.
It quickly dawns on the others that Gary hasn't changed a bit, especially when Andy finds out that Gary hit the others up for £200 each before visiting him (his mother isn't dead, either). The pubs all look generically alike ("Starbucking," Steven calls it) and the four career guys are content catching up with one another but Gary's obsession with getting shitfaced--and mocking Andy for drinking water--soon causes tempers to flare. It's around this time that Gary gets in a fight with a teenager in the men's room only to find that the kid is a robot-like creature filled with blue blood. The guys finally notice how strangely the townspeople are behaving, almost as if there's been some otherworldly takeover of all of Newton Haven. Agreeing that something's wrong and not wanting to draw attention to themselves, the guys decide to carry on with the crawl even as the situation worsens and they're pursued from pub to pub by an increasing horde of Newton Havenites seemingly possessed by an alien intelligence.
Wright and Pegg do a wonderful job establishing these characters and slyly use such things as "Starbucking" as a way of foreshadowing events to come (even the names of the pubs are used as indicators of plot developments that take place at each one). SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ were both intelligently-constructed, character-driven stories cleverly disguised as genre spoofs, and to that degree, THE WORLD'S END, with its riffing on INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, and John Carpenter movies, sticks to their formula. But there's a dark melancholy streak to THE WORLD'S END, the kind of which comes with maturity and middle age. We all know characters like the five here--some of us maybe are these characters. Every group has the one guy--in this case, Oliver--whose sister (Rosamund Pike as Sam) fooled around with at least one of his buddies. Every group has the guy who got his balls busted a little more than others (Pete). Go to your hometown and there's probably a guy like Gary hanging out at one of the local bars. He may not be a goth guy or a headbanger--maybe he's a once-legendary jock still telling stories about the big game 25 years earlier and still wearing his varsity jacket if it fits. Throughout the course of the Cornetto Trilogy, Wright and Pegg have approached genre spoofing as intelligently and as thoughtfully any filmmakers ever have, using them to create surprisingly real characters with thematic relevance to the genre being parodied. Making an alien invasion spoof is easy. Populating it with strong, believable characters who reinforce the genre staples while allowing the film to tell its own story takes a little more effort.
While THE WORLD'S END has a terrific ensemble (Pierce Brosnan also turns up as their old headmaster), it is, perhaps more than SHAUN and HOT FUZZ, very much Simon Pegg's film. Largely considered simply a "comic actor" and onboard to add levity to the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and STAR TREK films, Pegg uses THE WORLD'S END to establish himself as a legitimate actor. As Gary, he brilliantly and sometimes painfully conveys the desperation lurking just under the cocky bravado. When his big night starts falling apart and he's pressed about why he's so obsessed with the pub crawl, his outburst of "It's all I have!" is just heartbreaking. Pegg has turned in one of the great movie performances of this year, and it'll never happen, but it's one that deserves to be remembered come awards season (it's also interesting against-type casting to have Pegg, and not Frost, playing the perpetually juvenile fuck-up). THE WORLD'S END might not be quite as rapid-fire hilarious as SHAUN OF THE DEAD, and while that film and HOT FUZZ are still as enjoyable as they were when they were brand new, THE WORLD'S END is the most surprisingly substantive of the trilogy, offering a bit more to chew on that you'd expect from a movie getting dumped at the end of the summer.
