Annabelle Wallis Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank a franchise or filmography from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week, I'm profiling the work of Annabelle Wallis-whose latest project "Mutiny" releases in theaters on Thursday. 

Annabelle Wallis' Filmography Ranked:

11.Come and Find Me (D)

10.Annabelle: Creation (C-)

9.Annabelle (C-)

8.Mercy (C)

7.King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (C)

6.The Mummy (C+)

5.Body of Lies (B-)

4.The Brothers Grimsby (B)

3.Boss Level (B)

2.Tag (B)

1.Malignant (B+)

Top Dog: Malignant (2021)

James Wan knew had one chance to make a blank check movie after the box office heater he went from 2011-2018 (Insidious, The Conjuring, Insidious: Chapter 2, Furious 7, The Conjuring 2, Aquaman) and he took full advantage of it with Malignant. This man threw out every single wacky stylistic flourish and idea he had in his arsenal to make one of the gleefully deranged pieces of genre cinema that I've ever seen.  After the troubled production of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, he deserves the opportunity to make another wild passion project like this-although I'm pretty skeptical that there's somebody out there that would be willing to back it. 

Bottom Feeder: Come and Find Me (2016)

Let's rewind to a mere 6 days ago when I decided it would be a good idea to watch one of more Wallis' movies for this piece and Come and Find Me ended up being that lucky title. Electing to watch this movie very well could be the worst choice I've made so far this month. Come Find and Me is the first and only movie that was made by the disgraced Joss Whedon's younger brother Zack and after watching it, I'm not exactly stunned that he hasn't been entrusted to make another feature. This movie tries to position itself as this intelligent mystery thriller about a man (Aaron Paul) who stumbles upon a whole lot of secrets when he elects to go searching for his missing girlfriend (Wallis) a year after she disappeared, but what's lurking underneath its high aspirations is a scattershot, dull and idiotic movie that can't even create the illusion that all of its puzzle pieces are fitting together in a compelling or a clever manner for any meaningful amount of time. 

Most Underrated: Tag (2018)

While it's not quite strong enough to go down as one of the best studio comedies of the 2010's, Tag has a lot of fun with its "childhood friends who reunite every year as adults to play a month-long game of tag" premise and boasts a trio of very funny performances from Jake Johnson, Hannibal Burress and Isla Fisher that consistently elevates the warm stupidity of the humor. 

Most Overrated: Annabelle: Creation (2017)

Quite frankly, I'm kind of in awe this managed to become the best received Conjuring movie outside of the first two entries in the main franchise. David F. Sandberg tables the combination of eerie atmospherics and clever jump scares that made his breakout movie Lights Out work in favor of a long string of flaccid, sometimes unintentionally funny jump scares, the performances outside of Miranda Otto as the wife of the toymaker (Anthony LaPaglia) are all pretty bad and the reveal that it ties to the previous film is absurd even by horror movie retconning/lore building standards. 

Jeff Daniels Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank a franchise or filmography from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week, I'm profiling the work of Jeff Daniels-whose latest project "The Brink of War" releases in theaters today. 

Jeff Daniels' Filmography Ranked:

18.101 Dalmatians (D) 

17.Good Night, and Good Luck (C)

16.Dumb and Dumber To (C)

15.RV (C)

14.Fly Away Home (C)

13.Allegiant (C)

12.Traitor (C+)

11.State of Play (C+)

10.Something Wild (B-)

9.Away We Go (B)

8.The Squid and the Whale (B)

7.Pleasantville (B) 

6.The Lookout (B)

5.Looper (B)

4.Dumb and Dumber (B)

3.The Martian (B+)

2.Steve Jobs (B+)

1.Speed (B+)

Top Dog: Speed (1994)

Speed has become one of the most frequently mimicked action movies of the past 30 years for good reason. The simplicity of its plot and perfectly calibrated tone pave the way for a movie that keeps the suspense high without ever taking itself seriously enough to get in the way all of the freewheeling fun its producing. May the legacy sequel machine never come for this beautiful creation. 

Bottom Feeder: 101 Dalmatians (1996)

What Cruella was able to pull off with its flashy camp exploration of the iconic Disney villain's origin story reenforced my disdain for both of the Glenn Close-led live action films. Close's fine enough scenery chewing is just no match for how lifeless and boring the film's supposedly vibrant universe manages to be.  

Most Underrated: The Lookout (2007)

19 years after its release, The Lookout is a borderline forgotten piece of media. This unique, character-driven heist drama from Hollywood vet Scott Frank (The Queen's Gambit, Out of Sight) about a bank janitor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) with short term memory problems brought on by a serious car crash that derailed his promising youth hockey career being coerced by an old high school classmate (Matthew Goode) to assist in a robbery at the bank he works at was little seen when it came out in March of 2007, so this being the fate it suffered isn't exactly surprising. If you're a fan of the aforementioned genres and happen to find yourself on the home screen of a free streaming service like Pluto TV or Tubi looking for something to watch, you should definitely consider checking this out. 

Most Overrated: Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

Nobody makes a dry movie quite like George Clooney does and Good Night, and Good Luck is one of his finest hours. I was shown this when I was studying journalism in college and as important as its messages about freedom of the press and the media challenging power are, Clooney manages to present them in such a bland, stagey manner that they don't land with their intended power. 

Movie Review: Super Troopers 3

All roads lead back to Super Troopers for the Broken Lizard gang. The comedy troupe consisting of Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske owe much of the longevity of their career to people falling in love with this idiotic, prank-loving group of Vermont state troopers back in the early 2000's. 8 years after Super Troopers 2 finally completed its long, bumpy journey to the big screen, Thorny, Farva, Foster, Mac and Rabbit are back for another round of dumb, stoner-adjacent hijinks in Super Troopers 3.

Maturation and evolution are concepts that Broken Lizard flirt with at times during Super Troopers 3 as they're now in their late 50's, but whatever wisdom they've picked up over the years is often put on the back burner as they follow their true of putting as many dick, drug and Canada jokes into the world as possible. To their credit, they're just as enthusiastic about playing as these characters now as they were when they made the first movie 26 years ago and the passion they lead with makes it easy for the new cast members (Hannah Simone, Nat Faxon, Andrew Dismukes, Iqbal Theba, Sakina Jaffrey, Chace Crawford, Jon Rudnitsky, Lisa Gilroy) to come in and play around in the gleefully immature world they've built. Unfortunately, their continued love of these characters and spirited new additions to the ensemble can't gloss over the issues that arise with the material itself. The whiff rate on the jokes is much higher here than it was on either of the previous films and they spend way too much time on yet another drug ring subplot at the expense of its amusing A-plot involving Farva preparing to marry Thorny's sister (Simone). There's still enough joy to be had in watching this group along with the always great Brian Cox embody these lovable idiot characters again and crank out a handful of hilarious gags to make it a fun enough watch, but it's probably time for them to move on and do something that will move the needle more than a fourth Super Troopers movie. 

Grade: B-
 

Movie Review: One Night Only

By taking place in a fascist version of the United States where premarital sex has been outlawed by the government except for one night a year and relying on a plot driver that is catnip for the portion of the viewing audience that demands a thorough explanation for everything they see on screen, One Night Only is destined to alienate some people out there before they even sit down to watch it. The first half of that equation is one that I can understand as having a fascist backdrop adds an ominous layer to what is designed to be a light romcom that can be difficult to overlook. 

For me, One Night Only doesn't seriously engage enough with the political angle of its world to impact the movie in any meaningful way. The whole "The Purge but for sex" premise is almost exclusively used to put its protagonists Ally (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner) in a string of ridiculous situations as they run on sometimes parallel but often unintentionally overlapping tracks around New York City in search of some kind of meaningful connection on this chaotic night. With this narrative framing in mind, I believe that One Night Only works well. Barbaro and Turner have a natural ease to their dynamic that allows them to pull off the jabs they throw at each other along with the longing gazes and heartfelt conversations that fuel their eventual romantic connection, the whirlwind nature of the protagonists' journey around NYC allows for the expert deployment of its sizable supporting cast (Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton and Charlie Gillespie are the top standouts) to help play up the  situational comedy before they disappear back into the night and Will Gluck pulls off what is arguably the single greatest feat of his career by turning a Maroon 5 needle drop into one of the funniest moments of the entire movie. There are a couple of shaky notes at the very end that get in the way of the sugar high it had been effortlessly coasting on up to that point, but on the whole, I found this to be funnier and anchored by a stronger central romance than Gluck's last movie Anyone But You.

Grade: B 
 

Movie Review: 72 Hours

Streaming platforms have become a safe haven for comedy stars from the 90's and 00's to keep collecting paychecks in a world where box office receipts for comedies have been steadily eroding since the late 2010's. When these movies drop on Netflix or Prime Video every few months, they typically log big numbers out of the gate then quickly fade away as most people view them as vastly inferior products to what these actors were doing back when their movies were playing on the big screen. Kevin Hart has become one of the leaders in this space during the 2020's. Since 2021, Hart has led a whopping four Netflix movies (Fatherhood, The Man from Toronto, Me Time, Lift)-although it does need to be noted that the former two were titles that Sony sold off while COVID was wreaking havoc on the theatrical industry. Hart and Netflix's fifth collaboration of the decade 72 Hours falls so perfectly into the mold of instantly forgettable streaming comedies that you could convince me that it was done by design.

72 Hours is aiming to be a 2026 riff on something like The Hangover or Old School. Hart plays a 40-year-old working in advertising who gets accidently added to a bachelor party group text (Marcello Hernández, Mason Gooding, Ben Marshall, Kam Patterson) and exchanges some playful texts with the group acknowledging the mistake before he carries on with his day. After a failed pitch for a big vodka campaign that he needs to land in order to get the promotion he's long been seeking, he convinces these strangers to allow him to join them on their trip to Miami with the hopes that hanging out with young people will help him figure out how to market this product to people in their age bracket and nail his second chance at the big pitch that will allow him to finally advance up the corporate ladder. Things quickly go haywire as a series of unforeseen incidents turn this celebration into a nightmare that might prevent them from leaving the Sunshine State alive. 

When Hart first broke out as an actor in the 2010's, I really liked what he was doing. No matter the size of the part or what the role called for him to do, he delivered what the movie asked of him every single time. Recently, the returns haven't been particularly strong, and 72 Hours is one of the weakest efforts he's put forth to date. This role sees him playing an affable everyman who is kind of aloof and selfish but also has a wild card streak when he starts partying. Every aspect of this character is comfortably within his wheelhouse and yet, his performance somehow manages to fall pretty flat. He struggles to make this guy who isn't a complete piece of shit but is definitely far more of an oblivious, self-absorbed dickhead than he thinks he is redeemable and doesn't quite go far enough to sell the zanier moments (it was odd to see him struggle with doing so much over-the-top accent work given how great he was at doing a Danny Glover impression in Jumanji: The Next Level). Whether this is a case of him of phoning it in or just simple miscalculation is up for debate, but it's certainly a head-scratching failure that standouts even among his recent misfires.  

The supporting cast doesn't fare much better. Hernández is pretty blah as the immature slacker best man who is afraid that his best friend is going to leave him behind for good once he gets married, Gooding makes for a pretty boring straight man as the kindhearted groom who is much more mature than his idiot friends and Marshall's awkward sad guy schtick just isn't very funny. Ironically, it's Patterson-who is easily the least seasoned actor from the main cast-who leaves the most positive impression. There's a real eagerness to his screen presence that jolts the movie to life whenever it threatens to dip below average and his comedic timing is very solid for a guy who came up doing stand-up. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Hernández and Marshall putting in a good word with Lorne Michaels after this shoot helped him land the Saturday Night Live gig last fall. 

In defense of the cast, the material they had to work with isn't great. For a movie where the comedy is primarily built around the protagonists getting into crazy situations, the chaos that each of these unforeseen calamites provide doesn't really amount to much of anything. There's no real escalation of the stakes or clear desire to stack jokes up on top of each other in order to some build momentum. Instead, the movie operates in a machine-like manner where it plows through the vulgar scenes in a coldly calculated manner in order to get to the inevitable ending where everything works out for all of the characters as quickly as possible. Part of the magic of the movies that 72 Hours hopes to emulate was a willingness to go to great lengths to sell jokes. 72 Hours almost never displays that discipline and dedication to the craft, which is kind of embarrassing since it was made by people in Tim Story, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg who have plenty of experience making movies like this. 

At the end of the day, 72 Hours served its purpose to top the Netflix movie charts for 2+ weeks and the fact that the vast majority of the people that helped make this feat possible feeling it was mediocre or bad really doesn't matter. While I'm not anti-streaming comedy by any means, it's hard to get all that excited about any of them as they're always a decent chance that they'll end up being nothing more than aggressively average time eaters where nobody involved is overly invested in the outcome. C'est la vie in the streaming ecosystem and I wouldn't be willing to wager that this state of affairs changes at any point in the near future. 

Grade: C

Louis Leterrier Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank a franchise or filmography from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week, I'm profiling the work of Louis Leterrier-whose latest project "The Last House" releases on Netflix on Friday. 

Louis Leterrier's Filmography Ranked:

8.Clash of the Titans (C)

7.The Brothers Grimsby (B)

6.Transporter 2 (B)

5.The Incredible Hulk (B) it

4.The Transporter (B)

3.Fast X (B+)

2.Unleashed (B+)

1.Now You See Me (B+)

Top Dog: Now You See Me (2013)

Looking back on it 13 years later, the greatest gift that Now You See Me provided the world was being successful enough to spawn a franchise. The completely earnest, unapologetic ridiculousness that powers this dazzling picture has only grown stronger with time as the sequels have relished the opportunity to add new layers of absurdity to this world where the biggest challenge to the powers that be that are screwing over regular people are a secret society of cocky virtuoso magicians who redistribute wealth via elaborate heists. Fast and Furious is really the only other series that is operating with a similar ethos and if the band gets back together for a fourth installment somewhere down the line, I'm confident that they'll continue to honor the knowingly silly spirit that has allowed this franchise to develop a passionate following.

Bottom Feeder: Clash of the Titans (2010)

Clash of the Titans is a movie that I feel was worthy of being remade. The 1981 version is riddled with horrendously dated visual effects that cast a shadow over what is otherwise a decent but pretty unremarkable sword and sandal fantasy epic. What Leterrier did with the remake didn't really improve upon the flawed but relatively compelling original. While the CGI is mostly excellent (the sole exceptions being the big scorpions in the desert-that look like complete shit) this time around and there are some compelling moments (namely the scenes with Medusa and the Witches) that show off the benefits of telling this story again on the big screen, the choppy action, stiff pacing and not quite campy enough tone prevent this from being the consistently fun watch that it easily could've been. 

Most Underrated: Unleashed (2005)

Out of the many English language titles Jet Li headlined during the 2000's, Unleashed is my favorite by a wide margin. Not only are the fight scenes absolutely spectacular, but it tells the surprisingly emotional story of a man (Li) who was trained from childhood to serve as the human attack dog for a Glasgow mobster (Bob Hoskins) learning about the good side of humanity after he's taken in by a kind blind piano tuner (Morgan Freeman) after being left for dead by his old boss and features some really great performances from all three of the aforementioned actors. 

Most Overrated: None 

This was an inevitability. Leterrier is somebody who has made a career out of making movies that receive average-ish reviews and middling-to-decent receptions from audiences. He's the epitome of a reliable meat-and-potatoes filmmaker and there's seemingly no danger that he's going to evolve or devolve into something else at this point as he's been making movies at the highest levels of global entertainment for 25 years now. 

Movie Review: I Want Your Sex

It's been a whopping 12 years since American indie royalty Gregg Araki has made a feature. The 66-year-old has spent this time away from the big screen in the world of television, both as a hired gun director on a wide variety of series (13 Reasons Why, Riverdale, American Gigolo, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Heathers) and as the showrunner of a Starz series called New Apocalypse that was canceled after 1 season. His return back to his artistic home is one that makes perfect sense as it's a film that's primary goal is to have some fun exploring modern society's attitude towards sex. 

When Araki rose to prominence during the 90's, horny movies were the norm. It was pretty rare to even be able to make it through a movie aimed at kids without running into some innuendo or perverted double entendres. 3 decades later, Hollywood has become borderline puritanical with its depiction of sex on screen and audiences may be even more prudish as every movie that dares to be even a little bit salacious (Poor Things, Saltburn, Anora) becomes a lightning rod for online discourse. With I Want Your Sex, Araki is saying that he's not going allow to horniness on screen die without a fight. 

At the center of Araki's "it's alright to be horny and fuck" opus is a recent college graduate (Cooper Hoffman) working a low-level job who becomes completely smitten with his art gallery owner boss (Olivia Wilde) after she recruits him to enter a BDSM relationship with her. Hoffman's character serves as kind of a stand-in for all of gen-Z as he's a repressed, jittery young man who experiences liberation when he enters this unorthodox domineering relationship with an older woman who opens him up to a world of sexual possibilities he never knew existed. As much as this premise reads like a sex version of "old man yells at clouds", Araki is smart enough to acknowledge the slew of forces (increased societal isolation, rise of online porn, increasing scarcity of third spaces, etc.) that helped gradually build up this latest age of repression and maintains a playful tone that has zero malice behind any of its jokes. Ironically, some of the older Araki-heads out there will probably take issue with how tame the sex scenes are here, but it feels kind of counterproductive to me to go after one of the few people in the industry today that has demonstrated willingness to engage with sex in an honest, open-minded manner. 

The most captivating thing about I Want Your Sex isn't what it says about current attitudes towards sex or how artists are insufferable egotistical menaces who aren't nearly as profound as they think they are, but the actors who Araki enlisted to frolic around in his perverted playground. Wilde continues her post-Don't Worry Darling heater with an exhilarating portrayal of a miserable artist whose career decline hasn't impeded her ability to maintain a sexual muse that she takes great pleasure in toying with while Hoffman further cements his place as one of the most exciting young talents in Hollywood today by playing this complex character with the ideal mix of sweetness, self-destruction and cringey desperation. Their explosive dynamic carries this film through every turn it takes and there were a few scenes that even got to me question whether there was something real underneath all of the humiliation, toxicity and leather. While they stand absolutely zero chance of being nominated, I'd be thrilled if they both landed in the Oscar race come this winter.

The supporting cast is primarily deployed to punch up the comedy in the absurd situations that the plot throws out, and they deliver in a major way. Mason Gooding drops many of the film's best one liners as Hoffman's co-worker/confidant, Chase Sui Wonders continues to show why her stock in the industry is shooting through the roof at the moment with a delightful turn as Hoffman's best friend/roommate who is incredibly jealous of her pal's new freaky arrangement with his boss and Charli xcx (!) demonstrates a real knack for deadpan comedy as Hoffman's perpetually unenthused girlfriend. Araki really struck gold with this ensemble and there's no way this film would've soared to the levels it does without their terrific efforts.

Getting to see Araki return with a pure romp that is so full of laughs, energy and fun is one of my favorite cinematic stories this year. Independent cinema is an increasingly brutal game these days and there's just something really inspiring about watching one of the most important figures in that world make a great movie after being away from the medium for so long. Araki has plenty of creative juice left and hopefully some producers out there will be willing to back his next project so the world doesn't have to wait another 12 years to hear from him. 

Grade: B+