A 'nerdy' spy goes rogue

 

  Watching Rami Malek play Charlie Heller, a grieving CIA intelligence expert in The Amateur, it's easy to forget that the actor won an Oscar for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2019). 

   Malek sometimes seems to be a different movie than the rest of the cast. That could have been a calculated choice because Heller's CIA colleagues consistently underestimate his abilities. We're repeatedly told that Heller, who everyone refers to with the diminutive 'Charlie,' lacks a killer instinct. 

   Maybe Malek's performance seldom clicked for me, but that's not the only problem with director James Hawes's revenge saga. The Amateur strings a series of improbable events together as it hopscotches the world in search of excitement.

     The event that triggers all the commotion occurs when terrorists murder Charlie's wife (Rachel Brosnahan) while she's attending a work-related conference in London. Guilty about having declined an invitation to accompany his wife abroad, Charlie expects a full-throttle reaction from his CIA employer. 

  When his boss (Holt McCallany) dithers about why such a response won't be forthcoming, nerdy Charlie shocks his superiors by asking if he can be the one to kill his wife's murderers. He requests some hardcore training so he can hunt the antagonists responsible for his wife's death.

  The CIA grudgingly agrees, hoping Charlie's inadequacies will help quench his thirst for revenge. Enter Laurence Fishburne as the officer assigned to train Charlie in the agency's darker arts.

  As expected, Charlie proves ill-suited for a killer's role, but that doesn’t stop him from going rogue and taking off on his own. No longer willing to humor Charlie, the CIA sets out to stop him.

  A low-credibility affair, The Amateur might have saved itself had it been able to wink at its intermittent preposterousness while jumping to London, Paris, Marseilles, Istanbul, and Russia. 

  In adapting a 1981 novel by Robert Littell, the screenplay takes too little time establishing Charlie's technical brilliance, giving him too few opportunities to win the audience over. And for a movie that feels longer than its two-hour and three-minute run time, the story often feels more sketched than developed.

  Though undernourished, some of the supporting performances provide colorful touches. Jon Bernthal has a nice turn as a scruffy CIA agent who knows the ropes; Caitriona Balfe portrays the widow of a Russian KGB agent who helps Charlie; Julianne Nicholson signs on as head of the CIA, and Michael Stuhlbarg gives the finale some life as Charlie's chief adversary.

     And, yes, some of the action clicks, notably Charlie's confrontation with one of his targets in a glass-bottomed hotel swimming pool constructed between two skyscrapers.

   Overall, though, The Amateur unfolds like a potentially intriguing conversation to which you listen but don't fully connect. I half wondered whether the movie was leaping from one location to another in hopes of finding a much-needed spark.

An animated edition of ‘Transformers’

    I admit it. I've never spent a second wondering how an ordinary bot could become Optimus Prime. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can stop here. If you do, I’ll tell you that I’ve enjoyed a couple of Transformers movies, but would resist rending any garments should the series fade into the mists of memory. 

   That, of course, isn’t going to happen. The new animated Transformers One not only charts a path for sequels, it boasts enough inventive animation to push noise-weary watchers past its loud, repetitive battles. 

    Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, and Scarlett Johansson lead the voice cast, and director Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4) adds enough cheeky humor to stave off Transformers fatigue. 

    Hemsworth provides the voice for Orion Pax, a bot who’s subjugated to the oppression that consumes the planet Cybertron. Orion and his pal D-16 (Henry) work as miners, drudges who are expected to revere Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm),  the autocratic Transformer who runs the place. 

     The story centers on Orion’s attempt to reach Cybertron’s surface. Once there, he and a trio of bots that includes D-16, Elita-1 (Johansson), and B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key) try to win freedom for Cybertron's downtrodden. 

     Elita adds assertiveness, and B-127 brings humor. Whatever the situation, he won't shut up.

      Eventually, the quartet revives an older bot (Laurence Fishburne) who remembers the time before Sentinel enslaved ordinary bots, who lack the power to transform.

      In a welcome addition, Steve Buscemi gives voice to the treacherous Decepticon Starscream,

     Transformers One takes shape as a buddy movie, an action onslaught, and a story about underdogs who triumph. Perhaps to add political spin, the screenplay pits the dedicated unity of rebellious bots against Sentinel’s selfish authoritarianism.

     Cybertron puts the team's visual chops on display -- both above and below ground.

      I’m always a little put off by movies that require glossaries. Transformers, of course, has its share of ear-challenging names. To take one example, Cybertorn worker droids mine a substance called Energon, which provides the planet’s energy. Ordinary bots lack the “cogs” that allow for transformation, the key to power on Cybertron. Qintesson invaders add to the problems the defiant bots face.

      And, oh yeah, our quartet of  bots searches for the Matrix of Leadership, the object that serves as the movie’s MacGuffin.

      Who'd have guessed that anyone could get this much mileage from a Hasbro toy? Not me. But that’s the world we live in, and if we can’t change it, we should at least appreciate attempts to give it humor, visual invention, and a simple ethos.

     That’s the transformation audiences deserve. Credit Transformers One for trying to provide it.

          

In space, who’s to be trusted?

 In Slingshot, Casey Affleck plays an astronaut traveling to Titan, Saturn's largest moon, as part of a mission with earth-saving potential. The title derives from the mission's plan: The ship will be hurled slingshot fashion from Jupiter to Titan, a source of much-needed methane.

  The journey involves months-long periods of hibernation induced by drugs that may have dangerous side effects, including paranoia, hallucinations, and mistrust.

   Two additional astronauts accompany Affleck's John on his voyage, Laurence Fishburne's Captain Franks and Tomer Capone's Nash.

   Named Odyssey-1, the Titan-bound vessel’s cramped surroundings regularly are pierced by flashbacks to the relationship John formed with Zoe (Emily Beecham), a scientist who helped prepare the mission.

   Working from a screenplay by R. Scott Adams and Nathan C. Parker, Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom  focuses on emerging tensions among the astronauts. Alarmed by a problem with the ship, Nash wants to abort the mission; all-business Franks insists on continuing; John vacillates between the two views.

   Hafstrom creates an environment of uncertainty about what's real and what’s not. Is John hallucinating when he sees Zoe aboard the ship? Are Nash's worries the result of scientific calculation or drug-induced paranoia?

    Though obviously laid out, such questions create a bit of ambiguity and suspense, building toward a third act that plays with expectations as we try to anticipate the story's outcome.

   For a drama that’s meant to brim with psychological tension, Slingshot remains low-key, and Affleck's performance hardly can be called magnetic, a problem for a movie that makes him the centerpiece of a drama about astronauts who might be losing their grip.

    Slingshot pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the characters are as pinched as the ship they occupy, the romance between John and Zoe remains lukewarm, and there’s no HAL to serve as a worthy antagonist on a journey that too often seems routine.

  

   

‘Wick’ as crazy as ever. No, crazier

   

      John Wick: Chapter 4 is one wild movie, a two-hour and 49-minute stream of action that makes a virtue of excess.

     If you’re familiar with WickWorld, you know that action means violence, executed with guns, knives, nunchucks and anything else that can be weaponized — cars and motorcycles included.

     Director Chad Stahelski ably threads a plot through the real draw, a slew of action set pieces.

     You either like this sort or thing or you don’t. If you do, Chapter 4 delivers. Sure, Stahelski pushes the violence to the point at which logic evaporates. But style, invention and skill keep the bloody bounty from curdling into exploitation. 

     Considering how much physical effort Reeves expends during Wick's globe-hopping endeavors, it’s a wonder the actor still is able to walk —much less ignite the engine that drives Wick's fighting fury.

      About those set pieces:

      A dizzyingly impressive battle sprawls its way through a Berlin nightclub where Wick confronts Killa (Scott Adkins), a hulk of a man with golden teeth who looks as if he might have been resurrected from an early Bond movie. 

       In another set piece, drivers race against the flow of traffic at an Arc de Triomphe roundabout. It’s funny and, yes, crazy,  a near-cartoonish blur of motion punctuated by staccato bursts of gun fire

       A climactic sequence takes on Sisyphean dimensions as antagonists fight on the steps leading to Paris's Sacre Coeur.

       The story? Oh yeah, that.

       A fiendish villain called the Marquis (Bill Skarsgard) hires hitmen to put Wick out of commission. 

       These include Tracker (Shamier Anderson),  an assassin who travels with his beloved but brutal German shepherd, and Caine (Donny Yen),  a blind warrior brought into the game when the Marquis threatens his daughter.

       Hiroyuki Sanada operates a swank Osaka hotel that provides safe-house refuge for assassins who serve a mysterious organization known as The Table.

       The cast roster also includes  returnees Laurence Fishburne, as the Bowery king, and Ian McShane, as the sly operator of New York City's safe house. 

      Is the movie too long? Of course it is,  but then again it’s too much of everything. 

       That's the Wick way. Again evoking memories of bygone Hong Kong action movies, Chapter 4 brings commitment to its ceaseless battling and avoids the worst label you can apply to any sequel. This is no pandering cash grab.  

       Stahelski ups the ante with each successive set piece, thus proving you can give audiences what they want without cheating or insulting them in the bargain.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/20/19 -- Fantastic Fungi and Running with the Devil

If you watch a lot of movies, your consciousness often inevitably fragments to the breaking point. It’s possible, in the span of two films, to go from the generally overlooked world of fungi (yes, you read that right) to the massively over-observed (at least in movies) world of cocaine smuggling. I’m talking about Louie Schwartzberg’s documentary Fantastic Fungi and director Jason Cabell’s Running With The Devil, films that have no business being mentioned in the same breath, which is why I couldn't resist putting them together.

Let’s start with the healthy side of the ledger and a confession. What I know about mushrooms (magic or otherwise) is precisely nothing -- and, at the moment, I'm not especially fond of them. Mushrooms have mounted a late-summer invasion of my lawn, and some of them are not pleasing to the eye, protruding from the earth in a form that resembles a rotting phallus.

Of course, I’m not giving mushrooms their due -- as those who spend their time studying them, appreciating them and sometimes eating them would attest.

Narrated by Brie Larson (who occasionally speaks for the usually silent mushrooms), Fantastic Fungi includes commentary from authors such as Michael Pollan and Andrew Weil. It also focuses on the work of Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has made mushrooms his life and who runs a business cultivating, finding and selling all manner of mushrooms, which evidently come in an astonishing variety, 1.5 million species worth. Judging by the movie, it might be wise to think of Stamets as a human ambassador to the fungi world.

The movie is designed to provide information about the essential role that mycelium, part of a fungus, plays in keeping the planet balanced. Mycelium helps the earth digest decaying, carbon-based matter, keeping the earth’s life cycle — birth/decay/death/more birth —- humming.

Schwartzberg offers time-lapse views of mushroom growth and introduces us to the staggering array of mushrooms that grow in the earth’s forests. He also includes commentary from psychologists who suggest that ingesting certain kinds of mushrooms in controlled dosages can play an important role in coping with depression and dealing with other psychiatric issues.

In short, we may not be paying enough attention to the psilocybin mushroom, which can take us on a trip without having to go through airport security. The documentary shows psilocybin being taken in pill form under supervised conditions.

A bit of a commercial for mushrooms, Fantastic Fungi nonetheless should please those who ascribe to the idea, as the film does, that nature is intelligent.

Now, for a different drug:

In the age of opioids, a movie about the cocaine trade immediately and perhaps inevitably feels passe.

Running With the Devil functions as a kind of primer about how cocaine moves from Columbia to the US market, increasing in price with each step of its illicit journey. A strong cast — led by Nicolas Cage and Laurence Fishburne — can’t do much to elevate a by-the-numbers movie steeped in the violence and debauchery surrounding the drug trade.

The characters who populate Running With the Devil all have generic names. Cage, for example, portrays The Cook, a pizza chef who supplements his income in the cocaine trade -- or maybe it's the other way around. Fishburne portrays a character called The Man, an ambitious participant in the trade who’s gotten too deeply involved in sampling the merchandise and cavorting with hookers. Barry Pepper plays The Boss, a character who needs no further explanation. Cole Hauser appears as The Executioner. Can you guess his occupation? I thought you might.

The movie eventually finds Cage and Fishburne hiking through the North American wilderness en route to their final destination.

A mostly male production, Running With the Devil does include one major female character. Leslie Bibb portrays the DEA agent who’s trying to stop the drug trade.

With big money involved betrayals can’t be far behind and the screenplay, also by Cabell, has them.

Hints of Tarantino blow through a story which includes a surprise ending that you should see coming. Looking bookish and scholarly, Cage puts on an all-business front, with traces of madness, of course. His performance contrasts to Fishburne’s display of wanton carelessness.

I can't recall seeing Fishburne play a character such as this, but Running With the Devil stumbles as it laboriously works its way through the familiar piles of white-powder crime.

'Bernadette': flat where it should be sharp

Cate Blanchette plays a deeply depressed woman who's losing it in Seattle.

Bernadette lives in a large Seattle house that seems to be falling apart around her, although trace elements of a re-design can be seen. A sparsely furnished modern-looking bedroom, for example. Bernadette's husband works for Microsoft and has become a Ted-talking star in the world of high tech. Her whip-smart daughter is bound for Choate, a prep school that very likely will ensure her a place on the success track. Bernadette spends much of her time talking to Manjula, a Seri-like digital assistant in India.

Of course, she’s miserable.

Such is the life of Bernadette (Cate Blanchett), the title character of Where’d You Go Bernadette, director Richard Linklater’s adaptation of a well-received 2012 novel by Maria Semple.

Smart, judgmental and misanthropic, Bernadette can be a pain in the butt, and her contempt for what she calls “life’s banalities” doesn't seem to have led her toward anything resembling a cultural high ground. After years of ignoring her strange behavior, Bernadette's husband (Billy Crudup) has decided his wife needs help.

I can’t say I believed any of this because Linklater's movie can’t find a way successfully to blend satiric observation and character study while also giving his movie a bit emotional heft. As social satire, the movie takes hit-and-miss swipes at middle-class parents, over-achieving kids, annoyingly progressive schools and Seattle's tech-crazed world.

Even Kristen Wiig, as a neighbor and nemesis of Bernadette, isn't able to break through; she's playing a character who's so steeped in her "liberal" values that she's turned her life into a form of parody.

Bernadette's daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) narrates a story that gradually lets us know why Bernadette has lost her grip. She was once a star architect who won a MacArthur Grant for her genius. She designed houses that others envied, but after one of her vaunted projects met a tragic end, she vanished from the Los Angeles scene. She and her husband moved to Seattle, a city she says she hates.

Bee announces that she wants her parents to take her to Antarctica as a reward for something or other. Bernadette reluctantly agrees, even though the trip means she won't be able to avoid the horror of mingling with other passengers on a cruise ship.

Linklater's best movies are conversational gems that catch moods and moments, movies such as Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise. He's also made observant comedies, as those of us who enjoyed Bernie and School of Rock can attest. Boyhood may have been Linklater's best and most deeply felt movie.

Here, Linklater's working in a commercial vein while trying to retain the sharp idiosyncrasies of Semple's novel. The movie's most outrageous moment arrives in the form of a mudslide that disrupts a fund-raising party at the home of Wiig's character. It lands with a thud.

There's one very nice scene in which Bernadette encounters a former colleague (Laurence Fishburne) from Los Angeles. She regales him with a dizzying monologue about what she's been doing for the last 20 years. It's one of the few times Blanchett's amped-up theatricality proves revealing.

By the end, Bernadette starts delivering on-the-nose dialogue, offering its message in a form that comes close to bromide. Someone as creative as Bernadette must create or she'll go nuts. She'll become a menace to others. She's not cut out for ordinary suburban life.

Well, I thought, who really is? And, as I said, I didn't feel as if Linklater made me believe in Bernadette or her vast array of problems.

‘Ant-Man’: An amusing second helping

Paul Rudd returns in one of the least serious Marvel entries.

Ant-Man and the Wasp, the latest movie to spring from the Marvel Universe, falls short in many ways: It has a jangled plot, a trip into a strange Quantum Realm in which characters and creatures float as if immersed in Jello and stretches of talk in which the dialogue isn't likely to evoke comparisons with Shakespeare.

Fortunately, that's not the whole story. This second, big-screen helping of Ant-Man also benefits from what might be deemed a thoroughgoing and entirely welcome lack of cosmic ambition.

Thanks go to Rudd's genial reprise of his role as Scott Land (a.k.a. Ant-Man), enough humor to carry us through the movie's doldrums and a collection of characters who must act as if there's much at stake -- even if there isn't.

Director Peyton Reed, who directed the first installment, also plays fun games with scale as Ant-Man makes the shift from tiny creature to parade-float size. Ant-Man can become as small as ... well ... an ant or as big as a zeppelin, opening the door for Reed and his cohorts to play lots of clever games involving mutable size.

Stretches devoted to exposition may keep the movie from soaring, but it's difficult to resist car chases in which full-sized cars suddenly shrink to Hot Wheels proportions or an action scene in which a PEZ dispenser enlarges to play a significant role.

So what happens? Well, Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) believe they can rescue Hope's long-lost mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) from the Quantum Realm, the zone where she disappeared while executing a selfless act of heroism. 

Hope also is the Wasp, which means that she has been given wings to flutter and the responsibility of broadening the movie's gender appeal.

Additions to the series include the Ghost (Hanna John-Kamen), a woman who's on the verge of decomposing and who (understandably) would rather remain in one piece. Laurence Fishburne turns up as one of Pym's estranged colleagues, another researcher into the Quantum Realm. Walter Goggins plays a greedy businessman who also has his eye on the Quantum Realm.

Randall Park appears as an FBI agent whose interchanges with Scott provide the movie with a comic motif that it's not afraid to repeat, but which proves amusing enough not to wear out its welcome. Scott, by the way, is being monitored by the FBI because he's been under house arrest for two years. His time of confinement is almost up, but you can bet that he'll find a way to weasel out of his ankle bracelet and join the action before he's officially set free.

Michael Pena turns up as the fast-talking operator of a security company. A veteran of the first installment, Pena makes no attempt to do more than add laughs with his character's frenetic speech. Pena's Luis once shared a cell with Lang, a thief before his elevation to superhero status.

Look, there's little point rattling on about a movie such as Ant-Man and the Wasp. If you see it, you'll find enough humor to stave off a case of Marvel overdose -- and some of that humor has a visual kick, something rare in today's comedies and, therefore, something to savor.

(An aside: Gore Verbinski -- director of several Pirates of the Caribbean movies remains the undisputed master of visually inventive comedy.)

But as far as this edition of Ant-Man is concerned: It's nice to see a Marvel movie that seems intended to amuse us more than it's designed to beat us into submission.

Three Vietnam veterans take to the road

Richard Linklater's Last Flag Flying , a moderately successful mix of humor, sorrow and the bonds of brotherhood.

In director Richard Linklater's Last Flag Flying, three Vietnam veterans reunite for a sad task. One of them has lost a son in Iraq. The mission: To bury a young Marine.

Two former Marines are played by Bryan Cranston and Laurence Fishburne. Steve Carell 's Larry Shepherd -- nicknamed Doc -- served as medic in the Navy and wound up alongside Cranston and Fishburne's characters in the heat of Vietnam combat.

Last Flag Flying is based on novelist Darryl Ponicsan's sequel to The Last Detail, which was made into a 1973 movie starring Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid and Otis Young. Ponicsan co-authored the screenplay for Last Flag with Linklater, and the movie has some (but not all) of Last Detail's comic bite.

It's 2003: The movie's principals may have thought that their war-time experiences were safely locked in the vaults of the past, but their journey forces them to come to grips with their war-time behavior as well as with the nature of the sacrifices all young men make when they go off to war.

Low key and steeped in the kind of naturalism Linklater favors, the director's moderately affecting look at the deep-rooted impact of war begins when Doc tracks down Cranston's Sal Nealon, a boisterous fellow who owns a Norfolk, Va., bar where he seems to drink as much as he sells. The two then set out to find Fishburne's Richard Mueller, a tightly wound former Marine who has tried to push the war and his wild youth out of his consciousness. He has become a reverend.

Doc, who was dishonorably discharged from the Navy, is younger than the others and going through a particularly bad patch. Not only has son been killed in action, but he recently lost his wife to cancer. Doc refers to his Bad Conduct Discharge (BCD) as a Better Career Decision, but it's clear that the military made Doc something of a goat. Doc has not had an easy time of it, but somehow has avoided trapping himself behind bars of bitterness.

Questions arise about how Doc's son died. The Marines want to enshrine the young man as a hero, but the details of the young man's death turn out to be more horrific than heroic.

When Doc learns the truth, he refuses to have his son buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Despite the urging of a Marine colonel (Yul Vazquez), Doc won't allow the Marines to propagandize his son's death. He insists on burying the boy in his hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Military protocol requires that the young man's body be accompanied to its resting place. J. Quinton Johnson plays the young Marine assigned to this grim task: He joins the three older men as they make their way north from Delaware, where they have traveled to pick up the body.

As is the case with any road movie, the personalities of the men emerge as the trip unfolds: Cranston's Sal is happily boorish; Fishburne's Mueller has given up drink and tried to live a life of serenity and prayer, but you get the feeling that his newfound propriety can't entirely protect him from his past. "Doc" proves the quietest of the trio, a man whose soul droops with the weight of grief and regret. Doc found stability and peace in family life -- but, now, even that has been taken from him.

There's plenty of bickering as the men move toward the movie's sad finale, and some of the screenplay's bits feel labored: Sal's attempts to bring his compatriots into the 21st Century by buying them cell phones, for example.

Linklater mutes any political messaging. By the end, he makes it clear that these men aren't interested in honor or even patriotism. They claim a devotion to the Marine Corps, but what they really seem to cherish is their relationship to one another, bonds forged by a shared experience none of them ever will fully digest and which always will threaten to consume them. Still, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, they abide -- psychic wounds and all.

He's back -- and brutal as ever

Keanu Reeves reprises his role as John Wick, a reluctant hitman who piles up a staggering body count, and keeps fans of the series happy..

In John Wick: Chapter 2, Keanu Reeves -- as the title character -- amasses a staggering body count with a pointed efficiency that befits his status as a professional hitman. And when Wick fights with his fists (and legs), the ensuing symphony of hyper-grunts creates its own gritty eloquence.

Reprising his work in the 2014 hit, Reeves takes a substantial beating as the film progresses, and Chapter 2 boldly whirls its way through car carnage and carefully orchestrated mayhem spread across a variety of intriguing and well-selected locations -- from the catacombs of Rome to the subways of New York City to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Picking up where the first movie left off, the movie concocts a scenario in which hitman Wick quickly finds himself pulled back into the action. He's asked to pay back a debt. In Wick's world, this means he must return a favor by assassinating someone.

Chad Stahelski, who co-directed the first installment, goes solo in this effort, pushing the action into new corners, and following a philosophy that insists that no amount of violent action qualifies as too much.

Another hitman, Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), supplies the villainy. D'Antonio tries to manipulate Wick, and eventually to kill him -- with an assist from every hitman in New York.

Ian McShane portrays the urbane head of the Continental, a Manhattan hotel where hitman can relax (no slaughter allowed); a deadpan Lance Reddick works the hotel's front desk, and Laurence Fishburne, who appeared with Reeves in the Matrix, enjoyably chews as much scenery as possible as head of a team of hitmen who pose as New York City street people.

The Continental's sommelier (Peter Serafinowicz) adds a Bond-like touch, dispensing weapons while employing the vocabulary of a wine connoisseur.

You'll also see Common as another hitman. Like Wick, he's a pillar of stoicism. Little in this second chapter relies on expressive acting -- at least from the movie's hitmen. Killing without discernible affect might be the movie's idea of the noblest of human virtues.

Perhaps so that women don't feel excluded from this cinematic wild ride, Ruby Rose has been cast as a deaf-mute killer who communicates with Wick by signing.

From the movie's opening prologue -- Wick drives a Mustang that becomes a target for other cars -- it's clear that this second installment will rely on battering overstatement. A far-fetched plot about a global network of assassins provides a frame on which to hang the action, which, by the end, even resorts to the shopworn Hall of Mirrors effect -- and pretty much pulls it off.

Be assured, the violence never shies away from brutality of a kind that occasionally elicited audible gasps from a preview audience, a recognition that being shot or stabbed in certain areas of the body qualifies as excruciating to the max.

Reeves's barely buried fury sets a tone of semi-seriousness that director Stahelski maintains, creating a giant, grind-house conspiracy between the audience and a movie that loads up on chaos. We all know the movie is preposterous, so it doesn't have to wink at us.

And, yes, Wick once again has a dog, a conceit that forces us to worry over the animal's fate. And, yes, the door is open for another sequel, which I'm guessing will become inevitable after this chapter finishestearing up the box office.

'Ride Along' goes nowhere new

Riding in the same car, Kevin Hart and Ice Cube cover old ground.

Late in the new comedy Ride Along, Laurence Fishburne shows up in a small role. For those who seek out this mid-January formula job, I won't tell you exactly what Fishburne's doing in the movie.

His presence, however, has an unintended consequence: Oops, you may find yourself thinking, a real actor has arrived in what amounts to another variant on an odd-couple, bromance, cop movie junker that tries to make something out of flying bullets, fiery explosions, dumb car chases and predictable gags.

The set-up: A likable Kevin Hart plays Ben Barber, a guy who desperately wants to land a position on the Atlanta police force. Ben's engaged to Angela (Tika Sumpter), a woman who happens to be the sister of hot-shot Atlanta detective James Payton (Ice Cube).

Protective of his sister, tough-talking James is predisposed to hate Ben, and refuses to approve the impending nuptials -- unless Ben passes a test. He must ride along with James for one day, and prove that he has the right stuff to be a cop.

A murky and mostly irrelevant plot (something about Serbs and gun running) results in a seasonal throwaway that relies almost entirely on Hart's frenetic approach to comedy.

As the disapproving James, Ice Cube scowls his way through another performance, frequently mocking the notion that Ben's skill at video games will help him excel on Atlanta's mean streets.

There's not much help from a supporting cast led principally by John Leguizamo and Bryan Callen as Atlanta detectives who work with James.

You don't have to be a super-sleuth to know that the gags will be plentiful enough to provide even the skeptical with a couple of chuckles. For the most part, though, Ride Along remains distressingly unremarkable, another movie that tries to blend laughs and thrills and comes up short on both counts.

Action filled, but less than super

Instead of being a renewed helping of Superman, Man of Steel feels like one more summer blockbuster.

Despite a ton of action -- some of it impressive, some merely clangorous -- Man of Steel just didn't feel like a Superman movie to me.

It wasn't just that Henry Cavill, the British actor who plays Superman, looks a bit like a young John Travolta -- only buffed to the max. And it wasn't that many of the touchstone events marking Clark Kent's evolution to Superman pass without appropriate fanfare. And it wasn't that lovable stock figures such as Daily Planet editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) have been drained of vitality or even that spunky Lois Lane (Amy Adams) knows Superman's true identity from the start. They even smooch.

Those things don't help, but none of them prove fatal.

But by flooding the Superman story with blockbuster-style action and by presenting it in distinctly darker hues, director Zack Snyder (Watchmen) has deprived Man of Steel of the innocence, humor and moral certainty on which Superman thrives.

And by updating the series to the present day, the filmmakers are forced to abandon some of Superman's trademark flourishes. In the age of the cell phone, Clark Kent would be hard pressed to find a phone booth in which to change into his trademark outfit, form fighting tights and a red cape. Even Superman's suit has been rendered in a darker shade of blue than those of his predecessors, suggesting a super hero for an era consumed by global gloom.

And that "S" on Superman's chest? You might have thought it stood for Superman; it's really a symbol of hope from his home planet, Krypton.

Snyder & company treat Man of Steel as an origins story. In much of the movie, Superman is referred to as, Kal-el, the name he was given by his father Jor-el (Russell Crowe) on Krypton.

This young superhero has yet to discover his destiny, which eventually will cast him as a Christ-like savior for a needy planet, providing, of course, you can imagine a savior whose battles can result in the wanton destruction of whole cites.

At the movie's end, Metropolis becomes the stage for a fierce battle between Kal-el and General Zod (Michael Shannon), a villain who escapes imprisonment, along with a handful of dedicated followers after the planet Krypton self-destructs. The planet's core gives way, much like the center of this highly anticipated re-start.

In case you think I'm exaggerating about the connection between Superman and a more widely acknowledge savior, consider this: The movie includes a scene in which a troubled Clark Kent talks to a priest. A stained-glass figure of a kneeling Jesus provides an obvious symbolic backdrop for the conversation, which takes place moments before Superman makes an appearance in his trademark cape.

Perusal of the supporting cast gives you a quick idea about the way Man of Steel unfolds. Kevin Coster appears as Superman's earthly father, the dad who doesn't want his adopted son to reveal his powers lest the wary residents of Earth turn on him.

Diane Lane -- unconvincingly aged during the proceedings, plays Clark's mother -- and a group of mostly indistinguishable actors portray General Zod's evil devotees.

Zod plans to destroy humanity and reconstruct the planet Krypton on Earth, thus ensuring the survival of his race. To do this, he must tamper with the Earth's gravity and take possession of a Codex, a device in which all the genetic codes of Krypton have been implanted.

Man of Steel doesn't skimp on action. When Superman, still a drifting Clark Kent, saves the crew of a burning oil rig, the large scaled imagery proves impressive. So do CGI images of a monster tornado that sweeps over Smallville.

And for those who like pulpy views of alien planets, early depictions of Krypton may prove interesting. Of course, these also devolve into showers of fiery pyrotechnics.

Making Zod the villain tends to turn Man of Steel into a second-rate space opera that's equipped with ominous spaceships that resemble giant bugs that perhaps should have been fought with mega-blasts of Raid.

A booming display of CGI dominates a protracted finale that features so much destruction, you might think that Snyder hired Michael Bay (of Transformers fame) as a consultant.

There had been hope that the participation of Christopher Nolan (of Batman fame) as one of the film's writers and producers would add a compelling contemporary sensibility to the Superman story. But looked at with the benefit of hindsight, a more serious Superman represents a major miscalculation. The same goes for the memory-trigged flashbacks that reveal Superman's childhood.

Kal-el remembers a youth in which he tried to restrain his super powers, prompting an identity crisis that pervades the movie. This Superman really is an alien on Earth.

We're all locked into our personal cultural prisons. In the case of Superman, the walls of mine were built from the comic books I read as a kid when my parents weren't looking, from the early TV show starring George Reeves and from the better Superman movies in which Christopher Reeve found a signature role.

This edition -- which no doubt will smash as many box-office records as it does Metropolis skyscrapers -- seems to lack deep affection for Superman. To me, Man of Steel seems more like a medium-grade summer movie than a convincing revival. I missed the character whose claim to fame involved leaping tall buildings at a single bound and moving faster than a speeding bullet.

But even if you accept Snyder's action-dominated 143 minutes, you may have have to admit that the movie might have benefited from some narrative Super Glue. Are scene-to-scene transitions a totally forgotten art?

Only the movie's final scene offers a hint of the winking chemistry that Superman needs. Yet, it too can seem weirdly misguided. Clark Kent lands a job at the Daily Planet, thus making him one of the few people in any galaxy who doesn't know that the newspaper business is foundering. Bad career choice, Clark.

Man of Steel -- which offers enough action to induce motion sickness -- can't be accused of lacking an interpretive slant. (I didn't like it, but at least it has one.) And, yes, it makes a hell of a lot of noise.

What's missing? How about a major helping of fun? How about a clear sense of yearning for the simple virtues Superman so reliably embodies? By the end of this edition, Superman not only had rocketed through Earth's atmosphere, he'd basically flown the coop.