Netflix And Chill: The Machine (2023)

A star vehicle for Bert "The Machine" Kreischer, this comedy may be appreciated more by people who were aware of Kreischer's existence before watching it. I am not one of those people. To be fair, an opening sequence sets up both the character and the details that will set the main events in motion, but your reaction to it will still mainly depend on your reaction to Kreischer, who plays a fictional version of himself onscreen.

Having some problems with his family, largely stemming from a night when he got his daughter into some big trouble and live-streamed the whole thing, Bert is at a point when he knows that he needs to calm things down a bit. He needs to leave his past fully behind him, which makes the timing all the worse when his past, in the shape of a dangerous Russian named Irina (Iva Babic), comes to bite him on the ass. Whisked away, with his ever-critical father (Albert, played by Mark Hamill) also caught up in the mess, Bert has to delve into some hazy memories to find a way to make things up to some people he wronged twenty years ago. Are they right to feel wronged though, or has Bert just been exaggerating and lying about some of his drunken exploits for the sake of entertaining the crowds who enjoy his comedy?

I'm not sure how much faint praise I can keep laying on this before it collapses under the weight of it all, but The Machine was perfectly fine. It was better than I expected it to be, but I also know that I'll have forgotten all about it by the time the year ends. It works best when putting Bert and his father in serious trouble (there's a pretty great gag about an accidental gunshot that takes out numerous enemies), but it fails to maintain any consistent momentum, and 112 minutes is far too long for something built on so slight a conceit.

Director Peter Atencio has some great stuff tucked away in his body of work, and he's done action comedy material before with a great bias towards the comedy, but it seems as if everyone here is slightly hampered by having to keep everything on-brand for Kreischer. There's also attempts to have moments that are slightly more serious and heart-felt, which is all well-intentioned stuff, but doesn't work as it unbalances the movie even further away from the lighter tone it should have throughout. Writers Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes pack in a lot of unnecessary extra flashbacks (at least allowing Jimmy Tatro to have fun as a younger incarnation of Bert), but these mis-steps would have been easier to forgive if there had just been more big laughs.

Kreischer is fine in the main role, shoe-horning his persona into something made to accommodate him, and Hamill has a few really good moments, although they are too few and far between, but it's Babic and Robert Maaser, as well as Martyn Ford, who end up being more memorable. They're enjoyably ridiculous villains written in a way that feels amusingly old-fashioned and over the top, as if we're being told this story, yet again, from someone who is keen to exaggerate the details and turn it from something major into something epic. Tatro is someone I like seeing appear in anything (I've been a big fan since his turn in American Vandal) and his inclusion here, despite being part of the extraneous scenes that strip away the ambiguity of just what happened on that big drunken night, is another plus point. Stephanie Kurtzuba does a good eye-roll as the long-suffering partner, LeeAnn, and Jess Gabor follows suit as the older daughter, Sasha, who has had her life negatively impacted by the antics of her father.

Fitfully amusing, helped by the fact that Kreischer is self-aware to know what people like about his persona, and what can be twisted as he moves towards some kind of redemption, The Machine will never be a top viewing choice for anyone, but I am sure there are some fans out there who will enjoy it a hell of a lot more than I did. The rest of us can forget all about it and focus on the many better comedies available to take up 90-120 minutes of our time.

4/10

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Prime Time: You're Cordially Invited (2025)

I'm not a big fan of writer-director Nicholas Stoller, but I always tend to forget this when I prepare to watch another movie from him. I'm not sure that I even noticed his name here while I was being distracted by the fact that it was a comedy pairing up Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon in the lead roles. The fact that the supporting cast included Geraldine Viswanathan, Meredith Hagner, Jimmy Tatro, and Jack McBrayer also seemed to bode well.

It's a simple premise, ripe with comedy potential. Ferrell plays Jim, a doting dad who is hoping to oversee a dream wedding day for his daughter, Jenni (Viswanathan), and her partner, Oliver (Stony Blyden). Witherspoon is a successful TV producer who wants to oversee a dream wedding for her sister, Neve (Hagner), and her partner, Dixon (Tatro). Their worlds collide when the island resort they have hired for the wedding celebrations has accidentally booked them both in for the same weekend . . . when they only have the ability to host one wedding at a time. And so begins a disappointingly unfunny series of spats, with both of our leads trying to shoulder one another out of the way as they make the most of the big wedding weekend.

I don't want to spend too much time going over how much this gets wrong, especially when I am already depressed by the memory of the movie and the memory of how I fooled myself into thinking that it wasn't TOO bad. It's bad, very bad, and it's a waste of the talent of pretty much everyone involved.

Stoller directs as if he's just sleepwalking through the whole thing, but maybe his own script had already knocked him unconscious. The plot beats feel tired and unsurprising, the running gags (including use of a very famous song) don't land well, and there's also an annoying lack of bite. Both of our leads swither between rolling up their sleeves to fight one another and then just using each other as a shoulder to cry on. And as for the very last scenes . . . I won't spoil anything, but I cannot think of a Ferrell comedy that has been so wildly misjudged in trying to make everything and everyone wrapped up in a neat bow.

There were times when I laughed at this, and those laughs were all caused by Ferrell blurting out some inappropriate insults. He's at his funniest in those moments, and you want Ferrell to be funny in a comedy movie that gives him one of the lead roles, but they are very few and far between. Witherspoon does the kind of uptight thing she has been doing for decades, although she is allowed to soften slightly here in a way that allows you to eventually warm to her character a bit more. Viswanathan and Blyde are fun, as are Hagner and Tatro, and there are moments that try to make the most of McBrayer, Leanne Morgan, Rory Scovel, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, and Celia Weston, as well as a few others. Everyone is far too hampered by the weak material though, sadly, and even a potential set-piece involving our leads in the same room as an alligator fails to prompt even a mild chuckle.

It's really hard to argue against people who see streaming movies as inferior alternatives to cinema releases when Amazon put their money into something like this. This has the stars, it has familiar songs on the soundtrack, and it at least has a runtime of under two hours (clocking in at about 109 minutes). It doesn't have any soul or artistry to it though. More importantly, it doesn't have many laughs.

3/10

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The Wolf Of Snow Hollow (2020)

Remember the excellent Thunder Road, the film from Jim Cummings that gained him a lot of love, and fans, just a couple of years ago. It was all about a cop trying to keep his head, and his job, while grieving and going through some turbulence in his personal life. Cummings was excellent as the director, writer, and star. And he's equally good here, in a film that walks a surprisingly similar path, while adding an element of potential lyncathropy.

Cummings is John Marshall, a police officer who is working under the extra strain of trying to ensure his father, the Sheriff (Robert Forster), gives himself time to get the right medical treatment that he needs. Marshall is also about to take custody of his teenage daughter (Jenna, played by Chloe East), attends meetings for issues with alcohol, and things go from bad to worse when horribly mauled dead bodies start turning up in his small town. People start to speculate that it could be a werewolf, considering the damage and the fact that there was a full moon, but Marshall thinks that idea is ridiculous.

Once again deftly mixing comedy and drama, but with an added dash of horror this time, Cummings effectively uses The Wolf Of Snow Hollow to slightly push out the boundary line of his comfort zone. So much of this is familiar to those who enjoyed his previous feature, yet the one brand new additional ingredient allows it to feel a step or two removed from just being a retread.

Having said that, the horror of the premise is often left to just provide an undercurrent to the standard tensions and headaches for the small-town police force. I wouldn't want to whole-heartedly recommend this to someone wanting scares or a full-blooded werewolf movie, but I would definitely encourage anyone and everyone to at least give it a go. It's a wonderfully quirky and entertaining blend of Silver Bullet, Thunder Road, and Fargo, so you should know already if there's enough here to keep you amused.

Cummings is once again a perfect fit for his lead role, and manages to keep viewers onside with a character who is essentially quite inept and obstinate at times. Riki Lindhome is just as good in the main supporting role, Officer Julia Robson, and Forster is given a number of little moments that feel sadly fitting for one of his final roles. East is very good as the teen daughter dealing with a difficult relationship with her father, and both Jimmy Tatro and Daniel Fenton Anderson are highlights, the former a partner of the first victim and the latter a grumpy coroner.

I had already seen a decent amount of love for this before getting to it myself, which was a good sign, but it's hard to think of who will enjoy it the most. I think you just have to go into it as a film fan, first and foremost, and forget all about any genre labels. Which I know is the best way to go into any film, but we all know that rarely happens.

8/10

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22 Jump Street (2014)

21 Jump Street was one of the best comedies of the last few years so I was very happy when I heard that all of the main players were returning for a sequel, imaginatively titled 22 Jump Street. Once the trailer landed I was even happier. It looked like it was going to be a lot of fun. Well, having just seen the movie, I can assure fans of the first film that they will have almost as much fun with this brilliant follow-up.

Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum return to play Schmidt and Jenko, two undercover cops who have managed to get some good results, despite moments of staggering ineptitude. After going undercover at a high school for their first big job they end up now going to college. As Deputy Chief Hardy (Nick Offerman) goes to great lengths to point out that everyone wants them to do exactly what they did the first time around. More money has been ploughed into the project, the setting is slightly different, but the journey taken by our two leads should be a very familiar one. Nobody wants it to be different. Schmidt and Jenko may beg to differ, but they soon end up reprising a number of familiar comedy beats.

The plot isn't all that important to 22 Jump Street. What matters here is the meta brilliance of it all and the sheer exuberance in almost every scene. Sure, there may be some people who dislike seeing scenes that feel like pop video moments interrupting a standard narrative, but it's hard not to be swayed by the fun that Tatum and Hill are obviously having. The other main cast members - Ice Cube, Wyatt Russell, Amber Stevens, Peter Stormare, Jillian Bell, Jimmy Tatro - also get to have a good time, with almost everyone onscreen getting involved with at least one big laugh. Ice Cube and Offerman both steal a few scenes, and there are a good number of laughs packed into the one sequence that allows Rob Riggle and Dave Franco to show up again.

The script, written by Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman, isn't exactly a gold-plated classic, with a lot of the dialogue sounding completely unfunny out of context, but the execution of the material by directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (who are now 4 for 4), and the chemistry between the two leads, more than makes up for the shortcomings. There's also that meta coating that gives a lot of the lines more than one meaning, often quite audaciously.

As a comedy, it works. As a comedy sequel, it works. As an action comedy, it . . . . . . just manages to get by, but only thanks to one or two set-pieces at the start and end of the film. As a brilliantly sly sequel that gleefully plays with expectations and spends plenty of time ridiculing itself, however, I put it on a par with Gremlins 2: The New Batch. It's a cheeky way to recycle elements from the first movie, but it works.

I don't think you'll find a better film this year that includes such a strong bromance, a pair of twins uncannily in sync with one another (played by The Lucas Brothers), Patton Oswalt, Ice Cube in an office that LOOKS like an ice cube, a nod to Benny Hill, and some slam poetry that may feel very familiar to fans of So I Married An Axe Murderer. But let me know if you do.

8/10

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