Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Quick Movie Reviews: Jack and Jill, Johnny English Reborn, The Three Musketeers, Shame

Jack and Jill: Hands down the worst film Adam Sandler has ever done. It made Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (which Sandler co-wrote, but didn't star in) look like a landmark comedy masterpiece. I was expected it to be bad, but not this bad. Next to nothing works (I only chuckled at Shaq's cameo) and the humor is so lowbrow and dumb that I can't even appreciate it. I hope Sandler can back on track because this is just embarrassing. I have always defended a majority of Sandler's films (especially in the past five years or so), but I really can't back this one at all.  One of the absolute worst films I've endured in my quest for 2011 films.
1/5 Stars

Johnny English Reborn:  A nice surprise and a definite improvement over the first one. It's really silly, but that's the fun of it. It's a loving throwback to 80's and 90's spoofs like Naked Gun and Spy Hard. Rowan Atkinson has such a gift for physical comedy as well and is a perfect fit for the role of Johnny English. A harmless good time overall and I wouldn't mind seeing another installment.
3/5 Stars

The Three Musketeers:  The action scenes were pretty cool, but everything else just didn't click. The story has a shitload of holes. Some of the events in the film make little to no sense. It also suffers from some pretty severe tonal problems. It can't make up it's mind if it wants to be serious or campy and there is plenty of unintentionally hilarious lines ("You should have apologized to my horse" during the climatic fight scene is easily the most cringe-inducing). The acting ranged from bad (Orlando Bloom is worse than ever and Christoph Waltz is bad for the first time ever) to alright (Mila Jovovich, Ray Stevenson). A middling review might be too generous considering it's numerous flaws, but the action is good enough to warrant an average rating.
2.5/5 Stars

Shame:Michael Fassbender is excellent, but the whole film seems really underdeveloped. This could have been a fascinating and devastating character study if there was more substance, power and cohesion in the script. It attempts to go somewhere with the relationship between Fassbender and Cary Mulligan (who plays his sister), but it seems really forced at the end of the film after glossing over it for most of the duration. Instead it focuses on Fassbender's character's sex addiction, but it doesn't seem nearly as bad as the filmmaker's intended it to be. His addiction is demonstrated in a series of events that have pretty much no correlation and make for a really flimsy narrative to base a film of this nature around.  It wasn't nearly as unsettling or deep as it should have been. Fassbender's performance is almost good enough to make it worth watching, but the script just isn't strong enough.
2.5/5 Stars

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