12 Strong

Thor: The Dark Stallion

Grade: C +

Director: Nicolai Fuglsig

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Michael Peña, Navid Negahban, Trevante Rhodes, Thad Luckinbill, William Fichtner, and Rob Riggle

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 9 min.

Thor gets promoted to Captain America in 12 Strong, in which Chris Hemsworth plays Green Beret Captain Mitch Nelson, inspired by real-life Green Beret Captain Mark Nutsch, who led a twelve-soldier U.S. Special Forces team in Afghanistan during the months following 9/11. Their daunting, three-week mission is to link up with local warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum (Navid Negahban), one of several tempestuous leaders of the Northern Alliance, and fight their way to retake the Taliban stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif.

This is a true story about laudable gallantry, yet a film built around a novelty—the fact that members of Nutsch/Nelson’s ODA 595 unit rode horses alongside their Afghan counterparts to traverse the treacherous terrain. The rest of the time it’s all camo and camaraderie colliding with a hail of bullets, bombs, and bombast. Ted Tally and Peter Craig’s script is full of gung-ho platitudes and agitprop—yes, the Taliban’s treatment of women is horrific, but a scene in which the baddie de jour executes a mother for teaching her children how to read it utterly untethered from the rest of the narrative.

The real monotony is saved for the action sequences, ostensibly the film’s hallmark. When they’re not galloping into battle, Nelson and Dostum size up each other’s killer eyes under the cover of American aerial armaments. Director Nicolai Fuglsig spends a lot of time with the heart-pattering particulars of how to map bombing coordinates, then revels in the shock and awe of explosives delivered by unseen B-52s. When the firefights do occur, they’re fraught with confusion, shot from disjointed perspectives and backdrops. Moreover, Fuglsig adopts the Lone Survivor school of modern military filmmaking, where it takes a dozen bullets to take down a single American soldier yet the endless reservoir of faceless cannon fodder are dispatched with single head shots. The film is constructed like a video game, with avatars instead of characters and each village serving as a new level.

The only things lending 12 Strong any verisimilitude are its “Based on a true story” prologue and its end card reciting the legacy of Mazar-i-Sharif’s liberation and what happened to its liberators. Earnestness abounds, but this war-meets-cowboy-meets-superhero movie from producer Jerry Bruckheimer doesn’t rise above its mise-en-scène.

Dumb and Dumber To

Oh, I get it. You're "birdbrained." [crickets]

Grade: C –

Director: Bobby and Peter Farrelly

Starring: Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels, Rob Riggle, Laurie Holden, Rachel Melvin and Kathleen Turner

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 53 min.

During Dumb and Dumber To, lunkheaded Lloyd (Jim Carrey) is tricked into reaching below an elder nursing home patient’s bedding, searching for some supposedly missing diamonds. When Grannie’s contented grin prompts Lloyd that his groping has extended into the holiest of holies, he jerks away and, for the punch line, blows a dust cloud off his hand.

The scene is a fitting metaphor for a script seemingly extracted from a similarly musty void. Released 20 years ago, Dumb and Dumber was the first feature film for writer-directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly. That led off a triumvirate of irreverent comedies—Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary—over a four-year period that ensconced the Farrelly brothers as leaders of a new breed of cutting-edge comedy filmmakers.

But there are only so many grangina gags and yucks targeting minorities and the mentally challenged. Once that well dried up, it ushered in a 16-year creative drought for the Farrellys. And unfortunately, Dumb and Dumber To feels more like a neutered homage than a revival. [To the brothers’ partial credit, they played no part in the hideous knockoff prequel, Dumb and Dumber: When Harry Met Lloyd.]

After Lloyd emerges from an elaborate hoax where he faked being in a catatonic state for 20 years—another unintentional metaphor—he and manic doof pal Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) leave Rhode Island and embark on another road adventure, this time to track down Harry’s previously unknown daughter Penny (Rachel Melvin). Harry needs a kidney replacement, and he hopes Penny might be a “genital donor match.” Meanwhile, Lloyd’s motivation are his daydreams of wooing the fetching but equally dimwitted Penny.

Along the way, Lloyd and Harry become embroiled in a plot by Adele Pinchelow (Laurie Holden), Penny’s adopted mother, and her groundskeeper Travis (Rob Riggle) to kill Adele’s husband (Steve Tom), a famous scientist. There’s also a MacGuffin, a box containing a billion-dollar solution to the problems plaguing humankind that Dr. Pinchelow gives to Lloyd and Harry to deliver to Penny in El Paso, Texas.

There’s the expected surefit of flatulence and scatalogy, but it’s as stale as Carrey and Daniels’ man-child schtick, now creepily embodied in two fiftysomething actors. At least there’s an ease and familiarity to Carrey’s wit and physical comedy, which occasionally borders on inspired. On the other hand, Daniels can reel off the malaprops but appears uncomfortable, even embarrassed revisiting Harry’s arrested development.

Riggle ends up playing two roles, and he’s forgettable in both. Meanwhile, the actress formerly resembling Kathleen Turner is Fraida Felcher (make it stop…), the aging town floozy and Penny’s biological mom. And as if the audience wasn’t already quiet enough, a cameo by Mama June of Honey Boo Boo infamy adds a dollop of awkwardness.

At one point in Dumb and Dumber To there’s also a train wreck, perhaps the most appropriate metaphor of all.