SASQUATCH SUNSET

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B-

I went into Sasquatch Sunset expecting a kind of gross-out comedy that happened to be about Sasquatches. I had heard there was a lot of Sasquatch fucking and shitting. These things do happen in the movie, but, if you can believe it, they are used sparingly—which only heightens the impact when it does happen. What I was not quite prepared for was an ultimately bleak mood piece about extinction. In retrospect, the very title of the film should have been a clue.

There are only four characters in this movie, and none of them speak anything beyond a somewhat organized series of grunts. While watching, I kept thinking of the 1986 film The Clan of the Cave Bear, in which no verbal language is ever spoken. What I forgot about that movie is that they have established a form of sign language, with which the film presents subtitles. Sasquatch Sunset doesn’t even have that; in this movie, we just get the grunts. Beyond that, all communication and emotion is conveyed through a sort of mime by actors in hairy suits.

To say that Sasqutch Sunset isn’t for everyone is an understatement. There were reportedly many walkouts when the film played earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. This is not difficult to believe: I was one of six people in the theater when I went to see this, and a person in the row in front of us did indeed walk out in the midde. She even booked a seat for an AMC screening of Dune Part Two on her phone before getting up and leaving. An excellent choice, to be fair, but still, side note: don’t do that shit. Your phone screen is distracting and annoying—it’s why I know what movie you booked as an alternative, which you should do after leaving the theater.

I really thought Sasquatch Sunset would be funnier. If there’s so much sex and shit, why wouldn’t it be? Well, co-directors David and Nathan Zellner, working with a script by David, have created something akin to a nature documentary—but with mythical creatures as its subjects. They also mark their territory with piss, and in one fairly gross instance we see one vomit after eating too many fermented berries. But the thing is, once I got a recalibrated sense of the meditative tone of this film, I found myself surprisingly engaged by it. In the end, it’s a kind of family tragedy. About Bigfoot. But it takes an unusually “realistic” approach to what Sasquatch might actually behave as feral animals in the forest, particularly as a kind of “missing link” species between great apes and humans.

Speaking of humans, another curious detail of Sasqutch Sunset is that there are none. Inevitably, the Sasquatch characters encounter human civilization, in the form of things like a red X spray painted on a tree trunk, or a campsite. But, they never encounter any human beings. It’s unclear to me whether we are supposed to infer a loss of habitat due to human activity, though we do see them observe smoke from a forest fire in the distance. Several times the Sasquatch characters we’re following smack sticks against trees together in a coordinated pattern, clearly a signal to any other Sasquatch who might hear it. But, these are the only ones we ever see, and —spoiler alert—not even all of these ones make it to the end of the movie. I got to a point where I began to assume they would all be dead by the end of the film, but that’s not exactly how it ends. I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

I’ll definitely give Sasquatch Sunset credit for being absolutely unlike any other movie I have ever seen. I can’t think of a single person I would recommend it to, but I’m not sorry to have seen it. It’s certainly compelling to know that the Sasquatch characters are played, under intricate layers of makeup and prosthetics, by the likes of Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, playing the one female among the group. There is also a juvenile played by Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner himself plays the “alpha.” There is also a baby Sasquatch, performed mostly through what appears to be puppetry, with somewhat mixed results.

There are indeed a few genuinely funny moments, but Sasquatch Sunset plays much more like a meditative drama. And given whose story we are seeing unfold, your mileage may vary. By the time it ended, this Sasquatch story had kind of lost me and then, somehow, brought me back around again. This is a fascinating specimen of experimental cinema, with an unusual blend of absurdity and sincerity. Whether you’ll be into it, even if the premise intrigues you, may very well depend on when you watch and and what mood you’re in. Somehow, in my case, it had a hook that ultimately got me.

They have been to the top and it wasn’t what they were expecting.

Overall: B

ARTHUR THE KING

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I’m just going to level with you right out of the gate: if you love dogs and you like movies about dogs, regardless of the countless number of them already made, then you are going to love Arthur the King. That’s really all you need to know.

Well, except perhaps that the titular dog does not factor much into the story here, until maybe a third of the way in. That said, this is actually one of several elements that made Arthur the King a better moviegoing experience than I was necessarily expecting—full disclosure, this isn’t usually my kind of movie, but I agreed to see it with a friend precisely because I knew how much she loves dogs. As long as the reviews did not indicate it was terrible, I would go. In the end the reviews are decidedly mixed, and yet I would argue the movie is better than that might seen to suggest.

Based on a true story, this is the tale of a stray dog who bonds with Michael (Mark Wahlberg), well into his final stint captaining an adventure racing team through The Dominican Republic in 2018. The man Michael is based on is Swedish athlete Mikael Lindnord, but for the purposes of this film they made the protagonist an American. I guess Wahlberg isn’t exactly known for his accent work. Still, they pretty effectively diversified the rest of Michael’s four-person racing team: Simu Liu as Leo, an Instagram-star athlete who posted a viral photo of his and Michael’s failure at the 2015 race; Palestinian actor Ali Suliman as Chik, the team navigator who actually does speak with an accent; and Nathalie Emmanuel as Olivia, an expert climber. In addition to this team, and sporadic appearances by other team competitors, the narrative occasionally cuts back to Juliet Rylance as Helen, Michael’s wife back home in Colorado, showing their little girl his racing progress online.

Maybe just slightly less often, the narrative cuts back to the dog who will be later named Arthur, struggling as a stray on the streets of Santo Domingo. Michael and his team are resting at one of the race’s transfer points when Michael notices the dog, sitting quietly a few feet away. Michael feeds him one of the meatballs from a meal pack, and they move on. The story of the race moves on as well, and the dog catches up with them again 3 days and 200 miles later. From then on, Arthur the King becomes the movie about an adventure racing team and the dog who basically invited himself to become their fifth member.

Naturally we wonder how much of what happened in this movie actually happened in real life, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Only occasionally do director Simon Cellan Jones and adapting writer Michael Brandt (based on Mikael Lindnord’s book, Arthur - The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home) into obvious Hollywood-movie territory, amping up the herorics or the plight of that dog we can’t help but root for.

But here’s where Arthur the King actually won me over: the production values are much higher than we usually get with a movie like this. There’s a great sequence, before Arthur even becomes a significant part of the narrative, with the team crossing a ravine on a zipline with bikes hung off their backs, and one of them gets stuck in the middle. The sequence is exceptionally well shot, offering just the right amount of suspense, and is a big part of giving us reason to be invested in all the human characters as opposed to just the dog. Wahlberg, for his part, gives a pretty basic, serviceable performance, and the actors around him—including the dog—help elevate how they play as a group.

It would seem that “adventure racing” involves many different types of racing activity, from hiking to cycling to kayaking, and between how well the diverse terrain they’re crossing is shot, and how well the parallel narratives of the racers and the dog are edited, until their stories become one, Arthur the King actually works out to a pretty solid entertainment.

You’ll be on the edge of your seat, you’ll cry, you’ll be emotionally manipulated and you’ll love it.

Overall: B+

THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

Watching The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, eleven years after the first film in the Hunger Games franchise and eight years after the last one, is a little like getting offered one more drink while you’re barely buzzed at a party that’s not very exciting. Okay, sure, why not. I’ll have another.

In the moment, this film is engaging enough, with several charismatic performers. Tom Blyth charms in bleached blond hair as young Coriolanus Snow, assigned as “mentor” to one of the District 12 tributes, a stunning songstress (hence the film’s subtitle) named Lucy Gray. Rachel Zegler makes the most of the part, particularly with an incredible singing vioce, but Lucy isn’t given a whole lot of agency. She doesn’t ever even use any weapons in the arena.

After three novels and four movies that made Jennifer Lawrence a superstar, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes feels a little regressive. Even as a clear nostalgia play and franchise cash grab, here we are given the early life story of the authoritarian President Snow of the previous films, now with a young man as the hero, saving a helpless little lady. At least Katniss was a badass.

Oh sure, this is presented with characters facing all the expected moral dilemmas, and we already know what eventually happens to Snow, which makes this movie this franchise’s equivalent of the Star Wars prequels. A burning question might still be: did we really need this?

In the original Hunger Games, the games—in which, in case you’re one of the five people in the world who don’t already know, a group of teenagers are thrown into an arena to fight to the death—are in their 74th year. In The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, they are in their 10th year, which takes us back in time 64 years. Cornelius Snow is now supposed to be 18 years old, so I guess he was 82 the last time we saw him. The production design here is vaguely evocative of a society not quite as “perfected” as we saw it became later.

The story is presented in three parts, and the story beats are the only memorably unusual thing about it. This movie is two hours an 37 minutes long, pointlessly the longest film in the franchise. This is an average of 52 minutes per part, and we see the actual Hunger Games in “Part Two”—which end in such a way that the movie itself feels very much like it’s ending. By that point, we are indeed already a standard feature film’s length in. A group of seven very young adults sat in a line of seats two rows ahead of me, clearly big fans of the franchise, regularly raising the three finger salute from the previous films at the screen. And when Part III appeared onscreen, even one of those kids said, out loud, “There’s a whole other part”?

Indeed, Part III feels almost exclusively extraneous, although it is in this part when we finally see Lucy Gray take some real control. To be fair, she is defiant from the start, even belting out a song the very moment she is chosen at the Reaping Ceremony—a scene that would have come across as a lot more stupid if not for Zegler’s beautiful voice. This never makes her any less helpless and dependent on Snow any time she’s in the arena. And by the time this movie all but declares Lucy’s ultimate fate a total mystery, it’s too late for it to matter much.

If anything makes The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes watchable, it’s the cast. This includes Jason Schwartzman, amusingly smarmy as the Hunger Games’s first televised host; Peter Dinklage as the slightly drunken Dean of the Academy; Viola Davis as the deliciously nefarious head gamemaker; and even Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer as Coriolanus’s cousin. (The casting of a trans actor in a part never identified as such is maybe the one truly progressive part of this production, and it was really great to see her here.)

In other words, due in no small part to the performances, I found myself entertained by this, the fifth film in the Hunger Games franchise. I’m tempted to say I enjoyed even more than The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, but that may be just because this time it’s been so long since I’ve seen one of these movies. The truth is, it’s more of the same but with different characters and actors. Which is . . . fine. Like that last drink you didn’t need but won’t hurt.

Try watching through rose colored glasses.

Overall: B-

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Animation: B

How many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies have there been now, anyway? Seven, apparently—the first one having been released thirty-three years ago. The film franchise has reached the age Jesus did! I suppose one could make the argument that it’s time for a similar self-sacrifice for the greater good, except that Mutant Mayhem is actually kind of fun.

This is what I keep wondering, though: how many actual teenagers really care? In this new film, which really qualifies as a third reboot of the franchise, a pointed plot point is the fact that our four mutant turtles are fifteen years old. When these versions of the turtle-kids were born, the film franchise was already eighteen years old, and old enough to have been rebooted the first time.

This is an intellectual property based on an original comic book that was first published in 1984. As in, the characters themselves are one year shy of forty years old. I suppose I could be off base here, but I can’t imagine many actual fifteen-year-olds having much in the way of passionate interest in this. Instead, new iterations of this franchise have been trading on nostalgia for it for the past two decades.

Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script and co-produced, is 41 years old, making him pretty squarely in the target demographic at this point. This is a fun movie for him and people like him. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think this movie is going to take the youth by storm. It may have been one of many “bonkers-cool” concepts from our childhood, but time is a weird thing, which can turn even the weirdest things into something quaint.

On the other hand, maybe Mutant Mayhem isn’t made for a youth audience. The PG rating is pretty tame, but I found certain elements of it surprisingly dark at times. It actually kind of feels made for the middle-aged fans who have been waiting for a halfway decent film treatment after countless examples of mediocrity, and in that sense, it succeeds.

Not that it’s great. It’s better than mediocre, but not a whole lot better than good. As we watch these teenage mutant ninja turtles pining for a place in the human world outside of the sewer home in which a mutant rat (voiced by Jackie Chan) raised them, we do get a few good laughs out of a sprinkling of cleverly effective gross-out humor.

I suppose I should admit: I think I once saw the original film, in 1990. I would have been fourteen years old. I know I haven’t seen a single one of the other films. I don’t have a whole lot to compare to with authority, at least not that plenty of longtime fans will be apt to compare. The entire premise is, admittedly, pretty stupid. Amazingly, Mutant Mayhem is only the second of the seven films to be animated, and animation is a far better fit for something so over-the-top dumb.

Rogen costars as a mutant rhinoceros goon. He and his co-producers and co-directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears (respectively a writer and artist on The Mitchells vs the Machines) sure managed to get a lot of big names for the rest of the voice cast: Maya Rudolph as mad scientist Cynthia Utrom; John Cena as fellow mutant rhino Rocksteady; Rose Byrne as mutant crocodile Leatherhead; Giancarlo Esposito as the mutants’ scientists father; Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko; Hannibal Buress as Ginghis Frog; and Ice Cube as the villainous literal Superfly.

When it come to the animation style of this film, I have to say, I’m ambivalent. There’s something deliberately messy about it, falling just this side of scribbles, giving everything an off-kilter look. An unsettling number of human characters have their faces drawn with such mismatched and misshapen eyes they consistently made me think of Sloth from The Goonies (another reference most teenagers won’t give a shit about).

As you may have gathered, I’ve had to get past kind of a lot in order to enjoy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. But you know what? I did. Taking myself to see this movie on an early Monday evening—with several other exclusively middle-aged audience members—was not a waste of time. Do I think I would have missed much had I not gone? I suppose not. But it was a fun excursion nonetheless. Even that characterization makes it far better than anyone would reasonably expect the seventh film in an aging lower-tier franchise to be.

Did I mention The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri is also in this? Oh, and the turtles: Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon. They’re all fine.

Overall: B

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

The longer you trade on nostalgia, the more you’ll get diminishing returns, because, frankly . . . people die. How many people are even still around to keep loving Indiana Jones from their introduction to him in Raiders of the Lost Ark? That movie was released 42 years ago. It spawned two sequels by the time the eighties ended, and for basically a generation afterward, we all moved about our lives thinking Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was indeed his last.

Then came Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, released 19 years later, and 15 years ago. Harrison Ford was basically regarded as an old man even then, and in 2008 he was 66 years old.

He’s 80 now. And, lest you think I am a year off in my math: he’ll be 81 on July 13. Principal photography occurred on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny from June 2021 to February 2022, during which time Ford had his 79th birthday.

So how did he do? Honestly, just as was the case in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, surprisingly well. The man still has charm to spare, keeps incredibly fit, and actually feels like he’s doing this for the love of the character as opposed to just for a paycheck (surely he got a nice paycheck, but it’s not like he really needed it). This film, the fifth installment in the franchise, is the first that is neither directed by Steven Spielberg nor written by George Lucas, although both are credited as Executive Producers; it’s directed by James Mangold (Logan; Ford v. Ferrari) and written by a team of four writers, including Mangold himself, and David Koepp, who co-wrote Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

And here’s the thing about Dial of Destiny. It actually captures the spirit of Indiana Jones in a way Crystal Skull kind of didn’t. But, at two hours and 34 minutes, it’s by a fair margin the longest film in the franchise (previously it was Last Crusade, at two hours and seven minutes), and it really didn’t need to be; it sags a bit as a result. Some tighter editing, and I might have been a lot quicker to say this is a better movie than Crystal Skull, which actually holds up better than expected upon rewatch. But then, a lot of movies do: a second run-through cannot disappoint. For all I know, I might watch Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in another fifteen years—when Harrison Ford may well be dead—and decide it’s actually better than I remember it.

There are really fun sequences in this movie, mind you—especially, a bit surprisingly, the lengthy opening sequence, a flashback set at the end of World War II, in which Harrison Ford is de-aged uncannily well. (Presumably, however, the more advanced that technology becomes, the more dated even this digital work, which is the best I have ever seen, will appear.) There is still some dissonance, just as there had been with the pointless de-aging done in The Irishman (2019): Harrison Ford’s old body may actually move a lot more limberly than Robert DeNiro’s old body did under digital alterations, but there remains the issue of his voice. Harrison Ford’s younger, handsome face is kind of amazing in this movie, but then he opens his mouth and still sounds like a grizzled old man.

There’s far more visual effects work in Dial of Destiny than in any previous Indiana Jones film, and although it’s far from the best I have ever seen, it is serviceable and generally serves the story. It is best used in the dark of night in that opening sequence, set largely on a speeding train. That said, there is a moment in a wide shot of Indy running across the tops of train cars, and when he jumps from one to the other, he just looks like a video game character.

In spite of all that, Dial of Destiny has its characters to recommend it. Fifteen years after Crystal Skull not-so-subtly suggested Shia LaBeouf might have Indy’s iconic hat passed on to him, LaBeouf has been given the boot, his character now dead after enlisting in the Vietnam War. He gets one brief, somber mention here, and is otherwise quite effectively replaced by the fantastic Phoebe Waller-Bridge as his goddaughter, her late father being played in flashback by the great Toby Jones. Waller-Bridge brings a delightfully welcome and slightly different vibe to the proceedings, and has great chemistry with Ford.

Perhaps most notable is Mads Mikkelsen, who, in spite of arguably being typecast as the villain, still makes for the most memorable and effective villain in any Indiana Jones movie since Raiders of the Lost Ark. This movie once again dips into the well-tapped well of Nazis, both in its flashback and in its “present-day” setting of 1969, with still-living Nazis making their best effort to recapture what they’ve lost. Mikkelson’s Dr. Voller is doing it by racing to find the remnants of the titular dial, believed to make time travel possible.

Every Indiana Jones movie gets wildly supernatural by the time its climactic sequence is reached, and Dial of Destiny is no exception. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say that, after five of these movies, I felt little emotional investment in it. It’s much more fun just spending time with these characters again (including the return of now-79-year-old John Rhys-Davies as Sallah), their significantly advanced age notwithstanding, and the extended, silly action sequences no less exciting for how standard they have become.

It may not seem like high praise to say that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny could have been a lot worse, and thus the final product as another installment of all the same fun you’re used to is somewhat of a relief. The truth is, the movie works far better than one might expect after such unprecedented and notable turnover of filmmakers. (James Mangold is actually better at capturing the Spielberg sensibility than J.J. Abrams.) If it just had some tighter editing, I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about the experience.

If nothing else, the closing scene is worth the wait. It’s very sweet and touches that nostalgic nerve in just the right way, with a subtle callback to Raiders, bringing the series full circle. It strikes the perfect note for signing off on a beloved, four-decade-old franchise, leaving us with a lasting, warm memory.

Harrison Ford is Waller-Bridging generations.

Overall: B

DC LEAGUE OF SUPER PETS

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+
Animation: B

I suppose if you take your children, or your niece or your nephew, to see DC League of Super Pets, they will be suitably entertained, and you won’t hate the experience.

That’s about as close as I can get to heaping praise on this movie, which, even as an animated feature, embodies every cliché of comic book superhero movies developed over the past twenty years. It sticks to the formula, following the same story beats as nearly all of the rest of them, with a big, effects-laden climactic battle at the end, the fate of the world (or the city, or the galaxy, or the universe, take your pick) hanging in the balance. It has a few clever one-liners, most of which got burned through in the trailer. It wants you to think it has a sense of humor about itself, with self-referential meta humor, except that it’s all been done before ad nauseam, and ultimately it’s just another in a long line of cash grabs.

And League of Super Pets is very much in the “DC Cinematic Uniiverse,” the opening titles preceded by the glimpses of all the DC heroes in a graphic presentation long known to be part of their attempt at replicating Marvel’s runaway success. This movie doesn’t just feature Superman and his super dog, Krypto, but it features every quasi-human superhero member of the Justice League as a diversified ensemble supporting cast—each of them positioned to wind up with one of the “League of Super Pets” as their own pet.

To be fair, I did kind of enjoy this movie, for a while. Some of the humor, and a few of the animal-based puns (love Krypto’s dad, “Dog-El”), actually land. But, the shtick outlasts its welcome, and you feel all the exact same pieces of the “superhero story” clicking right into place. The truth is, DC League of Super Pets is just another superhero movie, just like countless others that came before it. Grafting the tropes onto domesticated animals doesn’t make it any more original.

If anything makes this movie watchable, it’s the voice talent, which is abundant: Dwayne Johnson as Krypto; Kevin Hart as Ace, the invulnerable dog; Vanessa Bayer as PB, the pig who can change her size; Diego Luna as Chip, the electrified squirrel; Natasha Lyonne as Merton, the speedy turtle; Kate McKinnon as Lulu, the villainous guinea pig; John Krasinski as Superman; Keanu Reeves as Batman; Marc Maron as Lex Luthor, of all people—his second major voice role in an animated feature this year (The Bad Guys isn’t exactly a classic either, but it’s a better movie)—and there are plenty more, in many cases recognizable voices in cameo parts. Every person voicing characters in this movie is clearly having a great time, and that alone makes it more fun to watch.

It’s still pretty forgettable once it’s over. DC League of Super Pets is fun while it lasts, but there’s nothing special about it. It’s just another movie that is almost literally paint-by-numbers and will disappear into the outer rims of the zeitgeist once opening weekend has passed.

Maybe if they’re cut enough you’ll be distracted from how stale it gets.

Overall: C+

CHIP 'N DALE: RESCUE RANGERS

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Animation: B

I went back and forth as to whether I would even review this movie, my reaction to it was so . . . lackluster. I daresay I was disappointed, but that’s not entirely the movie’s fault: I let people whose opinions I respect convince me to expect something far better than it was.

The common comparison is to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the groundbreaking film blending live action and animation in 1988, now a marvel also because of its unique blend of both Warner Brothers and Disney cartoon properties. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is also packed with cultural references, not all of them Disney—but I didn’t notice any Warner Brothers cartoons.

I even heard someone call this movie a new “classic,” and that was really what finally cinched my decision to fire up Disney+ and watch it. A “classic,” this movie is not. If you want to see what a classic really is, just watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, right there on that same streamer. It’s a far, far superior film. Not only that, but it’s a period piece and it holds up: that film could have been released today and it still would have impressed.

Plus, it’s packed with both verbal and visual gags that are far quicker and far smarter than the ones peppered in Chip ‘n Dale. To be fair, the original Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers TV show that ran on the Disney Channel from 1989 to 1990 was not something I ever saw, and nostalgic fans of the show will likely delight in this film and how it trades on that nostalgia. I can understand that much, and appreciate the conceit in this film, in which the characters are the chipmunk actors who played Chip ‘n Dale in the TV show over thirty years ago, and are now a bit washed up. Chip (John Mulaney) works as an insurance agent (“Coercive Insurance” being one of my favorite subtle gags). Dale (Andy Samberg) is attending fan conventions to sign autographs—something that provides ample opportunity for the presence of many other kids’ programming character cameos.

Their friend and former coworker Monterey Jack (Eric Bana) finds himself kidnapped by a shady organization that alters cartoon characters for the purpose of overseas bootlegging, itself a running gag that runs kind of stale, and thus the estranged Chip and Dale reteam in order to attempt a real-life rescue.

It should be noted that the Chip and Dale characters speak with regular voices, not the high-pitched, sped-up voices of their “characters.” This film is filled with meta jokes about “making it” in Hollywood (or not), as well as the seedy side, and has some surprisingly adult jokes that little kids won’t understand: “Now he can’t have kids.” There’s a fun sequence on “Main Street” in which we discover the seedy underbelly of Hollywood toons, who push things like cheese as though they are drugs (Monterey Jack has a problem).

My main criticism is that not all of the gags land, and sometimes there is too much time spent between the gags for things like exposition or character development. I’m sorry to keep coming back to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but that film expertly blended all of those things with its clever humor, and often Chip ‘n Dale goes for easy rather than clever humor. Admittedly, it did get me to laugh out loud a few times.

The overall sense I got from Rescue Rangers, however, was one of a “direct to streamer” movie—and I mean of the sort that was typical before the pandemic. We now can get true quality films direct from streamers, but what Chip ‘n Dale is, is . . . fine. I can’t muster enough enthusiasm to think of it as something to get excited about, and that’s what disappoints me. I had hoped that, at the very least, I could tell people you don’t have to be familiar with the original Disney Channel show for this movie to come highly recommended. Instead, I think perhaps you do need to have seen the show. I have no connection to it, so, in spite of this movie’s many pop culture references, it just didn’t land the way I wanted it to.

At the very least, I will compliment the voice work: John Mulaney and Andy Samberg are great; as are the vast supporting cast of characters, including J.K. Simmons as the police “Captain Putty”; Will Arnett as “Sweet Pete,” an overweight, grown-up Peter Pan; and even Flula Borg as “DJ Herzogenaurach.” We also get Dennis Haysbert as Zipper; Seth Rogen as several characters; and Tim Robinson as “Ugly Sonic,” playing on a notorious internet controversy that no one knows about, and I am unconvinced will be as hilarious as intended for those who do.

Basically, Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is entertaining enough, for something to watch at home with the family. It just fell short of what I wanted or expected.

Did I mention that Dale got “CGI” surgery? Hilarious!

Overall: B-

DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIIVERSE OF MADNESS

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+
Special Effects: B

There are people genuinely convinced that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a truly great film, and that makes me despair of humanity. Not because this movie is particularly bad, but because audiences are so conditioned by the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” that they can no longer distinguish between that which is quality cinema, and that which is average.

The thing is, this movie isn’t even all that great by MCU standards. I largely gave up on superhero movies over a decade ago, actively avoiding then for several years—because they were nearly all just like this one: rushing through expositional interludes between overly busy action sequences drenched in CGI that looked dated within a year, all in the service of the same story beats as the last film just like it, over and over again. But, over the past five or ten years, Marvel found better directors and better writers, and slowly but surely began to offer movies more worthy of regaining attention. This movie feels like a throwback to that earlier time.

The greatest disappointment about that is the fact that it was directed by the legendary Sam Raimi, of Army of Darkness (1992) fame, who directed the original Tobey MaGuire Spider-Man in 2002, and who has not directed a feature film in nine years (there’s nothing better to say about the equally mediocre Oz the Great and Powerful). It’s true that Multiverse of Madness gets better in its second half, and eventually it even gets genuinely weird, with quasi-horror elements that are only novel by MCU standards, but are still presented with recognizable Raimi flair. Alas, it doesn’t get sufficiently weird until at least three quarters of the way through, at which point it’s really too little, too late.

Multiverse of Madness comes up short by every measure. Even compared to other MCU movies, it’s not nearly as much quirky fun as Thor: Ragnarok (2017); it certainly has nothing of anywhere near as much substance to say as Black Panther (2018); it’s not even as interesting as the original Doctor Strange (2016). What it does do is rehash every concept imaginable, most of all the idea of a “multiverse,” something introduced brilliantly in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, arguably the best year for Marvel) but which has already been revisited in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), a live action film that was better than anyone could have expected. But, here we are again, with fully expected diminishing returns.

And this Doctor Strange sequel is not helped at all by its very direct narrative ties to the Disney+ series WandaVision. I won’t say anyone who hasn’t seen the show will be lost in the plot here, but they’d certainly understand it a lot more having seen it. And what good does that do the movie itself? This is the twenty-eighth movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, all presented by a studio that increasingly expects its audiences not only to have seen but have remembered them all, plus increasing numbers of TV series. There comes a point when it’s just all too much, and that point arguably came and went a decade ago.

Elizabeth Olsen does a fairly impressive job as the villain, the Scarlet Witch, but it’s not as easy to recognize without having seen WandaVisison, which was itself, frankly, a bit overrated. Such is the case with a great majority of MCU films, with occasionally notable exceptions. Benedict Cumberbatch as the title character is . . . fine. The same could be said of the entire cast, none of who are given any room to breathe their performances in the overstuffed plot. This movie is 126 minutes long, almost “short” compared to many MCU movies, and too much is happening too quickly, whether it’s CGI spectacle action sequences or the rare quiet conversations between characters.

It just feels like a wildly missed opportunity, like a movie dictated by committee (it having only one writer notwithstanding; it should also be noted that this is Michael Waldron’s first feature film script), beholden to a multitude of strictures as part of the broader cinematic universe. That very much limits a filmmaker’s ability to put their own stamp on it—Chloé Zhao’s Eternals (2021) suffered from the same problem. If the studio could have loosened their evident grip, the uniquely dark and macabre Sam Raimi style could have permeated more than just the final quarter of the movie. With that alone, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would have been much improved.

To be fair, this particular movie was never going to be a masterpiece, no matter who wrote or directed it. It still had massively unrealized potential, and instead stuck with well-worn storytelling tropes that renders it the same shit in a different movie. I’d probably have enjoyed this exact same movie more had it been released seven or eight years ago, but time is not always kind to a decades-old franchise (consider what a challenge it has been for ages for anyone to make a truly great James Bond movie). Now, we’ve spent far too much time, year after year, with rushed storytelling wrapped in subpar special effects. Too few of these movies get any finessing, and are instead churned out as from an assembly line, all using a well worn template. Even well worn templates are tolerable if they can be given a novel enough spin, but Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is convinced it’s taking a huge swing without realizing it’s stepping up to bat when the game is already nearly over.

I’d tell you more about the plot but it was so forgettable I forgot it.

Overall: C+

THE ADAM PROJECT

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: C

Watching a Ryan Reynolds action comedy is like the cinematic equivalent of eating an off-brand Hostess cupcake: clearly inferior, but tasty enough in the absence of something better. This is a pretty consistent element of Reynolds’s career, although the quasi-novel thing about The Adam Project is the inspired casting of 11-year-old Walker Scobell as Reynolds’s scrawny, 12-year-old self. This is Scobell’s first acting role, and he nails the signature Reynolds snark, just a preteen version of it.

Indeed, The Adam Project would not have been nearly as fun as it is—and it’s arguably more fun than it deserves to be—of not for the many funny quips in the dialogue, particularly between Reynolds and Scobell. Conceptually, the script of this movie is utter garbage, but I found it relatively to overlook due to the fairly consistent laughs it got out of me.

It does have a bit of a “straight to video” vibe to it. I realize that’s now an outdated phrase, but people who remember what that meant will get what I mean better than if I just call it “straight to streaming,” which is what this is. The thing is, in the streaming age, even Oscar-worthy fare sometimes gets released on streamers at the same time as their theatrical release. This has occurred with everything from Dune to The Power of the Dog. The Adam Project is nowhere near in the same league as those films, nor does it try or even pretend to be. Still I was surprised to discover it did get its own limited theatical release: it’s actually playing at the Cinemark Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue.

I wonder if it plays better in a theater? Perhaps it does. It doesn’t change the definitively low-rent special effects, or the wildly derivative science fiction concepts. The plot involves time travel, an idea always rife with problems no matter how it’s approached in film. And this script, with four credited writers, goes out of its way to make its characters discuss the dangers of breaking “the rules” of time travel, then they openly break them all.

So much for meeting yourself in the past being any kind of problem. Reynolds and Scobell both play the same character, Adam, with older Adam (42, apparently) crash-landing his plane from 2050 in the woods around his childhood home in 2022. When younger Adam meets the older one, there’s about five seconds of shock, and then in practically an instant they’re both just cool with being around each other, knowing who each other is, and getting on with the task of moving the plot forward.

Here’s a curiously convenient plot point: another time jump occurs, when both Adams take the plane back to 2018. (The plane is configured to his DNA signature but won’t let him fly when he’s injured; thus, he needs young Adam’s fingerprints.) This four year gap allows The Adam Project to have its Covid cake and eat it too: it can completely ignore the pandemic without presenting an alternate universe in which it never existed. For now, anyway: the way things are going right now, in March 2022, the maskless 2022 we see in the movie feels plausible. We’ll see how things are going in another six months.

When the time jumps back to 2018, Adam’s father comes into the picture, played by Mark Ruffalo. We see Adam’s mother, played by Jennifer Garner, in both 2022 and 2018. We get a brief glimpse of 8-year-old Adam in 2018 but only long enough to see him playing video games; this movie is evidently not all that interested in Adam at that age. Further convoluting things is Catherine Keener as the villain, Maya Sorian, whose future self has gone back in time to tell her younger self, Biff-in-Back-to-the-Future-style, how to become rich and then harness time travel technology and somehow wind up controlling it all in a deeply dystopian future that is only ever referred to vaguely. “We’ve seen The Terminator, right?” older Adam says to his younger self. “That’s 2050 on a good day.” With the exception of an opening sequence of his plane in space above Earth before the first time jump, that’s all the insight we get about that future.

Speaking of Back to the Future, The Adam Project is rife with references to it. There are also clear visual homages to the fern-covered forest floor seen in E.T.; the obligatory direct references to Star Wars; and clear influences from The Matrix. There really isn’t a single even remotely original idea in this movie. I still feel compelled to give the script credit because of its consistently funny and clever dialogue, which is always just entertaining enough.

There’s also a casual charm to the chemistry between Reynolds and Scobell, if not so much between Reynolds and Zoe Saldana, who plays his wife in a thanklessly small part. It’s also notable that Catherine Keener is usually excellent, at least when cast well, but she feels bizarrely shoehorned into this movie, and to say she’s phoning it in is putting it mildly. In other words, the performances are kind of all over the place, which means they even out to being just a bit better than fine.

I’m trying to imagine someone with genuine scientific knowledge trying to swallow this movie. They’d have to be exceptionally skilled at turning their brain off. I’m no scientist myself, but I’d like to bran a little that I can be quite good at turning my brain off. With a movie like this, it’s more important to relax into the mindless entertainment it is than to pick it apart pointlessly. If you want 2001: A Space Odyssey, go watch that movie. To The Adam Project’s credit, it knows what it is and makes no claims or promises otherwise. Which is to say, it’s a cut-rate action comedy released to a streamer that will fade into the algorithmic ether within a week or two. But for now, it’ll do.

Strap in … to your couch. With a blanket maybe.

Overall: B-

TURNING RED

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: A
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Animation: B

Turning Red is simultaneously about adolescent friendship and about mother-daughter relationships, and it handles both fantastically. The premise seems simple, in which a 13-year-old discovers she transforms into a giant red panda whenver she gets too emotionally excited, but it winds up being a great allegory for multiple shared experiences at once. There’s the idea of “harnessing your inner beast.” There’s acknowledging your “messy side.” There’s the literalness of the title, when an adolescent goes beet red with embarrassment. There’s even a brief sequence in which it effectively stands in as a symbol for when a girl has her period for the first time: “I’m a gross red monster!” One might thing I’m reaching with that one—except it literally happens when Mei’s mother, not yet understanding the true nature of the situation, is trying to offer her pads.

Things like this are surely why Turning Red is rated PG. It’s also the third Pixar movie to be released directly to Disney+, although it’s arguably the first not to be done out of necessity. That said, after having watched it, this film feels right for an at-home streamer. Perhaps we’ve just been spoiled by 27 years of Pixar Animation’s visual excellence, where in many cases the animation largely made up for somewhat waning story quality. Turning Red flips the script, so to speak, and offers animation that is . . . fine. It’s the story that truly elevates it, and makes for a wonderfully cozy, adorable, funny and moving at-home watch.

This movie happens to be the second Pixar film directed by a woman (the first was Brenda Chapman, though she co-directed Brave in 2012 with two men), the first to be solo directed by a woman, and the first to be directed by a woman of color. Domee Shi, who also co-wrote this delightful script, was born in China but grew up in Toronto, and having written largely based on her own family experience, thus provides the explanation for the film’s Toronto setting. Characters mention the city of Toronto regularly, and there are many establishing shots of the Toronto skyline, always with the CN Tower figuring prominently. I just found myself wishing those shots were rendered with a little more depth and personality; instead, they sometimes feel a little like a cartoon version of old movie matte painting backdrops.

Admittedly, this sort of thing was why it took a few minutes for me to really feel hooked into the story of Turning Red. The visual design of the characters themselves are a little “cartoonier” than normal for Pixar, and for the first several minutes we see the establishment of setting and the introduction of characters, particularly Meilin (voiced by 16-year-old newcomer Rosalie Chang) and her diverse group of three best friends (voiced by Ava Morse, Hyein Park and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). We see them quite pointedly and realistically acting like giddy, sometimes shrill, 13-year-old girls, and for a moment there I wondered if I would be able to tolerate this movie.

But, then we get introduced to Mei’s perfectionist mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), and we understand the central conflict of the story, which is a tension between Mei’s love for her mother and her love for her friends. Domee Shi and her two co-writers, Julia Cho and Sarah Streicher, write about these relationships exceedingly well, never painting anyone involved as inherently malicious. They are just people who make mistakes, who sometimes make misguided decisions in the service of the people they love.

By the time Meilin’s red panda is unleashed, Turning Red takes a quick turn, becoming equal parts entertaining and surprisingly layered, both with thematic meaning and cultural tradition. I love the diversity of both the characters and the voice cast here, not just for its own sake, but more importantly, because it accurately reflects the city in which it’s set: Toronto is one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world, more than half its residents belonging to a visible minority group, and just under half being immigrants born outside the country.

Mei’s family is well established, though, both her and her mother speaking with American accents; only Mei’s grandmother, Wu (voiced by Wai Ching Ho), speaks with a Chinese accent. Cantonese is regularly spoken, particularly when Grandma Wu arrived with reinforcements—both herself and other family members, presumably aunts, who have all at one point participated in a ritual that breaks the family spell of the red panda.

I also love how centered this story is on women and girls. Turning Red is written and directed by a woman, largely based on her childhood experience with several girl friends, and nearly the entire principal cast is girls or women. The most notable male character is Ming’s husband and Mei’s father, Jin (Orion Lee), and even he is written with more dimension than typically found with a part of that size. Which is to say, he doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time, but he is well woven into the fabric of the story.

The focus here, though, is on Mei’s relationship with the girls and the women in her life: her three best friends; her mother; her grandmother. The story even gets into how that mother-daughter relationship is informed by Ming’s relationship with her own mother—an idea relatable to a great many daughters and mothers, regardless of ethnic or cultural background. Were Turning Red made in an earlier cinematic era, most of the story would have revolved around Mei trying to keep her red panda spell a secret. Instead, Mei’s mother, her friends, and most of her classmates learn about it surprisingly early on. What follows is a struggle for Mei to control it, and her mother’s insistence that it needs to be locked away completely. There’s a lot to unpack here in terms of accepting ourselves—and our children—as who they really are, and not so much taming but learning to live with the beast within.

There is a climactic sequence in which an even more giant panda terrorizes a stadium during a boy-band concert, and it’s a little like a red panda version of Godzilla. If that were all it was, I might have rolled my eyes at it. But there is so much depth to this story, even a showy sequence like that works really well. Given Pixar Animation Studio’s increasingly spotty record in recent years, and the somewhat surprising choice to release straight to streaming, Turning Red exceeds expectations on nearly every level . . . except the animation itself. But, as with our relationships with our children and our parents, we can’t always expect perfection.

This is so embarrassing!

Overall: B+