‘The Creator’ aims big, falls short

 I rooted for The Creator, hoping this latest futuristic extravaganza would be a major addition to the big-screen sci-fi canon. Although the movie comes close, it ultimately falls short.

 The subject -- a war between humans and AI -- couldn't be more topical but director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) gives his two-hour and 15-minute adventure a bric-a-brac feel that keeps the movie from gathering force.

   Edwards's movie evokes memories of bygone sci-fi -- notably AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and The Terminator (2024). You also may find yourself thinking about a variety of Vietnam movies that showed Asian populations being decimated by American military might. 

    That's because much of the story takes place in the fictional location of New Asia, the place where special forces warrior Joshua (John David Washington) is sent to forestall the extinction of humanity.

   The story begins with a jumble of action set in 2065, ten years after Los Angeles was destroyed by nukes, a catastrophic attack attributed to the AI on which humans had become too dependent. The US has outlawed AI, vowing never to let it strike again.

   Early on, we meet special forces warrior Washington's Joshua. A  needless raid by the US military blows Joshua's cover during a spy mission in New Asia. During the melee, Joshua's pregnant wife Mia (Gemma Chan) is killed. 

    Joshua was supposed to coax Mia into revealing the location of  Nirmata. a creator with that the power to program AI for maximum destruction. Still, Joshua loved her and thought he could work to benefit both humans and AI.

    The US's imperialist objectives are anything but subtle. The US military operates NOMAD, a Flying Fortress that hovers over the earth beaming destructive rays on designated targets. 

    Leave it to humans. When encountering a force with superior intellect, the response: Blow it up.

    General Andrews (Ralph Ineson), a one-note hard ass of a military man, presides over NOMAD. Allison Janey portrays Colonel Howell, an officer who tries to be more sympathetic toward the mistrustful Joshua.

    As if to signal a theme, Joshua comes equipped with prosthetic robotic limbs acquired after suffering terrible war wounds. He's part robot, suggesting that a blend of AI and humanity might be possible. 

    New Asia is enemy turf, but wait. Why are some bots in New Asia wearing Buddhist robes and acting as if they've mastered the art of cosmic serenity? Why do they have spinning gears in the back of their heads?

    These bots, by the way, have human skin -- or a simulated version of it -- and digital parts. Same goes for an achingly cute six-year-old girl Joshua dubs Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Alphie has powers that she's only learning to harness.

  To complicate matters, she might be the very creation that Joshua has been ordered to kill.

    A scattered story includes a predictable twist, concluding with a mega blast of emotion built around sacrifice and hope. Some may be moved but I didn't know whether to be inspired or go with the one-word question I wrote in my notebook, “risible?”

   I presume you know which way I leaned.

   We've seen worse movies than The Creator and Edwards deserves credit for creating an immersive look and nailing an intriguing final shot. But The Creator seldom scales the heights of imaginative writing that could have matched its visual accomplishments and outsized ambitions.

     

'Miss Peregrine' runs a cluttered home

Tim Burton tries his hand a weird YA novel.

The YA novel, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, seems a perfect vehicle for director Tim Burton, whose ability to blend effects, story and mood tilts toward the dark and perverse without sacrificing something we might call general appeal.

With movies such as Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Corpse Bride, Burton has developed a following based on his distinctive style and a willingness to dip into the dark side of his palette.

Considering all that, Miss Peregrine should have been a slam-dunk.

But for reasons having to do with a glut of plot and the somewhat confusing creation of an alternate reality, Burton's adaptation of Ransom Riggs' 2013 novel proves only fitfully engaging.

Burton mounts a variety of captivating images -- from scary monsters to moments frozen in time to a floating girl who wears weighted shoes to keep herself earthbound.

At times, Burton seems to have been inspired by the Quay brothers, whose work with stop-motion animation surpasses almost all other cinematic peculiarities.

The story finds young Jake (Asa Butterfield) mourning his grandfather (Terrence Stamp). Just before his death, Grandpa instructed his grandson to travel to Wales to locate Miss Pergerine's School for Peculiar Children: Put anther way, Grandpa sends Jake on a destiny-defining journey.

After consultation with a child psychologist (Allison Janey), Jake's parents (Kim Dickens and Chris O'Dowd) decide that Dad should take the boy to Wales.

Once in Wales, Jake finds Miss Peregrine's school in ruins, destroyed by a direct hit from a German bomb during World War II.

But as he rummages through the bombed-out rubble, Jake begins to see the peculiar children of the movie's title. Eventually, he time travels back to the day the school was bombed.

He soon learns that Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), the school's head mistress, has the ability to stop time by creating time loops. Moments prior to the German bombing, Miss Peregrine stops the clock, and the day again repeats. Her charges are saved, although they're suspended in time. They never age another day.

For emotional heft, the movie focuses on the developing relationship between Jake and Emma (Ella Purnell), the girl who floats. He also meets Enoch (Finlay MacMillan), a kid who knows how to give life to expired creatures.

There's also an invisible kid and a girl who has a mouth with sharp predatory teeth on the back of her head; at times, the movie feels like an off-kilter take on X-Men, a story about young people who are heroic precisely because they don't fit into any mold.

Burton embeds all of this in a jargon-heavy screenplay that requires those unfamiliar with the novel to master a new vocabulary. An example: Ymbrynes, of which Miss Peregrine is one, can create time loops. You'll also find monsters called Hollowgasts -- or some such.

By the end, a new villain surfaces, Samuel L. Jackson's Barron, a creature known as a wight; i.e., a Hollowgast that can assume human form after devouring lots of eyeballs plucked from peculiar children.

And, yes, I gave Google a workout to catch up.

No stranger to over-the-top menacing, Jackson does what's expected of him. Butterfield doesn't bring much by way of expression to his role; and it falls to Purnell's Emma to make the biggest impression.

Not surprisingly, all of the actors are a bit outdone by the movie's copious effects.

Finding the story less than compelling, I drifted from scene-to-scene, wondering how Burton achieved some of the movie's more impressive images and trying to decipher the screenplay's murky references to the Holocaust.

What I didn't do was emerge with a coherent feeling about a movie that doesn't seem to have an entirely coherent feeling about itself. Miss Peregrine felt like movie I'd just as soon thumb-through as watch.

Melissa McCarthy's summer stumble

Tammy's as crude as you'd expect, but not as funny as you might have hoped.

Few things are more painful than being stuck in a moving vehicle with people who you find annoying. That's exactly how I felt watching Tammy, a movie that puts Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon on the road.

Painfully misguided, Tammy is the result of a collaboration between McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone, who co-wrote the screenplay with McCarthy and who also handled the directing chores.

Tammy finds McCarthy playing the title character, the wayward granddaughter of an aging alcoholic (Sarandon).

After being fired from her job at a fast-food franchise, McCarthy's Tammy sets out on a road trip with her grandmother, who supplies the car -- an aging Cadillac -- and the money that supports a journey toward Niagara Falls, a stop on grandma's bucket list.

All of this takes place over the objections of Tammy's mother (Allison Janney), who understands that grandma is both a diabetic and a drunk, and shouldn't be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

Sarandon may be game for anything, but she's given scenes that struck me as embarrassing: carrying on in the backseat of a car with a guy (Cary Cole) she meets in a bar or having a drunken outburst at a Fourth of July party thrown by her lesbian cousin (Kathy Bates).

McCarthy's luckier: Her previous comic roles have immunized her against embarrassment. Here, she plays a foul-mouthed woman whose husband (Nat Faxon) is having an affair with a neighbor (Toni Collette).

As is the case with many crude comedies, Tammy feels the need to sentimentalize its main character before it's done, something like an boisterous drunk who ends the evening crying in his beer.

Tammy 's told -- via lame dialogue Bates delivers with unnecessary conviction -- that she needs to take control of her life and stop wallowing in self-pity.

She's supposed to do this even though her drunken aunt has grabbed a microphone and told the partying lesbians that Tammy's a fat loser worthy of the nickname "cheeseburger."

Sarandon has been made to look as old as possible, even to the point of donning artificially swollen ankles, but she's never convincingly dissolute.

In what may have been intended as a comic high point, Tammy puts a paper bag on her head and robs a fast-food outlet after fashioning another paper bag into a pretend revolver. She needs money to bail grandma out of jail.

If this was intended as the movie's comic high point, it's not much of one.

Mark Duplass plays the son of the man who picked up grandma in a bar and a potential love interest for Tammy, the movie's lone representative of normalcy.

Tammy tries to get by making lame jokes about old folks, dishing out crude humor and toying with the image McCarthy has created in previous comedies such as Identity Thief, The Heat and, of course, in Bridesmaids, the movie that provided her with a breakthrough role.

Maybe because it's summer, Tammy even finds an excuse to blow up grandma's car. If only that had happened before grandma and Tammy had had a chance to get into it.

He comes of age in a water park

I recall reading somewhere that a single caring adult can alter the whole trajectory of a kid's life, particularly if that adult shows up at a critical point in a young person's development.

I thought about that while watching The Way, Way Back, a comedy about a dejected, angry teen-ager who blossoms under the mentorship of the owner of a Massachusetts water park called Water Wizz.

Fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) seems entirely uncomfortable in the world until he meets Owen (Sam Rockwell), an adult who senses the boy's loneliness and encourages him have a little fun.

For Duncan, loosening-up is no easy task. He's stuck on a month-long beach vacation with his divorced mother (Toni Collette) and the new man in her life (Steve Carell). To make matters even worse, Carell's Trent and Collette's Pam are in the early stages of their relationship and have yet to settle important territorial issues.

Just to add a little more insult to the already festering pile of Duncan's injuries, Trent's daugther (Zoe Levin) is a stuck-up, socially conscious teen who's totally condescending toward the dweebish Duncan -- at least when she's not entirely indifferent toward what she perceives as his worthless existence.

Directed and written by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash -- actors and screenwriters who won an Oscar for adapting The Descendants for the screen -- The Way, Way Back can't entirely overcome the familiarity of what amounts to yet another teen reclamation project. But the movie offers interesting wrinkles en route to a predictable -- if slightly attenuated -- finale.

To begin with, The Way, Way Back allows Carell to play to a jerk. Carell's Trent declares his jerkhood from the movie's outset, and does little to change our opinion of him as the story develops.

In Pam, Trent seems to have found a woman so desperate to hold onto a potentially stable relationship that she'll put up with a lot. Trent seems more than willing to take advantage of the situation. He shows far more interest in socializing with another couple (Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet) than in testing the waters of stepfatherhood -- or even in spending time with Pam.

Duncan's shot at self-affirmation arrives in the form of Rockwell's Owen, who becomes a kind of surrogate father for Owen. Not only does Owen offer Duncan a job at Water Wizz, he knows how to relate to a kid, in part because he still is one. In a way, the movie is Owen's coming-of-age story, too.

The cast is further bolstered by Allison Janney, who plays Trent's garrulous neighbor and Anna Sophia Robb, who appears as Janney's daughter, a girl who's smart enough to take an interest in the dejected Duncan, who suffers one indignity after another. An example: He's forced to explore the beachfront Massachusetts town where the story unfolds on a pink girls' bicycle he finds in Trent's garage.

Maya Rudloph appears as one of Sam's employees, and both Faxon and Rash play small roles as water-park workers.

To their credit, Faxon and Rash provide some shading, even for the dislikable Trent, and they belatedly give Collette a chance to dig more deeply into a character with an alarming tendency toward over-dependence.

For all of this, The Way, Way Back may leave you shrugging, perhaps because we've been down this road too many times, perhaps because the movie tends to be a bit bland and perhaps because the adult conflicts -- though sketchily presented -- are more interesting than Duncan's problems.

Let me backtrack a bit, though. It's convenient, but a little inaccurate to classify The Way, Way Back as a coming-of-age story. In truth, neither the movie's teens nor its adults fully mature.

Rather, they're brought to the brink of important life changes. Faxon and Rash keep the movie's ending upbeat, but allow us just enough room to speculate about whether these characters really will be able to sustain new and better versions of themselves.

Surviving a campus romance

Jesse (Josh Radner), an admissions officer for a New York city college, is 35-years-old and perhaps a trifle bored with his life. Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), a student at a Ohio university, is 19 and full of vigor. Jesse returns to that Ohio school -- his alma mater -- to honor a retiring English teacher (Richard Jenkins), a man he considered his mentor. Immersed in the hopeful environment of his youth, Jesse soon finds himself attracted to Zibby, who's bright, attractive and unusually comfortable with herself for a teen-ager. Written and directed by Radner, Liberal Arts may not graduate with honors, but it's by no means last in its class, either. Radner finds telling moments in a story that unfolds with easy-going sensitivity. An example: After retiring, Jenkins's character realizes that he's going to have a difficult time adjusting to a life of leisure. He asks the head of the English department to re-hire him, but discovers that he's already been replaced. It's not a major thrust of the story, but Jenkins shows us the pain felt by someone who's essentially surrendering his identity along with his job. Rounding out the cast are Zac Efron, as the kind of loose-canon figure who seems to turn up on every college campus, and John Magaro, as a bookish young student Jesse befriends. As Jesse wanders around his old college, he also remembers what it was like to be a student enamored of the romantic poets and awed by the teacher (Allison Janney) who taught him about them. Ultimately, Radner -- familiar from the sitcom How I Met Your Mother -- is interested in characters who are too smart to be jammed into a formula movie, but fit nicely into a low-key story that leaves you hoping everyone in it comes out unscathed.