It’s the first major release of 2019, so Fox has a bit riding on the trailers for this one. Here’s the British trailer for it. Looks familiar, almost fun.
You want to make a producer’s eyes do the dollar sign dance, make the star of her or his low-budget film a STAR after that indie film has finished shooting.
The folks behind the Brit dramedy “Adult Life Skills”can be excused for thinking they hit the jackpot. A year after their twee little character piece was finished and in the can, its star, Jodie Whittaker, barely-known for work in “Venus” and “Attack the Block” and co-starring in TV’s “Broadchurch,” became the first female Doctor Who.
And you know what they say in the UK. There’s famous, and there’s “She’s the first woman cast as The Doctor” famous.
Whittaker stars as Anna, an under-employed grunt at a seen-better-days outdoor activity “resort” (kayaking, sailing, etc.) in West Yorkshire. The work isn’t fulfilling, so she copes by running a vlog made up of thumb-puppet science fiction mini-movies she preps, shoots, stars in and edits in Shed Zeppelin, or Right Shed Fred — her fortress of solitude back of the garden of mum’s house.
She dozes off there most nights, forgetting to bring a change of clothes, shocking the mailman with her near-nude sprints back to her room to the scolding of her no-longer-indulgent mother (Lorraine Ashburne). Grandma (Eileen Davies) may think she just needs a man, that “You’re not really living right now.”
Mum is more blunt, about the “bloody thumb videos” that her about-to-turn-30 daughter labors over, a woman acting like an immature teen, dressing “like a homeless teenager.”
“You said you’d be OUT by now!”
Leaving Anna printouts of online listicles — articles listing “Things you should stop doing by 30” — isn’t helping.
“I’m not moving out until I’ve worked out what I’m doing!”
Anna is clumsy — the sort who wouldn’t realize that drying an underwire bra in the microwave is a good way to blow up said microwave. She’s clueless about the flattering attentions of her colleague Brendan (Brett Goldstein). Because she just assumes he’s gay.
“Why does everyone think I’m gay? I’ve got a soft voice. And I wore pink shorts — ONCE!”
But the overweening impression this “homeless teenager” pushing 30 leaves is of a woman stuck. She used to do those videos with someone else. That someone else is gone, and she’s lost.
A series of new characters promise to give her a chance to come unstuck. Lively, working class world traveler-pal Alice (Alice Lowe) returns to town, to Wilburwood Outdoor Pursuits Center. She notices Brendan’s attentions and tries to kick start Anna towards…something.
Mum is determined to move Anna into an apartment. Brendan’s other gig happens to be as a rental property agent.
And a little boy given the unlikely name “Clint” (Ozzy Myers) moves in next door. He dresses up as a cowboy, just like Anna’s missing co-conspirator on the videos. And his mother is very, very sick.
Plow through the thick-thicker-thickest Yorkshire accents and “Adult Life Skills” and Whittaker have an undeniable charm. Tragedy broke Anna, and Whittaker gets across that she was fragile to start with. She doesn’t have a lot to offer, but eager-to-please Brendan sees something and wants to give her credit for what she does know — DIY video special effects, wit, her ability to pull off “cute” as rumpled and despairing as she seems most of the time.
Brendan suggests that the world should hand out “merit badges,” like the ones teenage Girl and Boy Scouts get — for “Adult Life Skills.” Anna’s got just enough of those to be of use to a sad, odd little boy who is facing something not unlike the crushing event that broke Anna.
She still sees her former partner in crime (Edward Hogg), still has conversations with him. They used to debate the thesis that “All teddy bears are nihilists.” Not that such discussions, then or now, help her get unstuck.
Whittaker gives Anna a quirky vulnerability that suits editor-turned writer-director Rachel Tunnard’s needs, here. There’s a lovely humanity to all the characters, who are funny enough, but never broad enough to be caricatures.
Three generations of women under the same roof creates comedy.
“I can’t believe you’re my MOTHER.”
“LET’s get a BLOODtest!”
But you feel love and concern in both older women’s view of Anna. It’s there in her friends and indulgent colleagues, too. She’s not good at much, but going through what she’s been through means we won’t be sacking her just now.
The main reason people check this out will be Whittaker’s new role as Doctor Who. And she doesn’t disappoint. She gives this walking-wounded woman a hint of the coquette she never realized she was, a smartness informed by sadness and — with a little boy she’s utterly ill-qualified to baby sit, much less mentor — a purpose.
We don’t get merit badges for having “Adult Life Skills,” being able to feed, clothe and house ourselves, eat with chopsticks or balance a bank account. But Whittaker’s Anna makes the case that maybe Brendan’s right. Maybe we should. Sometimes, we all reach that low point where we could use a win, any win — credit for managing just well enough to get by.
That goes for the movie about her, too.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult situations, profanity
Cast: Jodie Whittaker, Lorraine Ashburne, Alice Lowe, Rachel Deering, Brett Goldstein, Edward Hogg
Credits: Written and directed by Rachel Tunnard. A Screen Media release.
There’s a sense of “Left Behind” in writer-director Jason Noto’s “Beyond the Night.”
It’s not about “The Rapture,” like those Christian novels and the films based on them, but about those corners of rural America which many have fled. Those “left behind” there have history. But along with that can come clannishness in which blood matters more than justice, old grudges can trump present grievances.
Because everybody there is either related to or socially connected to everybody else.
Noto illustrates this with a gritty rural thriller, a “Winter’s Bone” without the meth, but with a supernatural twist, a tale set in a backward town where you see the same half dozen surnames attached to every mailbox.
Zane Holtz of “Hunter Killer” is Ray Marrow, an infantryman we meet as he dashes to his dying wife’s bedside. Maisie was in a car wreck, and Ray has to come home to see to her arrangements and take care of their odd, birth-marked little boy.
Lawrence, beautifully played by without fuss or affectation by Azhy Robertson of “Juliet, Naked,” is unfiltered, unrestrained and young enough to be confused by his mother’s death. Or maybe he’s like this all the time. He acts up at in church, at the funeral, mouths off at the visitation, but not — oddly — at the coroner’s inquest, which his father (who delivered the body, in person) has dragged him along to.
Whatever’s going on with Lawrence, Ray’s bad-parenting isn’t going to help it. The kid needs counseling, therapy and understanding. Ray doesn’t want that, because he’s sure his violent past and present (he IS in the military, after all) is the reason for Lawrence’s anti-social awkwardness.
“I think that I’ve cursed my son because of it.”
They take Maisie home to the mountains (Sullivan County, New York) to bury her. It was a place she and Ray fled, which Lawrence has never known. But the odd kid seems oddly at home there. He knows things. And when he blurts out the name of a long-missing teen whom he could never have met, ears perk up.
July Rain Coleman was a cheerleader who disappeared years ago. She came from a violent, sketchy family. And her dad, Bernie (veteran character actor Chance Kelly) is every aged redneck thug you ever crossed the street to avoid.
He’s never gotten over his daughter’s disappearance and figures the town, which wasn’t all that sympathetic, is hiding something and owes him answers.
Little Lawrence, seemingly channeling some font of knowledge about July Rain and what might have happened to her, instantly has his interest.
“I don’t always get to practice non-violence,” he growls at the shrink (Enid Graham of “Boardwalk Empire”) a concerned Ray allows Lawrence to see. Bernie wants access to the kid, and Bernie’s a dangerous man to cross, or even to give in to.
There’s a supportive pastor (Neal Huff) and Ray’s sheriff’s deputy sister (veteran character actress Tammy Blanchard of “Into the Woods,” etc.) hoping to help out.
Maisie’s parents (Beth Glover, Sherman Howard) and the sheriff (Skipp Sudduth) fret over what all this fresh attention to a “cold case” will do to the town.
Noto takes care to keep the tension high and the drama safely on this side of “melodrama.” Religion is treated matter-of-factly, as simply a part of life there. There’s just enough disbelief in what might be going on with Lawrence to keep the story credible. This is one of those cases where “There must be some sort of logical explanation for this” goes out the window.
“Boy’s got the Devil in him!”
But even though the plot gets mired in lapses of logic in the third act, Noto never lets that hang up his movie.
It’s a well-cast and very well-acted film. Holtz has hints of bluff, blunt Michael Shannon in his father role. I love the way he plays Ray’s instincts about the kid, putting himself between his boy and potential danger, such as that first time Bernie and his “band of degenerates” wants a word with Lawrence.
“You’re good, right there,” is all Ray has to say.
He’s the sort of dad who comforts his boy after a tactless girl mockingly snaps a picture of him, and the sort who would go overboard defending his son from the bullying that a facial birthmark earns him at that age.
Young Robertson has a moment that will break your heart.
But this is Kelly’s picture, playing a simmering vortex of resentment and hurt, a man who has spent his life making threats, leaning on violence to get what he wants — and has paid a price for it. He’s no mustache-twirling villain. He’s a hard man not smart enough to have ever avoided a bad decision, not smart enough to have left, but someone with a point of view and the myopia to get what he wants, damn the consequences.
Like everyone else in this modest, far-fetched but earthy drama, Kelly keeps this creep’s boots planted firmly in the mud of the cold, Catskills ground.
Warner Brothers is awash in cash this last weekend of 2018, as “Aquaman,” its latest DC comics blockbuster, tallies another $50 million+ and closes in on $200 since release ($188-190s by New Year’s).
Jason Momoa’s TV and B-movie days are behind him. For good.
“Vice” is in wide release, and if the Oscar buzz is fading a bit (not for Bale, Adams), it looks to stay in the top ten until the New Year is well under way. Over $8 million this weekend for Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney take-down.
“On the Basis of Sex” is only on 33 screens, and a little Oscar bump could help that Ruth Bader Ginsburg bio-pic crack the top ten in wider release.
As things stand now, “Mary Queen of Scots” is besting “The Favourite” among the Brit period pieces competing for the prestige picture box office.
“Spider-Verse” will have cleared $100 million by New Year’s. I’m also intrigued to see Clint Eastwood’s “The Mule” sticking around. No awards buzz around it, Clint’s audience is quite old at this point and slow to get out to see his latest, but the cute but dark departure for the Grand Old Man of Cinema is passing $60 million this weekend.
“Bumblebee” isn’t fading as fast as its weak opening would have suggested. But “Mary Poppins Returns” is doing what good musicals do — adding audience and gaining steam. It will have cleared $102 million on its second weekend, with six to eight weeks of momentum ahead of it.
One thing you learn in this business, never write a good actor off. Whatever trap he or she has fallen into, whatever their overhead has become that drives the sorts of payday pictures they make, the good ones are never more than one expectations-defying role away from reminding you why they seemed special, back in the beginning.
Gerard Butler hasn’t made a Scottish ensemble piece like “The Vanishing” since long before he saddled up on the “Olympus has Fallen” franchise and began collecting “Den of Thieves” checks (he’s doing a sequel to that, too.). He settles nicely into a supporting role in this period piece, a thriller that speculates on a famous disappearance among the lighthouse keepers of the Flannan Isles.
Three Outer Hebrides lighthouse keepers disappeared in 1900, leaving behind no clue as to what might have become of them. “The Vanishing” leans hard on a very conventional solution, a plot that throws the three men into contact with a treasure.
Introduce a little gold into the equation, and you’ve got “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” at sea, on an island — a tale of greed, treachery, mistrust and bloody violence.
Veteran character actor Peter Mullan is Thomas, the widowed senior man at their remote station. Connor Swindells (sharp, naive) is young Donald, the new guy learning “the ropes.” And he’s to learn the care and maintenance of the light, maintenance that includes handling deadly quicksilver that was used to lubricate the rotating Fresnel lens.
James (Butler) is the experienced man, the one with the family, and a sense of humor.
“What does this do, then?”
“It’s a foghorn.”
“When d’ye use it?”
“When it’s foggy, Donald.”
The two old hands josh the new guy as they pluck dinner out of the crabs in the surf, check the anenometer (wind gauge) to log the weather conditions and struggle with the balky radio (the time setting has been changed from the real disappearance) that works a fraction of the time.
Their routine is shattered the moment a rowboat washes up in the rocks. A Nordic looking brute is washed up with it. With a small trunk. Sending the new guy down to check on him rouses the “drowned” man to a fury, and only Donald’s desperation saves him. The cast away flipped out that they were taking his chest.
Old Thomas is the first to look in the chest. He doesn’t share what he saw in it with the others, but they figure it out soon enough. Donald is racked by guilt, James by curiosity. But what Thomas realizes is that the gold the man had with him and his paranoid, to-the-death defense of it means others will coming looking for it — and asking questions. And they’ve got the chest and a body on their hands.
He sees the inherent threat in their situation and gives orders accordingly — “Do exactly as I say,” and “All you have to do is keep your bloody mouth shut.”
Things never work out the way the experienced hand plans. The island is visited, the visitors are menacing and the lies the fellows tell let them down. With just a gaff hook, a hatchet and shovel to defend themselves, they’re in deep before they even realize they’re in at all.
Danish director Krystoffer Nyholm doesn’t clutter “The Vanishing,” keeping it a stark, brutal thriller, a morality tale that reminds us that taking a life never comes easily or can be taken lightly.
The violence here is brutal, savage and personal — and filled with regret.
I’ve been a fan of the gruff, working class tough Mullan (“Hostiles,””Welcome to the Punch,” “Sunshine on Leith,””Tommy’s Honour”) for years and this makes a grand vehicle for his brand of Scots crustiness.
Butler sheds the bravado of too many years in Hollywood actioners and finds a family man torn by remorse, greed and the madness that can come from violence only given consequences after the fact.
The brogues are thick enough to warrant subtitles, but the actions are so primal as to require no dialogue to follow every wrinkle in the plot, every nuance in the tragedy we see unfold.
“The Vanishing” manages to shock even as it fails to truly surprise, a movie that takes a worn situation and wrings fresh pain out of it as it reaches — over-reaches — to solve a mystery that is probably even more mysterious than whatever the screenwriter’s cooked up.
And in taking a step away from the one-liners, the shootouts and B-action movies, Butler reminds us of the soulful Scot he used to play before “300” made him an action hero.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence
Cast: Peter Mullan, Gerard Butler,Connor Swindells, Søren Malling and Ken Drury
Credits: Directed by Kristoffer Nyholm, script by Joe Bone, Celyn Jones. A Saban Films release.
In the realm of “I TOLD you so,” but you’d rather send hate notes because I pan a movie with murky “seizure inducing” visuals than consider that somebody with 35 years reviewing experience knows what he’s talking about — there’s THIS.
It’s the sort of placard you’re finding at the windows of cinemas across America, warning patrons of the headache inducing focus issues and action flashing imagery in “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”
I ran across this one at the Regal Swamp Fox 14 in Florence, SC.
I of course warned viewers off with my review, and was criticized by the unwashed and wet behind the ears.
I polled a few friends in the reviewing profession when the hate mail started pouring in. One noted that he’d warned the studio about “seizures” and yet failed to note that in his review. Another, like me, was wondering if “they’d forgotten to give us 3D glasses” for his showing. Murky. Seizure-inducing or at least headache-inducing. Again, he did not note that in his review.
Cowards. If you fear fanboy/fangirl wrath, you have no business reviewing movies in this millennium.
I know what I saw and I don’t let “You’re RUINING our JUVENILE comic book movie’s PERFECT RATING on Rotten Tomatoes” hate mail and ugly comments sway me. Because I know the fervent comic book fans never let facts or a higher aesthetic get in the way of their fandom. And I never get tired of being right.
I looked around on opening weekend for evidence supporting my thesis — that Sony had screwed up. It took a week or two longer for this blowback to roll out.
And there you go. It’s a movie that runs out of wit and good ideas after 55 minutes (and goes on another hour). And to some viewers, it’s physically painful and or-dangerous to watch. Theaters are warning patrons off. Whole CHAINS are doing it.
Any worries — expressed in other reviews — that “Vice” would render the monstrously Machiavellian Dick Cheney “sympathetic” in an effort to understand him seem misguided.. The title of Adam McKay’s broad-based take-down of the ruthless ex-vice president is “Vice,” not “Nice.”
But there isn’t any confusing of McKay, “SNL” veteran, comic scribe for Will Ferrell, “Anti-Man” and “Drunk History” for the new Oliver Stone, either. “Vice” a mad grab bag of styles, scandals, fact and myth that shows post “Big Short” ambition if not a lot of polish.
“Vice,” using a variety of techniques — audio that sounds like secret surveillance recordings, an invented narration, meetings recreated from the record or reconstructed since the Bush White House erased millions of emails to cover Cheney’s tracks, even a faux Shakespearean Lady Macbeth and her Lord in bed — builds the case that the wildly unpopular, power-drunk blunderer Cheney is the linchpin that ties GOP “theories” of the limits of Constitutional power and its fervent misuse in the hands of a corrupt, venal and wrong-headed King of the Chicken-Hawks.
Christian Bale plays Cheney from his “ne’er do well” youth — a wasted Yale admission lost because he was wasted all the time –through the blue collar early days of his marriage to the Born to be a DC Wife Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams, fierce), who fumes at his power company lineman work and after-hours drunken bar brawling “I’ve picked the wrong man.”
Being from a tiny state, Wyoming, meant that just a little enterprise and a few connections could get him into the Congressional Internship program, and hitching his star to swaggering, salty Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell, terrific) . Cheney learns the secret to success in the 1960s-and-onward GOP.
“Be loyal.”
He follows “Rummy” into the Nixon White House, but not when he’s demoted overseas. Cheney shifts between the public and private sectors — energy, Halliburton — climbs the ladder in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, angling his way toward that fateful day when guileless goof Bush II (Sam Rockwell, perfect at conveying the confidence that doesn’t quite hide stupidity) lets Cheney steal the store to take the “thankless” job of Vice President.
Bush is a “decisive” know-nothing in “Vice,” Rumsfeld a better operator and turf warrior than big thinker — “I’m like bed bugs. You have to burn the mattress to get rid of me.”
The other neo-cons of the 9/11 debacle and its Iraq War aftermath — Wolfowitz (Eddie Marsan), Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk) float by like caricatures of the venomous reptiles who “engineered” the unwarranted invasion of Iraq and the rise of ISIS.
Cheney? He was “the quiet man,” currying favor, garnering power — “authorizing” the Air Force to shoot down any jetliner being used as a weapon, personally ordering the leak of the name of a CIA agent (Valerie Plame) to “punish” her critical husband, bulldozing differences of opinion and covering up former employer Halliburton’s rapacious billing of the US for the war Mr. Cheney ginned up.
Jesse Plemons plays the narrator, a character whose identity is one of the many surprise twists McKay cooks up. As a device, he has to be omnipotent, carrying the point of view of the filmmaker. As a device he’s clumsy. Naomi Watts comes off better as EveryFoxBlonde in a more biting invention, mimicking the echo chamber that turns its viewers further and further into the darkness.
Bale, bulking up to the weight that kept the inert Cheney in and our of heart attack wards (also covered up), speaking in the measured cadences of a man taking his time, speaking for shock value (an early Cheney trait, making outlandish suggestions, which he’d then reel in to something “reasonable”), gives an unerring portrayal of political manipulation.
What Hannah Arendt famously said of “The banality of evil” when talking about perpetrators of The Holocaust fits here. He’s a boring cutthroat with empathy issues (save when it comes to his gay daughter -played Alison Pill), a self-confident bully who gives no more thought to second guessing his litany of blunders and crimes than he’d give that second helping of pork ribs.
McKay’s gimmicky movie doesn’t obscure the wonderful job of casting that he did and the Oscar worthy performances. Adams plays Lynne Cheney, given chairwomanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities during Ronald Reagan’s Culture Wars, as the no-nonsense spine who gives Dick his purpose and his marching orders, a partisan loyalist every bit as fierce as her husband. Tyler Perry makes a solid Colin Powell, Bill Camp is all wrong as Gerald Ford.
McKay overreaches as he brings in partisan hack Antonin Scalia as the legal justification of Republican high-handedness, Roger Ailes and Karl Rove for the roles they’d play in the rise of the Right Wing State, and all the rest.
It’s too much to squeeze in, and in truth, it’s too disheartening to think about. A system that’s been rigged for the super rich to do what they want, the will of the people be damned, is not fit for light comedy.
And Bale, Adams, Carell and Rockwell don’t so much leave us in awe at how their characters were able to get us to today, and make us despair at ever being smart enough to see through them and their ilk.
If this is the only consequence these America-breaking goons face for their crimes, I only wish a better puncher than McKay had been raining down the blows upon their heads.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some violent images
Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell, Tyler Perry, Bill Camp, Allison Pill, Lily Rabe
Credits :Written and directed by Adam McKay. An Annapurna release.
Documentary director turned feature filmmaker Ondi Timoner (“Dig!”) directed this controversial bio-pic about the controversial photographer who created controversy wherever he went in the ’80s — especially Cincinnati.
It stars former Doctor Who (Matt Smith) in the title role, with Marianne Rendón as his lover, muse and foil Patti Smith. Robert Mapplethorpe specialized in homoerotic art, documenting the dark leather-laced gay life of NYC of the ’60s and 70s before emerging as a major figure and lightning rod in the late 70s and early 80s.
Samuel Goldwyn picked it up, and now that it’s finished its year in festivals, everybody can see it. “Mapplethorpe” is coming soon.
The third time doesn’t prove to be the charm for the funnyman pairing of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. The “Step Brothers” struggle to find much in the way of laughter in being the latest to send up that Victorian England smartypants, Sherlock Holmes.
Ferrell’s “Get Hard” co-writer/director Etan Cohen proves as comically out of step as his leads in saddling two of the cinema’s most reliable jokers to a gasping nag of a comedy.
He wasn’t the first to think of Dr. Watson (Reilly) as the true brains of “Holmes & Watson,” though perhaps he is breaking new ground in hunting for giggles in the Good Doctor’s offering of “Cocaine?” or “Heroin?” to Holmes (Ferrell) and those he and the World’s Greatest Detective enlist in their pursuit of Moriarty. That’s cutting edge comedy, there.
And the autopsy shared by Dr. Watson and “The Lady Doctor from America” (Rebecca Hall) turned into a send-up of the potter’s wheel scene in “Ghost” (“Unchained Melody” on the Victrola) kind of works — in a 1990s way.
It’s an old fashioned broad character comedy of the type Ferrell generally avoids, seeing what the genre did to earlier “Saturday Night Live” comics like Mike Myers. It’s more scripted than riffed, and the script is weak tea indeed.
We meet the adult Holmes as he practices his entrance to court, where he proceeds to find every excuse under the sun to excuse the accused Professor Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes, utterly wasted in a role with almost no lines and nothing to play) of his assorted crimes.
Moriarty is freed, to the fury of Inspector Lestrade (Rob Brydon). It’s only when a threat is delivered about destroying “a London marvel,” “changing history” and killing Queen Victoria (Pam Ferris) to boot, that Holmes springs into action. Not that he admits his blunder or anything.
Watson? He’s angling for “co-detective” status. And upon meeting The Queen, he goes to goo. They both do.
“What a looker, eh?”
“STUNNING.”
A corpse stuffed in a cake might contain clues, but Watson can’t examine it on his own. Dr. Grace Hart from America (Hall, game for anything that’ll get a laugh) will lead and he will assist.
“A LADY doctor?”
“Does ‘DOCTOR’ mean the same thing in America?”
She is a pioneer in her field, and already makes “30 cents to every dollar a MAN makes.”
Cohen — and yes, this is pretty much all on you, dude — sends up the Robert Downey/Jude Law “Sherlock” films by having Ferrell’s dimmer Holmes graphically work out how he’ll best a brawler twice his size, defuse a bomb etc.
And he hires many of Britain’s best character actors to play unfunny bit parts — Steve Coogan as a one-armed tattoo artist, Coogan’s comic foil Brydon as Lestrade, Kelly Macdonald as Holmes’ housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, Fiennes and Hugh Laurie as Sherlock Holmes’ smarter brother (another unfunny attempt at sending up Holmes had that title).
Ferrell and Reilly sing a love duet, sling euphemisms for masturbation — “These are the wages of WANKING!” — and take us through the “London in a Day” tourist attractions as their locations.
The prologue — Holmes and Watson in boarding school — almost works. The future detective was bullied, but clever enough to get every single other student expelled so that he’d have every teacher all to himself.
“Holmes & Watson” drags the Titanic (reusing footage from “Titanic,” and one of the stars) into Victoria’s reign, hurls a comic blast or two at America’s current president and takes shots at American junk food.
“Go back to America, with your ham-dogs and hot burgers!”
It’s just not funny. The material isn’t worthy of the great comic duo of our time.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude sexual material, some violence, language and drug references
Cast: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Rebecca Hall, Kelly MacDonald, Pam Ferris, Ralph Fiennes, Steve Coogan, Hugh Laurie
Credits: Written and directed by Etan Cohen, based on the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A Sony/Columbia release.
Warner Brothers is awash in cash this last weekend of 2018, as “Aquaman,” its latest DC comics blockbuster, tallies another $50 million+ and closes in on $200 since release ($188-190s by New Year’s).
Movie Nation 