Running With the Devil

Year 14, Day 85 - 3/26/22 - Movie #4,087

BEFORE: Nicolas Cage carries over from "The Croods: A New Age" and if you've been paying attention, you know it won't be for the last time. And most of them are recent, it seems like the only Hollywood actor who's been busier than Ryan Reynolds and Bruce Willis over the last two or three years has been Mr. Cage.

I'm still in Massachusetts, but we're driving back to New York tomorrow - and early, because I don't want to be in motion when the Oscars ceremony starts, even if I don't end up watching it live. Most likely after I get home tomorrow, I'll be frantically trying to clear my TV show DVR, just to make room for the Oscars. I can watch some shows remotely while in Massachusetts, then delete those shows from my DVR with my phone, but I can't watch all of them.

Now here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" for tomorrow, Sunday, March 27, featuring Best Picture Winners and then winners from the 1990's and 2000's:

5:45 am "Grand Hotel" (1932)
7:45 am "It Happened One Night" (1934)
9:30 am "All the King's Men" (1949)
11:30 am "All About Eve" (1950)
2:00 pm "An American in Paris" (1951)
4:00 pm "Gone With the Wind" (1939)
8:00 pm "The Artist" (2011)
10:00 pm "The Age of Innocence" (1993)
12:30 am "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" (1994)
2:30 am "All About My Mother" (1999)

I'm hitting for 8 out of 10, which is great, with just four days left in the their countdown. 133 out of 295 total brings me up just over 45%, so even with TCM going back to films of the 1920s and 1930s tomorrow, I think I'm in good shape.

THE PLOT: The CEO of an international conglomerate sends two of his most regarded executives to investigate why shipments of cocaine are being hijacked and over-cut somewhere on the supply chain.

AFTER: Eh, I didn't really get this one, because Nicolas Cage is the lead here, and he plays a man nicknamed "The Cook", I think because he runs a restaurant, but he's also involved in the drug trade.  He's called upon by the head of an organization (Business or criminal? This is a little unclear, but perhaps it's both...) to figure out what's going wrong with the pipeline. Why aren't the drugs getting through to their destination?  He aims to find out and fix the problem, but this doesn't make him a hero in my book, it makes him a villain, and it's hard to root for the villain as the main character - that character needs to be really charismatic, like "Scarface", and he's just not here. Nicolas Cage has played charismatic characters, but was he told to hold back here?  What went wrong, exactly? 

This essentially works as something of a primer on how cocaine can get from South America to dealers in North America, but honestly, I don't need to know that, I'm not in that business. It's tough to see why anybody would want to inform me about this, if I'm being honest. And yeah, it's a tough business, and people probably undercut each other, hurt each other, kill each other, but I'm still not all that interested in how it goes down.  What, exactly, is the point of all this?  It feels a bit like some filmmakers was trying to ride the coat-tails of films like "Traffic" and "Sicario" and just couldn't quite get there. 

We, the audience, get to see the whole drug pipeline, from the farmer who carries a backpack across Colombia, to the other guy who rides in a truck across the border into Mexico, to the pilot who drops a skydiver into Death Valley with the drugs, but does anybody else see the big picture?  The DEA agent doesn't, and I don't think "The Cook" does either, so does anyone?  Also, gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, why were the drugs dropped into Death Valley by plane if their final destination was in Canada?  Wouldn't it make more sense to fly them a lot closer to Canada, once they're loaded on to that plane?  This pipeline seems very inefficient with regards to the number of stops.  Also, is the drug war fought one backpack at a time?  Why not a truck full of backpacks, or a shipping container, wouldn't that be a little faster and more efficient? 

Also, NITPICK POINT #2, and I say this without knowing much about how dealing drugs works, what's the purpose of cutting the drugs with other substances, reducing the quality of the cocaine, or adding in some other substance, like heroin here?  Making it so easy for the customers to overdose doesn't seem like a very smart business plan, you don't get quite as much repeat business that way.  But what the hell do I know?

Also starring Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "The Color Purple"), Leslie Bibb (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Barry Pepper (last seen in "Broken City"), Adam Goldberg (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Cole Hauser (last seen in "Acts of Violence"), Peter Facinelli (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Natalia Reyes (last seen in "Terminator: Dark Fate"), Marie Wagenman, Christian Tappan Sorzano, J.T. Holmes, Tait Fletcher (last seen in "Free Guy"), Damacio Page, Luce Rains (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Sarah Minnich (ditto), Ellen Humphreys, David Priemazon, Lonnie Lane, Keith Jardine (last seen in "The Kid"), Lillie Richardson, Hank Rogerson (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Jason Cabell, Ron Weisberg, Barbie Robertson (last seen in "Only the Brave"), J.D. Garfield (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Chad Doher, Derek Blakeley, Chris Ranney, Jason Varge, Derrick Van Orden, Xavier Declie, Jorge Reyes, Camilo Amores

RATING: 3 out of 10 club kids

The Croods: A New Age

Year 14, Day 84 - 3/25/22 - Movie #4,086

BEFORE: Both Ryan Reynolds AND Catherine Keener carry over from "The Adam Project", that's always nice, and as you can probably tell, this is how I'm going to start the Nicolas Cage chain. This one's been on my list for a while, thank God it's still available on Hulu, and really, using it as a vital link like this sort of validates keeping it on my list for so long. Why hide it between two films with, say, Peter Dinklage in it when it can serve a much nobler purpose? Sure, I COULD have watched it last year in that fashion, but something made me hold back, and I guess this was it, it needed to be my connection to the Nic Cage chain, even if I didn't know it until almost now.

I'm still up in Massachusetts, I successfully turned in my parents' cable box, no problems, and that should save me some money in the long run. I'm still paying for internet service to their house, and I got a free device from the cable company that will allow their Smart TV to connect to more streaming services than just Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. So if and when I visit, I can also watch movies from Peacock, Pluto TV, HBO Max and Disney Plus - theoretically, of course. This weekend I only need to access Hulu to keep my chain alive, but who knows what the future holds?

Now here's TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, Saturday, March 26, featuring films that won for "Best Director", then Oscar winners from the 1980's:

5:30 am "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936)
7:45 am "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946)
11:00 am "Casablanca" (1942)
1:00 pm "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962)
5:00 pm "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957)
8:00 pm "A Passage to India" (1984)
11:00 pm "The Last Emperor" (1987)
2:00 am "Dangerous Liaisons" (1988)
4:15 am "The Times of Harvey Milk" (1984)

Whoa, just 9 films tomorrow, because there are some really long ones on the docket. But hurray, for me, because I've seen eight of these, I think - all except the last one.  I'm a little unsure about "Dangerous Liaisons", but I'm thinking I MUST have seen that at some point before starting this project, that's the only reason it's unrated by me on IMDB.  So another 8 out of 9 brings me to 125 seen out of 285, which is a whopping 43.8% seen, with just 5 days to go.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Croods" (Movie #2,444)

THE PLOT: The prehistoric family the Croods are challenged by a rival family, the Bettermans, who claim to be better and more evolved.

AFTER: My God, it's been a long time since the first "Croods" film - I barely remember watching it, back in 2016, that was like a hundred years ago, right?  So I certainly don't remember any of the plot points, but still, no need to review, I think I can just jump in here tonight and pick up wherever the last movie left off, because the sequel's just going to start from some arbitrary point in the life of this modern stone-age family, and it will have to give me all the exposition I'll need, just in case someone DID NOT see the first film, which I totally did, so I'll probably be O.K.

Guy is the non-Crood pseudo-family member, who's in love (if that word existed back then) with Eep, the daughter in the Crood family. (By the way, this is the second film in a week where Ryan Reynolds plays a guy who's also NAMED Guy.) First we learn a little bit more about Guy's back-story, he left the place where he lived in search of a better tomorrow, because he believed in a mythical place NAMED Tomorrow, or perhaps it was more of a concept, I don't know.  He just set out on the road because he thought things would be better someplace else. Here in the second film, he's not only still seeking Tomorrow, he's got the whole Crood family along for the ride, looking for a better place, but still sticking to their primitive methods of sleeping in piles and forming defensive kill-circles and testing out new sources of food, basically by trial and error.  

But eventually the family hits a wall in their search - no, literally, they HIT a real WALL, and when they break through it, they find all kinds of new, exotic and wonderful food, which for some reason has grown in perfect rows, all spaced apart, and, oh, God, this is somebody's garden, isn't it?  Must belong to whoever built that wall to keep primitive people out. Before long we find out this walled-off garden belongs to the Bettermans, their name is an obvious indication of their place on the evolutionary chart, and hint hint, it's further to the right than the Croods (sounds like "crudes", get it?).  But it turns out that the Bettermans (Bettermen?) know Guy from way back, they were friends with his parents, who died tragically, which apparently set Guy off on his crusade for Tomorrow.

The Croods are welcome to stay with the Bettermans, in their forward-thinking enclave where food is abundant, the wall keeps out the predators, everyone has their own room and some privacy, and people don't sleep in piles.  They also take showers, something that the Croods don't seem to know much about - and Phil Betterman has invented the world's first man-cave, which is, of course, an actual cave. Much of the humor here comes from the primitives inventing early versions of things we the audience are very familiar with, or somehow they know about very primitive versions of things we know, much like "The Flintstones" did way back when. Fred Flintstone had a television, a car, a bowling ball you know, stuff like that, only they were all made out of rock.

The Croods soon wear out their welcome, though, because they're so, well, primitive - but the Bettermans want them to leave and Guy to stay behind, because he's a perfect match for their daughter, Dawn. Because the Bettermans are not only more evolved, they're also smarter, they manage to trick Grug Crood into thinking he thought of this plan himself. There's a larger truth here within the joke, like we all believe that Homo Sapiens survived and the Neanderthal humans did not, simply because the Homo Sapiens were smarter, but honestly, do we really know that it went down that way?  No, we don't. Why one tribe of proto-humans survived and the other didn't is really anybody's guess, but sure, why not mine that for comedy? 

There's also a jab at over-protective parents, the Bettermans have never let their daughter go beyond their walls. OK, they've kept her safe, great, but now she has no experience with the outside world, and she's somewhat ignorant and rebellious as a result. Eep, on the other hand, is technically "dumber", as in less-evolved, but she's more street-smart, can handle herself in a fight and she has the scars to prove it. Which is better in the long run, to be safe and socially backward or to be outgoing, successful but also endangered?  The movie doesn't seem to have a clear answer, because when she does leave the family compound with Eep, she gets stung by a large prehistoric bee and has a bad reaction to the venom. This is a bit like kids with peanut allergies, I guess, because if their parents keep them safe and away from peanuts, then they'll never build up a tolerance and keep having bad reactions.  Or any disease like measles, mumps, or even COVID, if you keep your kid TOO safe, then they can't ever build up any immunities to these diseases, and that could be worse for them in the long run.  

After the two families have a falling-out, Grug Crood finally decides to eat a banana, the one thing that Phil Betterman had forbid him to do while a guest on his property.  Eating the bananas has an unforeseen consequence that puts the men of both families at risk, forcing the women of the two families (plus Thunk) to revive a sisterhood of warrior "wimmens", aka The Thunder Sisters, to rescue the men.  Sure, I'm all for feminism saving the day here, that's a nice twist in the world of typically patriarchal cavemen.

Not all of the jokes land, but so what?  I champion the attempts to find humor in the primitive times - we here in the modern times need all the humor we can find these days. 

Also starring the voices of Nicolas Cage (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Emma Stone (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Cloris Leachman (last seen in "You Again"), Clark Duke (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Leslie Mann (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Peter Dinklage (last seen in "Rememory"), Kelly Marie Tran (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Kailey Crawford, Chris Sanders (last heard in "Penguins of Madagascar"), James Ryan, Gabriel Jack, Melissa Disney, Joel Crawford, Januel Mercado, Ryan Naylor.

RATING: 6 out of 10 sharpened sticks

The Adam Project

Year 14, Day 83 - 3/24/22 - Movie #4,085

BEFORE: Ryan Reynolds carries over again from "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard", and thanks for the recommendation, Netflix, your timing just couldn't be better - for once. And there's an article about this film in the issue of Entertainment Weekly I JUST got, and I stopped reading it yesterday RIGHT THERE because I knew I would be watching the movie later that night, and no spoilers.

But we're driving up to Massachusetts today, after I watch this film, so I'm going to be short on time tonight. So, quickly, here's the line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming for tomorrow, Friday, March 25:

6:30 am "Derzu Uzala" (1975)

9:00 am "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972)

11:00 am "Day for Night" (1973)

1:15 pm "Logan's Run" (1975)

3:30 pm "Being There" (1979)

6:00 pm "The Candidate" (1972)

8:00 pm "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971)

11:15 pm "All That Jazz" (1979)

1:30 am "Woodstock" (1970) 

Ah, thank God for the 1970's.  I'm hitting with 6 seen out of 9 today, so that has to help my score, now I'm up to 117 out of 276, or 42.4%. Every little bit helps.

THE PLOT: After accidentally crash-landing in 2022, time-traveling fighter pilot Adam Reed teams up with his 12-year-old self for a mission to save the future.

AFTER: Ah, it's been a while since I've seen a good time-travel movie - last September I made some inroads into the topic with "Time Freak", which was a good one, and "My Future Boyfriend", which was a terrible one. For every "Bill & Ted Face the Music" that REALLY deals with the topic, there seems to also be a "Terminator: Dark Fate" which sort of tangentially involves characters time-traveling but doesn't really get into the logistics of it, the possible paradoxes and the implausibility of it all.  Then you've got films like "An American Pickle" that don't REALLY involve time-travel, they just have work-around methods of getting a character from the past into the future, like through some form of suspended animation. Then last year there was also "Palm Springs", which was just characters stuck in a time-loop, and of course "Tenet" that just redefined the whole genre and blew everything else away. 

Like "Tenet", the focus of this time-travel story is the invention of time travel itself, naturally that moment would become very important to all time-travelers, and as you might imagine, people from the future might use the device to travel backwards and mess with that watershed moment. This creates a paradox in and of itself, if someone were to use the time machine to travel back and prevent the process from being invented in the first place, and if they were to be successful, then how the hell did they travel back?  Or what if somebody from the future took the schematics of the time machine back with them and gave them to the machine's inventor, before he invented it?  Then, umm, who really invented it?  I tried to write a story along these lines, it was quite ridiculous, with various future versions of the same person coming back from different future timelines, and alternately assisting with the inventor's plans or messing with the plans, or trying to convince him that inventing time travel was a terrible idea, or one with disastrous consquences. And as the inventor would flip-flop over whether or not to invent time-travel, various future versions of himself would blink out of existence.  It was all quite ridiculous, but since the various incarnations of the inventor all met with him in a diner, I called the story "Adam and Eve on a Raft", which is of course diner slang.

I'm sure it's a coincidence that this film is called "The Adam Project", because I never published it or talked about this story publicly - for that matter, my story about futuristic robots all trying to travel back and kill Hitler as a baby was never published, either, and I had the perfect (?) title,too, which was "The Germanator". Get it?  Hitler's mother would be a take on Sarah Conner, and an Edward Furlong type could play Hitler as a boy, think about it. 

But "The Adam Project" instead involves a pilot from 2050 traveling back to 2022 and meeting himself as a boy.  This plot's a good one, so SPOILER ALERT from this point on, if you haven't seen this one yet, please turn back NOW.  He was trying to get back to 2018 to find his wife, who disappeared on a mission back to the past. Adam missed by a few years, but finds that his wife's been waiting through four years of real time (including the Trump years and the pandemic, presumably) for him to show up, but once he does, he learns that he's got to go back further, with younger Adam, to convince his own father to NOT follow through with his research, which would ultimately make time-travel possible, decades down the road.  

There are potential paradoxes all over the place here, one should never meet one's younger self, because any contact like that could change history.  Especially if Older Adam doesn't have a memory of meeting his future self when he was 12, that's a big warning sign right there.  But anything a person does when they travel back in time could change history, or at least that's one theory, the fluid-reality theory.  The other theory is the fixed reality theory, which states that the past can't be changed because it happened just that way, there's only one reality so traveling back will accomplish nothing, you can't save JFK from being shot, and you'll probably just end up helping out Lee Harvey Oswald, or worse, becoming Lee Harvey Oswald yourself.  

Kids today are just too smart, I think - Adam immediately wants to know if this means that there's a multiverse, to which older Adam (and this movie) have the answer: "Shut up."  This is kind of a cop-out, because then the film doesn't pick the fluid-reality theory or the fixed-reality theory, and instead they go with the "whatever makes the best movie" theory, which states that there simply MUST be a reason to go back in time, because it's so cool, so that means reality CAN be changed, the bad guys can go back and invest in Microsoft and Amazon, but then the good guys can go back AGAIN and through hard work, luck and unforeseen happenstance, change things back AGAIN.  This is commonly known as the "Back to the Future II" codicil to time travel, which states that yes, a series of events happened and this needs to be respected, but not changing anything makes for a boring-ass movie, so screw it.

So the theory here is that yes, the future can be changed, and if you manage to change the past, then the future will adjust, but you won't just ZAP out of existence or blink back to your new timeline, I mean I guess that WILL happen, it just takes a few minutes.  And very conveniently those paradoxes don't end up rupturing time or destroying the universe - but still, if you think about it, they're still THERE.  Older Adam and Younger Adam go back in time, they prevent time travel from being invented, so great, it never exists, but then they never had the ability to travel back and do that, so then time travel WASN'T prevented from being invented, therefore maybe it WAS invented, and that just loops around ad infinitum.

I wish I could believe in time-travel, but I fall back on the facts - we're not aware of any time-travelers who walk among us, and there probably would be SOME feeling that things are working out for the best, and since Hitler was never killed as a baby, the pandemic was not prevented, 9/11 still happened and so on, I have to believe that time-travel will NEVER be invented, because this just can't be the best timeline possible, right?  After all the time travelers screwing around, this is the BEST they could do?  Also, the time travel we see depicted in books and movies is always through time to the same fixed point, but the truth is, there are no fixed points, the universe is always in motion.  The earth moves around the sun, for example, and so if you time-travel from Boston in March back two months to Boston in January, the earth's not going to be in the same place, how does your time machine account for this?  You'd end up floating in space, at a different point in Earth's orbit.  You can't even treat the sun as a fixed reference point, but it's also moving around within the Milky Way galaxy, which is also moving, so forget it, it's impossible to calculate all that.  You can't move in time and stay in the same point in space, the two are inextricably linked.

I wish I could just roll with it, because this movie would then be pretty cool and a lot of fun. It's got the same director as "Free Guy", Shawn Levy, and it looks like he gets along with Ryan Reynolds just fine, because he's going to be directing "Deadpool 3".  Well, come on, let's go, what's the hold-up?  I know Ryan Reynolds is busy, I just watched four of his films that came out in 2021 or 2022, but tick tock, let's get a move on.

And you just know I had to have a NITPICK POINT tonight, right, and once again, it's about bullies. Older Adam tells his younger self that he HAS to stand up to the bullies and fight them, and why does Hollywood keep making this mistake?  A good kid punching out his bullies is no better than they are, and really, screenwriters are generally so creative, why is teaching a nerdy kid how to fight the best they can come up with?  Bullies can be outsmarted, they can be killed with kindness, they can be snitched on, there simply MUST be other ways to deal with them then stooping to their level.

Also starring Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Zoe Saldana (last seen in "Get Over It"), Walker Scobell, Catherine Keener (last seen in "Walking and Talking"), Alex Mallari Jr., Braxton Bjerken, Kasra Wong, Donald Sales, Esther Ming Li, Ben Wilkinson, Milo Shandel, Isaiah Haegert.

RATING: 7 out of 10 baseball gloves

Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard

Year 14, Day 82 - 3/23/22 - Movie #4,084

BEFORE: Ryan Reynolds carries over again from "Red Notice" and I'm inching closer to that Nicolas Cage chain, postponed from January - that should start in a couple of days, and then Mr. Cage will get me to the end of the month, and, what the hell, April Fool's Day as well.  One of those Nic Cage films (probably, more than one) seems very appropriate for April 1, but we'll see.  I had taken "Bangkok Dangerous" off the list because it was no longer available on HBO Max, but it's popped up again on Pluto TV, which is free, so maybe it's back in, as long as I can still make it to my Easter film on time.

Speaking of on time, just four days until the Oscars, so there's no more time to catch up on the nominated films - anyway, I'm going out of town tomorrow morning for a few days, but while I'm visiting my parents I'll still have access to Netflix and Hulu, and that was carefully planned, this weekend was not chosen by accident for a visit.  I'll be back home in time to watch the Oscars ceremony on Sunday night, though.  

Here's the line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", for Thursday, March 24, featuring winners from the 1960's:

6:30 am "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1966)

8:30 am "Exodus" (1960)

12:30 pm "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963)

3:30 pm "The Time Machine" (1960)

5:30 pm "2001" (1968)

8:00 pm "The Producers" (1967)

9:45 pm "Tom Jones" (1963)

12:00 am "Splendor in the Grass" (1961)

2:15 am "Planet of the Apes" (1968)

4:15 am "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962)

Well, I told you this would be my day - a little bit sci-fi, a little bit comedy, a little bit classic lit and ending with a psychological thriller, it looks right up my alley.  This would be the kind of chain I'd put together, only without the actor links.  I've seen a whopping nine out of these ten, every one of them except for "Exodus".  This should improve my stats - I'm moving up to 111 seen out of 267, or 41.5%. Seven days left, and I still may have a chance of finishing above 40% overall.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Hitman's Bodyguard" (Movie #3,063)

THE PLOT: The bodyguard Michael Bryce continues his friendship with assassin Darius Kincaid as they try to save Darius' wife Sonia. 

AFTER: First of all, what happened to the "THE" in the title?  This is a sequel to "THE Hitman's Bodyguard", but the "THE" is absent from the sequel's title.  This is a reverse of what happened to the "Suicide Squad" franchise, right?  The second film was "THE Suicide Squad", and the first film was without the "THE".  Did they need the "THE" for the title of "THE Batman"?  I guess maybe there was a shortage?  Or would the title look wonky on the poster if they added one more word to it?  It's not as bad as leaving the word "X-Men" out of the title of the "Dark Phoenix" movie, but it's still going to bother me.  

Yesterday I was calling out for a sequel to "Red Notice", but if they're going to get lazy and half-ass it like today's film did, then they probably shouldn't bother.  This was very confusing and ultimately hard to follow, I think I fell asleep halfway through and then when I woke up it was hard to get back into it.  Sure, maybe I was stressed out because I had a show to work tonight, and then I've got to pack for a trip, etc. - but that's a poor excuse, a film should still be able to hold my attention and keep me from falling asleep.  With "Red Notice", the characters had clear objectives at all times, even if the alliances kept changing - they had to obtain the eggs, steal them from the people who had them, find the last one and deliver them all to the client.  With this film, I had very little clue what the objectives were most of the time.  Umm, stop the bad man, defeat the evil power, save the, umm, electrical grid?  

There are sanctions against Greece (ooh, so close, we were looking for Russia. Russia...) and a terrorist madman wants to destroy the European power grid to...umm, protest those sanctions?  And naturally Interpol can't stop him themselves, they for some reason need the services of the unlikely trio, a hitman, a bodyguard and the hitman's wife.  Sure, because there are no Interpol agents available to do whatever it is he needs them to do?  They have to pick up a briefcase for the villain and deliver it back to Interpol, instead of where it's supposed to go, only they can't do that because they can't maintain their cover.  People keep recognizing the bodyguard and the hitman's wife can't stay in character, she's very high-strung and hot-tempered.  OK, so new plan, then?  

While on the run, they end up seeking help from Bryce's step-father, who lives in Tuscany and is also an expert bodyguard - it turns out there's a union, they have their own code of conduct and maybe even an awards show every year - or was that a joke?  I couldn't tell. Anyway Bryce Sr. offers them aid and transport, but that code of conduct cuts both ways, and it's not just the lingering daddy issues that bring Bryce into conflict with his step-father.  I don't know, it feels a bit like the screenwriter has confused "bodyguard" with something else here, I just doubt that this profession is so well organized around the globe and has such rigid rules in place.  Who would even check on how closely the "rules" of the profession are being followed - or is that another joke that went over my head?  

Damn, and I was on a roll this week with "Free Guy" and "Red Notice", now this one's brought my enjoyment inertia to a screeching halt.  There's just too much emphasis here on physical comedy, it's not really slapstick if people are getting hit by cars, stabbed, shot, drowned, etc., but it's kind of in the ball-park, and there's honestly just too much of it. 

Also starring Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Freedomland"), Salma Hayek (last seen in "Some Kind of Beautiful"), Frank Grillo (last seen in "Reprisal"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in Haywire"), Morgan Freeman (last seen in "Feast of Love"), Richard E. Grant (last seen in "Their Finest"), Tom Hopper (last seen in "Terminator: Dark Fate"), Kristofer Kamiyasu, Caroline Goodall (last seen in "The Cold Light of Day"), Alice McMillan, Gabriella Wright, Dragan Micanovic (last seen in "Papillon" (2017)), Rebecca Front (last seen in "The Aeronauts"), Blake Ritson (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Miltos Yerolemou (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Gary Oldman (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Ivor Bagaric, Tsuwayuki Saotome (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Barry Atsma (ditto), Tine Joustra (ditto), Michael Gor (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Brian Caspe (last seen in "Unlocked"), Anna-Maria Everett, Michael Aston, Jonny James, Venice Smith, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 tranquilizer darts

Red Notice

Year 14, Day 81 - 3/22/22 - Movie #4,083

BEFORE: Ryan Reynolds carries over from "Free Guy" - and I realize I'm creating a couple "roads not taken" by cutting to this one.  First off, I realized too late that Chris Evans had a cameo in "Don't Look Up", I could have squeezed another Oscar-nominated film in there, that's a missed opportunity.  BUT, it's not a mistake, especially if it turns out later on that I need that film to make an important connection - that film has a big cast with prominent actors, and I've learned by doing to keep those good opportunities open, sometimes.  

Also, with "The Rock" making an appearance (voice only) in "Free Guy" there was another way of doing this where I could have crammed several other films with Dwayne Johnson here, and ending with "Red Notice", then continuing as planned - but that won't work either, because there are only so many days until Easter, and I'm on a tight schedule already.  So now I have to re-schedule "Jungle Cruise", "Walking Tall", "Switch" and "Empire State", but I think I already see a way to do that, right after Mother's Day.  That could help bridge that 41-day gap between Mother's Day and Father's Day, but JEEZ, I forgot about Memorial Day, so maybe I should think of that as two 20-day gaps instead of one 40-day gap.  That could be easier to fill - so maybe I should check to see if there are any war-based films left on the list. 

Today was the World War II-based day on TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, but tomorrow, March 23, they're back on the 1950's: 

8:30 am "Les Girls" (1957)

10:30 am "The Solid Gold Cadillac" (1956)

12:30 pm "Designing Woman" (1957)

2:30 pm "Tom Thumb" (1958)

4:30 pm "Lili" (1953)

6:00 pm "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1950)

8:00 pm "Harvey" (1950)

10:00 pm "Lust for Life" (1956)

12:15 am "On the Waterfront" (1954)

2:15 am "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951)

4:30 am "The Old Man and the Sea" (1958)

Ah, they're back in a decade where I've seen more films - I believe I've seen five of these: "Harvey", "Lust for Life", "On the Waterfront", "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "The Old Man and the Sea" - so another 5 out of 11 brings me to 102 seen out of 257, or 39.6%, up just a bit.  Tomorrow might be my redemption day, though. 

THE PLOT: An Interpol agent tracks the world's most wanted art thief. 

AFTER: Well, if "Free Guy" was a little bit of "Boss Level", part "Deadpool", mixed with "Jumanji: The Next Level", with bits of "Inception" and "The Matrix" thrown in for good measure, then this one's something of a mash-up of "National Treasure", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Ocean's Eleven", James Bond films, a little "Mission: Impossible" and of course hints of "Deadpool" and "Wonder Woman" - but those are all good things, great movies to borrow from, so then the hope just becomes that putting all those little pieces together creates something bigger than the sum of its parts. 

I think this one is just that, because like "Free Guy", it's so much damn fun. The stunts are great, and there are a lot of them, all that's missing there is the "Deadpool" costume, but I know that somebody, somewhere, is working all that out, and we should have another "Deadpool" movie before TOO long.  I hope there's another "Red Notice" film in the works, too, I'd watch that, more than likely, I'm all about the sequels if they're good enough.  Man, it's just Netflix's world now, isn't it, and we all just scroll through it?  Since this was never in theaters, they don't HAVE to reveal the budget for this movie, but IMDB puts it at $160 million, but Wiki says it was more like $200 million - that's like the GDP of a small country, right?  You could maybe cure a disease for that kind of money, that's the only drawback, that we can enjoy this film, but people are still going to be suffering from Crohn's Disease or that one that makes your eyeballs all bulgy.  But it's not up to me where the money goes, and it's too late to stop that Netflix train or reroute the money that was spent here for another purpose. Maybe I'm in the wrong line of work. 

They really did film all over - Rome, Sardinia, Paris, Bali, Spain, Egypt, Thailand and the Cayman Islands - well, there's the reason for the high budget, I guess, plus the salaries of the three big stars.  Or maybe they stayed in a studio in Atlanta, Georgia and they green-screened everything, how would I know?  Somebody got to travel all over the world filming beautiful locations, maybe it was just a camera crew getting B-roll. But again, I'm getting off the point - I just love figuring out how movies are made, though. 

The plot here concerns three relics, Cleopatra's jeweled eggs, supposedly a wedding gift from Marc Anthony to the Egyptian queen, one's in a museum, the other's owned by a shady Italian collector, and the third has never been found. Some Egyptian billionaire wants them for his daughter's wedding (she's also named Cleopatra) but will only pay a fortune for all three together, because reasons. This sets in motion a chain of events where an expert art thief sets out to steal the first one, and an American FBI criminal profiler arrives to stop him, only he's JUST a bit late.  The art dealer's competition, a woman nicknamed "The Bishop" is also in the mix, and the three are eternally at odds with each other, alternately working against each other (and occasionally together) to see who can come out on top.  Then there's an Interpol agent who's out to get one or all of them, she comes to believe that the FBI agent has gone rogue because he works with the art thief to clear his name, after the OTHER art thief frames him for one of the thefts.  Damn, but I love me a good double-cross movie that turns into a triple-cross or maybe even a quadruple-cross. 

Then, of course, the main question is who's zooming who, and by working together do these enemies turn into friends, or frenemies, or whether everybody's just using everybody else to get ahead.  Well, it's not going to be settled during this movie if there are sequels planned, that's for sure - but at least there are constantly shifting sands in these relationships that are forged in the fire of art heists and prison escapes.  The roller coaster ride doesn't end until the clock runs out, then we'll see who's in handcuffs, and also if that's in a good way or a bad way. 

If I've got a NITPICK POINT tonight, with all these plans-within-plans and shifting alliances, none of it would have been possible if the FBI profiler hadn't been placed in the same cell with the art thief, because they work together to escape.  But who put them in the same cell?  Neither one had that kind of pull, and why would the Interpol agent arrange that?  It's a dumb idea, especially if she thought they might be in cahoots - or did she think they hated each other so much that sharing a cell together would be a form of torture?  Still, it seems that character made a terrible mistake, unless there's some other explanation for this.  

Also starring Dwayne Johnson (also carrying over from "Free Guy"), Gal Gadot (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Chris Diamantopoulos (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Ritu Arya, Ivan Mbakop, Vincenzo Amato (last seen in "Unbroken"), Rafael Petardi, Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Guy Nardulli, Ethan Herschenfeld, Brenna Marie Narayan, Ed Sheeran (last seen in "Yesterday"), with archive footage of Paul Hollywood, Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed")

RATING: 8 out of 10 useless museum security guards

Free Guy

Year 14, Day 80 - 3/21/22 - Movie #4,082

BEFORE: Winter gives way to spring, I've shaved off my beard in an annual cleansing ritual, and at the same time, I've completed the transition from romance-based films to action movies.  But my goal isn't just to get to the Nicolas Cage chain, I've got my sights set on SUMMER, if you can believe that. I'd initially only programmed my chain until Easter, while at the same time I'd figured out the connection between Father's Day and July 4, which involves my annual documentary - slash - Summer Concert series that should stretch until late July.  Well, last night I was linking some films and found a path - correction, two paths - to get me from Easter to Mother's Day, in the right number of steps.  What's weird here is that I'd gone through my list and ear-marked eight films with maternal plots or themes, and three of them link together, and another set of three of them link together.  And leading from Easter, it's about 21 days to Mother's Day - I could link to either set of three, but obviously not both.

SO, I've got two possible end points to my chain right now, and two possible starting points for the Father's Day-to-late July segment.  All I have to find is a chain of films between May 8 and June 19, about 41 days, that will start in one of two places and end in one of two other places, it doesn't even have to be 41 films long, it can be 40, or 42, or some number slightly less than 40, I'll be OK with that - and if I can find that, then this year is 2/3 linked at that point.  From there I just need to link to the start of the horror chain - plenty of time, all things will be possible, and then I could conceivably have my fourth "perfect" Movie Year in a row.  Dare to dream, because you've got to dream it before you can do it. 

The new method that I tried to use for linking, created just to confirm that I'd found the BEST path to Easter, I think I'm going to have to scrap that method, which involves mapping out EVERY possible path - but by the time I finish doing that, Easter will have come and gone.  So I think the rougher method, of just mapping out films on a piece of scrap paper, with arrows and circles, is more effective in the end.  Why should I spend time mapping out EVERY path, when I only really need one that works?  The GPS in your car doesn't tell you all the different ways to get somewhere, it only tells you the most obvious one, and I should take that lesson to heart.  Now, if that road becomes blocked, of course it can suggest an alternative, so I should just keep that in mind - I don't need an alternate path most of the time, one is fine, unless I realize there's something wrong with it.   

The TCM "31 Days of Oscar" schedule is the same way - they just pick one order and they roll with it, so I should do the same.  Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 22, they're back showcasing the Oscar-winning films of the 1940's:

6:00 am "The Secret Land" (1948)
7:30 am "This Land Is Mine" (1943)

9:15 am "49th Parallel" (1941)

11:30 am "The Search" (1948)

1:15 pm "Battleground" (1949)

3:15 pm "Air Force" (1943)

5:30 pm "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944)
8:00 pm "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940)
10:15 pm "How Green Was My Valley" (1941)

12:30 am "A Letter to Three Wives" (1948)

2:30 am "Kitty Foyle" (1940)

4:30 am "Blithe Spirit" (1945)

6:15 am "That Hamilton Woman" (1941)

What a weird day, a bunch of World War II films, then there's a few films about farming and mining families, then several complicated period pieces about relationships. I'm not seeing something they all have in common, other than the decade, so I guess it's just a mixed bag that they tried to make look a little less, well, mixed.  Unfortunately, I've only seen ONE of these, "The Grapes of Wrath", so my stats are going to take a hit tomorrow - 1 seen out of 13 brings me up to 97 seen out of 246, or 39.4%.  Hopefully I can rally and end this thing above 40%. 

Just six days left before this year's Oscar ceremony, and "Free Guy" looks like it will be the last nominated film I can squeeze in - it's nominated for Best Visual Effects, and after tonight I'll have seen FOUR out of the five nominees, or 80%. So, most likely I've already seen the winning film in that category, unless "No Time To Die" takes it.  "Dune", "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home" are the other nominees, and I watched all three of those films in January.  It'll probably be "Dune", right? 

Chris Evans carries over from "Cellular" for a cameo in today's film. 

THE PLOT: A bank teller discovers that he's actually an NPC inside a brutal, open world video game. 

AFTER: Damn, but this is really the kind of movie I like to see - the kind of film where somebody really thought outside the box - hell, even asked "Does it even have to BE a box?" - and realized that visual effects are there to make everything - ANYTHING - happen.  If we didn't have the effects tech we have, this film would never get off the drawing board.  If this beats out "Dune" for the Oscar, I'd totally get it, because one film had to use effects to bring a particular story to life from a book, so that's working within the narrow-ish parameters of that author's vision, but damn, with an open-ended world like one seen in a video game, there's no limit to what could be done in this film, within the writer/director's imagination, of course - and so a lot of wild stuff can really be depicted here.  

Of course, my reference point is "Grand Theft Auto", by the time Rockstar Games got up to the "San Andreas" version of that game, the world depicted within was just HUGE, so you could enjoy all the wonders of driving from the San Francisco-like city to the Las Vegas-like city within the game, without the annoyance of rest stops, hitchhikers and cheap motels.  Plus there was so much to do within the game that you really had to take off work for a week to make a dent in it.  Then they came out with GTA 4, which was another giant leap forward in size and style, and then GTA 5, which was even bigger and more advanced.  I didn't play GTA 4 or 5, but I watched my wife play them through, so I got a sense how big those cityscapes could really be, and how much stuff there was to DO in them.  (Right now she's playing "Zelda: Breath of the Wild" through for the 17 time, she just got the expansion pack, though, so there's new stuff.)

The movie this reminds me of, though, is "Boss Level" - which similarly had a main character who couldn't die, because of some accident with a piece of time-warping tech which sent him back, "Groundhog Day"-style, to the beginning of that action-packed day every time he died.  That movie was set in the real world, but the violence was so over-the-top that it FELT like a video-game, and being able to reset the day, with an infinite number of "lives", well that's just straight out of a video-game, essentially.  Plus it's called "Boss Level", another VG reference. 

"Free Guy" has a lot of different meanings, too - like you used to get an extra "guy" or Pac-Man or Q-Bert whatever if you rose above a certain score in a game, so, Free Guy.  But the main character here is NAMED Guy, so "Free" can either be an adjective describing Guy's free nature, or a command to free him from the confines of the game's rules - your call, really.  Once he's "Free", he becomes a bit like the superhero of that game's world, the only character doing good things, unlike the majority of the real gamers. 

This film played in theaters last summer, while I was working at an AMC - so I saw the ending a couple of times, that's really a no-no, I know - but I had to sweep the theater, and to get ready to do that I had to be in position a bit before the credits.  There are a dozen or so films that played at the AMC that I didn't get to see - I only watched "Black Widow" for free, which seems like a shame - and now I have to play catch up and watch films like "Cruella", "A Quiet Place II", "Respect", "Addams Family 2", Reminiscence", "Candyman", "Jungle Cruise" and "In the Heights" on streaming, either now or when they become available.  Then there's another list of films that played at the theater where I work now that I didn't get to see, like "Belfast", "Licorice Pizza", "The Lost Daughter", "Cyrano", "Tick...Tick...Boom!", "No Time to Die", "West Side Story" and "The Matrix: Resurrections". I'm going to try to get to ALL of these, they're all on my to-watch list, but it's going to take some time. But I'm getting off track again - I've got to focus on the path I'm on, instead of all the paths not yet taken. 

"Free Guy" is set in the expansive world of this giant video-game called "Free City", and it's the kind of place where gamers come in as avatars, cause a lot of mayhem and havoc, with the killing and the bank-robbing in order to gain points and in-game money and keep levelling up.  Guy is just a guy who works at one of those banks that keeps getting robbed, so getting down on the floor while some masked thug shoots up the place and steals a bunch of cash is like a daily occurence.  Guy walks around, gets the same coffee every day, says the same things every day, because that's what he's programmed to do, he's just a background character, until he's not.  One day he starts to become aware and a bit creative, almost like he's starting to think for himself or develop a personality, which shouldn't be possible for an NPC.  For that matter, it's a bit of a NITPICK POINT that Guy even has a home life, an apartment with a goldfish, different shirts in the closet (but all the same color).  Why would a programmer set him up in an apartment that no player would ever visit?  If you think about it, he should just work at the bank 24/7, waiting for the next robber.  Or if the bank in the video-game world had to close at night, his character should just cease to exist during non-business hours.  

So it's maybe a bit of a stretch that a programmer would develop a back-story, a home address, a pet, etc. for a non-player character.  This isn't "The Sims", after all, the players here wouldn't be interested in a character's home life - his one purpose is to hand over bags of cash to the bank robbers, so why does Guy have all this extra life in his life?  Ah, that's where the movie adds a bunch of back-story, because it seems that the lead video-game CEO for this company sort of stole a bunch of code or programming from another game that was pitched to him, and that game was a lot more focused on its characters' relationships, their home life, their thoughts and feelings.  All that stuff apparently got grandfathered in here, so it's the subtext somehow for the world of mayhem and chaos.  But this feels a LOT like some screenwriter trying to explain away a problem that isn't really a problem, it's all here to create some intrigue and drama when one of the original game's creators tries to sue the CEO of Soonami for stealing her code.  

Like, does this even make sense, from a game design angle?  I think this has to be "NITPICK POINT #2", if you were inclined to steal another person's video-game, change the look of it but use it as a starting point to jump-start your own MMORPG, how would that work?  You wouldn't take a relationship-based game like "The Sims", for example, and repurpose it as a first-person shooter, like "Call of Duty", because those are two very different games, and one wouldn't easily translate into the other.  It would probably be even HARDER to repurpose the character game into the shoot-em-up game, so therefore it would be EASIER to build the shooter game from scratch.  So, it's an interesting premise here, but not one that I think would come to pass.  

On another level, though, who cares, because this is so much FUN!  We're along for the ride as Guy has his whole world turned upside-down, suddenly he realizes that by wearing the sunglasses of a gamer, he can suddenly see all the missions, the floating healthpacks, the money and bonus points lying around his city.  He can put money in his bank for the first time ever, he can finally buy those cool sneakers AND he can set out to do some good in the world, stopping all the daily murder on his block, giving advice to the noobs and helping other NPCs achieve their goals as well.  Wait, the other NPCs have "goals"?  Oh, right, because this used to be that other kind of game before it got turned into Murder City.  

That game designer travels through Free City (OK, her avatar does, but you know what I mean) looking for the evidence that will prove the evil CEO stole her game.  But as soon as Guy sees her avatar (Molotov Girl) he's smitten - and there's another one of those lengthy screenwriter explanations about WHY she's the perfect girl for him.  Dude, we DON'T CARE, stop mansplaining coding and programming the personalities of NPCs to us, just move forward with the action stuff...  Guy also gets to learn that his whole world isn't real, he's just a background character in a fictional world (umm, aren't we all?) and also, his world is about to end - unless he takes action, "Free City" will be replaced by "Free City 2", and that new game won't be as backwards compatible as the company promised - (cough) Sony Playstation 3 (cough).  This got me wondering if the whole premise of the film was one giant metaphor, like aren't we all living in a world that we tend to take for granted, we're not 100% sure who or what created this world, we travel around it and have complex interactions with strangers, we follow our routines most of the time and well, like all video-game characters, we're here for a good time, but not for a long time.  Maybe I'm really over-thinking this, but that's what I tend to do.  

Don't be like me, don't think about it too much, just watch this movie and try to have some fun, that's my advice. 

Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "6 Underground"), Jodie Comer (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "Brittany Runs a Marathon"), Joe Keery (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Utkarsh Ambudkar (last seen in "Mulan" (2020)), Taika Waititi (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Channing Tatum (last seen in "Haywire"), Britne Oldford, Camille Kostek, Mike Devine, Sophie Levy (last seen in "Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb"), Vernon Scott, Matty Cardarople (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Naheem Garcia (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Anabel Graetz, Aaron W Reed, Ric Plamenco, Jonathan De Azevedo (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Destiny Claymore, Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, Imane "Pokimane" Anys, Lannan "LazarBeam" Eacott, Sean McLoughlin, Daniel "DanTDM" Middleton (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Tait Fletcher (last seen in "Project Power"), with cameos from Lara Spencer, Alex Trebek (last seen in "She's All That"), and the voices of Tina Fey (last heard in "Soul"), Hugh Jackman (last seen in "Bad Education"), Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "You Again"), John Krasinski (last seen in "A Quiet Place"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 missing cats

Cellular

Year 14, Day 79 - 3/20/22 - Movie #4,081

BEFORE: The original plan was to link to a film on Netflix titled "The Kissing Booth", via Molly Ringwald, but that plan's out the window now, I've decided to get back to action films, ones that should take me to the Nicolas Cage chain, and that in turn should set me straight toward my choice for an Easter-based film. Things could still go wrong, of course, but I like the way this new plan is headed, and honestly, I just couldn't watch one more romance-based film at this point.  Can you blame me?  

So, instead, now both Chris Evans AND Eric Christian Olsen carry over from "Not Another Teen Movie". Two actors in common?  Now I feel like I'm on the right track to...well, somewhere. 

Tomorrow, TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up goes back to the 1920's and 1930's, for the next to last time: 

5:15 am "The Life of Emile Zola" (1937)

7:45 am "The Circus" (1928)

9:15 am "The Music Box" (1932)

10:00 am "Sweethearts" (1938)

12:00 pm "Naughty Marietta" (1935)

2:00 pm "The Cowboy and the Lady" (1938)

4:00 pm "The Awful Truth" (1937)

5:45 pm "You Can't Take It With You" (1938)

8:00 pm "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1939)

10:15 pm "Boys Town" (1938)

12:15 am "The Gay Divorcee" (1934)

2:15 am "The Merry Widow" (1934)

4:00 am "The Broadway Melody" (1929)

I've seen only three of these: "The Awful Truth", "You Can't Take It With You" and "The Gay Divorcee".  I've seen the OTHER version of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", the 1969 remake, but I suppose that doesn't count here. Anyway, another 3 out of 13 takes me to 96 seen out of 233, which is just 41.2%

THE PLOT: A young man receives an emergency phone call on his cell phone from an older woman, who claims to have been kidnapped, and the kidnappers are targeting her husband and child next. 

AFTER: This thriller came out in 2004, back in the before-times - that's before the iPhone and other smart phones - so way back then, filmmakers saw the future and predicted we'd all be on Nokia phones in the days to come.  Or, perhaps that's what Nokia paid them to depict, which sounds a little more likely.  People had little idea how the phones of the future would take over our lives, to say nothing of the effect they would have on action movies.  Can a kidnapped woman hot-wire a broken landline phone the same way that people in action movies tend to start cars, just by crossing two wires together?  Honestly, I have no idea - but my point here is that SHE would probably have no idea how to do that either, she probably would have looked at the phone smashed to pieces and just thought, "Well, I'm screwed now."  

Of all the ways to get herself out of the predicament of being locked in the attic of a house, I think I'd only try to hot-wire the phone line if I'd exhausted every other method of escape or getting a message out.  There were glass windows - how hard did she try to break that glass?  Couldn't she use her shoe or something to break a window, and then if she did that, wasn't the car like RIGHT THERE under the window, just a one-story jump away.  I'm just saying.  I wouldn't expect her to break down the door or deck the guard on the other side of the door, but the house also seemed a little broken down, it might not have taken much to break a hole in the wall or just get out onto the roof somehow.  Other actions were possible, other than the ones she took, that's all.

So OK, I have to work with what the movie gives me, this kidnapped woman hot-wires the phone and gets a message out to the most unlikely of heroes, Ryan, just a regular guy who wants to get his girlfriend back by pretending to work a charity event at the Santa Monica pier (a location carrying over from "Not Another Teen Movie", I think...). Suddenly he's got to drop everything, and abandon his friend and ex-girlfriend at the pier and like, totally rescue this kidnapped woman.  Which is not cool, because his friend ends up in a whale costume to promote the "Heal the Bay" initiative - and you just can't get laid if you're wearing a whale costume and handing out flyers. 

Ryan does go straight to the police, but there's a crazy mix-up there because the cop working the front desk is about to retire to run a day-spa, so he's not very focused on his job - plus there's a bunch of rowdy guys who have JUST been arrested who start mixing it up in the police station lobby, so he sends Ryan up to major crimes on the fourth floor, and for some strange reason, Ryan can't find any detectives there, which really never gets explained very well.  And up until that point, the plot details were SO specific about everything that I was willing to believe that all this really happened to somebody - the whale costume, the day-spa, the hold-up at the cell phone store JUST to buy a phone charger.  Because, come on, who would write this stuff out of nowhere?

Things get more complicated when the kidnappers also abduct the woman's son, and then set their sights on her husband, too - because SOMEBODY in this family simply must know where the thing that they're looking for is.  (And what, exactly, is that MacGuffin of a thing?).  Hey, if you can't find something, just keep kidnapping people until you get lucky, I guess. Things get even MORE complicated when it seems that the kidnappers are also cops - so are they good cops kidnapping bad people, or bad cops kidnapping good people?  I really need to know who to root for here...

The cop from the police station eventually does get back in on the action, because something keeps bugging him about the case - it takes him quite a while to put two and two together, but he finally gets there, and then it just becomes a question about how deep the corruption goes in the department, but other than that, this sort of turns into a by-the-numbers thriller, once we've sorted out who the bad guys are. Ryan, meanwhile, is zipping back and forth from here to there in a stolen car - and then he gets stuck in traffic maybe a few too many times.  Sure, there's traffic in L.A., I GET IT, but from a narrative point of view maybe you don't want to rely on that plot point again and again.  

Screenwriters tend to be just a bit behind when it comes to technology, but this film might be an exception - this is 2004 cell phone technology, in a nutshell, that drives nearly all of the action.  The same screenwriter, Larry Cohen, had been working in Hollywood since the early 1960's, and he wrote "Phone Booth" a couple years before this one, I swear that's true, but then it looks like he retired before he could write another action movie titled "Potential Spam".  This concept would never work today, because people with smart phones now don't even answer their phones if they don't recognize the number of the person calling them.  So we'll never know how many kidnappings weren't solved last year because the victim couldn't get any help from random strangers. (NITPICK POINT: She could call a rando but she couldn't call 911 from the hot-wired phone?)

Also starring Kim Basinger (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Jason Statham (last seen in "The Pink Panther" (2006)), William H. Macy (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), Noah Emmerich (last seen in "Warrior"), Richard Burgi (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Valerie Cruz, Jessica Biel (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Adam Taylor Gordon (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen"), Caroline Aaron (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Matt McColm, Eric Etebari (last seen in "Boss Level"), John Cenatiempo (ditto), Brendan Kelly (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Rick Hoffman, Lin Shaye (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Lauren Sanchez (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), Sherri Shepherd (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Dat Phan, Esther Mercado, Al Sapienza (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Sean Smith (also carrying over from "Not Another Teen Movie").

RATING: 5 out of 10 seaweed face-masks