Moviefone Editorial

Category: Reviews

  • The 10 Most WTF-Worthy Moments From ‘The Boy Next Door’

    the boy next door stars ryan guzman and jennifer lopezThis week Jennifer Lopez stars in “The Boy Next Door,” a suburban psychosexual thriller where Lopez plays a recently separated teacher who has an affair with the (legally of-age) boy next door (Ryan Guzman), only to find her on the receiving end of brutal harassment and some profane graffiti (among other things). This is a movie that is so bad that it eclipse its own awfulness and becomes kind of good again. If I had seen it on opening night, in a packed theater full of screaming, susceptible fans, then I probably would have had the time of my life with it. Instead, I was in a stuffy midtown screening room and while there were certainly jolts of approval from the everyday folks the studio sneaked in, it was hard not to snicker in derision every chance we could.

    If you’re not going to see “Boy Next Door,” or maybe if you already have but want to relive the more painfully WTF-worthy moments from the movie, please follow along.

    SPOILERS, obviously, abound.

    1. The First Ten Minutes
    The first ten minutes of “The Boy Next Door,” overseen by schlocky action filmmaker Rob Cohen (“Dragonheart,” the first “Fast and the Furious,” “XXX”) are so deliriously inept that a colleague leaned over and said, “Is this the actual movie?” It’s an absolute nightmare, full of weird voice over and jarring cuts to either a flashback or a sexual what-if (a la “Eyes Wide Shut”) or maybe both. However you slice it, the opening of this movie certainly sets a precedent for the rest of the movie – the precedent being that this is going to be really awful.

    2. Jennifer Lopez Is the Most Tube-Top-Wearingest High School Teacher Ever
    The movie sets Jennifer Lopez up as this major hard-ass, at least when it comes to her high school literature class. But she also wears an insane amount of tube tops for such a supposedly dowdy profession. (I’m not advocating for stuffy stereotypes to be rigidly reinforced but it just seems at odds with her character, who seems buttoned down and somewhat straight-laced.) This is a character who supposedly threw her husband out for having an affair with a coworker, but allows the camera to linger on her bare thigh as she stares, longingly, out her window. Heterosexual males in the audience will not complain about such leeriness; those who are looking for characters that actually make sense might be displeased.

    3. There’s This Weird Thing With Chocolate Chip Cookies
    At one point Lopez’s you-go-girl best friend and vice principle (played with annoying alertness by Kristin Chenoweth) makes note that her now-ex John Corbett referred to the woman that he was having an affair with as “tasting like chocolate chip cookies.” I’m not sure how this is physiologically possible or what this even means, really, but they refer to it a few times. And each time I gagged a little.

    4. The ‘First Edition’ of the ‘Iliad’
    At one point the already-pushy boy next door drops by to give Lopez a “first edition” of Homer’s “Iliad,” a book that Lopez will be teaching in class that year. She says, “Boy this sure must have been expensive” and he laughs it off as having found it at a garage sale for $1. But wouldn’t a “first edition” of the “Iliad” come from ancient Greece and virtually priceless (and, you know, not written in English or resembling something that you grabbed from the bargain bin at Barnes & Noble?) Anybody who has read “The Iliad” or graduated from a high school-level literature class must have thought, What?!?

    5. At One Point, a High School Bully Picks on a Kid By Making a Turner Classic Movies Joke
    This is 100% true. And then he references “The Wiz,” which I’m pretty sure would never, ever air on the premium cable channel. Do teenagers these days even watch TV?

    6. ‘Bad Cunnilingus Pun’
    I don’t remember what the pun was, but I wrote this down on my notes, so it must have gotten a WTF-worthy reaction out of me, whatever it was. (It goes without saying that this is the kind of movie that you forget about almost as soon as you leave the theater, or even while watching the movie, especially if you’re thinking about other, better movies that are kind of like it.)

    7. Automobile Brakes for Dummies
    At one point, the boy next door gets particularly evil and tampers with the breaks of John Corbett’s sick ride. He’s out driving with his son (Ian Nelson) and they seem to be cruising for a little while when — all of a sudden! — the brakes go out, leading to a pretty dull little action scene (seriously, this guy directed the first “Fast and Furious”?) but more to the point, makes insanely little sense. Why would the brakes give out then, and not during the rest of the drive? And why would the boy next door, even if he’s outright evil and sleeps in a weird psychosexual dungeon underneath his uncle’s house, keep a file on his computer pertaining to the brakes of that car (and the car of his parents – who were also mysteriously killed!) I mean part of being a creepy evil stalker is covering your tracks. Come on man!

    8. Jennifer Lopez Gets Rid of Evidence Very Quickly
    At one point, “the boy next door” (no, his name isn’t important) rigs Lopez’s printer to endlessly dispense photos of them making love (wait what?) and has also wallpapered her entire room with the same photo. (Yes, he’s so creepy he filmed their banging!) Not only does Lopez get rid of all of the evidence rather quickly, she seems to just leave the crumpled up images in her trashcan, leaving the obvious question: What if one of her students wants to, like, throw something away? Oh well, no matter!

    9. A Girl Is Referred to as ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in School’
    Nelson plays Lopez’s dweeby son, a kid who is afflicted by a mysterious allergy that nearly kills him in every other scene and who looks like he’s several decades from actually hitting puberty. But he refers to a girl that he and the boy next door run into as “the most beautiful girl in school,” which is just painful and seemingly left over from some sub-John Hughes romantic comedy of the mid-’80s. What’s worse is that he refers to her as that again. Oh, and then to show how evil he is, the boy next door has sex with this same girl (she gets completely naked and is supposed to be a high school junior, which is another level of WTF that I don’t even want to get into) while Lopez watches. That dog!

    10. The Entire Climax
    Where to begin… The climax of “The Boy Next Door” is set in a barn, which is a weird place to set a movie otherwise concerned with the darkness dwelling just underneath the surface of suburban genteelness. It also involves, in no particular order: a fire, Kristin Chenoweth getting her throat slit (off-camera, of course, even though the movie is rated R), Corbett getting tied up, and the boy next door getting stabbed in the eye, in graphic detail, by one of the allergy pens the son uses to combat his mysterious illness. There is so much happening, while at the same time so little actually being conveyed, that it’s almost profound.

    “The Boy Next Door” is in theaters nationwide.
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  • ‘Mortdecai’ Review: Johnny Depp Is Very Silly Indeed

    The ad campaign for “Mortdecai,” the new Johnny Depp comic caper film, is so befuddling, both opaque and overbearing, that a recent Vulture article spent several hundred words trying to decode what, exactly, the movie was and why the powers that be behind said movie were content with selling the project based on large photos of the very handsome cast (also included: Gwyneth Paltrow, Olivia Munn, Ewan McGregor) sporting cartoonish mustaches. This is a shame, because the movie is an undeniably charming, frothy affair, a zippy, inventive, frequently funny international romp that recalls both the “Pink Panther” and “Austin Powers” franchises, while somehow being considerably stranger than either.

    Depp plays the title character, a kind of bone-headed aristocratic art dealer who trades in stolen antiquities. At the beginning of the movie, he’s trying to screw over some Chinese gangsters, since he’s in deep debt with the British government and his sprawling estate is threatened to go under. He’s got a brutish man servant/personal goon named Jock Strapp (Paul Bettany), who usually comes to his rescue, which in the case of this opening sequence means that he gets punched in the face a bunch of times and set on fire. (This sequence feels purposefully reminiscent of the beginning of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” fitting, perhaps, because “Mortdecai’s” director David Koepp wrote the last adventure, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”)

    When Mortdecai returns to his estate, he greets his wife (Paltrow), who is disgusted by his new mustache. Soon enough he’s embroiled in an even lengthier, more labyrinthine caper, this time involving a stolen Goya painting that is said to have had, during the course of its life, the code to a secret Nazi treasure scribbled on the back of it. This, of course, means that all sorts of nefarious underworld types are after the painting, and that Mortdecai is under the watchful eye of a British investigator (McGregor, in stuffy straight man role), who also happens to be in love with Mortdecai’s wife. Eventually Jeff Goldblum shows up as a scheming America and Munn appears as his sex-crazed daughter.

    There’s an anarchic craziness to “Mortdecai” that you have to appreciate, even if you don’t love it. Depp has been accused of exclusively being interested in dressing up and speaking with the most ridiculous accent imaginable. To a degree, this is a fair assessment, but within these constraints, he’s also pushed things to a deliriously bizarre degree. Just look at last year’s micro-budgeted horror comedy “Tusk,” or indeed his work here, where he sports a roiling oil slick of hair, a Letterman-esque gap in his front teeth, and an accent so effete that you can picture every word that comes out of his mouth accompanied with its own doily. His characters aren’t merely arch buffoons, they’re their own species. Increasingly, Depp isn’t merely performing, he’s creating performance art, and in some pretty mainstream movies at that. (Just re-watch “Dark Shadows” or “The Lone Ranger,” two brilliant, wholly overlooked studio duds. His performances are fearless and terrific but also, you have to wonder, who signed off on this?)

    Maybe the studio thought that “Mortdecai” would be a really-for-real franchise, hence the assumption that unaware audiences would simply go along with a film whose marketing push assumes that all you need is the title and those mustaches. The film was based on a trio of cultish European novels and handful of short stories and Koepp certainly has the franchise pedigree, having written entries in the “Mission: Impossible,” “Men in Black,” “Spider-Man,” and “Jurassic Park” series. But “Mortdecai” marches to the beat of its own drummer, and one that doesn’t exactly align with the tastes of modern audiences.

    There’s a huge debt owed to Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers’s “Pink Panther” series, so much so that the word homage doesn’t seem strong enough (“photocopy” might be too harsh), with enough winks and nods to the James Bond franchise and other espionage tales that it bears more than a passing resemblance to Mike Myers’s “Austin Powers” films. But there’s also something more here, something grander and stranger. The film moves at a breakneck pace, propelled in part by a jazzy score co-authored by “Uptown Funk” hit-maker Mark Ronson, unwilling to linger, for even an extra second, on a gag or location that doesn’t work. Instead, like the character, “Mortdecai” gets in, messes around, and gets out. And there’s a sweetness to the movie’s old-fashioned nature. Sure, there might be numerous dick jokes and a running gag that Jock has sex with every woman he encounters, but Mortdecai is deeply in love with his wife and never strays (well, almost never) — even if she hates his beloved mustache.

    And if it’s one thing “Mortdecai” has in spades, it’s heart. Yes it’s funny and energetic and bold but it is mostly very, very sweet and very, very silly. Depp is a rapscallion for sure, but he’s one who seeks revenge on the man lusting after his wife by attempting to trick him into eating foul cheese. It’s not exactly the toothiest humor, but that’s OK. The real world is harsh enough. “Mortdecai” is a gleeful, globe-spanning comic adventure that is daft and diverting. You might not remember it a week later, but while watching it, it’s hard to not have a really good time.

    Bottom line: Forget the mystifying ad campaign surrounding the film, “Mortdecai” harkens back to films like “The Pink Panther” series (with a dash of “Austin Powers” thrown in). The cast is uniformly terrific (and clearly having the time of their lives) and Depp is an unparalleled goofball. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but nothing in “Mortdecai” is particularly easy.
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  • ‘Blackhat’ Review: A Terrifically Entertaining Cyber Thriller

    Movies about computers or computer hackers have never been particularly exciting, at least on the big screen. Maybe that’s because the act of typing something on a keyboard while little words or hieroglyphics of code appear on the screen in front of you isn’t the most cinematic conceit. There’s not a lot of drama or suspense to be mined from, say, checking your email or engaging in an online chat. No matter how fraught with tension these acts are in real life might seem, they rarely translate to anything even remotely gripping on the big screen. And there is a used car lot full of movies that have attempted to mine thrills from people doing things on a computer and failed miserably (“The Net,” “Hackers,” “Swordfish,” etc.)

    All of this brings us to “Blackhat,” the latest film from Michael Mann, arguably one of American cinema’s most visceral filmmakers. It’s odd that he would choose a subject like cyber crime to sink his teeth into; this is the man who gets a raw thrill out of the ballet of broken glass, broken bones, and the way that people talk to each other, face-to-face. But of the many pleasures of “Blackhat,” a movie that seems to have been instantly dismissed for reasons beyond my understanding, is watching how perfect Mann ends up being for the material. In the hands of a filmmaker less interested in the raw physicality of movies, it would have been a bore. Under Mann, “Blackhat” is positively electric.

    The movie opens with an unknown hacker futzing with a nuclear reactor in China and causing a fairly dangerous meltdown (shades of the similar opening to “Godzilla”). In order to figure out who is responsible and stop similar, even-more-deadly attacks, a joint task force made up of Chinese and American officials spring a super handsome hacker named Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) from a maximum security prison to join in the investigation. Yes, this is silly, but Mann and his co-screenwriter Morgan Dvais Foehl make it just plausible enough that you never completely step out of the movie and go, “Wait… what?”

    In the interest of full disclosure, Viola Davis co-stars as a member of the task force, and Yorick van Wageningen, the creepy guy who raped Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander in “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is, somewhat predictably, the bad guy. Mann is known for his characterization through physicality, and there’s a moment of shocking earnestness when a character asks Davis who she lost in September 11th. It’s an alarming moment of introspection and one of the movie’s most touching scenes.

    Part of what makes “Blackhat” such an effective cyber thriller (the best, probably, since Phil Alden Robinson’s criminally underrated “Sneakers”) is that he always favors something immediate and tactile, stuff like shootouts and fist fights and stakeouts. Hemsworth is an unconvincing nerd, but he makes a passing comment about how he had to keep both his mind and his body sharp in prison, and, again, it makes just enough sense in this skewered world. And Mann occasionally goes out of his way to remind us that he’s still a dweeb at heart; while suiting up to face down the big villain at the end, he makes impromptu armor out of old magazines. (In another scene he fretfully works on a computer, his shirt hanging open to reveal his chiseled chest.)

    Some of the suspense set pieces, including a super-intense shoot-out and the climax, set at some kind of ceremonial procession, are truly top notch Michael Mann. Like shootout-at-the-end-of-“Heat” good. In the last few movies Mann has favored a more crunchy, low-res form of digital photography; lots of extreme close ups and hand-held camerawork. Here he returns to his more cinematic roots, when he was known as one of Hollywood’s chief stylists, offering a compelling combination of the kind of fluidity of earlier movies, with that immediate, no-frills approach that he brought to projects like “Public Enemies” and “Collateral.”

    All that said, it will be easy for people to pick apart “Blackhat.” Everything from the plot mechanics, including the somewhat byzantine nature of the attacks (there’s a bit about the criminal using the stock market to raise the price of soy futures that soared almost completely over my head), to the relationships between characters to Hemsworth’s dicey American accent will, undoubtedly, all come under fire. But none of this dilutes the pure, raw excitement of “Blackhat.” It’s a movie about computers where keystrokes are just as important and full of tension as bullet hits, and where a new era of crime is mapped out in front of you, comprised totally of ones and zeroes. Exhilarating and powerful, “Blackhat” is the first thriller in the computer age to actually thrill. And, under Mann’s watchful, artful eye, it does so spectacularly.

    Bottom line: “Blackhat” is a superb cyber thriller starring an incredibly handsome Chris Hemsworth (without his trademark hammer, although at one point he wields an axe pretty well), full of giant set pieces, international scope, and some sequences that will have you gripping the theater arm rest (or your partner’s forearm). Yes, it’s ostensibly about computer hacking, but director Michael Mann makes it a terrifically entertaining real-world exercise in large-scale suspense.

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  • ‘Taken 3’ Review: Only Liam Neeson Die-Hards Need Apply

    liam neeson in taken 3When “Taken” was first released, nobody thought that it would lead to anything, much less an insanely lucrative franchise. It was a modestly budgeted thriller ($25 million) that was first released overseas, in France, where its core creative team was from and where the film was mostly set. It starred Liam Neeson, who at the time was not much of a box office draw, and had a grippingly simplistic story, the kind of stuff compulsively readable paperbacks novels are made of. But then it came out and connected with people in a big way, making more then $225 million and leading to a sequel that made even more. In an era when studios are trying to artificially manufacture franchises and entire universes, “Taken” came out of nowhere and lasted much longer than anyone could have guessed.

    But just because something is a franchise, doesn’t mean that it necessarily should be one. This weekend’s “Taken 3” makes this lesson explicitly clear.

    In “Taken 3” nobody is taken (this was a stipulation Neeson made); instead the genre is refashioned as a “wrong man” thriller, with Neeson’s Bryan Mills on the run from both the police (led by a goateed Forest Whitaker) and assorted Eastern European thugs (they have bad accents, worse haircuts, and prison tattoos), after his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) turns up murdered. Those “particular set of skills” that Neeson famously remarked upon in the first movie are this time utilized to get him out of a number of sticky situations, all while trying to clear his name and bring down the actual killers.

    And honestly, as a premise, especially for a franchise as threadbare as “Taken,” this could have been pretty fun. These kinds of movies, whether their Alfred Hitchcock classics or something like Harrison Ford‘s “The Fugitive,” offer a very specific thrill, since as a law abiding citizen it’s uncomfortably easy to place yourself in the shoes of someone who was accused of something they had nothing to do with. The catharsis, of course, comes from the accused overcoming the odds and actually finding a certain level of justice and understanding.

    The problem is that the movie is limply directed, once again by “Taken 2” auteur Olivier Megaton, so nothing seems to matter. You would think that the stakes couldn’t be higher, although everything is photographed with the wistful negligence and technical expertise of a daytime soap opera or a commercial for laundry detergent. The propulsive drive of this kind of story simply isn’t there; everything feels slack and lazy.

    Most of this isn’t the fault of the performers. Neeson is, yet again, the epitome of composed cool and fierce determination; he’s a hulking physical presence but never brutish, his eyes glitter with fiery intelligence and every movement suggests tightly coiled, barely contained rage. When a police officer mutters that, “This is going to end badly for you,” Neeson blinks and says (in that beautifully gravelly delivery), “Don’t be such a pessimist.” Yes Liam Neeson yes.

    It’s just that the script, co-written by series overseer Luc Besson and his writing partner Robert Mark Kamen, gives Neeson (and Whitaker and sweaty series newcomer Dougray Scott, who delivers every line in a weirdly timed, Christopher Walken-esque cadence) precious little to do. Frantic action sequences pop up every once in a while, but Megaton shoots them with little regard for spatial relationships or more generalized geography. So people run into other people and cars crash into other cars, but you can’t tell exactly who is running or crashing into who.. The actors try desperately to add some weight to these sequences, but they’re so joyless and confusing that they barely register as complete scenes. Instead they’re just a series of images that flit by without narrative importance or emotional resonance. (The less said about a clumsy, out-of-left-field subplot involving the unplanned pregnancy of Neeson’s college-aged daughter, played by 31-year-old actress Maggie Grace, the better.)

    Honestly, it didn’t have to be this way. Besson is certainly capable of turning trashy material into world-class entertainment (as with last year’s wonderful “Lucy”) and Neeson continues to be one of the most compelling action heroes we’ve seen on screen in years, particularly in his team-ups with filmmakers like Joe Carnahan and Jaume Collet-Serra. But any chance of a celebratory send-off to the “Taken” series (if this is, indeed, that, since the conclusion certainly leaves room for a fourth film down the line) is dashed by “Taken 3’s” utterly lackluster execution.

    “Taken” was never envisioned as a franchise and this third film makes it very apparent why. Even a cracking good story, repeated too many times, robs it of its power, even if that story is growled at you by Liam Neeson.

    Bottom line: Only Neeson die-hards need apply. This doesn’t do a satisfactory job of wrapping up the franchise or providing much entertainment value at all. Instead, download Neeson’s recent, brilliant, wholly overlooked detective movie “A Walk Among the Tombstones.”
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  • The 79 Most Anticipated Movies of 2015

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    2015 is going to be huge, both in the sense that there are a ton of movies coming out and the fact that most of the movies coming out are explosive studio tent poles that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and come loaded with a 777’s worth of big time movie stars. Just look at our list of movies — it’s nearly doubled from last year, and crammed with superheroes, sentient robots, rampaging dinosaurs, and everything in between.

    A few notes about our rundown: firstly, there will be tons of movies that make their debuts at festivals throughout the year and manage to capture something that propels them into the zeitgeist (as if anyone even know what “Whiplash” was at this point last year), so it’s good to keep that in mind. There are also a bunch of movies that we are ridiculously excited about that we didn’t include on the list simply because they didn’t have a release date (like Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cubs,” Todd Haynes‘s “Carol,” and Richard Linklater‘s “That’s What I’m Talking About”) and others that didn’t even have titles (please Cameron Crowe, just title your new movie “Deep Tiki” and let’s move on with our lives). Sometimes you actually need information to write about it, even speculatively.

    So, with all of that in mind, please take a look at the year ahead, and the nearly 80 movies that you’ll probably be in the mood to see. As always, you know where to look for movie times, interviews, reviews, and behind-the-scenes action. That’s right, Moviefone.
    most anticipated movies of 2015