With apologies to the extremely funny The Campaign, first-time co-director John Morris and Sean Anders’s (Horrible Bosses 2, Sex Drive) Daddy’s Home is, ironically, Will Ferrell’s (Old School, Step Brothers) best-starring comedy role since 2010’s The Other Guys. It’s not a movie I thought I would particularly like and one that I had serious doubts about as much as 20 minutes in (I hadn’t laughed but maybe one time), but as the movie progressed, it got funnier and funnier. By its conclusion, it became a somewhat memorable movie that I wouldn’t put on the “A-shelf” comedy list but might find itself just a notch below. What made the movie work was the dynamics between Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg (Lone Survivor, The Fighter), who didn’t have the same chemistry they had when they teamed partners in the buddy cop The Other Guys but were still pretty close. While Daddy’s Home was 100% completely predictable, it didn’t make it any less fun, and while Ferrell and Wahlberg weren’t exceptionally awesome in the scenes where they weren’t together, it more than made up for during the scenes where they shared screen time.
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Category Archives: Genre
Triple 9 (2016)
If you watched season 1 of HBO’s True Detective and you were as much of a fan of the six-minute single-shot shootout scene that ended episode four’s (titled Who Goes There) as I was, you might just very well like John Hillcoat’s (The Road, Lawless) underappreciated Triple 9. Likewise, if you watch Game of Thrones and found the intense battle between the Jon Snow led wildlings and the white walkers at the end of season five, episode eight (titled Hardhome) as the best single scene in the history of the show, you might just very well like the star-studded Triple 9. If I had trusted my instincts and not those of the critics, I would have been able to appreciate this gem of a popcorn flick on the big screen. Instead, I let the movie pass through the theaters, knowing I would see it eventually at home, but convincing myself that, despite the awesome previous, I would be disappointed by this movie. One of my colleagues at work recently asked why I hadn’t told her to see Triple 9, knowing that it was a movie right up my wheelhouse. She was really the first person I actually knew who had seen the movie. So I feel obligated early on in this review to match this movie with an audience that can best appreciate it. If you like the intensity that comes with a bank robbery movie (my two favorite bank robbery movies are The Town, which is my second favorite movie ever, and the original Point Break), I can’t think of a reason that you wouldn’t like Triple 9. There are plenty of underlying storylines, but just like those two movies, Triple 9 refuses to take its foot off the accelerator and doesn’t confuse its audiences by undervaluing the ferocity of its story by wasting even a single scene that isn’t relevant to its story. In 2016, you almost needed a caveat when talking about movies. So while Captain America: Civil War is the best movie to be released in the first five months of the year, the best non-superhero movie is Triple 9.
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The Nice Guys (2016)
“Nice Guys Finish Last.” That’s a saying we’ve all heard before. The grunge band Green Day wrote an iconic song about it in the mid-1990s. I’ll alter the quote a little in saying that The Nice Guys finishes last. This was not my favorite movie. I knew that I would probably feel this way going into the film, but I was willing to sacrifice the two hours because it starred two of my favorite actors in Ryan Gosling (Blue Valentine, Drive) and Russell Crowe (Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind). Despite its 90% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I had no faith in this movie. Its style wasn’t my favorite. Shane Black (Iron Man 3, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang) style for directing this movie was similar to that of Joel and Ethan Coen in that it blended comedy, drama, action, dark comedy, crime (both organized and unorganized), and even small bits of horror to try to come up with a unique idea. Was The Nice Guys a unique idea? No, not really?
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Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Captain America: Civil War is perhaps the greatest superhero movie that Christopher Nolan has not directed. My two favorite superhero movies (The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) belong to him. As of this post, my third favorite would probably be a toss-up between Batman Begins, Iron Man, and Captain America: Civil War. There are others (such as The Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, etc.) that are up there, but there is clearly a distinction between the top 3 or 4 and all of the others. I hope that superhero movies continue to get better, but unfortunately, it feels like we get 3-4 bad ones for every good one we get. So when we get a movie like Captain America: Civil War, it’s important to take pause, see it, praise it, and encourage more movies like it because we know that poor movies will continue to be made because all of them seem to gross over $100 million easily. And the reason they do is our fault. We continue to see these terrible movies. But that is a different story for a different day.
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A Walk in the Woods (2015)
A Walk in the Woods, the 2015 comedy-drama that I thought would be a throwaway movie that I originally only watched so that I could add it to my list, turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of the year. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’d be a fool to think that a year from now that I’d remember anything from this movie or that I’ll ever watch this movie again. But for two hours on a Tuesday night in the middle of April, it was a very refreshing escape from reality, and a movie had me grinning from ear to ear from the first scene until the last. Also, if Robert Redford (The Horse Whisperer, All is Lost) or Nick Nolte (The Prince of Tides, Warrior) called it a career today, and this was either of their last movies, I think that would be okay. Each has had a solid career. While not his number one fan, I find it absolutely criminal that Redford has only been nominated for one Oscar for acting in his entire career (way back in 1974 for The Sting). Nolte has had more success as an actor in terms of awards (three Oscar nominations). And while these two actors are household names who each have more than a dozen movies that you could rattle off the top of your heads, their careers have followed very different careers. Controversies in his personal life have marred Nolte’s career, whereas Redford has sort of been the poster boy of how an A-list actor can live his life while staying out of the tabloids. The two don’t seem like much of a match for a movie like this so late in their careers. But the movie worked perfectly for each man. You’ll leave your viewing knowing that each gave an admirable performance even though it’s light-hearted and certainly not one of their most memorable ones.
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