This is the movie about three thirty-something buddies who decide to start an “Animal House” style college fraternity. I like the idea and was looking forward to some senseless guy humor. Well, I’m still looking forward to that.
It’s as if they didn’t even try. Take the opening part of the story – our main guy is Mitch, played by Luke Wilson. Who, by the way, always looks like he has a “chaw of tobacco” or something in his cheek. He really ought to get that swelling checked out by a doctor. Anyway, Mitch is a real estate lawyer who comes home early from a business trip and finds his girlfriend involved in a three-way sex romp. Not a bad idea, just executed badly. Juliette Lewis plays the girlfriend and the scene, like many in this movie, just sort of hangs there. Is it funny or serious or what? It’s none of those things and that was a sure sign of things to come.
The next thing you know “good guy” Mitch is talked into opening up his new home to frat boys. His buddy, played by Vince Vaughn, convinces him it’s the cool thing to do. Vaughn is a motor mouth and he’s not funny and mostly annoying. He plays the Dad of the group, an electronics store owner who prattles on but is really only after one thing – a place to hang out and be with young college girls. Again – nice premise, poor execution. This is the kind of character you’d like somebody to punch out and then we’d be done with him. Plus, Mitch doesn’t even want to do this – he’s the one guy of the three who is ready to settle down. It makes no sense. But that’s par for the course for this movie.
The third buddy is played by Will Ferrell and this is as close as the movie gets to being truly funny. This guy is newly married and is the doofus of the group. He hasn’t outgrown his days of drinking and running around naked and that’s exactly what he ends up doing in the new fraternity. If you look at Ferrell and you look at the pretty woman he married, it makes no sense he lands somebody like her, but I’ll go with that because Ferrell plays probably the only person worth following in this movie. Here’s a guy who looks closer to forty years old, but does manage to pull off playing the part of this man-child. He seems to be in a daze most of the time, but you will crack up at the scene where he charges off naked to streak through town and his wife and her girlfriends come across him and don’t realize it’s him. Later on, he takes a tranquilizer dart to the neck and seems oblivious to it. Funny, but it goes on too long.
The rest of “Old School” is filled with the typical plot of an anal retentive college dean who is determined to drive the new fraternity out of business and the frat buddies dreaming up ways to stop that from happening. The fraternity, of course, has men of many ages and sizes, so there’s a ninety-year old guy and an overweight guy to fill out what are supposed to be some other “funny” moments. But like most of this movie, these moments just end up awkward. There are these odd pauses in many scenes as if this movie was mostly adlibbed and nobody knows what to do next.
I like the idea of making a movie about guys who are reluctant to give up their college days of drinking and hanging around naked and passing gas trying to gross out their buddies. But this isn’t it. I give “Old School” a “3.0”.
Friday, February 21st, 2003
So they finally made a big screen movie about the ’92 riots. Sort of. “Dark Blue” is set during the time leading up to the Simi Valley verdicts but is not about the Rodney King case. It’s about another set of cops who more resemble the Rampart guys. Remember that scandal?
Our main guy is named Eldon Perry and he’s a part of one of those secret, “frame ‘em if you have too, but just get ‘em” units of the LAPD. Eldon is played by Kurt Russell. His new partner is a young guy named Bobby. We open up with Bobby being questioned over a shooting. These guys get questioned over a lot of shootings. Eldon is the lead wise guy and spouts so much ugly racist stuff in the first few minutes you are immediately aware he has no concept anymore as to who are the bad guys and who are the citizens who just happen to be in the way.
Now I know guys like Eldon exist in many big city police departments, it’s just that this movie uses the sledgehammer approach and makes his character so clear, so quickly, that he’s a big turn off. And, of course, you just know poor new guy Bobby is in for it. The other no good cop is their boss, Jack Van Meter, who looks so much like an evil white guy I didn’t need to hear his Irish accent coming through to figure him out. As added ambience, these guys constantly drink. Even a judge downs a martini after signing a phony warrant. Hey,it’s pretty stressful covering your tracks all the time.
Eldon also has a bad marriage and young Bobby is dating a black cop who just happens to work for the story’s main good guy, an Assistant Chief played by Ving Rhames. However while that may seem a complicated set-up, this isn’t a very complicated movie.
In fact, all you need to know is that just about all the white cops are crooked and immoral (and drink alot) and all the black cops are out to set things right. That doesn’t bother me – it’s common belief, at least in Hollywood, that the Chief Parkers’ and the Chief Davis’ and the Chief Gates’ cops caused all the “civil unrest” episodes. I understand that in the movies you really do have to make it very clear to the audience just who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. So, in “Dark Blue”, just know the white guys who drink too much have to go down.
If you hang in there, the riots of ’92 do show up and they complicate things for Eldon in this long and sad morality tale. The ending is too melodramatic but it almost saved the movie which is awash in silly stereotypes. I give “Dark Blue” a 4.0 on the scale.
Friday, February 14th, 2003
If you were a comic book reader as a kid, this is definitely your time at the movies. After “X-Men” and “Spiderman” broke through as hits, this year alone will bring a sequel to “X-Men”, plus “The Incredible Hulk” and this movie.
The first thing that hits you about “Daredevil” is that it’s not exactly breakthrough storytelling. In fact, the comparisons to “Spiderman” are hard to avoid. Instead of a kid bitten by a bug, this one gets toxic chemicals blasting into his eyes. He’s permanently blind, but boy do those other four senses kick in. So well, in fact, this guy can now scale walls and climb up buildings just like “Spidey”. It’s the usual sad story of an orphan boy who would love to avenge his Dad’s death. Ho-hum. But I shouldn’t be so critical – this is, after all, based on a comic book character. By the way, I never heard of “Daredevil” and was beginning to get annoyed that this was just a second rate cheapo rip-off movie they were giving us to capitalize on “superhero” fever.
But I hung in there and things got a lot better when Ben Affleck’s “Daredevil” character is joined by several excellent supporting players. “Daredevil” goes by the name of Matt Murdock and is a lawyer by day and a crime fighter by night. This is good because as we all know, too many bad guys slip through our justice system. “Daredevil” is there to hand out street justice. Too bad this ends up bothering his conscience.
His law firm partner is played by Jon Favreau and he has some pretty funny lines as the tough New Yorker questioning how the two are going to make it if they only take on charity cases. But things really get going when Jennifer Garner shows up as the kick ass daughter of a rich guy. An important scene occurs where she and Daredevil do a mating dance which turns into a choreographed fight scene. At first I was thinking “what is this?”, but it’s actually pretty funny and the whole movie takes off from there.
Most importantly, a bad guy named “Bullseye” played by Colin Farrell is dispatched to kill Jennifer’s father and Daredevil intervenes. This is a fantastic scene you want to stay awake for. I think all actors who want to play movie villains should take note of this performance by Colin Farrell. This is how to do it – he combines tough guy with talented guy (just watch him toss those projectiles, he’s not called “Bullseye” for nothing) with funny guy. Well, funny in that “I don’t care about anybody or anyone” sense.
“Daredevil” takes it’s time getting going, but it was worth the wait. Ben Affleck is mostly a waste but Jennifer Garner and Colin Farrell should get their own movie. They were in rare form – sexy, on the brink and in Farrell’s case, terrifying. I give “Daredevil” a “7.0”.
