Movie Review: The Rundown (2003)

An action-packed buddy comedy adventure, The Rundown (also known as Welcome To The Jungle) is mindless fun, and often much better than it has any right to be.

In Los Angeles, Beck (Dwayne Johnson, credited as The Rock) is a hard hitting but soft-at-heart "retrieval expert" (bounty hunter) looking to get out of the business and open his own restaurant. His boss Billy Walker (William Lucking) offers him one last job with a big payoff: retrieve Billy's wayward son Travis (Seann William Scott) from the wilds of the Amazon and bring him home.

Beck travels to the Brazilian jungle, connects with pilot Declan (Ewen Bremner), and finds Travis in the ramshackle mining town built by nasty businessman Hatcher (Christopher Walken) to exploit local resources. Travis has no interest in surrendering to Beck, as he is on his own quest to find the mythical El Gato de Diablo treasure, and trying to sweet talk bartender Mariana (Rosario Dawson) into helping him. Beck's assignment gets much more complicated when Hatcher demands that Travis lead him to El Gato's location, and Mariana reveals her own agenda.

A big budget production lavishly co-funded by WWE Films and directed by Peter Berg, The Rundown features Johnson relatively early in his transition from popular professional wrestler to action film superstar. The film celebrates its high ridiculous quotient, and locks into an action packed, irreverent groove.

The showcase fight sequences arrive at regular 10 minute intervals, with Beck's insistence that he does not use guns channeling the brutality into inventive one-against-many brawls. The multiple fracases are artistically choreographed and coherently handled, with an ever-present  shadow of a smile anchoring the flying bodies and flailing limbs. In an apt summary of the film's mindset, one fight scene finds Beck trapped upside down on a swinging rope in the heart of the jungle, his leg dry-humped by a crazed wild monkey.

As for the plot and the story, The Rundown is a combination buddy movie, treasure hunt, social justice comedy adventure. Enough disparate stuff is thrown onto the screen to ensure something kinetic is always going on, and Berg does not linger in any one place long enough for the preposterous attitude to deflate. The jungle colours are vivid, the settings teaming with sweaty life forms from both the human and animal kingdoms.

Seann William Smith's take on Travis is irritating enough to get under Beck's skin, and while Christopher Walken mails in his performance as prime evildoer Hatcher, his presence lends heft to the exploitation sub-plot. As for Johnson, he lumbers through the movie carving out his screen persona, a slightly more emotive Schwarzenegger without the accent but with a dash of vulnerable self-awareness.

The Rundown never wavers from its mission to deliver satisfyingly silly entertainment, and yes, for the final mop-up Beck does yield and pick up guns -- many guns.

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Movie Review: American Wedding (2003)

Too much Stifler. Not nearly enough sizzler. American Wedding, the second sequel to American Pie, attempts a withdrawal from the account of bankrupt ideas, and emerges with a stained handful of excrement.

Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are planning to get married. Before he gets to the big day, Jim has to overcome two main hurdles: impress Michelle's parents (Fred Willard and Deborah Rush), and keep his vulgar friend Stifler (Seann William Scott) as far away from the wedding as possible. Nothing goes according to plan, with Jim embarrassing himself in front of his future in-laws at every opportunity, and Stifler forcing himself into the wedding planning arrangements and proceeding to instigate or fall victim to one disaster after another.

In the meantime, Michelle's game sister Cadence (January Jones) attracts the attention of both the boorish Stifler and the relatively more suave Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), while Jim's hapless dad (Eugene Levy) doles out his dorky advice when it's least needed.

American Wedding huffs, puffs, and works up a smelly sweat to create a series of set-piece comedy tableaux, to place either Jim or Stifler in the most contrived and awkward situations possible. So Jim is contorted to appear as though he is shagging a dog when he first meets Michelle's parents, and Stifler has to endure both eating dog poo and having intercourse with a hideous grandmother in the dark. The comedy stubbornly stays at this sewage-dwelling level throughout, and it's clear that writer Adam Herz ran out of  clever ideas a couple of scripts back. And if director Jesse Dylan inherited any creative genes from his father Bob, he certainly did not display them here.

American Wedding aims for the lowest common denominator and still manages to under-deliver.

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Movie Review: American Pie (1999)

A teen sex comedy that not as much pushes the envelope as shoves it through the shredder, American Pie is a wild and raunchy film that reset the standard for a questionable sub-genre, and it is also much better than it has any right to be.

Four horny high school friends are about to graduate, and they are all still virgins. Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Oz (Chris Klein), Jim (Jason Biggs) and Paul (Eddie Kaye Thomas) make a pact that by the end of prom night, they would each have had their first sexual encounter.

Kevin and Vicky (Tara Reid) are a steady couple: she wants to hear from him that he loves her before they sleep together; Kevin is not so sure that he can utter these words. Oz is a jock on the school lacrosse team; he decides to recast himself as a sensitive choir singer to improve his chances with girls. Sure enough Oz meets Heather (Mena Suvari), and she has to decide whether a reinvented Oz can be trusted.

Jim is hopelessly awkward around girls, and has to deal with a terribly gawky if well-meaning dad (Eugene Levy). After a massively failed attempt to have sex with hot foreign student Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth) is broadcast throughout the school intranet, Jim has to settle with taking blabbermouth Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) to the prom, and she can't stop yacking about band camp. Despite his best efforts to create a fake cool persona, Paul has no prospects when prom night starts; but he unexpectedly meets a cougar in the basement.

Earlier generations had Animal House (1978) and Porky's (1982) as defining films in the never-ending young male's quest to discover the joys of mating. In the very late 1990s, American Pie created it's own mini earthquake of a cultural impact. Sexy pies, MILFs, horny teens watching scrambled cable porn, early internet sex broadcasts, and fun with laxatives: the script by Adam Herz captured and then extrapolated what it meant to be a sex-obsessed teenager at the turn of the millennium, and made no apologies for being all about wanting to get laid.

The young cast of unknowns help make the film relevant to its intended audience, the only surprise being that none of them broke through to a significant career beyond the obvious sequels. The guys mostly disappeared into grade C productions, and the girls generally descended into Maxim photoshoots and faux celebrity status.

Accepted for what it is, American Pie is consistently funny, and wins high marks for boldness and originality. And for a generation of boys who grew up with the film, freshly baked pies would never look the same.

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Movie Review: The Promotion (2008)

A lacklustre attempted comedy that lurches along, stuck somewhere between neutral and first gear and lost in the outer reaches of an energy-draining, sun-drenched parking lot.

Doug (Seann William Scott) is an Assistant Manager at a suburban Donaldson's supermarket. He spends his time dealing with cranky or insane customers in the store and violent thugs in the parking lot. Doug is told that he's a shoe-in to become the Manager at a new, about-to-open Donaldson's; but Richard (John C. Reilly), is suddenly transferred from Canada as another Assistant, and is equally eager to compete for the Manager position.

The Promotion is neither funny nor thoughtful, and it is rarely engaging. In the absence of a spark in Director Steven Conrad's script, it is left to the performers to save the movie, but they are not up to the task. Seann William Scott is bland to the point of transparency, and John C. Reilly, without an animated foil to bounce against, never gains traction. Jenna Fischer, as Doug's wife Jen, would have been the most interesting thing in the movie had she not been criminally under-used.

There are some mildly amusing moments in The Promotion, and it does succeed in presenting a befitting version of stale suburbia. But for the most part, the attempts at humour fall flat, and we never get to care about any of the characters, and even less so about who may win the promotion. Had either Doug or Richard been shown to be actually good at their job, we may have believed that one or both are deserving; instead, they are both portrayed as thoroughly incompetent.

Maybe the thugs in the parking lot should be given their chance at managing the new store.

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Movie Review: Mr. Woodcock (2007)

What is Susan Sarandon doing in this movie?

That is only one of many unfathomable questions thrown up by the horrible Mr. Woodcock. Other questions include:

Did screenwriters Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert really think that the 12th "woodcock" joke in the movie would still be funny? (they probably did).

How likely is it that a wimpy preppy author would defeat a robust and macho gym teacher at wrestling? (only in the imagination of Grade Z writers like Carnes and Gilbert).

Is small-time Director Craig Gillespie capable of handling actors like Sarandon and Billy Bob Thornton? (no).

As for the plot: John Farley (Seann William Scott) is a young and successful self-help author who goes back to his hometown in rural Nebraska to accept an award, only to find out that, to his horror, his mother Beverly (Sarandon) is in a romantic relationship with Mr. Woodstock (Thornton), the sadistic high school gym teacher. Farley proceeds to do his best to destroy his mother's happiness.

Once the plot elements are in place, Mr. Woodcock offers very little that is unpredictable, including Farley's slob of a former high school friend and the bright-eyed girl that he had a crush on.

And it says a lot about the failure of the film that Woodcock is an immediately more likable character than the bland Farley, although the film even manages to flub the basic old values / fake values premise that would have at least provided some weight to the proceedings.

Mr. Woodcock may have been trying to comment on the gullibility of self-help consumers, but given the smarts that he displays, it is also a real stretch to believe that Farley could have written down a sandwich order, let alone a best-seller about "letting go".

The only watchable thing in this wooden flop is Amy Poehler in a small role as Farley's driven but boozy publicist -- she steals every scene that she's in, but she's in too few scenes to save this one-joke bore.






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