TAG

TAG is a superb film - great slapstick and verbal wit - wonderful spoofs of action movies - and a really genuinely warm heart.  It's based on a Wall Street Journal article about a bunch of grown men who have been playing a game of tag together since they were kids. Now grown-ups, every May is hunting season, and while all of them have been tagged one time or another, Jeff (Jeremy Renner) hasn't. So they band together to try and take him out at his wedding, although they aren't complete dickheads, so they don't actually want to ruin his wedding doing it. It's absolutely glorious seeing Ed Helms, Jake Johnson and Jon Hamm take in pratfalls and stunts - they look like they're having the time of their life.  And Jeremy Renner is hilarious spoofing the super-serious inner monologue of an action hero trying to avoid being tagged. The visual humour has flair and the film just works! But what I really loved was the attempt to seriously interrogate where the line is between a fun game and obsessive competition, and what the value of friendship really is.  The ending of this film gives us a clear view on this, and it's deeply moving while never feeling cheap or manipulative.  I also love how the script - which could've just been another HANGOVER style bro comedy - managed to beef up the roles of the women - making them actual protagonists and deeply enmeshed in all of the moral questioning that occurs. Kudos to all involved!

TAG is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes. It's available to rent and own. 

STRETCH

STRETCH is a super-low budget film shot in fast gonzo style and, despite an all-star cast, has gone to straight to video. This is a shame because it's really quite funny and works well under its own momentum.  It's directed by Joe Carnahan who directed the awesome Liam Neeson drama, THE GREY, as well as that awful A-TEAM reboot. I'm pleased to say that this movie definitely belongs with THE GREY as one of Carnahan's better movies.   

Patrick Wilson stars as a failed actor turned limo driver and recovering addict called Stretch who's still paying off the debts he incurred in his former life.  This day in the life starts when his creditors demand that he repay his $6k debt that night, he blows his first pick-up (a hilarious David Hasselhof playing himself) and tries to jack another high-paying client from his limo company's big rival, The Jovi.  This involves some convoluted events including Ray Liotta giving him a gun and a badge and a heavily disguised and hilariously gonzo Chris Pine playing a ultra-rich playboy who promises to pay off Stretch's debt if he in turn goes to pick up a suitcase full of money and some drugs.  Meanwhile, Stretch encounters his ex-girlfriend and sets up a blind date. Oh yes, and did I tell you that Stretch has a heavy voice-over throughout the movie and sees visions of his dead ex-colleague played by Ed Helms?

If all this sounds ridiculous it is.  But the movie does what all ridiculous movies needs to do - it has utter conviction in what it's doing and never winks at the camera, even when Hasselhof is on screen.  The result is a film that may  not be credible but which, against all odds, has us rooting for the protagonist and carries us along on a wave of fast dialogue, outlandish characters and crazy situations.

STRETCH has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated R. STRETCH is a straight to video movie that is available on streaming services. 

THEY CAME TOGETHER

THEY CAME TOGETHER is a high quality spoof of the romantic-comedy genre from writer-director David Wain (ROLE MODELS) and Michael Showalter. It stars Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler as the lovers and features comedians of the calibre of Ed Helms, Bill Hader and Jack McBryer (30 ROCK). It comes out of the gate strong - absolutely nailing every cliche of every dumbass Jennifer Aniston or Katherine Heigl movie you've ever seen.  "New York is almost another character in the story" leading to those opening credits where a helicopter sweeps over the city on a bright sunny morning. The romantic lead Joel (Rudd) is a nice guy with a bitch girlfriend who he catches cheating.  He has close friends who fit all the stereotypes - the married one with kids, the dickhead womaniser who isn't as hot as he thinks he is - and as they rightly point on the basketball court - he needs to combine all their strengths to win!  Meanwhile, the romantic heroine Molly (Amy) is a classic manic pixie-dreamgirl in the Zoe Deschanel mould - running a cutesy shop threatened by evil corporates where, you got it!, Joel works. They meet cute at a party, and ultimately get over their immediate antipathy.

As I said, the film is absolutely spot on in how it skewers lazy rom-com screenwriting. Let's be honest - has there been a good romantic comedy since WHEN HARRY MET SALLY?   And it's absolutely the right choice for all the actors to play it straight.  But even with the short running time of the film (80 minutes) it still got pretty boring and felt a bit like an SNL skit stretched beyond itself.  The movie didn't run out of steam but I did.

THEY CAME TOGETHER has a running time of 83 minutes and is rated R in the USA.  The movie played Sundance 2014 and was released earlier this year in the USA and Canada. It went on release in the UK and Ireland this weekend.

WE'RE THE MILLERS

WE'RE THE MILLERS is a lukewarm, predictable comedy about a group of misfits who learn to love each other on a roadtrip to Mexico in which they're trafficking mary-jane.  (As a side-note I find it amazing that getting baked is now seen as so acceptable by the mainstream media that you can have a mainstream box office hit featuring you're friendly neighbourhood dope peddlar.)

The classic odd-couple comedy sees Jason Sudeikis of SNL fame cast as Dave, the arrested development pusher who is blackmailed into going to Mexico by his college room-mate turned megalomaniacal drug-kingpin (Ed Helms.) He figures he'll be better able to smuggle the drugs if he recruits a Brady Bunch style family, and turns to his neighbour, who happens to be a stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold, Rose (Jennifer Aniston), his goofy neighbour who is a virgin, Kenny, (yes - that's his tag!) (Will Poulter) and some homeless chick (Emma Roberts.)  Naturally, the misfits scrub up well, and bond over singing TLC's Waterfalls, and Rose gets to strip so that Brad Pitt can see how Jennifer Aniston still is, in perhaps the most unsexy stripping scene in movie history.  Finally, there's one of those Han Solo moments in which Dave realises that what he really wants is a family, and hey presto, it all ends happily.

There are one or two genuinely good laughs in this flick - the first aimed at satirising wannabe gangsta teen boys - and the second aimed at - what I can't even remember.  The rest of the film is disappointingly weak on humour, suggesting that the two screenwriters who wrote the piss-poor HOT TUB TIME MACHINE had more to do with this than the two screenwriters who wrote the brilliant WEDDING CRASHERS.  The direction, from Rawson Marshall Thurber (DODGEBALL) is fairly pedestrian, which is pretty much the description I'd give to this whole film. It's very Tab A into Slot B.  You know exactly where it's going as soon as you see the opening credits.   Acting-wise, Jason Sudeikis is always charming, as is Aniston, and Emma Roberts has little to do as the pissed off hobo.  It's good to see Will Poulter getting his first major US role, and he's good in a straight comedy role. But basically, this movie is one for DVD and dinner night at best.

You can hear a podcast review of this movie here, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

WE'RE THE MILLERS has been rated R in the USA and 18 in the UK. It has a running time of 110 minutes.

WE'RE THE MILLERS is on release in the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, Austria, Denmark, Israel, Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, the UK and Ireland. It opens next weekend in Belgium, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Taiwan. It opens on September 6th in Russia, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Mexico and Romania, and on September 12th in Chile and Italy. It opens on September 20th in France, Hong Kong, Norway and Sweden and on September 27th in Brazil. 

THE HANGOVER PART II

THE HANGOVER PART II has been critically panned. No matter. The collective goodwill that bounced off the first, break-out, film, has enabled the sequel to smash box-office records. Not only is THE HANGOVER PART II the biggest opening on record for an R rated film, but it's also the biggest opening ever for a comedy. So, people are going to watch this flick AND, according to the IMDb ratings, a quarter are scoring it as a perfect ten, with nearly 60% giving it between 8 and 10. 

So, what's biting the reviewers?! I guess what disappointed me most about the sequel was its slavish replication of every key scene - every little surprise - from the first movie. This makes the sequel lead-heavy as we fall to checking the boxes from the original, and sucks the air out of every gag. The second problem is that Zach Galifianakis - the break-out star from the original movie - is given way more air-time in the sequel. This brings up a problem I have with a lot of movies - from Galifianakis' previous flick DUE DATE, to most recent movies starring Danny McBride. These guys are funny but in a kind of creepy way, and they work best when used in short cameo scenes to enliven broad comedy. When they move to centre-stage they shatter a movie's equilibrium and start to grate. 

The final problem is the movie's setting. Taking the flick from Vegas to Thailand radically changes the sleaze factor of the antics. After all, Vegas has done an amazing job over the past fifteen years, relabelling itself as a family destination and distancing itself from its criminal past. So when our clean-cut heros get into shenanigans, we don't seriously fear for their lives - it's all basically slightly naughty but fundamentally fine. Changing to Bangkok adds a level of grime, grit and stakes that sit at odds with the movie's comedy stylings. For example, in the original, Bradley Cooper's Phil gets tasered. In this flick, he gets shot. In the original, Ken Jeong's Mr Chow gets locked in a car boot. In this flick, he actually dies from a cocaine dose. In the original, Ed Helms' Stu loses a tooth and marries a stripper. In this flick, he gets fucked by a Ladyboy. Not that I'm against explicit material in general. But it just felt that time and again, this movie had moved beyond the same boundaries of the original - and for no real comedic gain. The upshot is that I had a lousy time watching THE HANOVER PART II. I was bored and unamused. The slavishly familiar plot. The lack of a cameo to rival Mike Tyson. The grimier, bleaker environment. It was all, basically, a downer. But what do I know? Director Todd Phillips is sitting on a cash-pile the size of my house. 

THE HANGOVER PART II is on release in the UK, USA, Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Peru, Slovenia, Thailand, Brazil, Bulgaria, Colombia, Estonia, Finland, India, Mexico, Norway, Paraguay, Venezuela and Armenia. It opens on June 2nd in Belarus, Greece, Germany, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Poland and Turkey. It opens on June 16th in Georgia; on June 24th in Spain and on July 1st in Japan.

THE HANGOVER - dude, where's my groom?

THE HANGOVER is basically a rip-off of the Ashton Kutcher vehicle, "Dude, Where's My Car?". Except this time, the drunken idiots are a thirty-something bachelor party in Vegas and they've misplaced the groom, stolen Mike Tyson's tiger, and gotten married to a hooker. The morning after they have to piece together the events of the night before, rescue the groom and get him to the church on time.

Problem is that THE HANGOVER is only sporadically funny in a "mild chuckle" manner. Sure, the fat, weird guy is funny to look at, but mostly because he reminded me of THE BIG LEBOWSKI. And dear god, do we really want to milk comedy out the drunken-hooker-marriage plot? A Mike Tyson cameo is utterly wasted and after a while, I really started to miss the superior comic stylings of Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn et al. Overall, while I didn't have a bad time watching the film, it's certainly nowhere near the level of raucous hilarity of ROLE MODELS. Neither does it have the genuinely affecting camaraderie of PINEAPPLE EXPRESS.

The best things I can say about THE HANGOVER, is that it is definitely funnier than Todd Philips' efforts like SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS. And second, that Ken Jeong is screamingly funny in his cameo.

THE HANGOVER is on release in the USA, Canada, Iceland, Australia, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Slovakia, the Ukraine and the UK. It opens next weekend in Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Estonia, Italy and Norway. It opens on June 24th in Finland, France and Sweden. It opens on July 10th in Denmark, Romania and Turkey. It opens on July 24th in Germany and Austria and on July 30th in the Czech Republic, Israel and Malaysia. It opens on August 7th in Bulgaria and South Africa. It opens on August 14th in Argentina and Spain and on August 28th in Brazil.

MEET DAVE - mirthless

MEET DAVE is a truly mirthless comedy from the people that brought you NORBIT.

Eddie Murphy plays a human-replicant droid sent my a miniature alien species to drain earth of its water. The survival of their race entails the destruction of our world. However, when the robot, Dave, starts hanging out with a cute moppet from New York and his sweet mother, he learns the meaning of love and laughter, and loses his will to destroy humanity.

This film is high concept but low on laughs. We've all seen movies that have random strangers struggling to fit in with our weird earth manners. This sort of thing was done far better in the TV seris, THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN, for instance. And as for the production design, it's distinctly low-rent. Compare the set design for the captain's bridge inside Dave's head with any sci-fi show, or the special effects in the decades earlier INNERSPACE.

Overall, then, a big fat thumbs down.

MEET DAVE is on release in the US, Iceland, Kuwait, Russia, Finland, Indonesia and Romania. It opens next weekend in the UK, Australia, Israel and Estonia. It opens later in July in Mexico, Venezuala and Greece. MEET DAVE opens in August in Belgium, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, France, Singapore, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Autria, Germany, Hong Kong, Slovenia and Sweden. It opens on September 19th in Norway and on December 19th in Japan.