Netflix And Chill: Reptile (2023)

Not only is Reptile co-written by director Grant Singer, but star Benicio Del Toro apparently had a helping hand in the screenplay, alongside Benjamin Brewer. That makes it even more curious, considering how Del Toro is the best thing in it DESPITE the weak screenplay. A messy mix of neo-noir tropes and moments that seem to be struggling to give the movie more substance, Reptile is enormously unsatisfying. And it's made all the worse by how badly it wastes a great cast.

Del Toro plays a cop named Tom Nichols. He's been entangled in some bad stuff in the past, but he seems to be trying his best to be good at his job. That is essential when he is called to the scene of Summer Elswick's murder. Summer's body was discovered by Will Grady (Justin Timberlake), making him a prime suspect, but others soon start to arouse suspicion. It doesn't help that Grady and his mother (Frances Fisher) have upset people with their business practices. One of those upset people is a young man named Eli (Michael Pitt), who blames the Gradys for the suicide of his father. Maybe there's more to the case than what seems obvious though. Maybe Tom needs to start looking at everyone around him with equal suspicion.

Although he has a wealth of experience helming music videos, this appears to be the feature debut from Singer. That makes complete sense when you consider how much (misplaced) faith he has in the strength of such clumsy and half-baked material. There are some good moments here, some strong individual images, but there are just as many moments that don't work, whether it's the plotting of the central mystery that doesn't feel worth really caring about or the moments that have a discordant piece of music increasing in volume in a way that's supposed to unnerve viewers and lead to some nerve-tingling climax, but then fails to present anything to justify that audio choice. With both Brewer and Del Toro similarly inexperienced in the role of feature writer, Reptile is left as a collection of decent images that can barely cling on to the decomposing skeleton of the script that should have given it a strong centre.

Del Toro is much better in front of the camera though, and he's the best thing about this. His performance is easily on a par with some of his best work, and equally thoughtful and morally discombobulated, at times. Alicia Silverstone is excellent in the role of his wife, although she also suffers from one or two moments that seem to just peter out just as they could get more interesting. Timberlake is fine, working comfortably with a persona that he tends to portray well in movies, Fisher is riveting, despite having disappointingly little screentime, and Pitt adds another quirky turn to his repertoire. The fact that the film also has room for great work from Eric Bogosian, Domenick Lombardozzi, and Ato Essandoh (playing the partner to Del Toro's character) is both a plus and a minus, because everyone here deserves to be delivering that great work in a stronger film.

I'm guessing that this is a story that Del Toro was passionate about, considering he also attached himself as an executive producer, and I can see how the whole thing could have been handled much better, but the end result feels like a wasted opportunity. The cast cannot be faulted though, nor can the cinematography from Mike Gioulakis (with shot choices and framing complemented by some fine editing from Kevin Hickman). Technically, all is well. It's just the writing and direction that work against it, but those are the two areas that need to be locked down for this kind of material.

4/10

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Trolls World Tour (2020)

Honestly, there are times when I just don't want to write a review of something I have watched. But I made my viewing choice, I wanted it to go on my blog, and now I am up at 0530 in the morning to write about Trolls World Tour because there are only 24 hours in a day and I was too tired last night to get this done ahead of time.

Following on from the horribly average, but I guess successful enough, Trolls, this sequel comes along to make you look back on that averageness with fondness, and yearn for those good old times when the worst thing a Troll movie did was rework some classic singalong tunes alongside some kid-friendly visuals.

This is horrible. Really horrible. If it wasn't for the charm of San Rockwell (yes, even in animated form, his charm blasts out of the screen and helps things along), I am not sure I would have given it such a relatively high rating.

The slight plot concerns the fact that our two main trolls, Poppy and Branch, find out they are one of a number of troll tribes. Each tribe is aligned with a certain type of music. You have the ones we already know from the first movie, pop trolls, and you also have ones that enjoy techno, classical, country, funk, and rock music. Queen Barb heads up the rock music trolls, and she wants to collect the one guitar string from each troll territory before bringing everyone together into one big world of rock.

Yeah. Although the main message here is about valuing individualism over conformity, it's hard to see beyond the fact that a) trolls are only individual when compared to other tribes, so that's a stumbling block for the main message, and b) rock is pretty much shown as an evil kind of music over all the others.

Everyone returns to the main voice roles they had in the first movie, and Kendrick and Timberlake are still just fine in the leads, although James Corden still gets a few lines to give him the potential to spoil things by being James Corden. Rachel Bloom is suitably loud and impetuous as Queen Barb, and there are cameo roles for Ozzy Osbourne, Kelly Clarkson, George Clinton, and Mary J. Blige (to show that the makers of the movie DO know some people who sing songs that aren't just upbeat pop tunes). I already mentioned Rockwell, but he's definitely worth mentioning again.

Walt Dohrn returns to co-direct, this time with David P. Smith alongside him (his first feature). Everything is as you'd expect from a sequel to Trolls, although maybe slightly worse in the obviousness of the various design choices and attempts to build different worlds.

Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger are back to write the screenplay, helped along by Maya Forbes, Wallace Wolodarsky, and Elizabeth Tippet. Five people. It took five people to write this piece of crap, and yet there still isn't enough here to make it worth your time. No great character moments, no funny lines of dialogue to single out, no redeeming value in the muddled message at the heart of it all. Even the soundtrack is just a big mess.

One to avoid, although I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who felt differently about this. It's one of those films that you find hard to consider anyone being a fan of.

3/10

You can buy this shiny set here.
Americans may want to go for this.

Trolls (2016)

I think it's always important when discussing a movie aimed at children to remind people of how immature and childish I can be. When people tell you to try remembering how it felt like to be a wide-eyed child . . . I'm already there. I'm not going to compare a children's movie to, say, Casablanca (although some are gold-plated classics in a different way from that Bogart vehicle), but I am still going to expect it to do a certain job.

Trolls is an odd film in almost every sense. First of all, it's based on those little troll dolls that I thought had faded out of our shared consciousness back in the 1990s (the last thing I remember about them was a console game on the Sega Mega-CD, I want to say). Second, it's a film that patches together a number of horrible cover versions of songs, almost as if every main scene was initially planned to be the standard finale/credit sequence we've seen in dozens of other big animated releases. Third, the story is a bit wild, being all about a race of creatures that believe eating the trolls is the secret to happiness.

You find that out at the very start of the movie. The Bergens are about to have their annual feast of trolls, served up by the Chef (Christine Baranski), but they find that the trolls have escaped. Some years pass by, trolls live in a new area, they sing and dance (which is what they do), and have hug time every half an hour. Poppy (Anna Kendrick) is a most vocal fan of all of this stuff. Branch (Justin Timberlake) is not. He's too busy worrying about when the Bergen will find them and whisk them all away to be eaten. And so, when a load of the trolls are found by the Bergen and whisked away to be eaten, Poppy and Branch head off to rescue their troll buddies.

It's bright, it's full of excerpts from popular songs (with the main theme being that they're all upbeat singalong favourites, from what I can recall), and it has enough to keep younger viewers entertained. But that doesn't make it actually any good. It makes it passable, average, it's the bare minimum to be expected from a mainstream animated release from a major studio. Director Mike Mitchell has films on his CV that prove he can do much better than this. Co-director Walt Dohrn, on the other hand, will have to work harder on future projects to make me forget his name is attached to this.

Writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger have been involved with some treats (the Kung Fu Panda movies stand out from their filmography). This seems like a thankless task for them. The characters aren't too bad, although often defined by one main trait, but the script is simply required to hop from one peppy song moment to the next.

The voice cast almost make up for the rest of the negatives. Kendrick is always someone I enjoy onscreen, and her personality is perfectly suited to her character here. Timberlake is very good, and Baranski is superb as the mean Chef. Chriostopher Mintz-Plasse is a grumpy young King, Zooey Deschanel is a staff member who is smitten with the King, Russell Brand is a guru type of troll, Kunal Nayyar voices someone very glittery, and there's a turn from James Corden that is small enough to have him be almost tolerable.

Trolls is average, at best. It's easy to see why kids will enjoy it. The tunes, the bright colours, the cute characters. It's also easy to see that it was put together without any of the care or detail that goes into so many other movies looking to capture the attention of the same demographic.

5/10

Here's a shiny set available.
Americans can buy this disc.

Mubi Monday: Southland Tales (2006)

The second full feature from writer-director Richard Kelly (a talent who illustrates someone flying high and then crashing and burning hard more than any other 21st-century success I can think of), Southland Tales is a sprawling mess of a film, once again mixing some heady ideas and timey wimey trickery with some individual moments of greatness. A couple of scenes still stand out as favourites of mine, but they're often overlooked by film fans because of being contained within such an uneven feature.

I don't even know where to begin when it comes to describing the plot. It's set in America, but an America that has endured two nuclear attacks. There's a war on, both abroad and at home, a war against terror. A company named US-IDent tries to keep all citizens under surveillance, and various people want to strike against them. The main characters we end up keeping track of are an action film start with a case of amnesia (Boxer Santaros, played by Dwayne Johnson), an ex-porn star who believes that she can predict future events (Krysta Now, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar), a scarred Iraq War veteran (Abilene, played by Justin Timberlake), and two identical characters named Roland and Ronald Taverner (played by Seann William Scott).

If you want something that seems to make complete sense, maintains a consistent tone throughout, and doesn't cast people in roles that are completely atypical for them then look elsewhere. Southland Tales is the film you stick on when you want something hugely, almost ridiculously, ambitious and self-indulgent. When you want to see Jon Lovitz as a blonde cop all too quick to reach for his gun and shoot people trying to protest against the current system, or see Kevin Smith give his best performance in a small, heavily made up, role, Southland Tales will scratch that itch.

As well as those already mentioned, who are all doing some of their best work (another reason to give this film a watch if you have yet to do so), the strong supporting cast includes wonderful performances from Nora Dunn, Wallace Shawn, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Mandy Moore, Zelda Rubinstein, and Miranda Richardson. AND you get to see Eli Roth in a satisfying, and very brief, cameo for those who both like and dislike him.

There's also a superb soundtrack (with The Killers being the best choice for one particular sequence), a fine line in sly humour running through everything, and the general feeling that Kelly had been handed resources he never thought would be at his disposal, and decided to use everything offered to him. The third act may be even messier than everything that precedes it, as hard as that is to believe while you are watching the rest play out, but it's also hugely satisfying. Kelly probably remains very disappointed by the lukewarm, at best, reaction to this. Some will view it as a bad film. I view it as a noble, flawed, attempt to deliver an impressive piece of cinema.

8/10

I think there's a better release coming, but here's a DVD just now.
Americans can get a little bargain here. Or the blu.

Prime Time: Bad Teacher (2011)

Bad Teacher doesn't entirely work, mainly because it doesn't really spend enough time wallowing in the right kind of bad teacher behaviour, but I am surprised that it received the generally negative reaction that it did when first released. While not great, it IS good, and it IS funny.

Cameron Diaz stars as Elizabeth, a lazy teacher who is looking forward to marrying her rich fiancé and leaving working life behind her. Except that doesn't happen. So she's back at school for the next year, looking for ways to earn enough to pay for the boob job that she hopes will help her land another rich guy and allow her to live the comfortable, kept lifestyle that she years for. Her lessons consist of showing pupils films (Stand And Deliver, Lean On Me, Dangerous Minds) and she is happy to do even less than the bare minimum, until she hears about a cash prize for the teacher of the class with the best test results.

Written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (who previously worked together on Year One and the American version of The Office), this is most enjoyable when it is showing a character pushing things much further than any adult in a position of authority should. It's just a shame that they don't ever really risk pushing things towards darker, and potentially funnier, territory. This is a film that tries to be fun and edgy without ever being really becoming transgressive, which is understandable from a sales point of view but disappointing nonetheless.

Director Jake Kasdan does solid work, moving between a few of the bigger set-pieces (a car wash moment, a scheme to steal a test paper, the grand finale) briskly enough to ensure that the film doesn't overstay its welcome. It's a simple 90 minutes (give or take) of bawdy humour that does enough by the third act to have you rooting for the main character, despite her selfish and manipulative ways.

Diaz is a lot of fun in the lead role, whether she's trying to look wide-eyed and innocent or showing her true colours in amusing exchanges that leave others shocked. Lucy Punch is the other teacher who suspects that things are going very wrong in the classroom across the hall from her, John Michael Higgins is the Principal, and Phyllis Smith is a rather timid teacher who is also a friend, and unable to see the real badness of Diaz. All of them are great fun, as are Jason Segel and Justin Timberlake, two very different men who work at the school. The former is interested in Diaz while she, in turn, is looking to bag the latter (because his family has money). Thomas Lennon is as hilarious, as he so often is, in a small role, and all of the main child actors do well.

There are a number of mainstream comedies from the past few years that you could pick if you want more laughs, I can't deny that, but Bad Teacher is still good enough to pass some time and keep you amused. It's not ace . . . but it still makes the grade.

6/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.