Movie Nation

When an actor of limited talent and great clout builds vehicle after vehicle around his charisma-starved kid, he’s asking for some serious abuse. Take that, Will and Jaden Smith. Get that pretentious has-been M. Night Shyamalan to direct it, and there’s more blood in the water. It’s not hateful, but it is pretty bad. All bad reviews for this one.

There was a moment, early this AM, when I was the lone voice of complaint on the Tomatometer re: “Now You See Me,” an empty bit of flash with a good cast, a lousy script and “magic” that is anything but. A lot of early filing reviewers gushed in that easy-lay way.

Now, it’s at 34% and dropping.

“The Kings of Summer” is sentimental and sweet and rude and goes into limited release.

“The East” is a superb cult thriller with Brit Marling, Ellen Page, Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Skarsgard, also in limited release.

“Before Midnight” nicely finishes up the “Before Sunrise” trilogy. Unless they take Ethan and Julie into their dotage.

Orlando gets the wrenching “What Maisie Knew” with Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan as the divorcing couple who cannot see the child they’re neglecting in their self-absorbed states.

Julianne Moore’s the best actress never to win an Oscar.

And Enzian is landing “Frances Ha,” a cute Greta Gerwig vehicle that’s worthy of its cute reviews.

The razzle dazzles but the smoke never quite hides the mirrors in “Now You See Me,” a super-slick new magicians’ heist picture that demonstrates, once again, how tough it is to make “magic” as a movie subject work.
A medium that is, by definition, a trick has a very hard time making the illusions real, realistic and anything anyone would be impressed by. Ask “Burt Wonderstone.” Ask “The Illusionist.”
A quartet of street hustlers and rising stars of the various corners of the magic trade are recruited by a mysterious hoodie-wearing figure for a series of epic stunts. Billing themselves as “The Four Horsemen,” misdirection man Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) and his former assistant Henley (Isla Fisher), “mentalist” Merritt (Woody Harrelson) and card-sharp Jack (Dave Franco) proceed to star in magic “events” where they catch the imagination of the world, and their super-rich promoter (Michael Caine).
“Tonight,” they tell Vegas, “We’re going to rob a bank.” Which they do, a continent away, raining currency down on an audience that appreciates a bank finally getting its just desserts.
The impossible, physics-defying caper itself? Remember, Atlas has told us in the narration “The closer you look, the less you see.”
Mark Ruffalo is the comically hyper-ventilating FBI Agent Rhodes always a step behind The Four Horsemen.
“You, Agent Rhodes, have a drawing board to get back to.”
And Morgan Freeman is the mysterious magic expert who may be helping the Feds, explaining to them (and the audience) how tricks work. Or maybe he’s playing another game, one on the Feds.
A lot is riding on momentum in this Louis “Clash of the Titans”/”The Transporter” Leterrier thriller. But it never gets up a good head of steam. Freeman  and Ruffalo make strong impressions. But there’s little character development, the point of view shifts, willy nilly, between the magicians — who start to feel they’re willing puppets in some larger scheme — and the cops, where Ruffalo works himself into a fine comic fury.
It’s a plot-heavy thriller, too much explaining and need to explain. And without pacing, the mind wanders into “Wait, how could any entity other than Hollywood stage a New York bridge crash like that?” and the like.
For all its showmanship, “Now You See Me” has a lot less up its sleeve than it lets on.

LINK: “Now You See Me” makes a little magic at the box office.

LINK: Jesse Eisenberg’s big reason for making this magic movie.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language, some action and sexual content
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Isla Fisher, Morgan Freeman, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco
Credits: Directed by Louis Leterrier, written by Boaz Yakin, Edward Ricourt and Ed Solomon. A Summit  release.
Running time: 1:42

Truth be told, “After Earth” wouldn’t exist had Will Smith not cooked it up as yet another star vehicle for his son, Jaden. But since buying your kid a movie credit is a tradition that dates back to the beginnings of Hollywood, you can’t hold that against it.
This sci-fi adventure about a boy who must become a man to save himself and his wounded warrior father on a hostile world is a corny, generally humorless M. Night Shyamalan picture without his trademark surprises and twists. It’s a straightforward quest in which incapacitated Dad (Will) sends guilt-ridden, fearful teen son Kitai (Jaden) off to fetch a rescue beacon that broke free of the spaceship they just crashed in.
This is Earth, a thousand years after we’ve abandoned it. The buffalo and trees and vast migrating flocks of birds are back.
There are beasts in the primeval forest Kitai must cross — ferocious digital baboons and digitized tigers and killer digital condors. A digital monster named Ursa was being transported in the space ship. It’s on the loose, too, tracking Kitai’s “fear.” There are rivers to cross and and waterfalls and high cliffs he must fly from. The oxygen is thin, the hot days yield to frigid nights that could kill him.
And every step of the way, Dad is sitting in front of holographic monitors, slowly bleeding out, “teaching” and leading his son every step of the way.
“Take a KNEE.”
Most of Dad’s lectures are about controlling and mastering fear. But in odd moments, father and son hallucinate the layers of their strained relationship, the incident that scarred Kitai for life and that he fears his father blames him for. Sophie Okonedo plays the mom who insisted her would-be Ranger boy go off with legendary Ranger dad for bonding and adventure. Zoe Kravitz — yes, she was born into the business, too — plays the boy’s sister.
A Will Smith action film that has him, grimacing on his back, giving instructions, is nobody’s idea of a lot of fun. Jaden, a good looking kid with a hint of charisma, has to carry the film and doesn’t have the presence to pull that off. And inexplicably, father and son have attempted Southern accents from over a thousand years in the future. Epic enunciation fail.
The digitally augmented scenery is striking and a couple of the action beats work. Jaden isn’t an awful actor. But there’s little here to separate him from a hundred peers who could have played this role as well, if not as prettily. Focusing on him, the movie feels a lot more “Karate Kid” than Will Smith action picture. Since Shyamalan’s last film was the insipid “Last Airbender,” perhaps that’s the standard to judge it by — an undemanding, childish adventure picture for kids starring kids whose parents happen to be show business folk.

LINK: Is “After Earth” a Scientology sales pitch?

LINK: “After Earth” is not exactly setting the box office on fire.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi action violence and some disturbing images
Cast: Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okonedo, Zoe Kravitz
Credits: Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, written by Gary Whitta, M. Night Shyamalan and Will Smith. A Columbia release.
Running time: 1:40

The “Smash” star is signing up to do a  film b the “Mystic River” author, a tale of women who kill someone they think is a murderer, only to wear the guilt and suffer the life-changing consequences of their depraved actions.

“Man of Steel” isn’t even in theaters, but Henry Cavill’s peeps aren’t waiting for the reviews and box office to impact their man’s quote. They’re going after “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” the TV-show based action piece Guy Ritchie is set to direct with Armie Hammer in the supporting role of the Russian sidekick.

Cavill has been down this “about to break out” road before (“Immortals,” leading to “The Cold Light of Day”). This time, they and he are not taking their chances. Two franchises? Sure.

The school year hasn’t gone well — assignments missed, opportunities to ask out that “special girl” botched. And for Joe Toy (Nick Robinson), the summer ahead doesn’t look much better.
He shares a house with his had-enough-of-your-nonsense widowed dad (Nick Offerman), a guy who inspires fear — and sarcasm.
“I’m making lamb stew.”
“Are we in Beowulf?’
Joe wrecks dad’s dates, dad curses Joe out for all those peccadilloes that “aren’t cute anymore.”
Joe’s pal Patrick (Gabriel Basso) is a nervous wreck, dealing with smothering, overly attentive parents (Megan Mullally his his hilarious mom) and his own dread of the summer to come.
“They’re giving me hives.”
So Patrick is down with Joe’s craziest idea — running away from home, building a shack in the woods, and “living off the land.” With their crazy hanger-on not-quite-pal Biaggio (Moises Arias, demented), they have found a remote spot where nobody’ll find them, a spot not so remote that there isn’t a Boston Market close by, should living off the land not work out.
If they don’t starve or run out of cash, if their parents or the cops or the community-wide search parties don’t find them, they’ll be “The Kings of Summer,” masters of their fate and their domain. Won’t all the other kids be jealous?
A TV writer and an online Funny or Die vet concocted this amusing, sentimental “Superbad” with less edge, a teen boys’ fantasy, roughing it, impressing the girls and coming of age.
“We make the rules. We’re men!”
The leads are pleasant enough. Arias goes WAY out there for laughs as the clumsy, daffy shouldn’t-play-with-sharp-objects Biaggio. But the adults all but steal the show from the kids here. Offerman gives Joe’s dad an acerbic ticking time bomb quality. You never know when he’ll blow — at the kid, the cops who can’t find the kid, or the doofus delivering wonton soup that doesn’t meet with his approval. Mullally (Offerman’s real-life wife) plays against type as a goody two-shoes mom who have never heard a cross word from her kid, and wouldn’t tolerate it if she did.
For an R-rated teen comedy, “Kings of Summer” is an awfully nostalgic one, with old fashioned comic rituals (the boys take an oath to each other, they turn an abandoned pipeline into a percussion instrument), an “Our Gang/Andy Griffith Show” style kids’ construction project and parents who have the same problems as their kids, but eventually realize it.
“Now, it’s just the two of us,” Joe’s dad confesses at one point. “I’m afraid I broke him.”
“Kings” adds up to a summer movie that staggers down that fine line between sentimental and snarky, a tale of nature and nurture and first love that manages to more charm than any R-rated movie about horny teens has a right to.

LINK: Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally talk about becoming parents for “The Kings of Summer”

MPAA Rating: R for language and some teen drinking
Cast: Nick Robinson, Gabriel Basso, Erin Moriarty, Moises Arias, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally
Credits: Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, written by  Chris Galletta. A  CBS Films release.
Running time: 1:33