Mr. Popper's Penguins

Ace Ventura: Happy Feet

Grade: C –

Director: Mark Waters

Starring: Jim Carrey, Carla Gugino, Angela Lansbury, Ophelia Lovibond, and Clark Gregg

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 35 min.

Like Eddie Murphy, Fred MacMurray and Glenn Close before him, it’s a shame to see Jim Carrey reach the “animal co-star” portion of his film career. But that is just what happens in Mr. Popper’s Penguins, very loosely based on Richard and Florence Atwater’s 1938 children’s book.

Carrey plays a career-driven executive who neglects his home life, particularly his relationship with his former spouse and child. It’s essentially the same role Carrey had in Liar Liar, except instead of the curative properties of unadulterated truth, Mr. Popper discovers the healing power of a waddle of penguins.

As a NYC real estate shark, Popper’s last rung up the corporate ladder involves the task of procuring the purchase of Tavern on the Green from its geriatric owner (Angela Lansbury). His only apparent pal is his loquacious assistant Pippi (Ophelia Lovibond) parades a persistent parlance that prescribes pronouncing the letter P as often as possible during her prosaic prattle.

Popper’s efforts are sidetracked, however, when he suddenly receives six penguins bequeathed by his equally absentee, recently deceased father. He tries mightily to farm out the birds until, well, he actually finds a zookeeper (Clark Gregg) willing to take them off his hands. For some reason, Popper acquiesces to the whims of his suddenly interested children, who force daddy to choose between keeping the avian sextet just so they can occasionally play with them, or having his kids hate him for getting rid of them.

So, Popper transforms his condo into an igloo and nearly loses his job. Typical silliness ensues, as the foul fowl – portrayed by actual, yet freely anthropomorphized penguins – somehow teach Popper life lessons and (shocker!) heal his strained relationship with his kids and ex-wife (Carla Cugino).

He also gives the penguins characteristic nicknames like Bitey and Loudy, with not much imagination needed to know how each tuxedoed creature gets its moniker. This is particularly true of Stinky, as director Mark Waters – the relatively surehanded director of Freaky Friday, Mean Girls, and The Spiderwick Chronicles – wallows in animal reaction shots and the grating poop/flatulence/crotch gags that have infested what passes for contemporary children’s cinema.

The birds do display an affinity for watching the kindred waddling in Charlie Chaplain movies, so at least there are glimpses of quality cinema sprinkled about. Otherwise, as with Murphy in his lesser efforts, only Carrey’s quick-witted ad libbing keeps this kiddie comedy semi-watchable. Otherwise, Mr. Popper’s Penguins will leave you cold, and probably a bit spheniscidaeaphobic to boot.

Neil Morris

Faster

The Rock says...get out of my blind spot

Grade: B

Director: George Tillman Jr.

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Maggie Grace, and Carla Gugino

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

Tapping the vein of genre standards like High Plains Drifter, Death Wish, and Kill Bill (the latter being borrowed from quite freely), the otherwise blandly titled revenge flick Faster is lean and mean in its focus.

An archetypal man with no name (Dwayne Johnson) leaves prison after a serving a stint for bank robbery, hops into his muscle car, and sets about exacting retribution against those responsible for shooting him in the head and slitting his brother’s throat ten years ago. Armed with a revolver, a metal plate in this head, and a dispassionate glower, this angel of death power walks with impunity into an office building, hospital, and even a tent revival seeking his violent vengeance.

Hot on his trail is a weather-beaten, drug-addicted cop (Billy Bob Thornton), along with a dotcom millionaire-turned-hitman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) whose presence and relationship with his newlywed wife (Maggie Grace) ends up superfluous to the storyline.

No matter: with gunfights and car chases galore – and enough character back-stories to flesh them out beyond cardboard cutouts – Faster is gritty, minimalist stuff, highlighted by the best role and performance in Johnson’s still-nascent film career.

Neil Morris

Race to Witch Mountain

Star Drek

Grade: C

Director: Andy Fickman

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, Alexander Ludwig, Carla Gugino, Ciarán Hinds, and Tom Everett Scott

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 39 minutes

Can you smell what The Rock is cooking? Take a whiff of Dwayne Johnson’s recent career arc, and you’ll detect a heaping helping of Disneyfied family-fare mixed with a dash of muscle-flexing action for flavor. Sadly, his latest concoction, Race to Witch Mountain, is yet another bankable but bland entrée that leaves you hungry for more.

Disney revisits their Witch Mountain franchise in an innocuous diversion that makes for pleasant enough viewing granted you do not bother applying even a modicum of logic. Otherwise, you’ll wonder why two Aryan aliens (a delightful AnnaSophia Robb and dour Alexander Ludwig) who assume human form and exhibit superpowers – one can alter his molecular structure and the other is capable of reading minds, levitating objects, blowing things up, operating a car telepathically, etc. – need the help of a Las Vegas cabbie (Johnson, now officially sans his “Rock” moniker) whose woebegone backstory is belied by the fact that, well, he looks like The Rock.

Aided further by a defrocked astrophysicist (the underutilized Carla Guigno) and a dog (the animal, not this movie, though the term aptly applies to both), the teen E.T.s are on a mission to deliver some gizmo holding the secret to environmental renewal back to their dying native planet. Standing in the way of their wormhole home is an intergalactic assassin patterned after Predator and a cadre of government MIBs led by Ciarán Hinds (wearing a constipated scowl).

Indeed, this derivative film blindly assimilates contemporary alien-movie conventions more than Disney films of yore, despite brief cameos by Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, the former child stars in the 1970s Witch Mountain films. Johnson is affable enough, but it is hard to know whether it is the one-note Disney roles or one-note performances that inhibit his growth as an actor and box office behemoth. This is no exaggeration: Johnson once exhibited more charisma during any five minutes of “WWE Monday Night Raw” than the entirety of his film career thus far. Perhaps it’s high time for The Rock to take a trip down Know Your Role Boulevard.

Neil Morris

Watchmen

Why so delirious?

Grade: B –

Director: Zack Snyder

Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, and Carla Gugino

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 41 minutes

Renowned, mercurial comic book writer Alan Moore once declared that his epic graphic novel series Watchmen was unfilmable. While now a technically inaccurate statement, one gander at the long-awaited cinematic rendering of Moore’s magnum opus provides ample appreciation for the spirit behind his proclamation. Watchmen is as much a Rorschach test as the undulating inkblots that incessantly swirl across the stocking face of the story’s keynote sociopath vigilante. The film is visually arresting and thought-provoking; it is also bloated and unwieldy. Some will regard it as a cinematic work of art; others will see sheer fanboy pornography.

It must be said that the opening two scenes are brillant - and hover like an unmet promise throughout the remainder of the almost interminable 161-minute running time. First is the brutal, lyrical beating death of venerable Watchman Edward Blake, aka The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), set to Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” That is followed by a contextualized opening credits sequence, accompanied by Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which chronicles the Watchmen’s origin as a group of 1940s-era crime-fighters called The Minutemen (cops who decided to mask-up like their quarry) who later become social pariahs outlawed by federal legislation but still clandestinely serving the U.S. government as jackbooted goons-for-hire with a hand in everything from the Vietnam War to the JFK assassination.

In this present-day, hyper-realistic setting, the year is 1985 and Richard Nixon, credited with victory in Southeast Asia, is serving his fifth term as president. However, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. are on the brink of atomic conflagration, a cold to hot war shift largely the consequence of a power imbalance generated by the existence of Dr. Manhattan – formerly gregarious nuclear physicist Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup) – a radiantly blueblooded, Nietzschean nude whose omnipotent powers have gradually forged a detached ambivalence towards mere mortals.

Against this backdrop, Comedian’s death convinces Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), who continues to mete out his skewed measure of justice in spite of federal law, that there is a plot afoot to kill all superheroes. He solicits the help of his former Watchmen mates, including Dr. Manhattan, his sultry yet frustrated girlfriend Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), a retired, burned-out Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), and Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), one of the only Watchmen to publicly reveal his secret identity in order to capitalize on his celebrity and super-intelligence for material gain and the realization of a worldwide utopia.

By portraying its heroes as antiheroes plagued with foibles, neuroses, and god complexes, “Watchmen” is widely viewed as a deconstruction the superhero mythos. Director Zack Snyder (300) pulls no punches for the silver screen, intersplicing his sumptuous palette with buckets of blood, ultra-violence, sex, and frontal nudity. Snyder’s mostly inspired, sometimes heavy-handed soundtrack choices run from KC & The Sunshine Band to Leonard Cohen to Janis Joplin to Mozart. However, the irony is that the story employs and relies upon the very superhero archetypes it attempts to (literally and figuratively) strip bare. Indeed, we may snicker at seeing Dr. Manhattan vaporizing the Vietcong, but the spectacle is no different than when Superman and Captain America fought Adolf Hitler in their comic books during the early 1940s.

Watchmen is a phantasmagorical mind-trip, but not about the psychology of America’s pop-culture as much as psychology of America itself. On one level are the extremes of our ideological spectrum: the weirdly arch-conservative Rorschach patrols New York City’s mean streets like a deranged guardian angel, while Veidt’s abstruse liberalism makes him feel superior to those he would supposedly save. Rorschach believes in killing the guilty to save the innocent; Veidt believes it is acceptable to kill innocents to save others from the guilty.

On another level is an allegory for America’s psychic apparatus. The cigar-chomping, maniacal Comedian is our id, gleefully feeding off his own lusts as he imposes a warped, but potent brand of law and order. Dr. Manhattan is the super-ego, divorced from emotion and perhaps humanity even as he acts as the world’s father figure imposing his perception of perfection (“The Superman exists, and he is American,” Osterman’s fellow scientist famously boasts). In between is the ego, epitomized by Nite Owl as an ordinary man not blessed with superpowers but struggling to do what is right to the best of his abilities.

The problem arises when Watchmen wallows too literally in its pop psychology at the expense developing a storyline with drive and purpose. Dialogue that is profound on the page proves ponderous when spoken, whether it is Dr. Manhattan’s metaphysical musings or the narration of Rorschach’s journal that reads like the deranged rants from the serial killer’s diaries in Se7en. Snyder’s slavish, if skilled devotion to crafting a faithful adaptation shackles him to the panes of Moore’s graphic novel in the same way film versions of plays are often confined by stagy strictures. When the film visits Mars where Dr. Manhattan constructs his own fortress of solitude, or Veidt’s Antarctic lair, or even an explicit sex scene between Nite Owl and Spectre, the results feel as hermetic as Dr. Manhattan’s psyche. Psychologically speaking, Watchmen needed more Jon Osterman and less Dr. Manhattan.

Who will watch Watchmen? Undoubtedly, a great many will. Enjoying it, however, involves a matter of perspective.

Neil Morris

Righteous Kill

At long last, we've found the remains of our careers

Grade: D +
Director: Jon Avnet
Starring: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo, Curtis Jackson, Donnie Wahlberg, and Brian Dennehy
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Back in 1986, 70-somethings Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas teamed together one last time playing elderly gangsters in the buddy comedy, Tough Guys. While the production was steeped in Hollywood nostalgia and a few guilty chuckles, it was more than a bit melancholy to witness two of the silver screen’s finest actors relegated to B-movie schlock. Their best days – and roles – were far, far behind them.

Righteous Kill trods similar ground, with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino starring as aging, tough-talking NYPD cops – nicknamed Turk and Rooster – teetering along the edge of the moral dividing line. However, with its obvious typecasting and palpable joylessness, the macabre spectacle reminds me more of the uneasy, strained collaborations between Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi during the latter days of their careers. It is a movie 20 years past its expiration date, and the only extraordinary sights to behold are Pacino’s efforts to still tease-up his increasingly thinning bangs, and De Niro laboring to propel his expanding girth through the Earth’s gravitational pull.

With the fragile assistance two younger detectives (John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg), Turk and Rooster are on the trail of a serial killer on the loose. The first, and and by no means only, with Russell Gewirtz's (Inside Man) ponderous screenplay is that it makes the mistake of forecasting upfront that Turk is secretly the killer. Fed up with rapists, pedophile priests, and drug dealers (including a kingpin played by Curtis Jackson, aka rapper 50 Cent) beating the rap and roaming the streets, Turk dispenses vigilante justice as some odd mash-up of Dirty Harry, The Star Chamber, and Se7en.

Or so it seems. You can be assured of one of two things while watching Righteous Kill: either this early revelation makes the rest of the film a gigantic waste of time, or there is going to be a twist ending you can see coming a mile away…and the film is still a gigantic waste of time. Director Jon Avnet helms this police procedural with the dexterity of a lumberjack as one implausible scene after another is strung together to form a head-scratching, tedious saunter through Madame Tussauds. An opening credits montage shows Turk and Rooster target-shooting and pumping iron (and, oddly, coaching Little League baseball and playing pickup chess), and Avnet spends the remainder of the film trying to prop up this masculine artifice.

No one is buying it, particularly when the cost includes being repeatedly subjected to De Niro’s creepy sexual escapades with a comely fellow cop (Carla Gugino), always shot from camera angles that obscure the actor’s paunch. Add to that De Niro’s animatronic line readings, poorly written supporting roles, and consistently stale repartee between the two leads (including a reference to the cartoon character Underdog as closeted pill-popper that is even older than De Niro and Pacino’s acting heydays), and you are left with a geriatric revue kept on life support way past the point somebody should have pulled the plug.

Neil Morris