THE UNDERDOGGS****

Snoop Dogg continues his journey toward National Treasure with this hilarious self-consciously genre-respecting underdog sports comedy. The dude even reveals that he literally has sponsored sports outreach for poor kids for the past decade.  Could we love him more?

Snoop plays a not-even-remotely-thinly-veiled version of himself called Jaycen "Two Js" Jennings. He is a washed-up sports-star who longs for a lucrative commentating gig, and decides that coaching a bunch of foul-mouthed poor kids will look great on social media, and help him win back his childhood sweetheart. He does this with the help of his drug-dealer side-kick Kareem (stand-up comedian Mike Epps) and soon discovers his inner good guy. Naturally there's a climactic sports match in which our hero has to choose between being with his team OR debuting on Fox Sports. No prizes for guessing the ending.

What I love about this film is that it is - much like Snoop - unabashedly what it wants to be. It even references THE MIGHTY DUCKS in an opening and closing scene. The screenwriters aren't trying to do anything too clever with the genre.  They aren't reinventing it. The only nod to modernity is putting in a discussion about consent. Otherwise the kids remain foul-mouthed, hilarious, and utterly loveable, to the end.

THE UNDERDOGS is rated R, has a running time of 96 minutes, and was released on Prime Video in January 2024.

SPARKLE

SPARKLE will be remembered as the last film Whitney Houston shot before her untimely death.  And its only redeeming feature is her care-worn, slightly bloated but forever poised and authentic presence as the religious, reformed mother of three talented daughters. At around half way through the film, Houston goes back to her roots in gospel and sings a rendition of His Eyes Are On The Sparrow that is so full of meaning and pain and power that we are transfixed.  That song is worth the price of entry alone.  And throughout the rest of the film we are ever alert at the resonances between her character, and the advice she gives her daughter Sister (Carmen Ejogo) - a beautiful talented woman who falls for an abusive, addicted man. As the mother chastises the daughter for failing to use her life as a cautionary tale, we wonder how self-aware Houston was in saying those lines.  

That morbid curiosity is about as much interest as there is in this rather trite remake of the Joel Schumacher musical.  It reads as a pale echo of the critically acclaimed DREAMGIRLS, with hackneyed dialogue, banal performances and pat answers.  Set in the late 60s, the story sees three sisters form a girl group in the manner of The Supremes, playing local clubs in search of a recording contract.  The eldest sister, Sister, falls prey to a rich husband who abuses her and feeds her cocaine to the point where she ruins herself and the band .  The second sister gets an afro, gets empowered and leaves to become a doctor.  That leaves Sparkle (American Idol winner Jordin Sparks), to write her songs and get enough confidence to actually sing them for the all important record company executive.

As tales of empowerment go, it's not very convincing.  Sister has by far the most interesting story in the manner of Ike and Tina until she is rather summarily sent to the sidelines.  Dolores seems to have been born a fully formed activist and leaves the film before she can do much of anything.  And Sparkle is just about as bland as Jordin Sparks wide smile.  The only faint interest is in the treatment of Satin (Mike Epps) - a comedian who plays to white audiences.  There's still a shudder at the language he provokes and the material he uses.

SPARKLE was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Argentina and Italy. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland; on October 11th in Germany; on October 25th in Australia and New Zealand; on November 16th in Bulgaria; on November 23rd in Norway; and on November 29th in Portugal. 

SPARKLE has a running time of 116 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.

Random DVD round-up 4 - WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS

Malcolm D Lee may be kin to Spike Lee but he produces movies that are diametrically opposed to his cousin. Spike Lee joints are politically engaged, technically accomplished and audacious - sometimes to their detriment. Malcolm D Lee, by contrast, produces disposable commercial movies devoid of artistic vision. WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS is just such a movie. The story is pure romantic-comedy formula - nice guy (Martin Lawrence) with bitch-girlfriend does mean things to alienate warm-hearted friends before epiphany leads to apology, dumping bitch and dating childhood sweetheart. It's all very glossy and slips by easily enough, that is until you start choking on the crude racial stereotypes, blatant class-politics and generally stale contents. According to this movie, African-Americans are either assimilationist, materialistic sell-outs or obese, violent hicks. Formualaic plotting and racial stereotyping could be forgiven if this movie were actually funny. But it's not.

WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS opened in the US, France, Turkey, Egypt and UK in Spring 2008 and is now available on DVD.

Al's RESIDENT EVIL:EXTINCTION 3 is more muffin than cake theory

This review is posted by the target demographic, Al, who can usually be found here.

I remember playing those retro RESIDENT EVIL vid games back in primary school, when my eldest sis first introduced them to us younger siblings. At first we cowered, hiding behind pillows while reluctantly peeking out to see how the game progressed as whoever was playing courageously journeyed past armies of zombies, and along with the atmospheric music and special effects the game had, it was a genuinely scary experience at that time. It didn't take long before we took charge ourselves and soon after we were the ones gunning down the undead: as the extremity of the terror increased so did our immunity towards it.

Anyhu, let's get to the film. Extinction carries a wafer-thin plot mostly consisting of scenes where the surviving humans combat the zombies and nothing much else. The entire direction this movie adopts is transparently straightforward: no pretensions about what it's trying to do-unlike some other piece of exceedingly torturous garbage such as TRANSFORMERS. In TRANSFORMERS the insufferable script was made worse with lame humour and annoying characters. It was a perfect case of a dumb kid pretending to be an adult: utterly oblivious at how badly he was humiliating himself. And it is in this respect,the RESIDENT EVIL trilogy succeeds..sorta.

It has many right things going for it - Milla Jovovich, probably one of the least talented actors around - dare I say the female equivalent of Josh Hartnett? Nah, not that bad - she manages to pull off the Alice character just o-k and doesn't annoy the hell out of me. It's a good thing the second movie turned the character into a half-robot of some kind, because Jovovich's stilted acting suits that level of starry-eyed emotionlessness the act requires, but when she tries to cry - kill me, kill me quick. Aside from that, they have all the essential ingredients in place - the zombies aren't too shabbily done, the cinematography's not bad - it's certainly nothing new, but occasionally it does unexpectedly impress with some nice desert landscapes.

Expanding on that, the RESIDENT EVIL franchise is like someone setting out to bake a cake, and after gathering all the right ingredients for it, the person decides to use all of it to make a muffin (okay, hold that thought). It's all out of order, objectives aren't met and the end result is distant from what was envisaged - it has crude chunks of details unobservantly picked out from the game, but just because you've inserted the Alice character, the Umbrella company, some vague virus and hoards of zombies and a script full of words like "infected", "cure", "hope"- it doesn't mean it's really RESIDENT EVIL. Really it's more of an excuse to put a hot chick in the lead, give her a couple of guns and knives and get her to do some real cool martial arts shit while occasionally making obligatory references to its origins. It might as well be titled Karate Blondie or Zombie Barbie, and it'll still retain the tiny amount of relevance it had to its content and existence. But-going back to the cake/muffin analogy: muffins most definitely have their own exquisite taste to offer, and biting into this one you get faint, weak traces of the cake it originally aspired to be. I feel slightly infuriated, but I wasn't promised a real cake in the first place and the accidental muffin's quite nice.

Characters are thrown into the story like slaves to a plot, each with one unambiguous function. Children are there to be protected; teen girl cries to show remorse at every possible chance; evil boss is the evil boss, complete with ubiquitous sunnies that never come off and assisted by blue-collared workers whose speeches are limited to supporting one-liners with no real purpose but to point out the obvious and attempt to make things more serious. e.g. "That's unbelievable". "This is not going according to plan". Like zombies, but more subtle. Anyhu,everyone but Alice gets killed off or shoved out of the story eventually and everything leading up to that point seems utterly pointless by then.

It's unremarkable and offers absolutely nothing new - you'd expect a franchise coming this far to take a few tips, maybe hire better special effects people (there was one scene when the skies filled with fire-which was particularly cartoon-y and unrealistic) and make better use of the supporting characters and leave out all the unnecessary jumpy scenes. Plus, it recycles a lot of things from the previous two installments. The main character doesn't evolve, just a change of clothes and hairstyle and much less talking. And,perhaps the most unforgivable - they used the flesh-chopping laser room in the first RE to finish things off (to seal the climax) -and things just abruptly come to a halt. The past two REs ended very well, this one does too I guess with this whole Alice clone thing revealed at the final part-but the battle between Alice and the crazy creature close to the end finishes off disappointingly,with some silly Poltergeist-ish I-move-things-with-my-mind schtick that should've been omitted completely.

But it's still fairly enjoyable-at the end,I thought "That's exactly what I came for" and unlike disposable, no-brainer flicks like Transformers or Fantastic 4 (both of them), this one has no grand delusions: it's just a story about a girl with too much bronzer on and some cannibalistic zombies and animals we don't mind seeing explode to bits or getting their necks hacked off. And it's not too bad, not too bad.

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION is on release in Russia, Mexico, USA, the Philippines, Germany, India, Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Brazil, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Argentina, Australia, Hungary, Singapore, Italy, Kuwait, the UK, Slovenia, South Korea, Iceland and Turkey. It opens in New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Bolivia and Spain later in October. It opens in Bolivia, Slovakia, Finland, Venezuela, Japan, Denmark, Latvia, the Netherlands and Norway in November 2007. It opens in Egypt on January 9th 2008.