A kickless dud of an action comedy

 

Ariana DeBose's portrayal of Anita in West Side Story earned her an Oscar for best supporting actress in 2022.  Ke Huy Quan won an  Oscar for best supporting actor in 2023, playing a character who vaulted through multiple universes in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

   The two Oscar-winning actors are teamed in Love Hurts, a skimpy action comedy in which Quan gets most of the attention. Director Jonathan Eusebio lands a few bloody high shots (the view through a hole that has been blown in a man's head) but seldom connects when it comes to laughs.

    Love Hurts' major accomplishment involves brevity: It's 83 minutes long.

    The story begins with a cliched premise: Marvin Gable, a ludicrously joyful real estate agent, is drawn back into the assassin's life he believed he had abandoned.

     A poor excuse of a plot kicks off on Valentine's Day after Knuckles (Daniel Wu), Marvin's crime czar brother, tries to punish DeBose's character for taking mob money.

    Marvin, who once did his brother's bidding, had been ordered to kill DeBose's Rose. He didn't follow through. Now, she's back.

    Quan seems to be working way too hard. DeBose has too little to do, and the pair generates little by way of the rom-com chemistry that's supposed to provide heart.

    A gaggle of uninteresting thugs -- one played by Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch -- doesn't add much either. 

   Some scenes simply don't pay off. Ashley (Lio Tipton) plays Gable's assistant at the real estate office. She falls for the brutal Raven (Mustafa Shakir), who wins her over with his sensitive, if unexpected, poetry. Sean Astin has a nice turn as Marvin's boss. 

   A duo of uninteresting thugs -- Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch and André Eriksen-- doesn't add much either. 

   Might as well follow the movie's lead and keep things short. Cartoonish and forgettable, Love Hurts  proves a kick less dud.

A loopy, discombobulated 'Kraven'

 

   I'd never heard of Sergei Kravinoff until I looked at the credits for Kraven the Hunter, the latest Sony Marvel movie to reach the screen.

  Still confused, I sought more information. Better known as Kraven the Hunter, Kravinoff, I read, is an arch-enemy of Spider-Man. That didn't help, either. Spider-Man didn't appear in the credits or, as I later found out, in the movie.

  Seeing this standalone helping of lethal action resulted in only mild clarification. Marked by R-rated violence, director J.C. Chandors's scattered origin story plays like a darkly-hued Russian thriller that occasionally stops to remember its comic-book origins.

    The story kicks off in earnest when Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) flees his corrupt father (Russell Crowe) and sensitive brother (Fred Hechinger). He’s off to the woods, where he builds a yurt-like home and communes with wildlife

   Sergei, who'll become Kraven, holds a grudge against Crowe's Nikolai Kravinoff, a big-time drug dealer who drove Sergei's mom to suicide. Dad divides the world's inhabitants into two categories: Weak and strong. Mom was weak. 

  Two villains appear. Alessandro Nivola plays Rhino, a psycho nut job whose skin can turn into rhino hide when he needs protection. The transformation is painful, requiring the insertion of a tube into a portal that links to Rhino's gut, pumping him full of whatever turns sadists into rhinos.

   Christopher Abbott plays Foreigner, a villain who can vanish in one place and reappear in another, although it's unclear how he manages this trick.

  Perhaps to keep Kraven from drowning in testosterone, the screenplay introduces Calypso (Ariana DeBose), a lawyer who allies herself with Kraven; she helps him locate the miscreants he pursues. He has a list.

   Kraven has an advantage over his foes. He possesses the keenly developed senses of a hunter who forms bonds with animals. You may not get him, but four-legged creatures view him as a friend.

   Employing a Russian accent, Crowe delivers his sparse lines with fortune cookie terseness. "Man who kill legend becomes legend,'' he tells his then teenage sons during a hunting trip to Ghana in the movie's early going.

   At one point, Demitri, Kraven's sensitive brother, opens a piano bar and lounge. Listening to his son sing, Dad delivers the movie's most unabashedly irrelevant line. He announces that he trusts no man who doesn't like Tony Bennett. 

   Enough. Chandor (Margin Call, All is Lost) tries to corral a heap of disparate characters and ingredients: a Russian drug lord who groves on Tony Bennett, a potion that brings Sergei back from the dead, action scenes in which Kraven climbs walls and scampers on all fours, and a thundering herds of CGI yaks among them.

  Oh well, as Crowe's character might describe the resulting discombobulation, "No sense in screenplay makes nonsense on screen."

A musical that's all exclamation points!!!

   

      Garish and bubbly, The Prom makes no attempt to disguise its message, something on the order of the now-familiar yard sign that says, "We believe love is love." 

     Put another way, The Prom  tells us that a high school senior who happens to be a lesbian should be treated no differently than any other teenager. She should be able to attend her high school prom with her girlfriend.

     Of course, if Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman) were easily able to attend the prom with her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose), there's no movie ...

    So.....

    Director Ryan Murphy, working from a screenplay by Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin, does what the Broadway production of The Prom did: He follows a scenario in which four not-entirely-successful Broadway actors travel to middle America -- specifically Indiana -- to oppose the bigoted forces that want to cancel the prom because they're outraged at the prospect of having "a gay prom."

    To make the movie version, the filmmakers have swallowed an A-list pill, employing the services of Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and James Cordon. 

    Watching The Prom, I wondered whether every cast member was required to down a case of Red Bull before filming. If you like high energy, The Prom provides it and for the first hour or so it works so hard to be giddy you can almost feel it sweat.

    Streep portrays Dee Dee Allen, a diva of Broadway musicals, who -- along with Cordon's Barry Glickman -- is coming off a massive flop, a musical about Eleanor Roosevelt. 

     In trying to assay what went wrong, Barry, who describes himself as "gay as a box of wigs,” decides that the actors must change their images. They must prove that they're not narcissists, that care about something.

    Joined by chorus girl Angie (Kidman) and actor turned bartender Trent Oliver (Andrew Rannells), they set out for Indian to support Ellen's efforts to attend her prom. 

     In Indiana, they find a principal (Keegan-Michael Key) who's totally on their side and who happens to be a fan and long-time admirer of Streep's character, so much so that the story later takes a love tilt in his direction.

     Opposition to the gay prom is led by Kerry Washington's Mrs. Greene, whose daughter, it turns out, is (what else?) gay.

      The Prom -- with songs such as One Thing's Universal -- can't help but fall prey to obvious right-thinking, surrendering f the mild satirical bristle that marks the movie's first half.

     There's no faulting the performances. Kidman happily accepts a second-fiddle role that's enliven by Zazz, one of the movie's signature numbers. Cordon may have been born to appear in musicals and Rannells has fun as a failing actor who consoles himself with reminders that he once attended Juilliard.

      Streep knows how to do diva and gives it her all.

      At 131 minutes, the whole thing goes on a bit too long and the movie's mixture of glitz and sincerity won't raise the curtain on every viewer's enthusiasm. Me, for example: I'm not one to surrender to material that's delivered with nothing but exclamation points. I tended to forget each song, the minute it ended. 

       Yes, The Prom has its moments, but on screen it often feels as if it has been factory produced to become a hit. Damn, if it doesn't want to please the daylights out of us.