Every manly man in America will enjoy this movie. If you walk out of the theater going "Oh my god, that was too loud!" or "Why did they have to do that?" then you're obviously not a manly man and we'll tear your man card right with your ticket stub. Plot is secondary and action is king. Does it matter or add any brevity that it was inspired by a true story? Nope. Just buckle up and enjoy the chase. This is vintage stand-up-and-cheer Tony Scott spectacle.
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Megamind, the newest computer-animated family film from Dreamworks, is just that kind of story. It's a villain's origin story and a look inside their motivations and inner psyche. It's a chance to see what would happen if the hapless bad guy actually won for once. While the pool that we get to look at is pretty shallow, it still has a lot more going on than one would realize. That different point of view is the cleverness and fun of Megamind and it's quality storytelling elevates it much higher than this year's previous villain-inside-story animated movie Despicable Me.
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Simply put, Due Date suffers from, what I like to call, "Nacho Libre Syndrome," where all of the funny parts of the movie are in the previews and TV spots. The moments in-between turn out to be worthless, preposterous, or just bad.
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Call it the human condition or whatever you like. Everyone handles death differently and everyone copes with it differently in very distinctive and personal ways. In any case, because of those strong personal differences, it is very tough to make a populist, wide-reaching movie about it that everyone can snuggle up together and identify with. If anyone has the chops to try, it's the great Clint Eastwood with Hereafter. His newest film follows three parallel stories, each in different countries, of three people affected by death in dramatically different ways.
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With this premise, Red is a fun action-comedy that doesn't take itself too seriously and definitely doesn't have to. It's an A-Team for the Viagra crowd. There's enough mystery in their preposterous mission to create a suspenseful puzzle to keep your attention, while balanced with enough bullet-filled "too-old-for-this-shit" moments to really entertain.
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Because I myself am a school teacher, I found that there was no way to write a movie review for the documentary film without wanting to jump into the first-person to share, analyze, and discuss my own impressions along the way. Still, I wanted my reviews to stand on their own as objective and with journalistic integrity. For that reason, I kept my thoughts and feelings on the topics out of the reviews and separated them for a follow-up editorial column after each review.
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From both story perspectives, the cracks and deficiencies of the American public school system are revealed and out on display in a very strong way. Waiting for "Superman" doesn't sugarcoat or hold its statistics and ugly findings back. Much about No Child Left Behind and educational funding is discussed. It is both sickening and fascinating to watch at the same time, yet all the while poignant.
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