Agent Cody Banks

Year 18, Day 162 - 6/11/26 - Movie #5,343 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #6

BEFORE: I suppose it was inevitable, like once I put both "Big Fat Liar" and this film on my list there was a good chance that I'd find a way to knock them both out in the same week, along with this film's sequel, the next one on the list, of course. But I wanted to save them for when they served some kind of purpose, and I suppose getting me three steps closer to Father's Day and the start of the Doc Block is about the best function I could have hoped for.  This still leaves the "Spy Kids" movies unwatched, of course, I thought last year I might be able to link to them as a lead-in to my October horror movies, but it turned out to not be necessary, based on the horror chain I put together, I guess there was an easier way to get to the start, and/or I just ran out of slots and had to take a shortcut. Anyway, that was last year, who even remembers? I've really got one more chance in 2026 to get to the "Spy Kids" films, maybe between Doc Block and the Shock Block, but I can't even predict that with any certainty right now, I'm just focused on getting through June. 

Frankie Muniz carries over from "Big Fat Liar".

THE PLOT: A government agency trains Cody Banks in covert operations that require younger participants. 

AFTER: Well, sure, this was never going to be as serious as a James Bond film, which aren't even all that serious themselves. You can't really think that the CIA would institute a program where they recruit teenage agents (that should be "teenagents", I know) just in case they needed to somehow infiltrate a high school or get close to the daughter of some famous scientist who might be doing freelance work for America's enemies, right? Yet this is where we find ourselves tonight, at the junction of teen romance and international intrigue. One day you get selected for a special summer camp due to your high grades and superior video-game puzzle solving skills, and the next thing you know, you're a secret junior CIA agent. (again, "CIAgent", I'm aware.)

Really, in tone this fits in somewhere between the James Bond films, which we're meant to take semi-seriously, and the Austin Powers films, which we're not meant to take seriously at all - so sure, this is ridiculous, but maybe not as ridiculous as it could have been, as in not an outright parody of spy movies, we still want to thrill the 10-18 year olds in the audience, but also maybe most of them are in on the joke. The whole last act of this film, which is set in the villain's lair inside a mountain, looks like it could have been filmed on the set of one of the Austin Powers movies, as if it were decorated by Dr. Evil himself or his henchmen. 

When you give a 15-year old kid a pair of X-ray glasses, sure, he's going to use them to look at women in their underwear. That tracks - but the CIA also finds that if they want him to have time to study up on the background of the girl that he needs to get information from, by maybe getting an invitation to her birthday party, then they'll have to send agents to his house to do his chores and also his homework. Well, I guess that's the price you pay for setting up the TeenAgent program. They also find it's hard to convince their own security guards that a 15-year-old needs to be admitted to the headquarters. Cody also gets a bankroll of money and a bunch of other cool gadgets so he can walk on ceilings and use lasers to cut through ropes and hatchway doors.  

I get it, the movie "Mission: Impossible" was a big hit in 1996, and in 2003 we were all dealing with the fallout - we had lady spies in "Salt" and "Atomic Blonde", older spies in "RED", and the franchises with Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan, The A-Team and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. all came along or came back since Tom Cruise did that wire-hanging thing in that first film, and countless others. We even had one film where a spy turned into a pigeon, and still had to complete his mission, but the less said about that film, the better. So we probably wouldn't have the "Cody Banks" movies without Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt making a billion damn dollars, or any of the thousand other movies glorifying the spy game. 

The MacGuffin here is a bunch of nanobots that can be trained to "eat" anything, their inventor wanted to use them to clean up oil spills, but his financial backer who is also bent on world domination and/or chaos would prefer to re-purpose them to destroy America's nuclear arsenal, I mean, just imagine a world without nuclear weapons, that would be terrible, right?  Wait, would it, though? I mean, as long as they ate up our enemy's missiles, too, we'd have mutual total disarmament and I think maybe that might not be such a bad thing, except we might have more old-fashioned wars where people died in the old-fashioned way. Honestly, there's no way to be sure, but let's assume that the guy who has a mountain-top secret base and wants to disarm only America might have some evil intent. 

The biggest problem that Cody Banks has is that he's shy and self-conscious around girls, and it seems the CIA trained him how to drive a car, how to disarm a bomb and how to fight off 12 attackers as a one-man army, but they forgot to teach him how to flirt. Guys, this is James Bond 101 here, you stop the villain, you disarm the bomb, and you CHARM THE GIRL, even if she used to be the villain's girlfriend, you try not to think about that and you say something mildly (or very) suggestive and then you sleep with her. The pattern WORKS and you don't mess with success, OK? So they try to give him a crash course in the art of seduction, or at least making conversation, and it all goes horribly wrong, because it turns out the CIA is full of weird nerds who don't even know the first thing about romance or even casual conversation. The army guy has bad advice, the tech expert has bad advice, and the "relationship expert" they bring in is even worse. 

Narratively speaking, there's a lost opportunity here - when Cody wasn't getting any good advice from ALL of the different weirdos who work at the CIA about how to talk to girls, this is where a better writer could have brought in some heart, just by having Cody talk to his own dad. Sure, I realize Cody and his parents were kind of VERY different people, he was in the CIA so he kind of grew out of needing them already, but then he DOES need advice at a critical time. A simple conversation here with his father would have gone a long way. It doesn't even matter what the advice is - "Just be yourself" or "Talk to a girl just like she's a normal person, because she is." Anything like that would have worked here and solved a narrative problem and also brightened up the story. 

But really, there's no time because the villain kidnaps the scientist's daughter in order to make him comply with the instructions to program the nanobots a certain way. Cody is off the case because he got too emotionally involved, also he beat up like ten bullies at that birthday party, the villain recognized his martial arts moves and essentially, his cover was blown. He then disobeyed orders and took Natalie out for ice cream to explain, and that's when she got kidnapped. So he takes it upon himself to sneak into CIA headquarters and get the equipment he needs to track down the base and rescue her, but ends up stuck in a tree, thanks to his rocket-powered skateboard. 

His handler, Agent Ronica, finds him, though, and she at least applauds his initiative - they sneak into the secret base together and work on rescuing Natalie before the villain can release his frozen ice-cube nanobots on the world. Well, as James Bond probably said, when in doubt just kill the villain with his own evil device and blow up the base, that should set everything right. Then you run off with the girl and kiss her by a lake just before sunset - again, the formula works and if it ain't broke, then don't fix it. 

Directed by Harald Zwart (director of "The Pink Panther 2")

Also starring Hilary Duff (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Angie Harmon (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Keith David (last heard in "Free Birds"), Cynthia Stevenson (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Arnold Vosloo (last seen in "Blood Diamond"), Daniel Roebuck (last seen in "The Munsters"), Ian McShane (last seen in "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina"), Darrell Hammond (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Marc Shelton, Chris Gauthier (last seen in "The Butterfly Effect 2"), Harry Van Gorkum (last seen in "Our Brand Is Crisis"), Connor Widdows (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Eliza Norbury (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Justin Kalvari, Saul Kalvari, Andy Thompson (last seen in "Woman of the Hour"), Andrew Johnston (last seen in "Miracle"), Ben Immanuel (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Miriam Smith (ditto), Jared Van Snellenberg (ditto), Noel Fisher (ditto), Tseng Chang (ditto), Lisa Calder (ditto), Stephen E. Miller (last seen in "Cousins"), Lorena Gale (ditto), Alexandra Purvis, Chad Krowchuk (last seen in "She's the Man"), Jeffrey Ballard (ditto), Shayn Solberg, Anthony Quao, Dee Jay Jackson (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Peter New (last seen in "Playdate"), Natalie Sellers, Andrew Francis (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Alex Diakun (ditto), Branden Nadon, Jessica Harmon (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Hayley Bouey, Michael Cromien, Dan Zukovic (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Fiona Hogan (last seen in "The Show"), Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "How It Ends"), Scott Swanson (last seen in "3000 Miles to Graceland"), Terence Kelly (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Gary Peterman, Dennis Caughlan, Xantha Radley (last seen in "The Fog" (2005)), Prevail, A.C. Peterson (last seen in "Shooter"), Moneca Delain (last seen in "Trick 'r Treat"), Sonja Bakker, Ty Olsson (last seen in "Cut Bank"), Forbes Angus (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Gail Worobets,

RATING: 6 out of 10 surveillance vans disguised as cable installers or florists' vehicles

Big Fat Liar

Year 18, Day 161 - 6/10/26 - Movie #5,342 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #5

BEFORE: OK, I've got a couple days off now before I have to return to the very crowded, very busy festival. Which is fine, I can't hog all the shifts, and I need the break, physically and mentally. I may sneak into Manhattan today on a stealth mission to watch a certain big-budget sci-fi franchise movie before it disappears from theaters, but I'm not paying for popcorn, I'm going to sneak in some from home. I'm on a budget - but that film will play a crucial linking purpose for me at the end of the month. 

Sandra Oh carries over again from "Over the Moon". One other actor also carries over, but I only needed one. 

THE PLOT: Fourteen-year-old Jason Shepherd has a reputation for stretching the truth. So when abig-time Hollywood producer steals his class paper and turns it into a smash hit movie, no one believes Jason's latest tall tale. 

AFTER: Yeah, I figured that once I hit June and started looking for movies about fathers, and people's relationships with their fathers, some would turn up. It's inevitable, and it's not just the chain or my subconscious working stuff out, it's just such a common theme - school films, too, they keep turning up everywhere because everyone goes to school, duh, and if I can keep most of those films contained to May/June or September, then I'm fine with it. Summer break is for documentaries and movies about going to camp or going on vacation. I have spoken. 

The reason I'm counting this as a Father's Day film is that young Jason kept stressing that the most important thing for him to do was to win back his father's trust, after telling so many lies about homework and chores and whatever else. So apparently he doesn't give a crap about what his mother thinks of him, he's really focused on how his father perceives him. His teacher, either, though if he could get his teacher to believe in him he might not have to finish summer school, and that would ALSO solve his current problems, but OK, keep focusing on Dad, I guess. I think having your teachers believe in you is important, I spent years being a straight-A student who almost never got in trouble, and this paid off when I got to high school and my teachers and the school staff completely trusted me, to the point where I could skip the last couple periods and walk right out of the building, past the office, and everyone just assumed I had a valid reason to do so. Now, I never skipped a class, I only left early if I had a study hall period at the end of the day, but my point is that nobody ever checked to see if that was the case, they just let me go home early. People with straight-arrow reputations can actually get away with more...

But let's focus on Jason Shepherd, who is forced to do a homework assignment FOR ONCE or he would lose 1/3 of his grade in English class, so he buckles down and writes a story as required. But then after getting a lift in a limo from a Hollywood director and accidentally leaving his essay behind, he learns that Hollywood is filled with the worst kind of people, who will steal your ideas (if they're good) and make sure you don't get credit for them. Yeah, that tracks. I mean, if filmmakers weren't required to list the people who worked on the film in the credits, or face prosecution by not telling you that Charles Dickens wrote "David Copperfield", I bet they just wouldn't. "Wait, we don't have to PAY Dickens? He's dead? Well, then why should he get a writing credit?"

I learned what kind of a director I was working for early on, when I began working for this notable animator in 1993 he was working on a live-action film in between cartoons, and we got this whole feature finished and we were working on the credits - I found a document in our files that was a signed agreement between him and an actor who demanded that his name appear in the credits a certain way - it had to be the only name on the screen at the time and be visible for no less than 30 seconds. My boss had signed the piece of paper, agreeing to these conditions in exchange for the actor playing the role, signing a release and (I assume) getting paid. But when it came time to create the "scroll" for the credits, suddenly the director found these terms unacceptable, because it would make the credits take up too much time, slightly - plus there were like 40 or 50 other actors we had to list. So the director said, "Well, we're not doing THAT even though I was holding a piece of paper that said he was legally bound to do so." That's what you call a red flag, and that kind of prepared me for the next 30 years of working for the man, always struggling to get him to do things the "right" way. Eventually he stopped listening to me, so I stopped working there - wait, that might not be in the right order.

Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, and you would think there would be room for everyone to get the credit they deserve for their work, but if you look at any film on the IMDB there are actors listed as "uncredited", meaning they only wanted to recognize the efforts of SOME people, and really, that's across the board. The guilds will only award two or three of the writers on a film, even if 37 people contributed to a screenplay - and the visual FX companies employ dozens, hundreds of people even who never make it to the final credits. Why, it's almost like there are two or three people at the top of the food chain who want to take credit for everybody else's work...

So really, who would be surprised if a director took a story written by a kid and made it into a movie, while giving himself or his assistant the writing credit? I sure wouldn't. There's a guy on Instagram who makes songs out of stories his young daughter writes, and he's way more honest about it than a Hollywood director or producer would be. Marty Wolf is the director of a film called "Whitaker and Fowl", where a cop's partner turns out to be a chicken (named Whitaker, duh). It's a nod to films like "Turner and Hooch", maybe, only much stupider. So when the "Big Fat Liar" drops into his lap, it's a chance to make something that has much more depth, even if a kid wrote it, and something more imaginative as well. 

One day after summer school (which Jason was forced to take because he didn't hand in that essay) he and his platonic girlfriend Kaylee go to the movies and see a teaser trailer for "Big Fat Liar", and now he's convinced he knows what happened to his essay, thanks to the rat-fink director who obviously stole his story. So Jason risks everything when his parents go on vacation (thankfully his adult sister would rather hang out with her new boyfriend then spend 5 minutes keeping track of him) to somehow get plane tickets to L.A. for him AND Kaylee (umm, NITPICK POINT, I think you have to be an adult to buy a plane ticket) and go and confront the director in person. SURELY once he's confronted face-to-face, the horrible director will see the error of his ways, give credit where credit is due, and call Jason's father to straighten the whole thing out. 

Yeah, that doesn't happen - the horrible person continues being horrible and in fact BURNS the original draft of the screenplay. So Jason and Kaylee prank him by figuring out his daily routine of swimming and showering before going to work, and they chemically turn his skin blue and his hair orange. (umm, go Knicks? Mets?). Then they prank call his office and tell him the location of his meeting with the head of the studio has been changed, so he ends up at a kid's birthday party instead, and everyone assumes he's a clown and the kids beat him up. Look, I hate clowns as much as everyone else does (except for Puddles Pity Party) but this is a bit of a narrative short-cut in addition to being NITPICK POINT #2: there are no clowns with blue skin, really white is the only acceptable color for clown make-up, also it's not a given that kids are definitely going to beat up a clown at a party, there might be a couple good kids out there who could resist the temptation to give a clown the proper beat-down they deserve. 

(You might think there would be a NITPICK POINT about Jason and Kaylee working and sleeping in the studio's prop house, making all their plans to get revenge work with the help of the studio's costumes and equipment, and they're never spotted on camera as intruders or kicked out by security guards. But we know this is possible, because it's how Steven Spielberg started his career, he got off the Universal studio tour in the very same way and just helped himself to an office. Anybody can do it, go ahead, give it a try, just go to a movie studio and don't ever leave, you could be the next Spielberg.)

Life gets worse for Marty Wolf when Jason messes with his car, causing all of the controls to go weird and random, leading to a fender-bender with a monster truck that leaves Marty's car crushed by the Masher. And STILL he won't make the phone call - though at this point he pretends to, he's really calling his own security, though, and making sure that the two kids are not only removed from his office, but taken to the airport the next morning and sent back to Michigan. 

Before that can happen, though, Marty's overworked, under-paid and pissed-off (relatable!) assistant, Monty, steps in and prevents the kids from being shipped back to the Midwest or turned into L.A. landfill - and they hook up with the limo driver/aspiring actor that Marty had fired, as well as many other tormented or unfairly dismissed (and possibly sexually harassed) former employees who also bear grudges against Marty Wolf. After Marty went out of his way to get the financing to make his movie, the studio head did warn him that if only made ONE mistake, he'd be fired and cancelled. So all of those ex-employees team up on the first day of the shoot to give Marty the WORST day of his life, to not only ensure that he shows up late on the set, but also reveals on camera that he stole the movie plot from a kid. As a bonus, Jason's parents were told by him to fly to L.A. and get driven to the set, so they also get to hear Marty's confession, and Jason's father's faith in him is restored. Umm, NITPICK POINT #3, he probably should STILL be in trouble for ditching summer school, flying across the U.S. with no permission or adult supervision, and spending a fair amount of time making an adult man's life a living hell. Nah, I guess we're going to sweep all that under the carpet, because Jason's getting credit for writing the movie! He's 14 and he's got a screenwriting credit!  Unfortunately now he's probably going to go to film school and become just another asshole writer/director himself. Sorry, that's just how I see it.  

Marty is unable to work in Hollywood any more, and is forced to work as a birthday clown for real this time, so more beat-downs from kids are coming his way. Years later, of course, he would go on to direct a puff-piece documentary about the First Lady of the U.S. and move to Israel to attempt a show-biz comeback. Don't say it couldn't happen...  Look, I know this is a silly, stupid little fantasy film, and really I put off watching it for the LONGEST possible time, but it's still watchable thanks to Paul Giamatti, who is so wonderfully over-the-top here with his aggressive nature. He's calmed down a lot in the last couple decades, so this is really PEAK angry, boiling-over Giamatti. 

What doesn't really work here is the structure of the film - in the early parts of the film we see Jason being bullied, beat up by bigger teens, they take his skateboard. Jason learns exactly the wrong lesson from this, because when somebody else (Marty Wolf) has something that he wants, something that could save him from summer school, he becomes a bully HIMSELF in order to try and get Marty Wolf to call his father and explain things. Then when that doesn't work, he becomes an even BIGGER bully and gets a hundred other people to become bullies to get Marty kicked out of show business. This is a terrible message, especially in a film made for kids - if you don't get what you want, just make someone's life miserable until you do, and then if that doesn't work, just go ahead and destroy them.

I will tell you a much better way to get back at a film director, if you find that you are working for one and you are overworked, underpaid or mistreated overall. My recommendation is that you DO NOT quit, that would be too easy for them - instead, you must keep working for them, and do your job well, really gain their trust and not let on that you have an axe to grind. Keep this up for, I don't know, let's say 31 years and during this time, make sure that all of the payroll reports and tax returned are properly filed, the studio rent gets paid, the unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and property insurance policies are maintained. It's not going to be easy, especially when money gets tight and the director goes into a bit of debt, you can expect to not get a raise for a very long time, no Christmas bonuses, and you may have to work nights and weekends and even go on an occasional business trip, run some booths at conventions, you know, REALLY put in the extra effort. Fund-raising might also be required to keep the company going while you plot your revenge, but eventually there will come a time when you get fired or let go because he can't afford your salary any more. Don't worry, this is when your plan comes to fruition, because you can move on to another job or collect unemployment for a while, and he will be stuck there, he can't fire himself. And let me stress that up until this point, you have done NOTHING wrong, you've followed the letter of the law with regards to taxes and insurance. Then you can watch from afar as his entire business collapses because he's deep in debt, and eventually won't be able to pay the rent or cover the insurance or know how to run a Kickstarter campaign, and his whole business will implode. NOW you will have your revenge - of course, I'm still waiting on this but I'll let you know how it goes. 

Directed by Shawn Levy (director of "Deadpool & Wolverine")

Also starring Frankie Muniz (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Amanda Bynes (last seen in "She's the Man"), Amanda Detmer (last seen in "Drop Dead Gorgeous"), Donald Faison (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Russell Hornsby (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Michael Bryan French (last seen in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer"), Christine Tucci, Lee Majors (last seen in "The Fall Guy"), Sean O'Bryan (last seen in "Get a Job"), Amy Hill (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), John Cho (also carrying over from "Over the Moon"), Matthew Frauman (last seen in "Bounce"), Don Yesso (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Rebecca Corry, Sparkle (last seen in "Man on Fire"), Taran Killam (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Alex Breckenridge (also last seen in "She's the Man"), Ned Brower (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), John Gatins (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Andre Rosey Brown (last seen in "Space Jam"), Steven Shenbaum (last seen in "Edtv"), Jake Miner, Ted Rooney (last seen in "Somebody I Used to Know"), Marisa Petroro (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Randall Newsome (last seen in "Geostorm"), Michelle Griffin (last seen in "Boomerang"), Mike Smith (last seen in "Equilibrium"), Andrea Sevilla, Tracey Cherelle Jones (last seen in "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood"), Pat O'Brien (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Brian Turk (last seen in "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles"), Patrick Falls, Timmy Fitzpatrick (last seen in "Just Married"), Corinne Reilly (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Kyle Swann

with cameos from Dustin Diamond (last seen in "Made"), Martin Klebba (last seen in "The Electric State"), Shawn Levy (last seen in "Made in America"), Kenan Thompson (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Jaleel White (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman")

RATING: 5 out of 10 famous props in the prop house

Over the Moon

Year 18, Day 160 - 6/9/26 - Movie #5,341 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #4

BEFORE: My fourth day this week at the Tribeca Festival was also very star-studded, starting with a new comedy titled "Never Change!" featuring a bunch of current comedy all-stars, with Joe Pera and Susan Sarandon in the audience. Then came a documentary about the Burning Man festival, with a bunch of the fashionable elite in attendance - I'm not naming names, mostly because I didn't know them. This was followed by a documentary about cable TV legend Robin Byrd, and the theatre was packed, with stars like Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, also Andy Cohen. Finally a live reading/performance from Laurie Anderson, avant-garde music legend. Whew, I'm exhausted and I need a few days off just to recover. Tomorrow I think I'll go to the movies, but you know, just for fun. Not for work stuff.

Sandra Oh carries over from "Good Fortune". 

THE PLOT: A girl blasts off in a homemade rocket ship in hopes of meeting a mythical moon goddess. 

AFTER: Yeah, this film is not really my bag, either - but in a different way from how "47 Ronin" is not really my bag. This is a children's movie made for children, and as an adult there's not really much for me to grab on to. Like I know that there's just NO WAY that a girl's homemade rocket would make it to the moon. She might have been a genius at rocketry, but the technical part would have involved math that, if done correctly, would have proven that she didn't have enough power to overcome gravity, that her rocket was too heavy, plus what was she using for fuel, exactly? The idea to use magnetic levitation to go fast enough was a good one, perhaps, but not even the mag-lev trains go fast enough to slip the bonds of earth - do you think if the maglev rail systems were pointing UP then those trains would be able to break orbit? I don't think so...You can't just make a rocket go really fast down a rail system and then suddenly point it UP and get it into orbit, that's just not how things work. I think. 

Just because Fei Fei didn't get the memo that says a homemade rocket wouldn't have enough lift OR thrust to get into orbit, let alone the moon, that doesn't mean that her belief is enough to MAKE it work, at some point the reality of physics would settle in and take over. Having her new little stepbrother tag along only added more weight and made it more un-possible. But then, we're not meant to believe she flew her rocket to the moon, because at some point the moon goddess grabs the rocket in a beam and takes it the rest of the way there, which of course only takes a few minutes of screen time and NITPICK POINT, it took the Artemis astronauts six DAYS to get to the moon, not six minutes. But I realize this film is a fantasy film, in more ways than one. 

People have been making movies about going to the moon almost as long as they've been making movies. The French short "A Trip to the Moon" by George Mélies came out in 1902!  And there were several others, from Fritz Lang's "Woman in the Moon" to 1964's "First Men in the Moon", and then once we actually DID land people on the moon, there was no stopping all the sci-fi films that used that historical event as a jumping-off point. But this one might be the first to work in Chinese myths and legends with a trip to the moon. PLUS, it's a musical, AND also I'm counting this as a Father's Day movie, because the whole reason for Fei Fei's trip to the moon is that she misses her dead mother and she's having trouble dealing with the fact that her father is dating another woman, they're probably going to get married and then she'll have to deal with a step-mother AND a step-brother. 

The situation of the father here is mirrored in the legend of the Chinese moon goddess Chang'e, who took an immortality potion which caused her to become a goddess and ascend to the moon, leaving her lover Houyi on the earth. She's still waiting for him there, despite the fact that he's earthbound and not a god, so therefore quite dead. There are a number of narrative problems with the legend of Chang'e, like you'll notice that each member of Fei Fei's extended family tells her story a little bit differently, or focuses on a different aspect or meaning. Chang'e only has her Jade Rabbit for company on the moon, supposedly, but when Fei Fei gets there, the moon seems quite populated with Luminarians, and Chang'e performs for them in concert, like a K-Pop stadium star. (NOTE: This film is not from the same studio that made "K-Pop Demon Hunters", and it shares no cast members with that film except for Ken Jeung. The only reason I'm not watching that film next, with Ken Jeung carrying over, is that I don't want to.)

After Fei Fei and her stowaway stepbrother Chin land on the moon, thanks to Chang'e's beam of energy, two winged guardian lions appear to carry them off to Luminaria, where Chang'e is performing a song about being "Ultraluminary" and Fei Fei can't believe she's meeting the real moon goddess from the stories, so she takes a selfie with her to prove she's real. But Chang'e grabs the photo and won't give it back until Fei Fei returns with the "gift" she was supposed to bring with her, the gift that would bring Houyi back.  Fei Fei has no idea what the gift is, but she sets out on a journey across the moon's surface to find it anyway, hitching a ride with the Biker Chicks. Meanwhile Chin challenges Chang'e to a game of Ping Pong in order to either get back the photo or learn the location of the gift - but when Chen wins, Chang'e gets bored so she traps Chin in a chamber. Meanwhile Fei Fei's bunny, Bungee, is making friends with Change's Jack Rabbit, if you know what I mean.  

Over at the crash site with the Biker Chicks, Fei Fei meets an exiled Lunarian named Gobi, and also finds her Chang'e doll, which she thinks is the "gift" except that it isn't.  So she and Gobi head back to Lunaria on the backs of giant toads (OK, start smoking the weed...NOW) and Gobi reveals that he was exiled after writing a song about moving on, which the whole movie is kind of about - only it seems Chang'e wasn't ready to move on at the time Gobi wrote the song.  Fei Fei finds a broken half of a jade circle inside one of her mooncakes (NITPICK POINT #2, how the HELL did that get in there?) and realizes that it matches the half-circle that Chang'e wears around her neck, so it simply MUST be the gift that completes the circle. Once the two parts of the necklace are put together, Chang'e and Houyi are briefly reunited, but unfortunately it's only for a moment, and Houyi tells her to move on before he fades away.  But Chang'e can't accept this and slips into a state of depression, plunging the moon into total darkness. 

Fei Fei and Chang'e have to encourage each other to move on past their, umm, pasts and focus on the love all around them now, plus the memory of their loved ones, which they'll always have. Fei Fei and Chin are allowed to return home (umm, NITPICK POINT #3, how?) except for Bungee, who has found true love with Jade Rabbit and is probably knocked up already, you know those rabbits and as a bonus, Gobi is no longer banished from Luminaria. Once they're back on Earth, Fei Fei accepts Mrs. Zhong as her new step-mother and acknowledges that her father is a sexual being with needs of his own. JK. Another year goes by and we see them celebrating the Moon Festival again, only as a connected family now. 

Overall the message is really muddled, though. Like, if Fei Fei can prove that the moon goddess is REAL, logically therefore that means that her father should NOT marry Mrs. Zhong, because her mother might come back? That doesn't make any sense, and also it's not a good way for Fei Fei to react to her father's new relationship. Plus, in a time when we have actual astronauts going to the moon again, should we be teaching kids they can fly there with a rocket they built in the backyard? Not a good idea. 

Directed by John Kahrs & Glen Keane (writer of "Pocahontas" and producer of "Tangled")

Also starring Cathy Ang, Robert G. Chiu, Phillipa Soo (last seen in "Tick, Tick...BOOM!"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "My Spy: The Eternal City"), John Cho (last seen in "Get a Job"), Ruthie Ann Miles (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Margaret Cho (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Kimiko Glenn (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Artt Butler (last heard in "Her"), Irene Tsu (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Clem Cheung (last seen in "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere"), Conrad Ricamora, Glen Keane, Brycen Hall, Edie Ichioka, Elizabeth Pan (last heard in "Penguins of Madagascar"), James Taku Leung (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Josiah D. Lee (last seen in "Olympus Has Fallen"), Lucy Lin (last seen in "Scream 2"), Brittany Ishibashi (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Janice Kawaye, Trisha Vo, Esther K. Chae (last heard in "Soul")

RATING: 3 out of 10 useless facts about hairy crabs

Good Fortune

Year 18, Day 159 - 6/8/26 - Movie #5,340

BEFORE: I used one of my skip days - and when I explain how busy I was yesterday, I think you'll see that I made the right call. The shifts when we have the Tribeca Film Festival at the theaters are particularly celebrity-packed, therefore some of the busiest, and on a weekend day that means three seatings, six films, and zero downtime. BUT as a bonus I get to rub elbows with high-profile people who appear to speak on Q&A panels - the only days that are more celeb-forward are the red-carpet premieres where they all arrive by limo and I get to see them in the press tent. 

But my Sunday was packed, starting with former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who spoke on a panel after a film about women and politics - this meant extra security, bag check, and an extra task for me, showing the Secret Service around the theater. No problem, I'll gladly do that if it keeps us all safe - and all I wanted was a photo of her on-stage after, WHICH I had to take for the house notes, anyway. Once she was done speaking, and clear of the building, my life could return to a normal level of crazy. 

For the second screening, there was a documentary about fashion, co-directed by Sean Lennon and produced by Natasha Lyonne, so they were both there on stage. Then for the third screening we had Artemis astronaut Victor Glover appearing after "Odyssey", a documentary about space travel, duh, and in the big theater we had a film called "In Memoriam", directed by Rob Burnett (of "Late Show with David Letterman" fame) and starring Marc Maron, Michael McKean, Lily Gladstone and Justin Long, who all spoke on stage after. I only spotted one other celeb in the audience, Denis Leary, but that was fine. I was busy during load-out helping a woman with a walker take the ADA elevator out of the other theater. 

(Friday night, forgot to mention, I had Emilia Clarke walk right by me, being escorted into the theater. Another one for the "Star Wars" cast life list...)

Anyway, bottom line, no Sunday movie for me, but it's fine - today I wrap up the Keanu Reeves mini-chain as he carries over from "47 Ronin". 

THE PLOT:  A well-meaning but rather inept angel named Gabriel meddles in the lives of a struggling gig worker and a wealthy venture capitalist. 

AFTER: It's pretty easy to see which two classic movies are getting mashed up here - first, "It's a Wonderful Life", because it shows an angel helping out a man who's given up on life, by showing him a different version of reality, how his life could be different. The second movie is "Trading Places", where a rich man and a poor man have their lives swapped as part of a social experiment about nature vs. nurture, to determine how someone who was born rich would act if he lost everything, and how a man picked off the street would act if he were suddenly given everything. 

I'll check later - but I'm darn sure that mash-up is the inspiration here. Keanu Reeves plays the angel, which is great casting because he's still kind of playing Ted from Bill & Ted, somebody who's inept and clueless and has great big plans, even if he doesn't quite know how to make them happen. Seth Rogen plays Jeff, the venture capitalist who invested grandpa's money into a telecom company or something, and then just kept investing and hitting big, while Aziz Ansari plays Arj, a guy who's having trouble making ends meet in the gig economy, he's working at a hardware store and also some kind of task-based service, doing household chores for people, even standing in line for entitled people to pick up cinnamon buns. At the same time he's lost his apartment and is sleeping in his car, I think it's safe to say he also doesn't have health insurance or any kind of savings or safety net, he's living check-to-check. 

Gabriel the angel is SUPPOSED to be saving people who text while driving, he sits in their back seats and nudges them when they SHOULD be looking at the road - the angel jobs are apparently VERY specific and well-defined and God knows a lot of people still text when they drive for some reason. But Gabriel wants to do so much more, he wants to be like Azrael, who has tales of finding lost souls and reminding them how great it is to be alive, how much life is worth living. Even though Gabriel's boss, Martha, has warned him against doing so, he wants to find a lost soul himself, and he thinks Arj might be the one. After doing some TaskServant jobs for entrepreneur Jeff, Arj applies to be his permanent assistant, and Jeff offers to give him a week's trial. 

Jeff even gives Arj a company credit card to use, you know, to buy stuff for the house or make travel arrangements for Jeff - but Arj uses it to pay for a dinner at a steakhouse to impress Elena on a date, and that's enough for Jeff to fire Arj. NITPICK POINT: Jeff seems to have money to burn, and if he was paying Arj as his assistant, he COULD have just docked Arj's pay or made him pay it back, but no, he went straight to firing him. I can kind of see both sides here, I mean, it didn't seem like Arj even had any money to pay Jeff back WITH, so him offering to pay Jeff back was kind of an empty promise. Still, Jeff did not need to be such a damn dick - well, I guess the story required him to be. 

Worse off than ever, Arj feels his life is not worth living, and that's when Gabriel makes himself visible and audible. To prove a point, Gabriel intends to show Arj some perspective by changing reality, and now Arj lives in the fancy house, has a ton of money and, one would assume, mo money, mo problems - while Jeff is now penniless and forced to get a delivery job of his own, competing against food delivery robots and getting blamed for forgetting the extra ranch sauce, when he didn't even package the food, he's just the delivery guy. Well, no problem, Gabriel should be able to switch the men back, except Arj doesn't want to switch back, he didn't learn whatever lesson Gabriel wanted him to learn, because he's suddenly living in a great house, he's got a ton of money and he can wine and dine Elena and also take her on vacation to Paris. She doesn't want to go, because she's busy trying to unionize the hardware store, and she and Arj realize that they're two very different people, but STILL Arj is better off than he was before, so he refuses to switch back. 

Things get worse when Gabriel gets in trouble for messing with reality to try and prove his point, so he loses his wings and gets demoted to human, which is kind of the angel equivalent of getting fired. Suddenly Gabriel has to EAT and find someplace to SLEEP like a regular guy, so he gets a job washing dishes, starts chain-smoking and he tries to share a hotel room with Jeff, but before long they both end up sleeping in the car, their situation seems very familiar. Then when Arj gets into a car accident (because there was no angel to stop him from texting while driving, probably) and is in a coma, there doesn't seem any way to change reality back again, Jeff may be stuck as a poor person and Gabriel may be stuck as a human, and financially speaking, what hope do they have?  We learned from "Nomadland" that you've got to keep moving on down the road and bouncing from gig to gig and get your expenses WAY down if you want to keep the money flowing in. 

Jeff comes up with a plan to break into his OWN house and steal some of his prized wristwatches in order to sell them and get some money so he and his former angel friend can afford a place to live. But what could POSSIBLY go wrong here?  I won't go into how this all shakes down or how it ends, but this all feels extremely contemporary, like a modern update of those two films I mentioned earlier, or possibly just its own new thing. It probably also calls to mind that film where John Travolta played an angel, too, I'm just not sure how. Would a former angel be obsessed with watching footage of baby elephants on the internet? Sure, why not? 

Here's the best news of all - I was at the Tribeca Festival again today and there were three screenings and one interview session at our theater. There were two documentaries, one about gymnasts and one about Daft Punk (who appeared on stage after, without their costumes) and the third screening was a preview episode of an upcoming TV series I'd never heard of - but the interview was Keke Palmer in a conversation with Whoopi Goldberg. Keke Palmer, who was in today's film, "Good Fortune", like what are the odds of THAT?  So I'm taking that as a sign from the universe that I'm on the right track here, the movies are lining up with the calendar as well as my external life, that's a win for me. So now there are 13 days until Father's Day, and 12 films to watch, the plan is still solid and very do-able. 

Directed by Aziz Ansari

Also starring Seth Rogen (last seen in "The Fabelmans"), Aziz Ansari (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Keke Palmer (last seen in "Nope"), Sandra Oh (last heard in "The Tiger's Apprentice"), Matt Rogers, Felipe Garcia Martinez, Stephen McKinley Henderson (last seen in "Civil War"), Penny Johnson Jerald (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Sherry Cola (last seen in "A Family Affair"), Blanca Araceli (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Joe Mande (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Aditya Geddada (last seen in "Encounter"), Alexander Jo (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Kristen Henley, Shoukath Ansari, Erik Estrada Loaiza (last seen in "Middle Men"), Wil Sylvince (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Michael Arnold, Cam Barr, Addie Weyrich, Cari Shayne, Nena Woolworth, Nate Jackson (last seen in "American Dreamer"), Jesus Garcia, Jay Traynor, Leo Gonzalez, Mason Lawrence, Shing-Hua Pa, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Randy Focazio, Lakshmi Sundaram, Kiry Shabazz, Sandra Marcela Hernandez, Elena Campbell-Martinez (also last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Chris Kapcia, Joe Anoa'i / Roman Reigns (last heard in "Zootopia 2"), Tanner Cortez, Mitchell Group, Eliza Shin, Jennifer Woods

RATING: 6 out of 10 cold plunges, followed by trips to the sauna

47 Ronin

Year 18, Day 157 - 6/6/26 - Movie #5,339

BEFORE: Now I'm deep into work, five whole days in a row! Now is about the time I wish I was still young, because both of my jobs are a bit physical, so for every two days I work in a row now, I feel like I need at least one day off to recover. Well, I'm just not going to get that this week, with the Tribeca Festival running, and I picked up five shifts, three of which are on successive days. The report from Day 1 (Friday) was that I saw Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga at one screening, they were on stage for a Q&A after, and then Emilia Clarke walked right by me (she was surrounded by cast, crew and security people) and she was on stage for a Q&A at the later screening. We worked with the festival staff to clear the theaters quickly after the screenings, so we could get them cleaned and start loading in the second show. Tomorrow's going to be busy, too so I'm thinking I should use one of my "skip" days for June and have no Sunday movie, really I just need to get some sleep and prepare. If I get home late on Saturday after the Liberty game, that's what I'll do - no Sunday movie. 

Keanu Reeves carries over from "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina". 

THE PLOT: A band of former samurai sets out to avenge the death and dishonor of their master at the hands of a ruthless shogun. 

AFTER: Well, Japanese movies are not really my thing, and this is basically a very Japanese movie, even if it's in English and was directed by an American. I still have not seen anything made by Kurosawa, and now if I'm only linking movies, it might be too late to do that. I know, I should watch "Ran" and "The Seven Samurai" if I'm going to call myself a movie buff, but I just have never been in the mood to do so. Hey, I did watch "The Last Samurai", and "The Magnificent Seven", which is basically the same as "The Seven Samurai", right? 

This one kind of surprised me though, I didn't think there would be much too it and I did not expect to like it, not as much anyway. But I got into it, even though I fell asleep on Friday night while watching it, that meant I backtracked on Saturday morning and watched the whole second half, but this time on Peacock, with subtitles. (Originally I watched the first half on a homemade DVD with no subtitles, and it was much harder for me to tell what was going on. I don't LIKE watching Peacock, because that has to be on my phone and not my computer screen, but here's where the subtitles really did make a difference, I needed them.)

This is supposedly based on a real Japanese story, however there's a fair amount of fantasy worked in, like witchcraft and ghosts and dragon-like creatures. So it might be hard to tell where reality leaves off and fantasy begins, but I think maybe that's part of the charm? Keanu Reeves plays Kai, a half-Japanese and half-English outcast who grew up in the Tengu area, but escaped  from his trainers when he was a teenager because they taught him to find in the manner of demons or something. He was found in the Ako domain and adopted by Lord Asano - over time he came to fall in love with Asano's daughter, Mika, only since Kai was not a samurai and also a half-breed, he could never be worthy of her love or something. 

Lord Kira, from another province, wants to take over the Ako Domain, with the help of Mizuki, a shape-shifting enchantress who can turn into a fox. Misuki sends a monster to kill Asano and his men while on a hunting trip, but the monster is slain by Kai, who notices the fox nearby.  Kai tries to warn Lord Asano's counselor, Oishi, about the shogun's concubine who is also a witch and sometimes a fox, but Oishi does not believe him.  Lord Kira then suggests a duel between his best warrior, a golem, and Asano's chosen combatant, but Mizuki incapacitates Asano's warrior with magic. Kai tries to disguise himself and fight the golem, but when he is unmasked he is beaten severely. Mizuki strikes again when she bewitches Asano to make him think that Kira is raping his daughter Mika, causing Asano to attack Kira, for no reason. The shogun then sentences Asano to death via seppuku, or ritual suicide. 

This gives Lord Kira domain over Ako and the shogun decrees that Mika must marry him, but she is granted one year to mourn her father before the wedding, but during this year she must stay with Lord Kira, I guess to get to know him better? Anyway, the counselor, Oishi and all of Asano's men are branded as ronin, masterless warriors, and they are also forbidden to avenge Asano and go after Lord Kira. For good measure, Oishi gets imprisoned in a pit and Kai is sold into slavery. 

A year later, Oishi gets released from prison, as he is deemed harmless - but he realizes that sorcery was used to frame Asano and he and his son, Chikara, try to reunite the scattered ronin, and also track down that half-breed, because he was a pretty good fighter, remember he fought like a demon almost. They find Kai in the fighting pits of a Dutch colony, and though the other ronin don't really care for Kai because he wasn't an official samurai, Oishi reminds them that NONE of them are samurai any more, so it doesn't really matter. They need his blade, and for that matter, they need a lot more weapons to boot.  Kai leads some of the men to the Tengu Forest, where he grew up, as he believes they can get some good swords there, if they pass the mystical testing process. Kai bests his former master in a duel, while Oishi is shown an illusion of his men being slaughtered, and manages to resist drawing his blade and fighting back. 

The ronin all reunite, since now they have the half-breed and enough swords to fight back. Their plan is to ambush Lord Kira on a pilgrimage, because he must visit the graves of his ancestors before he can marry Mika. One ronin is sent to the town Kira must travel to, to talk to some local riff-raff and whores to see if he can learn when Kira is planning to visit - but Mizuki is there and gives him false information so she can lure the ronin into a trap. Most of the ronin are killed in Mizuki's trap, and the rest need to come up with a new plan. 

What happens next reminds me a bit of "Star Wars", and also "The Wizard of Oz" - remember last week when I reviewed the "Wicked" movies I mentioned that as a kid, I realized that those movies had a lot in common, specifically that in one, the heroes dress up like palace guards to infiltrate the Wicked Witch's palace to free Dorothy, and the in the other, the heroes dress up like stormtroopers to infiltrate the Death Star to free Leia. OK, so here the heroes dress up like wedding performers to infiltrate Lord Kira's castle to free Mika. Same shit - of course, I also know that the original "Star Wars" movie was heavily influenced by Lucas' love of Kurosawa movies, among other sources. But there's a connection between Japanese films, Westerns, fantasy movies, hell there are connections between all movies, really. Certain basic themes and plot points resonate across all genres, combat and rescue and revenge, right vs. wrong and all that. 

Some of the ronin are granted access disguised as the wedding performers, while others scale the castle walls at night and take out the guards. It's a solid plan - but Oishi is on stage and is hit by a sentry's arrow, and the jig is up. Oishi fights Kira while Kai and Mika face Mizuki who attacks them as a dragon, and Kai has to unleash his demon-like fighting abilities to killer her. Oishi beheads Kira, and you'd think that would be the end of things, but then the whole thing has to be explained to the shogun, who had forbid any avenging of Lord Asano, and the penalty for breaking the shogun's rule is death. 

There's some good news, however, the Shogun decides that since Lord Kira used treachery in the first place, and the ronin who are still alive followed the principles of bushido, their honor as samurai is restored, and they will receive a proper burial - yes, they still need to kill themselves, so umm, yeah, not really seeing the upside there. I'm not sure most Western audiences would consider this a happy ending - Kai went through hell to rescue Mika, and now he doesn't get to be with her? Well, maybe in the next world - he did say he would search for her through a thousand worlds and ten thousand lifetimes, so good luck with all that, I guess. 

Directed by Carl Rinsch

Also starring Hiroyuki Sanada (last seen in "Speed Racer"), Ko Shibasaki, Tadanobu Asano (last seen in "Kate"), Min Tanaka, Jin Akanishi, Masayoshi Haneda (last seen in "Colette"), Hiroshi Sogabe, Takato Yonemoto (last seen in "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie"), Hiroshi Yamada, Shu Nakajima, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Neil Fingleton, Rinko Kikuchi (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"), Natsuki Kunimoto, Togo Igawa (also carrying over from "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina"), Tanroh Ishida, Masayuki Deai, Yorick van Wageningen (last seen in "Escape Room: Tournament of Champions"), Clyde Kusatsu (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Haruka Abe (last seen in "Cruella"), Tomoko Komura, Takako Akashi (last seen in "The King's Man"), Akira Koieyama (last seen in "Rush"), Arisa Maekawa, Daniel Barber, Gedde Watanabe (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Manato Sekiguchi, Rick Genest, Kano Ichiki, Yuriri Naka (also last seen in "Speed Racer"), Jamie Tran, and the voices of Ron Bottitta (last seen in "In Good Company"), Victoria Grace. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 ghosts in the Tengu forest

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

Year 18, Day 156 - 6/5/26 - Movie #5,338 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #3

BEFORE: OK, let's go, let's get this big festival train rolling, the sooner the ride starts the sooner it will be over and I can once again catch up on some sleeps. Today I'll be at the Tribeca Festival venue from 2:30 to whenever, maybe I'll be home tonight in time to post something about "Ballerina" and MAYBE watch another film for tomorrow, but I think by Monday I'll be looking to cash in one or both of my skip days and just focus on my job, then pick up movies again on Tuesday or Wednesday. It sure would make things easier. Let me check the actor birthdays for the next couple of films and see if I can justify that. 

Catalina Sandino Moreno carries over from "The Rip". Honestly, I don't even know what exactly to call this film - IMDB just lists it as "Ballerina" but my cable company uses the full title "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina", so, umm, which is it? Wiki also prefers the shorter title, saying that the "From The World of" part was just used for marketing purposes. Yes, as the NAME OF THE FILM. Quite often I think you'll find that the name of the film is very important to the marketing of the film. People need to know what to call the film when they buy a ticket at the box office. I'm going with the longer name because I think I filed the DVD alphabetically under "F", not "B". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "John Wick: Chapter 4" (Movie #4,613)

THE PLOT: An assassin trained in the traditions of the Ruska Roma organization sets out to see revenge after her father's death. 

AFTER: Also, it's more hilarious to point out the studio's terrible marketing ideas. Everybody's just throwing darts at a dartboard at the end of the day and really, nobody at any studio has any idea what they're doing. Using "John Wick" in the title will put asses in the seats - but we don't want to call this "John Wick 5" because movie fans hate numbered sequels, and also John Wick is only in the film for about 10 minutes, max, and we don't want "John Wick" fans to get pissed off. Oh, we want them to come to the theaters, but we don't want them to expect a full "John Wick" movie because this is NOT that. So now it's a damned confusing mess, like if you're going to use the "John Wick" brand to sell tickets, then use it and own that. Don't just dance all around it, am I right? Like it's "Solo: A Star Wars Story" because it's "Star Wars" that puts butts in seats. You know somebody just wanted to call it "Solo" and they got voted down, right? 

This film is set between "John Wick: Chapter 3" and "Chapter 4", that should be obvious because the Continental is still in business, and it was closed down in Chapter 4. There's no real reason this couldn't have been a numbered John Wick movie, if they had just put him in more scenes or made him a bigger part of Eve Macarro's life, it all would have been fine. But she takes the lead here and acts like the one-woman army herself, so I guess maybe having John Wick do some of the grunt work or the killing could have taken away from her accomplishments. This is a bit like "Wicked" in that the main character doesn't even really know her own back story or her true parentage - the man she called her father may have been an assassin himself, only we don't see it, and we only know that he kidnapped her from the cult, which led to the death of her mother. The cult and the Chancellor raid their castle-like home, and her father dies in the process, but he got Eve to safety so she wouldn't be raised by the cultists. 

Instead she's found by Winston Scott, the manager of the New York Continental and he brings her to the Ruska Roma, a different assassins' society where she can major in assassin and also have a minor in ballet, or maybe it's the other way around. She trains for 12 years, and the final test is to kill another member who's jaded, her heart just isn't in it any more - ugh, what are you gonna do with these Gen Alpha kids, I ask you? - but this cements her reputation, completes her training and she earns the title of "Kikimora", whatever that means. At some point along the way she bumps into John Wick himself, and apparently he's got a reputation, because she expresses that she wants to be like him. Wick, meanwhile, says that he's looking for a way out of the lifestyle - yeah, that tracks. 

But Eve wants to use her new assassin skills to track down the cult that killed her father - Winston doesn't want to tell her at first who's responsible, because they don't play by the same rules as the other assassins. Killing isn't just business for them, it's also sport, and who doesn't love sports? Also, once she learns about them she can't unlearn them, but still, he tells her one former cultist, Daniel Pine, is staying at the hotel, having just recently rescued his own daughter from them - wait, that feels a bit familiar... When Eve goes to visit him, cult member Lena suddenly increases the bounty on him, causing several assassins to attack, hoping to earn the large payday. 

Pine gets shot, and his daughter Ella gets re-taken by the cult. Eve is incapacitated and the two assassins who attacked a guest of the Continental (it's against the rules) are executed. Well, that sure tidied up a few loose ends - after a few more cult members attack the Continental's arms dealer, he shares the location of their base in Austria with Eve so she can try to set things right, get Ella back for Pine and also track down whoever killed her own father. This means that basically the people she wants to kill are protected by a whole TOWN of ex-assassins, who moved there so they could, I don't know, practice the assassin lifestyle, or send their kids to assassin school, or maybe there were low property taxes, who can say? 

To prevent a war between the cult and the Ruska Roma, the Director sends John Wick into the fray, I'm sure with his very unpopular ideas about morality and inability to follow rules, he's only going to make things much more confusing. Yep. In the battle between Wick and Eve, Wick comes out on top and he urges her to abandon her pursuit of vengeance - he should know, it only ends after a lot of people die and you never really get your dead dog back, so umm, what's the point of it all? But he gives her until midnight to kill the Chancellor, and he even helps out by being a long-range sniper. Yeah, it's a bit weird how he was sent there to kill Eve, but then he helps her take down her target. Well, it's not a linear path sometimes, and even an assassin has to just follow his gut sometimes, if he takes a job and it doesn't feel right, he's allowed to switch things up, right? Hey, his actions ended up producing a result, even if it's not the result he was hired to achieve, it's still a result. 

There's an ending but no real resolution here - due to the death of the Chancellor, Eve ends up with a $5 million bounty on her head, and, well, good luck collecting that, everyone. What's really weird here is that the John Wick Franchise already had a character in "Parabellum" who was in the Ruska Roma, and who was a ballerina AND an assassin, only Eve is not that character, that character was named Rooney, and was played by Unity Phelan. So why make a whole new movie about a new character very similar to one from the previous movie, instead of just revealing Rooney's back-story? I have no idea. For that matter, why release the film just one week before "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning", because everyone's going to go see THAT movie instead of "Ballerina" in its second week of release. 

Directed by Len Wiseman (director of "Total Recall" (2012) and "Live Free or Die Hard")

Also starring Ana de Armas (last seen in "Blonde"), Keanu Reeves (last seen in "Much Ado About Nothing"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Death Race"), Anjelica Huston (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Gabriel Byrne (last seen in "No Pay, Nudity"), Ava Joyce McCarthy, Juliet Doherty, Norman Reedus (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Lance Reddick (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Sharon Duncan-Brewster (last seen in "Imagine Me & You"), David Castaneda (last seen in "The Guilty"), Victoria Comte, Robert Maaser (last seen in "The Machine"), Sooyoung Choi, Jung Doo-hong, Anne Parillaud (last seen in "The Man in the Iron Mask"), Marc Cram (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Rila Fukushima (last seen in "Annette"), Abraham Popoola (last seen in "Atlas"), Magdalena Sittova, Waris Ahluwalla (last seen in "Okja"), Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in "Lou"), Anna Schmidtmajerova, Emilie Paclova, Jackson Spidell (last seen in "Blue Beetle"), James Beaumont, Tracie Bennett, Stephanie Brush (last seen in "Knock Knock, It's Tig Notaro"), Mirko Marchesi, Zac Ladkin, Togo Igawa (last seen in "Speed Racer")

RATING: 5 out of 10 flamethrowers (sure, they look cool, but how effective are they? You can't kill five assassins with one unless you also burn down the entire town...)

The Rip

Year 18, Day 155 - 6/4/26 - Movie #5,337

BEFORE: I just want one last quiet day at home before the madness starts, and I have to report in at the Tribeca Festival tomorrow. Working at the WNBA game last night was a bit weird because everybody in town really just wanted to watch the Knicks game, it was being screened in Central Park and I walked past places in Brooklyn that were projecting the game on the sides of buildings, for everyone to watch. Bars were full and I suspect that many people at the Liberty game were also watching the Knicks game on their phones at the same time, and wondering why they didn't just put it up on the big screen in the stadium so everyone could watch two games at the same time. Things are only going to get crazier - I'll be working the next five days so I'll be at home very little in the week to come. And on top of everything else, I need to find a way to watch the "Mandalorian" movie before it disappears from theaters, if I don't it's going to throw my whole July Doc Block into jeopardy. Good news, the Discount Tuesday program at AMC seems to have been extended to cover Wednesdays too, so I might be able to sneak out next Wednesday and watch a movie on a big screen in an actual theater, which would be a rare occurrence for me. I'll keep you updated. 

Kyle Chandler carries over from "Back in Action".

THE PLOT: A group of Miami cops discovers a stash of millions in cash, leading to distrust as outsiders learn about the huge seizure, making them question who to rely on. 

AFTER: At first I just thought this was going to be another reverse-heist film, you know, like "A Working Man" was - something that focuses on the people trying to STOP crime, instead of the ones doing it. But then I realize that like "A Working Man", the whole thing was a lot more complicated, because sometimes there are dirty cops (or security guards) and sometimes working around a lot of money turns good people into bad people. Then I realized that this was also a play on "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", which is what that situation tends to remind me of - you take good people and you give them access to treasure or a lot of money, and then you watch them try to outwit each other to get the money, or start acting paranoid or crazy because of the money. 

So that's what we're dealing with here, essentially, but there are a lot more layers to it, and a lot more players involved. The main characters are Miami cops who are trying to solve the murder of one of their fellow cops, in the midst of a series of raids on criminal stash houses, with rumors flying around about dirty cops who might be behind all that, which is what the deceased police tactical team member just happened to be investigating. Before she died, Capt. Jackie Velez managed to text an address to her second-in-command, Dane, which leads him to assemble the team and conduct a search of that address. Now they don't have a warrant, so they do a little trickery and coercion to gain access to the property, the woman who owns the house says it belonged to her late grandmother, and the cops discover a stash in the attic, where the homeowner swears she has never even been. Umm, sure, I guess some previous tenant left millions of dollars lying around in plastic buckets and then forgot about it? 

Dane goes a little overboard when he realizes that the amount of money stashed in the attic far exceeds what he expecting, his earlier tip said there might be $150K there, perhaps up to $300K, but a few million is a whole different ball game. Suddenly Dane shuts the operation down, demands the cell phones of all of his team members and insists that they count the money there before bringing it in, following certain protocols that would theoretically prevent any of his squad members from taking the cash. He also insists on manual counting, which could take all night - which would only be a problem if the drug dealers or whatever were watching from afar and threatening to attack and kill everyone in 30 minutes. 

The homeowner suggests that the cops just take whatever amount of money they want, and keep it without reporting it - she apparently has some kind of deal with the criminals, whose only instructions to her were to stay out of the attic and to clear out of the house for a few hours when instructed to do so, so they could move cash in and out without being seen, and then she would get paid for her silence. Seems like not too bad of a deal, sure, just let criminals store their money in your attic, what could possibly go wrong there? 

The psychological game then kicks in, because Dane does not know if any of his team members have some kind of similar deal with criminals, if they're also getting paid for their silence, or worse, taking money from the stashes they find without reporting them. For that matter, Dane's team does not know if HE is on the take, which I suppose is just as likely, and therefore all of his odd decisions and sudden demand for secrecy does seem a little suspect. There are other possibilities of course, the DEA tactical squad could be behind the recent raids, then the FBI agents have been on the case as well, and team member J.D Byrne's brother is on the FBI squad, and they appear to have a very contentious rivalry.  

Things get weirder when the house takes heavy gunfire, one officer is wounded and then Byrne finds a cartel lookout in a neighboring house, however that lookout's boss swears that the cartel did NOT attack the house, and did NOT kill Capt. Velez, and he also suggests that the cops should just take the money and go, it would be the easiest thing for all parties involved in this thing. Hey, it's not every day that you here the drug cartel ask you to take their money and call it a wash, that's for sure. 

Tensions run high, the team members start accusing each other and a fight breaks out, accidentally setting the house on fire. Great, as if things weren't already bad enough - a couple officers are instructed to stay behind and report the fire, while the DEA shows up with their armored vehicle and offers to help deliver the money bags to a secure police lock-up. That's when things get really weird, with three TNT members and one DEA agent in the tank/truck with the money, all the secrets and lies get exposed. Perhaps nothing has been what it seemed all night long, and perhaps Dane only pretended to be willing to pack up the cash and leave. Perhaps nobody really called headquarters about the situation, for whatever reason, and has been waiting for the right moment to seize an opportunity and a few bags of cash. 

Everything turns out to be somewhat important, so you kind of have to pay close attention, and it's really a different play on the "whodunnit"-type detective story, and you're never really sure if the situation is what it claims to be, or if it's all some pretense as part of a larger trap, of sorts. Pretty clever in the end. And it's based on a true story of Miami-Dade County police whose narcotics squad did conduct a raid on a private residence that turned up $20 million - surely that amount of money would have an effect on anyone, even police officers. There are probably a lot of people in this world who would immediately kill everyone in the room if they thought it would lead to possessing that amount of money.  

And to think I used to get nervous about walking across the San Diego Comic-Con floor to get to the main office with maybe $1,500 in cash in my pocket, just to put the deposit down on the booth for the following year...

Directed by Joe Carnahan (director of "Boss Level" and "Smokin' Aces")

Also starring Matt Damon (last heard in "Inside Job"), Ben Affleck (last seen in "The Accountant 2"), Steven Yeun (last seen in "Mickey 17"), Teyana Taylor (last seen in "One Battle After Another"), Catalina Sandino Moreno (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse"), Sasha Calle (last seen in "The Flash"), Scott Adkins (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 4"), Daisuke Tsuji, Nestor Carbonell (last seen in "Bandit"), Lina Esco (last seen in "LOL"), Alex Hernandez (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Cliff Chamberlain, Jose Pablo Cantillo (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Sal Lopez (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Angel Rosario Jr., Isabella Aparicio (last seen in "Blue Beetle"), Chris Casiano, Lourdes Hernandez, Jovan Perez, Jesse Valdivia, Joel Perez (last seen in "tick, tick...BOOM!"), with the voice of Joe Carnahan (last seen in "The A-Team").

RATING: 7 out of 10 bullet-proof vests (you'd think they keep people safer, but don't they just cause your enemy to aim at your head?)