This summer I decided to post my recap in ascending order to build suspense. A few days ago, as I lazily let my thoughts drift back over the summer in a non-specific way, I had a vague sense of disappointment. Overall, I’d say last summer brought a stronger crop of popcorn flicks. But then when I sat down to rank the movies I’ve actually seen, and I considered each one of them specifically, I realized that most were pretty good. Maybe there was more excellence last summer, but there was also clear mediocrity and undeniable disaster. None of this year’s “bad movies” was nearly as abysmally unpleasant as last summer’s Battleship, and most of the movies that weren’t amazing were still better than just okay. Maybe the summer landscape would look different to me if we hadn’t gone on vacation the week that R.I.P.D. came out and returned home with a smaller movie budget for August. Mid-to-late August can be a dumping ground for insipid, failed blockbusters. I couldn’t really afford to waste money on those, so my list doesn’t even have a true (F) this year. I’ll start instead with a pair of Ds, then jump a (sizeable) gap to a C+ that rounds out the bottom tier.
23.) After Earth (D)
Why I Didn’t Like it:
When I heard Will Smith turned down a leading role Quentin Tarantino wrote especially for him and planned instead to develop a movie with M. Night Shyamalan, I thought, “What?!!! What an insane gamble!”
The thing is, I admire risk takers because I’m not one. Shayamalan desperately needed a hit, and Smith is a bankable star who can open a movie. To be honest, I hoped Smith’s baffling choice would miraculously result in a surprise masterpiece that critics would hail as the second coming of The Sixth Sense.
When early word made it clear that such an unexpectedly sunny outcome was not on the horizon, I began to cross my fingers instead for a cinematic disaster so spectacularly embarrassing it made Battlefield Earth look like Casablanca.
Unfortunately, After Earth is neither odds-beatingly awesome nor hilariously abysmal. In a word, it’s boring. Another apt word for it is tedious. Dull also springs to mind.
Really I could gladly offer synonyms for at least two hours because spending that time reading a thesaurus would be far more exciting and rewarding than watching After Earth again.
Being boring is not the movie’s only fault, but it is its most glaring one. Other things that bothered me include lack of suspense (because you know the kid is going to make it home, Will Smith always survives, and for most of the runtime they’re the only characters), poor dialogue, illogical plot elements (featuring Most Unlikely Use of a Bird), and the vague (yet more than vaguely annoying) nearly omnipresent “accent of the future.”
The sad fact is that expecting Jaden Smith to carry a big budget, sci-fi/action blockbuster at the age of fourteen is unrealistic and unfair. Such a move not only fails to set him up for future success, but it instead sets him up for massive failure. Who are the other fourteen-year-old action stars who can carry a movie and pack the house with people of every age and description? They must all be ghosting I guess because none springs to mind. Jaden is a talented young man. He plays strong emotion very well and shows great physical prowess and dedication to his craft, but the task he’s given here would make Sisyphus say, “Yeah, I’ll stick with the boulder, thanks.”
How is Jaden expected to step out of his famous father’s shadow when he’s playing a kid who (for like two hours) can’t quite seem to step out of his famous father’s shadow? The script fails Jaden (and the audience) here because Will Smith is clearly playing the more interesting character. As the guy who invented ghosting, in fact, Cypher Raige is a massively interesting character. But all he does in the movie is sit motionless in a chair and talk in a steady monotone as he slowly bleeds to not-quite-death. And we’d still rather be watching him! Thanks a lot, Dad (and M. Night Shyamalan)!
I also think that if you’re going to maintain that you’re not a Scientologist—certainly no crime; I maintain that I’m not a Scientologist every time I’m asked—then it’s probably not a great choice to make the most showcased scene in your movie look like cover art for Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard, particularly if the thrust of this scene is that you can only realize your full potential once you’ve purged yourself of the negative emotions left by past traumas (in front of a volcano). Just a thought.
Why You Might Like It:
Not everybody will find this movie boring and devoid of narrative tension/suspense. From the moment the Raiges crash landed on Earth, my four-year-old daughter was terribly concerned about Kitai. She watched most attentively and (too often and slightly too loudly) vocalized her worry that Kitai would not make it through the latest danger to his life. So if you’re four and haven’t seen that many movies before, maybe After Earth is pretty gripping, after all.
Even adults might find themselves falling in love with the movie. If somebody told me, “After Earth was my favorite film this summer,” I’d be surprised—and extremely curious—but not disdainful. The movie does have some strengths.
Visually, it’s pretty impressive, in fact. M. Night Shyamalan movies usually look good, and this one is no exception. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky gets an A+ from me. (Fun fact. He was director of photography for The Empire Strikes Back.) I also really liked James Newton Howard’s score. In a relatively brief role, Sophie Okonedo gives the strongest performance of the film, but Will Smith (an actor of immense talent) is quite good (and outside his usual box) as well. Zoë Kravitz is also pretty easy to watch simply because she’s behaving like a normal person instead of attempting a bizarre, affected way of speaking like most of the cast.
As Kitai, Jaden Smith gives a decent performance, too. He doesn’t seem to have his father’s level of natural charisma and screen presence, but he is a pretty good actor (particularly in emotional moments), and he’s great in the action scenes.
To be honest, even though After Earth failed to excite me, one aspect of it did make a strong impression—some people’s very vocal, extremely vile, over-the-top hatred of Jaden Smith. What is wrong with people? I agree that the younger Smith isn’t yet the star his father wants him to be. He doesn’t have even half the charisma that Will Smith did as a teen. But he is not without talent, and he’s proven that he’s willing to work hard and take risks. Why do people keep complaining about nepotism when Smith tries to help his children build their careers? What father wouldn’t want the best future for his kids and do everything in his power to try to help them make that happen? If Smith were a welder, and he taught his son to weld, surely nobody would object. My best guess is that people just wish their dads were Will Smith and feel resentful that they aren’t being showered with riches and opportunities themselves. I personally think Smith’s desire to help his children’s careers along is perfectly normal and sometimes has delightful side effects. For example, Smith put together a remake of Annie to create a strong starring vehicle for his daughter, but Willow eventually bowed out and now Beasts of the Southern Wild’s adorable and talented Quvenzhané Wallis has another great film role.
After Earth is not the greatest movie, no, but I actually liked it infinitely better than last summer’s Battleship. Plus my husband is a huge Will Smith fan, and I’m bizarrely drawn to M. Night Shyamalan (though he disappoints me every time). We didn’t like this movie much, but when either of them makes another film again, we’ll probably buy tickets. So no harm done.
22.) Turbo (D)
Why I Didn’t Like it:
I actually hated Turbo more than After Earth, but then I asked myself which I would rather watch again. The answer is a resounding, “Neither!” Still, it will probably be a miracle if I manage never to see Turbo again. I’m sure at some point, it’s going to come on TV and at least one of the kids is going to want to watch it. And I’m sure when that happens, I will spend several minutes dancing around the living room singing, “The snail is fast fast fast fast fast!” and wishing Bill Hader were still on SNL (for my sake, not his).
This movie does a lot of things wrong. In fact, if I were to say it does everything wrong, I would not be exaggerating much. After Earth ended up not being as awful as I’d expected. Turbo was far, far more disappointing than I’d ever dreamed. (How can you be disappointed by a movie you expected to find disappointing? I thought that was impossible until I saw Turbo.)
What really irritates me about Turbo is that I wanted to root for it, wanted to cheer for it, and it just let me down. Forget that the movie is an almost ridiculously blatant rip-off of Ratatouille (the oddball protagonist who dreams of doing something unheard of while everybody else laughs at him and conforms) with a splash of Cars (in the form of the little town that everyone forgot). Never mind that it’s clearly trying to cash in on the enduring popularity of The Fast and the Furious franchise. All of that is pretty forgivable. (I mean Pixar rips off everything, and The Fast and the Furious stuff is more self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek homage.) The problem is, Turbo reminds us of a lot of other movies we’ve seen before, and then is pointedly a million times worse than any of them. If you’re going to make the comparison obvious, then make sure you distinguish your version in some positive way.
This may sound nitpicky, but the premise itself bothers me. Why on earth would a snail think winning the Indy 500 is a realistic goal? Ratatouille makes more sense to me. Why couldn’t a rat learn to cook? Everybody can cook. Rats can eat. They have taste buds. But besides being known for being slow, snails don’t have wheels or engines. Not everybody can win the Indy 500. Nobody can win without a car! A snail who wanted to race a cheetah, a snail who dreamed of Olympic glory by being faster than Usain Bolt, that would make sense. I know a snail carries his house with him, but a house is not a car. Maybe they should have ripped off Up instead.
Still I’m always game for a wacky premise. The real problem is that the movie moves at a snail’s pace. The pacing is flat out awful. Most of the movie is slow and dull. And whenever interesting characters do pop up, we’re never allowed to focus on them for very long. I’m dubious of the “moral” of this story, too. If you want to do something impossible, don’t listen to any well meaning friends who try to encourage you to set more realistic goals. Instead take performance enhancing drugs to get you most of the way there, and then hope your competition will implode from sheer insanity when you’re just inches from the finish line.
Why You Might Like It:
Turbo’s problem is that it focuses on the wrong characters. Tito is an amazing character. I always like Michael Peña, but I didn’t even realize he was voicing Tito until the end credits, and I still loved the character.
Theo (aka Turbo) is strangely bland, but Tito is a protagonist you can really cheer for. I love his relationship with his brother Angelo (voiced by Luis Guzmán whose work I also usually enjoy). These two are fantastic characters and great brothers. They obviously really care about each other. Tito’s a crazy dreamer, but all of his harebrained schemes are focused on bringing publicity to the taco truck and making Angelo proud. Angelo, for his part, tries to rein Tito in, but he still wants him for a partner and is genuinely delighted for him when one of his crazy schemes succeeds. One thing I do love about this movie is that Tito just seems like a regular guy, like someone you know, like somebody you’d love to have for a friend. And although he and Angelo run a taco truck, they don’t behave like lunatics or cartoon stereotypes (like the over-the-top, vaguely likable but ultimately bizarre El Macho character in Despicable Me). Making tacos is a totally normal (an in my opinion extremely necessary) thing to do for a living, and it is entirely possible to do so without being a huge weirdo. As I’m writing this down, it sounds a little odd, but honestly, how often in a children’s movie do you see a character who owns a restaurant specializing in a particular cuisine who isn’t turned into some kind of over-the-top ethnic stereotype? That’s so lazy, and it’s incredibly refreshing that it doesn’t happen here.
The problem is, Tito and Angelo are interesting, but the movie doesn’t focus on them. The other people who work in the strip center with them might well be fascinating people, too. We’re really not allowed to find out. Turbo wastes excellent characters, so because I loved those characters, I got really frustrated with the movie. The racing crew is also pretty captivating. For one thing, Samuel L. Jackson has by far the best lines in the entire movie. (I don’t know if he’s amazing at improv or if they just wrote him the best part because he’s Samuel L. Jackson.) It doesn’t matter. For some reason, we’re forced to spend most of the movie listening to droning, dull exchanges between Turbo and his brother Chet, arguments they could have skipped entirely if only they’d watched the movie Ratatouille.
I do like the bit when “The Snail is Fast” goes viral. And the last ten minutes of the movie are both immensely captivating and side-splittingly hilarious. As Guy Gagné, Bill Hader is screamingly funny. Of course, nothing that he does makes sense, and the character has absolutely no integrity. (I mean as a fictional character, though it’s probably true of Gagné as a person, too.) I also find it a bit weird that in a movie where race or ethnicity commendably makes no difference (i.e., Just like in real life, people of all different racial and ethnic backgrounds live and work together in a city and share a common American culture), the villain of the piece is an increasingly insane, dramatically French Indy 500 driver.
Gagné’s final moments in the movie are so strange and out of place. The thing is, that’s the best part of the movie. My daughter did cheer for Turbo to cross the finish line. Other young children will probably cheer for him, too. But there are about two hundred other animated features I’d choose before watching this again.
21.) Elysium (C+)
What I Liked:
Imagine if Thomas Malthus and Nelson Mandela were forced to spend a weekend together with only an Xbox, a bunch of Mad Max movies, and instructions to write a screenplay. If I were writing a myth instead of a movie review, I’d be positive that’s how Elysium was born. (It goes without saying, of course, that after a poorly received test screening, concerned studio heads axed Malthus’s original ending and replaced it with cheerful nonsense.)
Elysium has a cold, sleek, almost elegant, dystopian brutality that kept me from falling in love with the film but also prevented me from hating it. Although the premise and plot have crushing limitations, I can’t imagine how anyone who truly enjoys the genre could fail to admire the ambition and near success of this tonally perfect piece of good, old fashioned science fiction. Genre mash-ups and clever metadramatic flourishes may rule the day, but not in Elysium.
I don’t much like true sci-fi. (I’m always wowed at first, but it’s never long before the vague sense of despair sets in.) True sci-fi is usually too topical, too political, too depressing, too bleak, too cold for me. But I can’t deny that Elysium is true sci-fi, and intellectually, I respect it for that. I never warmed to Neill Blomkamp’s previous feature District 9 even though it’s a very good film (arguably a masterpiece), and I wasn’t honestly too interested in seeing Elysium based on its previews (and suspicious mid-August release date), either.
I have to say, though, this film really surprised me. Up until the halfway point, I thought, This is definitely the strongest sci-fi film I’ve seen this year. It features superb visuals, well choreographed/meaningful action sequences, a decent score, a (surprisingly) complex plot, fantastic pacing, and several captivating performances (from Matt Damon, Sharlto Copely, Diego Luna, Wagner Moura, William Fitchner).
What I Didn’t Like:
Then in the last act, it all goes to hell.
The intricate, tangled web of carefully woven plans and double crosses gets swept aside in an instant to make way for lots and lots of generic fights and uninspired explosions. I guess the oldest rule of late summer cinema still holds true. When the movie hits a wall, BLOW UP EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!
And as Elysium slides into increasingly brutal, senseless violence, it also becomes more and more depressing. At this point, it’s about as much fun as watching somebody decapitate a box of small puppies. The closer the protagonists get to their alleged Utopia, the more and more dystopian the entire piece feels. And then we get the insultingly happy ending, a deceptively optimistic non-solution, ham-fistedly tacked on to mask still festering problems the film hasn’t allowed itself the time or scope to address and resolve properly. Plus that heavy handed ending really drives home the point that in general, Elysium makes political attack ads look like masterpieces of subtlety.
I’m also curious. Did the director watch his own movie before its release date? How could anyone with ears fail to notice that Jodie Foster’s accent flat out does not work? I can’t tell if she’s attempting some blended dialect of the elite future that doesn’t yet exist in our time, or if she’s trying to sound South African like the director and Sharlto Copley, or if she was playing a prank on Neill Blomkamp that got out of control and she just had to go with it. To me, Foster sounds distractingly like Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond, so perhaps she’s going for Hollywood Rhodesian. The point is, regardless of her intentions, the accent is awful. It’s painful, distracting, and Foster’s performance seems to disappear into it entirely. She’s a great actress. Why pay for Jodie Foster if you’re only looking for someone to stand around in pants suits and speak in a goofy accent? I’d do it for free (if you’d let me keep the pants suits. That’s reasonable, right?) I’ve seen Jodie Foster give about a million solid or exemplary performances, so I’m pretty sure that the problem here is Neill Blomkamp. Maybe he doesn’t know how to direct women. Alice Braga’s scenes aren’t quite as moving as they should be either. Maybe the director should stick with aliens and Sharlto Copley (whose performance is fantastic here as it was in District 9). Or maybe in the future, all of the best kind of people are going to be standing around up on Elysium, wearing their pants suits and sounding exactly like Delacourt, and I’ll be down here on Earth dying slowly of radiation poisoning and starvation, wearing nothing but a homemade Doc Ock costume and eating only my words.