BEFORE: I've got a full day off so I'm going to try to double-up today, two films for the low low price of one. The alternative is to use a shorter path to my February 1 film, but what fun is that? I'd miss the epic movie "Babylon" if I did that, and that film is simply taking up too much space on the DVR, it's got to go. I'm in a race to get to the end of the month by any means necessary, but not by breaking the chain or dropping the film I really want to see.
A comedy action film based on a stand-up routine from Bert Kreischer? Yeah, I'll give that a whirl, especially if it's got Mark Hamill being funny in it, and carrying over from "Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists".
THE PLOT: Bert's drunken past catches up with him when he and his father are kidnapped by the people he wronged 20 years ago while on a college semester abroad in Russia.
AFTER: Well, we've come full circle on Russia, haven't we? It's OK for them to be the bad guys again in a movie, which calls to mind the old James Bond movies and leaders like Stalin and Kruschev before that, we always knew these guys were up to no good, right? Even during the eras of glasnost and perestroika and Clinton working with Yeltsin and come on, did anybody really fall for the chance of democracy taking hold in the former Soviet Union? For a few years there the movie villains had to be from Bulgaria or Chechnya or Albania, when we should never have taken our eyes off the Russians. It's good to be back home, really.
This film uses a lot of flashbacks, to detail Bert's semester abroad when he was twenty years younger, and I understand, it just wouldn't work to show that whole trip first, because that would give too much away, and then to document the return trip. So there has to be a split timeline, but those don't always work, just look at "All the Old Knives", you can't really tell which scenes were taking place eight years ago, which were taking place three months ago, and which were taking place in the present, because the editors cut between them liberally, and they didn't put up captions each time to say "THEN" and "NOW", like they do in the comic books. So they have a different actor playing Young Bert, and that helps out a lot, any time we see him we know we're back in 2003 or whatever, and then as Bert retraces his steps in the present, we learn more about the past trip at the same time. Clever, because then we don't learn all the events at once, and the flashbacks don't have a chance to feel boring. (The other method was used by "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny", with a long opening sequence set in 1945, then the movie jumped forward to 1969, with some of the characters from the past carrying over, but also a lot of new ones. There was also enough action there to never feel boring, but the split timeline made a bit more sense, showing us all of the past events to set things up before they jumped forward.)
(I saw this technique used in a Captain America comic recently, Cap was standing in a room with a dead body, and every few frames they cut to the past with the villain talking to the still-alive victim, then back forward to Cap talking to Dr. Strange about the crime scene, and it was super-confusing, to say the least. If it's that puzzling, for the love of God, please find another way to tell this story. Form needs to follow function, please.)
Here it's a bit more like that part of "Beerfest" where the drinking team couldn't find the secret underground drinking competition unless somebody got super drunk and retraced their accidental steps from the previous visit. Bert and his father get kidnapped and brought back to Russia, where Young Bert helped a bunch of Russian gangsters rob a train, and now somebody is trying to locate ONE stolen item, a pocket watch that is very important to a female mobster/assassin, it belonged to her father and if she can locate it, she will earn the right to succeed him. That's a bit like "Mafia Mamma", only she clearly deserves to run the family, and she doesn't get the position just willed to her after her uncle's death, she's got to find the macguffin, er, the watch. And Bert being there in person to retrace his steps could be the way to do that, provided things haven't changed too much in Russia in 20 years.
Unfortunately, they can't just jump right into the action part, there's still a long opening sequence here where Bert's in counseling with his wife and two daughters, and the family dynamic is fractured due to an earlier incident where he got drunk and convinced his teen daughter to pick him up and drive him home, only she lost her learner's permit because there was the only responsible adult in the car was acting quite irresponsibly, and so that's technically illegal. Yeah, that sounds like it could happen. Now Bert's trying a bit too hard to mend those fences, he's quit going on the comedy circuit and just focusing on being a dad, but then he invited too many people to his daughter's birthday party and falling back on being the "cool" but also embarrassing dad, and that's just not what his daughter wants. This leads her to act out, and head off on a road trip with her friends without his permission. Also, Bert's own dad shows up at the party, and he's also got a fractured relationship with Bert, which, big surprise, also ties in to that Russian trip 20 years ago, where he lost his father's heirloom pocket knife. Say, you don't suppose...
Yep, that Russian female gangster shows up on cue, takes Older Bert and Even Older Dad off to Russia, where she needs them to find that watch. One scary gangster/party DJ is left behind to tail Bert's daughter, and kill her if Bert doesn't comply. Finally, the action kicks in and Bert & company work their way through the Russian underworld of train bandits (all named Igor) and trigger-happy hitmen who slap each other for fun, and the solution to every problem is for Bert to chug a bottle of vodka and become "The Machine", which is perhaps a bit too reminiscent of Popeye eating a can of spinach whenever the need arises. Much of the comedy arises from the disconnect of this fat, often shirtless inept comedian being an unlikely hero who's absolutely no good in a fight, unless he's had his "spinach" and he's ready to fail upwards.
But if you're ready for an action film that doesn't take itself too seriously, or at all, then this is fine. Mark Hamill is totally the best thing about the film, smart casting to have Luke Skywalker curse and do drugs and maybe screw a Russian woman, it's totally against type for him. Kudos. He's also great at the father thing, telling us that Dads can be overly critical, but it's only because they love their kids too much and want their kids' lives to be better than their own, so they over-compensate because they love so damn much.
Also starring Bert Kreischer, Jimmy Tatro (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Iva Babic, Robert Maaser (last seen in "Uncharted"), Stephanie Kurtzuba (last seen in "Bad Education"), Martyn Ford (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Jessica Gabor, Rita Bernard-Shaw, Nikola Djuricko (last seen in "World War Z"), Oleg Taktarov (last seen in "The Man from Toronto", Amelie Villiers, Aleksander Sreckovic, Jovan Savic, Marko Nedeljkovic, Set Sjöstrand, Mercedes De La Cruz, Dorde Simic, Brian Caspe (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Milena Predic (last seen in "Extinction"), Tea Wagner, Rachel Moncilov, Helen Babic, Mladen Sovilj, LeeAnn Kreischer, Philip Waley.
RATING: 6 out of 10 improperly flipped hamburgers
No comments:
Post a Comment