Taken

I summarized the movie on Twitter as follows: It's like the "Bourne" movies only without the boring command center scenes. So basically you're left with the car chases and fights without a bunch of nerds and bureaucrats yelling at each other. I think that's an improvement. I mean, when you're doing a dumb action movie you might as well just get to the action and be done with it.

The plot of the movie is really simple. Brian Mills (Liam Neeson) was a former CIA agent who quit so he could be close to his 17-year-old daughter Kim, who is living with his ex-wife and wealthy stepfather. (One question I have is since when does the CIA hire foreign people for its agents? Shouldn't he have been in MI6 or something? Whatever.) Kim wants to go on a trip to Europe to follow U2 around. (Since she's 17 shouldn't it be Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers? Whatever.)

Brian is reluctant to let her go, but gives in. Once she and her friend get to Paris, Kim meets a boy named Peter and they share a cab to where she's staying. Not long after that, hired goons show up at the apartment and kidnap both Kim and her friend. Kim is on the phone with Brian at the time, and he swears to come after her and kill those responsible, as you should know if you saw the previews/commercials where he says, "I will find you. And I will kill you." To which the other guy says, "Good luck."

From there the story is pretty simple. Brian flies to Paris, hunts down the Albanian goons and connects the dots to those holding Kim. Along the way he beats up, tortures, and kills anyone who gets in his way. Besides that he tampers with a crime scene, shoots the wife of a policeman, and steals numerous cars. Basically if this were real life he'd be doing the rest of his life in prison. Good thing this is a dumb action movie where that kind of collateral damage can be overlooked.

This is a dumb action movie, but it works well enough. Liam Neeson is probably one of three people who could pull this movie off. The other two are Harrison Ford in his younger days or maybe Bruce Willis. Basically you need someone who can seem like a concerned family man who you could also see being able to kick ass. It really wouldn't work with a Schwarzenegger or Stallone or even a Matt Damon.

The movie clocks in at like 85 minutes--and that was the "extended cut" so there's not much to it. (Maybe if you took all those command center scenes out of the Bourne movies they'd only be 85 minutes too.) How he finds all these people is so easy and disposing of them is even easier. It makes you wonder why the police couldn't find them. Maybe they could if anyone had bothered to call them. And if they weren't on the take.

Still, for an action movie with a little heart you could do a lot worse.

That is all.

(My score: 2.5 stars)

(Metacritic score: 50/100)

The Informant!

I found "The Informant!" an entertaining but ultimately frustrating movie. By the end I didn't know what to make of this Mark Whitacre guy. Was he insane? Was he a compulsive liar? Was he just an egomaniac? I still have no idea. Maybe he was a little of all three.

"The Informant!" starts off with a disclaimer that some of the characters are composites and the dialog dramatized. It finishes by saying, "So there." That gives you a hint on the tone that it's going to deal with serious stuff but not too seriously.

The story is based on a book that is based on a true story. So there. It's about Mark Whitacre, an executive at Archer, Daniels, Midland, who make food additives and other products. If you've seen "Meet the Press" or such shows you might have seen an ad for ADM. Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon with a cheesy mustache and bad hair piece) is in charge of something called lysene that is added to chicken, shrimp, and other products to make them bigger. If we can believe anything he says then he was a former biochemist for the company working in Germany before transferring to headquarters in Illinois, where he and his wife are building stables and own a Porsche and Ferrari, pretty expensive stuff for a guy making $350,000 a year.

Whitacre is having a problem with the lysene and tells his superiors that someone is sabotaging it. He also claims that a Japanese competitor is calling his house trying to offer information for money. ADM goes to the FBI, who send in agent Brian Shepherd (Scott Bakula) to tap Whitacre's phone. But then Whitacre pulls Shepherd aside to tell him about a global price-fixing scheme among ADM and its competitors.

Soon Shepherd and another agent (Joel McHale of "The Soup" and the new show "Community" on NBC at 9:30 Thursdays--shameless plug!) are soon having Whitacre wired up to get dirt on meetings between ADM execs and those of other companies around the world. After two and a half years the FBI finally takes ADM down and declares Whitacre a hero.

End of the story, right? Nope. Because while he was informing to the FBI, Whitacre was involved with his own schemes. This explains how he was able to afford that stable, fancy cars, and large house. It becomes a web of lies that leaves the FBI, Whitacre's own lawyers, and me wondering just what the hell this guy was thinking.

The movie is pretty good in that I have no complaints about Damon or any of the other actors. Though I wonder why guys like Joel McHale and other comedians were cast in serious roles. Seems like a waste to me. The only real complaint was the annoying music score with its "Austin Powers"-esque '60s music despite that the movie takes place in the 1990s. That at times seemed overbearing and irritating. I suppose there was some reason for it, maybe to recreate '60s cinema or something. Why you'd want to do that I have no idea.

My biggest complaint is what I said at the beginning. When all is said and done I'm not sure what conclusion to draw. Maybe the filmmakers, book's author, and everyone else involved--maybe including Whitacre himself--have no clue what really made this guy tick. So in the end it's an entertaining film but not an enlightening one. Still, as I Tweeted about it, it's probably the wackiest film about corporate crime that doesn't involve Michael Moore.

Recommended as a rental.

That is all.

(My score: **.5 stars)

(Metacritic score: 66/100)

Adventureland

This is a case where I wound up feeling the previews and reviews lied to me. I thought this movie would be funny and sweet, perhaps with some message about growing up. Instead it was a dull, boring slog riddled with cliches and as predictable as the sunrise.

A note after the title card states the movie takes place in 1987 (as if you couldn't figure this out from the music cues, clothes/hair fashions, and image of Reagan on the TV screen) and James (Jesse Eisenberg) is graduated from college and planning to go to Columbia for his graduate studies in journalism. He's also planning to go to Europe over the summer with his rich buddy, where he might finally get laid. And he plans to share an apartment with the same rich buddy and experience the fast life in the Big Apple.

Of course none of these plans work out. His father is essentially demoted for being a drunk, which leaves the family too strapped for cash for the trip to Europe or sending him to Columbia. (Why couldn't the rich buddy float him the cash for the Europe trip? And isn't James smart enough to get a scholarship? Apparently not.) To get money for school, James tries to get a summer job, but the only one he can get is at the two-bit theme park Adventureland, the sort of place where the games are all rigged--one cardinal rule being "no one ever wins a giant ass panda."

James is presiding over a rigged game when some customers con him and threaten to take a giant ass panda by any means necessary. He's saved by his coworker Emily (Kristen Stewart of "Twilight" fame) who is working at the park for reasons that remain unclear. She attends NYU for reasons that also remained unclear to me even after watching the movie twice. You should already know what happens: James falls in love with Emily and she in love with him. Of course their relationship is complicated by the fact she's screwing the rock n roll maintenance guy (Ryan Reynolds).

Look, if you don't know how this plays out then you haven't watched many movies. Anyway, I was bored and irritated both times I watched this. For taking place in an amusement park there's very little amusement to be had. Only the park owners (Bill Heder & Kristen Wiig) provide any sort of comic relief and that's because they're the only ones who seem to give a damn about the park.

The rest of the characters all act like they're much too good to be working at a crappy theme park. (Which they probably are, except the logical question then becomes--why are you working at a crappy theme park?) This idea worked fine in movies like "Clerks" and "Office Space" because there were enough other shenanigans provided by annoying customers and dorky bosses to make it interesting. In "Adventureland" there isn't much of that, so it focuses instead on the whiny, awkward relationships among James, Emily, and their coworkers, which wouldn't even make for a decent show on the CW. Most of their time is spent moping around and occasionally smoking weed.

I didn't like any of the characters in this movie. James is the standard bland, overly sensitive guy always whining because he's too dumb to realize the good thing right in front of him. Emily is even more bland, not to mention whiny and unpleasant. Though at least it's obvious then James and Emily deserve each other. The movie even manages to squander the presence of Ryan Reynolds by having him play it straight, instead of setting him up for some good sarcastic quips like "Waiting," "Van Wilder," or even the third "Blade" movie. So in the end it was a bunch of obnoxious snobs who think they're better than you because you have the audacity to go to the crappy theme park where they make minimum wage. Ugh, no thanks.

All of this could have been salvaged if there was some good message about growing up or any of that. Instead it goes for the formula, cliche ending. What I was left this was a movie about people I didn't care about and a message I'd seen a thousand times before in much better movies.

As I Tweeted after watching this, movies like this or the lamentable "Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist" really make me appreciate the genius of the recently-passed John Hughes. He knew how to make movies about growing up that were also fun and entertaining. You'd be much better served watching "The Breakfast Club" or "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" than this dull, third-rate imitation.

That is all.

(My score: 50/100)

(Metacritic score: 76/100)

BTW, my other Tweet about this movie is that we need to have a Bland, Overly Sensitive Guy Olympics between Michael Cera and Jesse Eisenberg. Maybe Chicago could host it since they lost the real Olympics.

Away We Go

When I wrote a book review for Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I commented that I had read the book at just the right time. Had I read the book five years earlier I might not have got it and if I had read it five years later I might have been too cynical to buy into it. The same is almost true for the movie Eggers co-wrote, "Away We Go." The only hitch for me is this is a movie about parenting and I do not (nor will I ever) have children. Still, I watched it at the point where I'm not too young that parenthood seems like a far distant concept or too old and jaded about it.

The movie begins with Burt (John Krasinski of NBC's "The Office") discovering his life partner Verona (Maya Rudolph of NBC's SNL) is pregnant in a very unusual fashion that doesn't involve a rabbit or peeing on a stick. Six months later, they go to see Burt's oddball parents who have a surprise announcement: they're moving to Belgium for two years, starting a month before Verona is supposed to give birth. With the parents leaving, Burt and Verona decide it's time to leave their crappy house and find a new place to live.

Since Burt's job selling insurance futures (insurance for insurance companies) happens by phone and Verona's job doing medical illustrations happens by mail they can pretty much go anywhere. So they decide to have a sort of competition among their friends and family to find the perfect spot for raising their daughter.

They start by traveling to Phoenix, where they meet Verona's former employer and her husband, who take them (with their kids) to a dog or horse track, where it becomes painfully clear the couple are lushes. From there it's a short trip to Tucson where Verona meets her sister.

The next step of their journey is to Madison to see Burt's "cousin" LN. You can guess from her name that LN is not exactly normal. This becomes more clear when Burt and Verona interrupt her nursing her toddler. They make some more disturbing discoveries before taking off on the last leg of their trip to Montreal.

In Montreal are a couple of old college buddies who have adopted a bunch of kids of varying ethnicity but who can't seem to produce their own offspring. Things seem almost settled when Burt receives an SOS from his brother in Miami and away they go again.

There's a running joke in the movie that Burt is far too relaxed and placid, so that he can't really get upset at Verona (or anyone else) even though she refuses to marry him. When Burt does finally get upset at someone the effect is more comical than anything else. That and the soundtrack by mellow indie folk-pop artist Alexi Murdoch pretty much sum up the movie's entire vibe--it's mellow and laid back and really can't bring itself to get riled up. Throughout Burt and Verona's journey the only real obstacle they have to overcome is when the airline refuses to let Verona board the plane because they think she's too pregnant and doesn't have a doctor's note to say she's only six months along. The rest of the movie is pretty much watching Burt and Verona's wacky friends/family with bemusement. (This is markedly different from director Sam Mendes's other forays into couplehood: "American Beauty" and "Revolutionary Road." Though perhaps strung together they form kind of a timeline for relationships: "Away We Go" is the sweet beginning, "Revolutionary Road" the early struggles, and then "American Beauty" the last gasps of middle age. Maybe the next one should be about a geriatric couple.)

That's not to say this is a bad movie. It's sweet and touching and funny at parts. And it's not so syrupy that I actively wanted bad things to happen to Burt and Verona, a principle I refer to as reverse catharsis. If you're of the age where you're about to start a family and "settle down" then you can probably identify with it. If you've already started with your family then you might be a little too cynical for this.

I was a little too cynical in that while I think Burt and Verona have great intentions, I couldn't help wondering how things would play out for them after the baby is born. It would be really interesting to make a sequel in 3-4 years to see how things are for this loving, placid couple after midnight feedings, diaper changes, and the Terrible Twos. Somehow I bet there'd be more conflict then.

That is all.

My score: 75/100 (3 stars)

Metacritic score: 58/100 (2+ stars)