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Review by Loc

To remember the good old days, when action movies were jingoistic and Tom Cruise was a fighter pilot. There’s little better than watching Maverick blow up some unnamed Commie basterds while playing volleyball against a prebloated Val Kilmer. Since then, action flicks have become more “realistic” and politically ambivalent and Cruise has become a couch-jumping caricature whose allowed his off-screen exploits to poison his box office viability. What a difference an Oprah appearance makes. So, why not jumpstart your career with a safe, action-comedy turn? Quick hit: sometimes, even a formula flick can’t get you out of the rough.

Knight and Day stars Cruise and Cameron Diaz as unlikely accomplices in a supposedly convoluted spy-vs-spy game of intrigue. Only with laughs and Cruise’s unfaltering smile and charm. Except, the smile and charm can no longer hide the underlying ick associated with real-life Cruise. Not that it matters too much here, but it’s a stain that’s going still take more time to scrub off. Diaz is trying to revitalize her own career after hitting a crescendo with the original Charlie’s Angels. She does her thing, flashing her own million-dollar smile while finding herself in goof-inducing action and exploits. In the end, both stars rely on what brought them to the show, and unfortunately, most of us have already moved on from their brand of entertainment. Continue reading →

Review by Loc

You know what you get by now when you’re dealing with a Will Farrell vehicle. You get decidedly low-brow humor, sometimes it hits and sometimes it doesn’t. You get moments of complete insanity that make absolutely no sense, and those sometimes work and sometimes don’t. The biggest variable is the Will Farrell meter and whether he decides to crank it to 10 or leave it at 1. Most times, he’s straddling a very solid 7 that notches up to 8 or 9 when he starts yelling. Well, this flick has all the prerequisites, which may work, or it may not. Quick hit: mostly not.

The Other Guys is the Will Farrell take on buddy cop flicks. Whereas you have the original Lethal Weapon series as the measuring stick, The Other Guys steps in as the dipstick. Yes, satirizing this tired genre could be a hilarious romp, but this film is not that romp. Instead, it’s an extra-long Saturday Night Live skit with Farrell doing his thing and Mark Wahlberg doing his own shtick as well. Normally, ” an extra-long SNL skit” isn’t a good thing, but this time it barely works. It doesn’t happen often, and throughout this flick you can feel the suck bursting at the seams, but someone this film never fully unravels and maintains a sense of mediocrity. That’s not a ringing endorsement, but at least it doesn’t make your eyes bleed. Continue reading →