Music, dance dominate 'Michael'

     It's probably a mistake to look at Michael as a biopic that explores every facet of Michael Jackson’s life with nuance and studied objectivity. Approved by the Jackson estate and made with its participation, the movie makes no mention of the widely known child sex abuse claims against Jackson. The deconstruction of Jackson’s image began in 1993. Michael concludes in 1988, offering a terse title card at the end, “The story continues.” 

  I’ll say.

  Whatever you think about Michael Jackson, director Antoine Fuqua concentrates on something incontestable: Michael Jackson’s riveting performance skills and the connection he made and still makes with his legion of fans.

   If you think that’s insufficient, stay home. Otherwise, you’ll find a movie that can be regarded as an entertaining slice of showmanship with selective biographical footnotes. 

   Fuqua begins with 10-year-old Michael (Julian Valdi). who’s under the dictatorial sway of his father Joe Jackson, a menacing Colman Domingo. 

   From the start, it’s clear that Michael occupies his own world, separate even from the brothers who make up the increasingly popular Jackson Five. 

    Michael's relationships with his brothers get short shrift. Instead, Fuqua concentrates on Joe’s command of his sons. When Michael errs during rehearsal, Joe beats him with a belt. Mom (Nia Long) remains sympathetic to Michael, but Joe runs the show.

     A father/son conflict sets the stage for the movie’s theme: Michael struggles to gain independence, to become the master of his destiny, without rejecting his family. Michael lives at the family home throughout most of the movie,  albeit a much improved version when the newly prosperous Jacksons relocate from Gary, Indiana, to Encino, Ca.  The entire movie takes place in pre-Neverland days.

     In many ways, Michael remains a child throughout. He reads illustrated versions of Peter Pan, amasses an army of stuffed animals, and then begins collecting real ones, notably Bubbles, a chimp that becomes his friend. (It's evidently a CGI creation.) The movie seems to accept all this at face value, leaving us to decide whether there's something slightly pathetic about Michael's juvenile preoccupations.

    The movie also deals with the business side of Michael’s life: his alliances with Motown and Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate); his work with Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson), and his move toward solo performing, which culminates with the firing of his father as his manager. Michael instructs his attorney, John Branca (Miles Teller), to deliver the news. He does so by fax.

      Another glimpse of Michael’s manipulative power comes into view when he meets with the head of CBS (Mike Meyers) and threatens to persuade the label’s major white artists— Bruce Springsteen among them — to quit the label unless Michael’s creative and dazzlingly produced videos are shown on MTV, which at the time didn’t play much work by Black artists.

    Without the right Michael, the movie would have been laughable. It doesn’t take long for the movie to be placed squarely on the shoulders of Jafaar Jackson, Michael’s real-life nephew and the son of Jackson Five member, Jermaine. 

    Jafaar looks like Michael, moves like Michael, and sings with a voice that — to my untrained ears — sounds like Michael. It’s either an amazing act of mimicry or an amazing performance. Either way, Jackson's presence in the movie feels real.

     Jafaar also gives Michael an aura of innocence; he visits sick kids in cancer wards and donates big money to the burn center where he's hospitalized after a serious accident during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. Michael's relationship with his mother remains tender throughout, and he plays peacemaker when he meets with Crips and Bloods to lower antagonisms. He also uses the gang members as inspiration for the choreography in his “Beat It” video.

    Michael's battle with Joe continues to the end. The elder Jackson tries to cling to Michael’s earning power as long as possible, even concocting a deal with Don King (Deon Cole) to promote the famous “Victory Tour.” 

    At its best, the movie functions as the best imitation act you’ve ever seen. Jafaar does his own singing and the score has been cranked to maximum effect. The infectious rhythms of a showcase number such as Billie Jean prove irresistible.

    Sure, reality, or what we know of it, casts a shadow of skepticism here, and it occurred to me that the family might still be riding Michael’s coattails, but if you see Michael as a show that captures the magnetism and performance energy that underscored Michael’s ascendance, you may have to agree that the King of Pop earned his crown.

Finding smiles in the afterlife

 The afterlife isn't a new subject for movies. Albert Brooks tried his hand at it in 1991 with Defending Your Life, and we've seen other big-screen journeys into the beyond. Consider Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), It's a Wonderful Life (1946)  Heaven Can Wait (1978) or the 1943 version, The Sixth Sense (1999), make your own list.

  Now, David Freyne (Dating Amber) plunges into the life to come with Eternity, a clever movie that's good in the setup, amusing in its midsection, and overextended in its final act. Generosity lands me on the positive side of the ledger.

  When Larry (Miles Teller) dies, he awakens in a crowded junction surrounded by faceless apartment buildings. He's  told that his understandable confusion will be addressed by his personal AC (Afterlife Coordinator). 

   If the late Larry immediately saw his reflection, he might not recognize himself. The recently departed arrive in the afterlife at the age at which they were the happiest during their lives. 

    They then must pick the place where they will spend eternity, choosing from an array of choices that are presented as if they were theme park attractions: Famine Free Ireland or Weimar World, a happy German romp that's free of Nazis. Those addicted to nicotine can choose cancer-free Smokers' World. Others prefer beaches or mountains.

    The catch: The choice, once made, is irrevocable. 

     No wonder, then, that Larry tells his AC (DaVine Joy Randolph) that he wants to defer his decision on where to spend eternity until the terminally ill wife he left behind (Elizabeth Olsen) arrives. He can't imagine eternity without her.

    The now youthful Larry -- he was in his 70s when he died -- tries to learn the ropes of afterlife living, if that's not too weird a contradiction in terms, but it doesn't take long for Olsen's Joan to turn up. 

    Larry's exhilarated until he learns that Joan's first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), a young man who was killed during the Korean War, has been waiting for her as well. Luke has spent 65 years pining for the woman he never had a chance to mature with.

   What's Joan to do?

   That's pretty much the movie.

   Freyne offers comedy and sentiment along the way while differentiating between two kinds of love. Luke represents heart-throb, head-over-heels ardor. Larry's more of an endurance guy; he understands what it takes to build a long marriage and raise two children.

    Temperamentally different, the two men find themselves at odds. Luke has charm; Larry indulges in cranky complaining.

    The supporting cast includes Olga Merediz in a nice turn as one of Joan's former friends. Her ideal happy age turns out to be 72, the time when she finally came out as gay. 

   A screenplay credited to Freyne and Pat Cunnae includes additional invention, notably a hall of mirrors in which each of the major characters watches key scenes from the past.

  Too bad, Freyne has trouble sticking the landing, which means that the film's charm runs out before the final credits roll.  Maybe it was inevitable that a film titled Eternity would have trouble ending.

    Films such as Eternity demand healthy suspensions of disbelief. Throughout, the dead are told that ironclad rules govern their choices. Trying to switch eternities, for example, will throw one into a never-ending void. But what's the good of rules if they can't occasionally be broken?

    Oh well, if Eternity has trouble letting go of these characters, so be it. There are enough smiles along the way to snuff out reservations. 

Failures of ‘The Gorge’ go deep

 Billed as an action/romance, The Gorge is set to bow on Apple TV+. I’ve been hesitant about reviewing movies released exclusively on streaming services. My reluctance doesn’t necessarily speak to the quality of such films, but a lingering prejudice about the superiority of theatrical releases has proven difficult to shake, at least for me.

  I nonetheless opted to watch The Gorge. Given the chaos of the moment, I craved a diversion that might contain vertiginous thrills — no matter how obviously delivered. 

   Here’s the premise. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play two sharpshooters — one a former Marine, the other a servant of Russian overlords—who are assigned to remote posts in what appears to be an Eastern European wilderness. They are separated by a deep gorge that's home to an ominous threat. 

   Their job: Prevent the threat — dubbed The Hollow Men — from climbing out of the gorge, a task that requires ample amounts of ammunition.

   Don't get too excited. Sure, T.S. Eliot wrote a poem called The Hollow Men and the screenplay includes other erudite references but they play more like Post-it notes than deeply felt revelations.

    A simple story arc emerges. Independent sorts, the sharpshooters must bridge the physical gap that keeps them apart, join forces in a battle for survival, and, of course, fall in love.

   At first, I remained hopeful. Sigourney Weaver turns up as a no-nonsense official who sends Teller’s Levi on his mission. Of course, we don’t trust her; she’s too crisp, too smart to be straightforward. 

   After providing some background about Taylor-Joy’s character, director Scott Derrickson lands the two assassins at their outposts, towers flanking both sides of the wide gorge. They’ve been instructed  to communicate with each other, but Taylor-Joy’s Drassa makes signs for Teller's Levi to read through his high-powered binoculars. She invites him to help her celebrate her birthday.

    Derrickson doesn’t waste time revealing the danger,  mutant creatures that look as though they’ve been assembled from sticks, leaves, slime, and animal parts. 

     Joy-Taylor's boldness gives the movie one of its few highlights carrying us to the moment when the two killers wind up in the gorge. There, Derrickson and his team build a world shrouded in fog and populated by weird creatures.

   Considering that both characters are deadly shots at long distances, it's odd that the movie forces them into so much close-quarters combat, slathering the action with gook and gore.

    When our heroes find an abandoned laboratory, we learn how the creatures were spawned, another letdown. A film made by a long-gone scientist explains the whole movie, but not without a heavy reliance on devices that the scientist and her colleagues conveniently left behind.

   You'll have little trouble finding your own examples of contrivance, so I'll conclude by saying that The Gorge returned me unrewarded to the world I'd been trying to escape. 

'Top Gun' sequel hits the right marks

  

    Top Gun: Maverick should once and for all prove how easy it is to make a mega-hit. All you need is Tom Cruise, lots of sleek fighter jets, a gifted camera team, and an attractive supporting cast that knows how to trade macho barbs.

   OK, I'm kidding. 

   If Cruise is the last remaining movie star, as some would have it, it could be because he’s whip smart about managing his career. Besides, a movie as slick as Top Gun: Maverick requires more than a little behind-the-scenes talent.

  Since the release of the original in 1986, few viewers have been clamoring for a sequel. But now we have one, and it deserves credit for finding the right gear: The movie brims with exciting aerial action (not CGI), its own ideas about heroism, and plenty of Cruise charisma.  

    Although Cruise isn’t entirely immune from aging, he retains the pluck and dentist’s dream smile that upped the octane of the original — and many other Cruise hits. 

   Taking over for the late Tony Scott, director Joseph Kosinski infuses the movie with a welcome blast of youth. This time, a new generation of actors (Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, and Monica Barbaro among them) portray the best pilots in the world.

    The dramatic key to the new movie involves Maverick’s relationship with a younger pilot, Miles Teller's Bradley (Rooster) Bradshaw.

     In what amounts to a disregard for avian identity, Rooster, we learn, is the son of Goose, a Maverick pal who died in the original movie. Goose's death, referred to in a flashback, left Maverick wrestling with guilt.

   Maverick’s inner struggles aside, no one attends a Top Gun movie in search of psychological revelation. Kosinski and his team ably create the visceral excitement of watching jets in dog fights. Though preposterous, the movie’s major mission cranks up lots of tension.

   The supporting cast includes Ed Harris (briefly) as an admiral who tries to ground Maverick’s career. Jon Hamm portrays the commanding officer of the unit to which Maverick is reassigned after another run-in with Naval authority.

    Maverick has a protector in the Navy, Val Kilmer's Ice, his former rival from the first movie. Now an admiral, Ice makes sure that Maverick, an officer with a taste for improvisation, survives in a rule-bound military society.

   In a near-nostalgic moment, Kilmer and Cruise share a scene in which Ice types his part of the conversation onto a computer screen before forcing himself to speak.

   For most of the movie, Maverick trains younger pilots to trust their instincts so that they can perform seemingly impossible tasks without thinking.

    A bit of romance softens the proceedings -- or, at least, tries to do that. Jennifer Connelly plays an admiral’s daughter and potential love interest for Maverick. She owns a bar where the pilots gather. She also has a teenage daughter (Lyliana Wray). 

   The young cast — particularly Powell's  “Hangman” — blends perfectly into a movie that glorifies roguish individuality over the increasingly machine-like nature of combat. 

     Moreover, the tough-love conflict between Maverick and Rooster creates sparks, recalling the original without feeling as if it's repeating it, a feat the movie in general accomplishes.

         Early on, Harris’s character claims combat soon won’t involve human pilots. In a drone-dominated future, there’s no place for guys such as Maverick, men who insist that the pilot makes the crucial difference, not the plane.

       Guess who turns out to be wrong?

      Top Gun Maverick probably will roar at the box office. Why not? It’s so obviously scaled for the big screen that there's no reason to take it too seriously -- at least not as a portrait of military life or of global conflict.

      To put it another way, in the world of movies, Top Gun: Maverick hits the mark, maybe because neither the filmmakers nor the actors are flying on auto-pilot.

Veterans marred by combat

A straightforward look at the difficulties of returning home from war.

The problems depicted in Thank You For Your Service should be familiar to anyone who has followed news coverage about the plight of veterans returning from Iraq: high suicide rates, an over-taxed VA, crippling cases of PTSD, limited job prospects and other issues related to re-entering civilian life. I've read that the percentage of soldiers who incur psychological damage after deployment in contemporary war zones ranges from 20 to 30 percent.

Familiarity aside, director Jason Hall (who wrote the screenplay for American Sniper) dramatizes the problems facing veterans in mostly effective ways, focusing on three soldiers returning from Iraq in 2008 (Miles Teller, Beulah Koale and Joe Cole).

The actors are playing lower-middle-class guys whose lives have been radically altered by the intensity of their war-time experiences. Tiller's Adam has difficulty re-connecting with his wife (Haley Bennett) and two kids. Cole's Joe arrives home to discover that his fiancee has abandoned him, leaving him in a state of disconsolate confusion. Kaole's Tausolo Aieti -- a.k.a. "Solo" -- suffers from memory loss and sudden eruptions of violence that ultimately affect his relationship with his wife (Keisha Castle-Hughes).

Emotionally disturbed and mentally addled, Solo becomes involved with an older veteran (Omar J. Dorsey), a drug dealer whose efforts to exploit Solo pull the movie off track, but who also adds another generation of disaffection to the story.

Although these men are combat-tested, they're not too proud to ask for help from a VA that is often too burdened to provide it. The movie, which pretty much skirts political issues, doesn't rail against the VA: The folks who work for the VA are simply overwhelmed by numbers.

A combat incident that saddles Teller's character with guilt weaves through the movie; it's seen in flashback toward the end when Adam meets with the widow (Amy Schumer) of a soldier whose death has become a principal source of Adam's guilt. Equally moving is a scene in which Adam travels from Kansas to Arkansas to meet with Emory (Scott Haze), a debilitated soldier for whom Adam also feels responsible.

Playing a take-charge sergeant, Teller gives the movie's main performance, but he strips his work of any trace of show-boating, something that's true for the entire cast.

Based on a 2013 book by David Finkel, Thank You For Your Service stands as an illustrative example of the kind of fighting that begins once soldiers return home from war: Too often, the battle they wind up waging is with themselves.

A middleweight's amazing comeback

Bleed for This tells a powerful story -- but doesn't always do it with distinction.

Boxing movies long have been a staple in Hollywood's repertoire with Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull still topping most lists of big-screen punch-outs.

Bleed for This, the story of Vinny Pazienza's amazing career in and out of the ring, stands as a medium grade, often dreary look at a man who sustained what should have been a career-ending, spinal-cord injury.

Instead of going down for the count after a devastating car wreck, Pazienza returned to win the middleweight title. His feat has been dubbed the greatest comeback in boxing history.

The minute you sit down to watch Bleed for This, which stars Miles Teller as the Rhode Island-bred "PazManian Devil," you know that the movie will end with videos showing the real man. Fair to say, surprise isn't the movie's strong suit.

In the hands of director Ben Younger (Boiler Room), Bleed for This revels in the working-class atmosphere that spawned Pazienza. The film takes place in a rough-and-tumble Italian American milieu with numerous scenes of Pazienza's family gathered around the dining room table, their Rhode Island accents thick enough to float in Narragansett Bay.

Younger offers a straightforward -- if condensed -- account of Pazienza's career, which certainly qualifies as a wonder of sorts.

After his injury, Pazienza was told he'd never fight again. Ignoring the diagnosis, he began training soon after his release from the hospital, an activity made more difficult by the halo that had been screwed into Pazienza's skull to hold his neck in place.

Two relationships bolster the story; one involves Pazienza's trainer Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart with a dramatically receding hairline); the other centers on Vinny's father (Ciaran Hinds).

Hinds's performance has a kind of scowling rigidity that never entirely convinced me, but the movie tries to make its dramatic weight with a scene in which Hinds's Angelo Pazienza wonders whether he hasn't pushed his son too hard, and is, therefore, partly responsible for Vinny's plight.

Pazienza's relationship with Rooney doesn't have much by way of psychological subtext. The alcoholic Rooney helped Pazienza establish his career by encouraging him to move up two weight classes. Later, Rooney helped prepare Pazienza for a comeback that seemed impossible to everyone but the fallen fighter.

Teller doesn't have the physical bulk of the real fighter, but he gives the movie his all and the fight scenes are mostly convincing -- if cinematically routine.

Younger does a better job showing the physical pain involved in Pazienza's retraining. The most difficult scene to watch is one in which a doctor removes four screws from Pazienza's skull and drops them into a waiting receptacle. After three months, the halo was replaced by a neck brace.

Because the movie mostly celebrates Pazienza's determination, it doesn't waste much time counterpunching; i.e., considering the idea that a man who can't see any other role in life but that of a fighter might be tragically limited.

Pazienza's story obviously makes a strong subject for a movie, but Younger and company can't bring the movie to total victory -- either as a Rockyesque source of inspiration or as a Raging Bull-influenced hunk of tormented realism.

In fight-movie terms, I'd call it a draw.

Selling arms for fun and profit

Miles Teller and Jonah Hill team for a comic thriller about gun runners.

It's impossible to watch War Dogs without thinking about such recent movies as The Big Short, American Hustle and maybe even Wolf of Wall Street. Director Todd Phillips (The Hangover Trilogy) has made a movie about a couple of buddies who wind up trying to outsmart the US government with a $300 million arms contract that involves faulty and illegally shipped bullets.

Making a movie about amoral characters isn't easy, even when that movie has an infectiously jaunty spirit. Because we spend a lot of time with the buddies played by Miles Teller and Jonah Hill, War Dogs puts us in the awkward position of rooting for a couple of gun runners without asking that we give much thought to the ramifications of their business.

Hill plays Efraim Diveroli as an overweight hustler without qualms. Teller portrays David Packouz as a person who hasn't entirely lost his moral compass, but the movie is best as a conventional bromance that deals in stark incongruities: A couple of ill-prepared novices trying to cross Iraq's "triangle of death" with a shipment of Berettas and a guide named Marlboro, for example.

The partners' trip to Iraq qualifies as an exception to their standard business practice, which involves reaping as much profit from war as possible without leaving their Miami offices. The idea is to make money without getting shot at.

As explained in the movie, Diveroli understood that serious money could be made by bottom feeding; i.e., landing the small contracts that the big arms dealers ignored. Lots of small contracts added up to big money.

A lot of what the two men did was perfectly legal -- until it wasn't.

Hill -- not exactly a physical specimen to begin with -- has put on weight as if to demonstrate that Diveroli is encased in his own gluttony. He loves money, cocaine and prostitutes. Hill gives good sleaze, complete with slicked back hair and a high-pitched, near maniacal laugh. A poster of Al Pacino as Scarface hangs above Diveroli's desk.

As the more conventional of the two, Teller's David has a wife (Ana de Armas) and small daughter. Initially, David hides his business from his wife, who thinks that he's selling high-quality sheets to Florida homes for the retired. David did try his hand at that business until Diveroli invited him to join his lucrative venture.

Diveroli's arms operation -- his company is called AEY -- is financed by a dry cleaner and Orthodox Jew played by Kevin Pollack. Pollack's character believes -- or wants to believe -- that he's investing in a business that supplies arms to Israel.

Following a well-worn path, Phillips shows the exhilarating kick of making large amounts of money. The partners move up in the world, buying fancy Miami apartments and indulging in ample amounts of high living.

Credited to three writers including Phillips, the screenplay focuses mostly on Teller's David, a man who starts the movie as a masseuse. David's early picture financial failures make him vulnerable to Efraim's advances.

The two men knew each other as kids, and were best friends at the local Yeshiva. David also serves as the movie's narrator, our guide through this tainted world.

You probably know from previews of coming attractions that War Dogs makes room for Bradley Cooper. Cooper plays Henry Girard, a shady arms dealer whose name appears on the terrorist watch list. After what appears to be a chance meeting in Vegas, Gerard offers to sell Efraim and David 100 million rounds of bullets for AK-47s, allowing them to bid on a contract that would result in their biggest score ever.

It's a bit late in the review to mention it, but War Dogs is based on a true story that derives from a 2011 Rolling Stone article by Guy Lawson, who wrote also tackled the subject in a book, Arms and the Dudes.

Despite his penchant for gross-out comedies, Phillips has directorial chops, and he uses them effectively in scenes set in Jordan, Iraq, Albania, Las Vegas, and Miami. Phillips proves capable of handling the globe hopping this kind of comic thriller requires.

What's missing from War Dogs, which can be entertaining, is a real sense of an arms trade that inflicts considerable harm on large numbers of people. It's a war movie without casualties.

Phillips may be too addicted to fun to go all the way to seriousness. For all of War Dogs' antic energy, I couldn't help wishing Phillips had taken a bigger step in that direction.

Trip to Planet Zero amounts to nothing

Fantastic Four, a bland attempt to stoke the Marvel fires.

The title of Fantastic Four is half true. There are four inadvertent superheroes in this latest offering to roll off the Marvel assembly line. Fantastic? Not so much.

Bland and dimly realized, this fourth Fantastic Four film stumbles through an origins story that begins well enough but quickly dissolves into heaps of uninspired exposition.

A negligible and familiar story launched when nerdy Reed Richards (Miles Teller) wins a scholarship to the Baxter Institute, a scientific think tank run by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey).

Dr. Storm understands that Reed, though not exactly the star of his high school science fair, has invented a device that can transport objects (and maybe people) to another dimension.

Because it contains abundant supplies of energy, this other dimension -- dubbed Planet Zero -- may hold the key to mankind's future. Perhaps humanity will have a chance to undue the damage it already has done to its home planet.

Once the story arrives at the Institute, Teller teams with Kate Mara, Toby Kebbell and Michael B. Jordan, an able enough cast, but one that's stuck in a movie that sometimes feels like a throwback to '50s sci-fi -- only without the trashy fun.

The young researchers acquire their powers when they use the teleportation machine to journey to Planet Zero, some sort of alternate reality where canyons, mountains and energy flows are depicted with a singular lack of creativity.

Marvel fans already know that each of the researchers at the Baxter Institute eventually morphs into a superhero with one power, so there's little element of surprise here.

Teller's Reed develops a rubbery body that expands his reach; Mara's Sue Storm can make herself disappear; Jordan acquires the ability to turn himself into a fiery missile.

Reed's less-than-brilliant pal Ben (Jamie Bell) joins the brainiac adventure: He becomes The Thing, a massive creature composed entirely of rock. Bell so quickly vanishes from the picture, I found myself hoping that he wasn't being paid by the minute.

One of the teleportation travelers -- Kebbell's Victor Von Doom -- doesn't make the return trip from Planet Zero. He eventually turns into the movie's arch villain, Dr. Doom.

Trank did a far better job with Chronicle (2012), a refreshing movie in which a trio of high school pals acquired super powers. Stuck serving the Marvel machine, he founders.

As a result, Fantastic Four comes and goes without even making a dent in the pop-cultural imagination.

Improvement in the 'Divergent' series

Insurgent adds a bit of pep to the series' overall mediocrity.

There are at least two ways to look at Insurgent, the second installment in the planned four-movie Divergent series.

Taken on its own terms, this second chapter remains a disappointingly familiar helping of young adult sci-fi with a story built on a rigid caste system that divides what remains of the world's population into distinct personality groups -- the smart, the honest, the aggressive, etc.

Those stumbling into Insurgent with no prior knowledge will find a passable if not especially novel addition to a genre -- dystopian sci-fi -- that's best when it's a bit more brainy.

But if one allows for a little relativism, and places the movie in the context of a franchise with two more movies remaining, it's possible to argue that Insurgent marks an improvement over a far more tepid first installment.

With new director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, RED and R.I.P.D.) taking over from Neil Burger, this second helping emphasizes action and special effects, some of which are truly dazzling.

In this edition, the evil Jeanine (Kate Winslet) wants to capture heroine Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley). A full-fledged divergent, Tris possess genes from all of the five personality types into which this futuristic society has been divided.

Tris also has the power to open a mysterious box that contains a message from the group that originally set up the factional system that's supposed to ensure that peace prevails.

Although the screenplay by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman and Mark Bomback remains laden with jargon, Insurgent feels a bit freer and looser than its predecessor.

The movie opens with a quartet of rebels on the run. Tris, her boyfriend Four (Theo James), Chris's brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and Peter (Miles Teller) are all fleeing the evil regime.

Early on, the movie's quartet of refugees seeks sanctuary among the greenery and quietude to an Amity village, Amity being the faction dedicated to a total lack of conflict, as well as to what appears to be a grimly wholesome vegetarian diet.

The head of Amity (Octavia Spencer) eventually decrees that the interlopers must be expelled from the Amity Eden.

We quickly learn that Tris has become mired in guilt from the last movie. She blames herself for the loss of her parents, a bit of torment that provides Woodley with a chance to add psychological depth to a character who also struggles to contain her most violent impulses.

Bland in the first installment, James adds a bit of welcome color to his portrayal, but the characters in Insurgent hardly qualify as memorable.

Sporting a brunette dye job, Naomi Watts makes an appearance as Four's mother, a woman he neither trusts nor loves. Watts's Evelyn leads a group called Factionless, misfits who may become a necessary part of the alliance that's required to overthrow Winslet's Jeanine, as much the tyrannical ice princess as ever.

The story builds toward scenes in which the captured Tris is hooked up to a device that causes her to hallucinate and puts her character through the severest of tests.

I don't know precisely what to make of it, but Tris's torture prompts the movie's best visual accomplishments, including a vertiginous sequence in which Tris imagines that she must rescue her mother from a burning house that's uprooted and careering through the ruins of what's left of Chicago.

And, yes, this is another movie in which someone could have gotten rich by cornering the rubble market.

I can't imagine that anyone but devotees of Veronica Roth's trilogy of novels will be enthralled, but that group seems large enough to create a seasonal hit.

Roth's final novel, Allegiant, is scheduled to be broken into two films. Listen, cynicism comes easy for me, but this time, I choose to be optimistic.

Despite its obvious liabilities, the Divergent series at least seems to be trending positive.

Drumming to beat the band

Whiplash has enough energy to stock 10 movies.

I've always thought of jazz as an art form that allowed skilled, disciplined musicians a great measure of freedom. But jazz -- like just about everything else -- has been transformed by time and social change.

Music once was mastered in clubs and learned from other musicians now can be studied in conservatory-like situations where highly motivated young people pursue jazz with the zeal and determination you'd expect to find among a group of Harvard MBA candidates.

That's the environment we find ourselves in Whiplash, an exciting and sometimes disturbing debut feature from Damien Chazelle, a director who obtains fine performances from Miles Teller as Andrew, an aspiring jazz drummer, and from J.K. Simmons as Fletcher, an unapologetically judgmental and sometimes sadistic teacher.

Simmons, who portrays Fletcher as if he were a Marine Corps drill instructor, hasn't had this kind of a badass role since he portrayed white supremacist Vern Schillinger on HBO's Oz.

If ever a teacher could create performance anxiety in his charges, it's Fletcher. He leads the school's prestigious first-string jazz band, and takes pride in its ability to win just about every competition it enters.

Teller's Andrew desperately wants to find a place in Fletcher's world. He's the kind of driven kid who'll practice until his hands bleed. He sweats and drums himself to the point of exhaustion. When Andrew plays, it feels as if we're watching an action movie.

Fletcher specializes in pushing his students' buttons, learning about their personal lives and using information he acquires to test their ability to withstand public humiliation. He's quick to make fun of Andrew's English teacher father (Paul Reiser), calling him a failed writer, for example. Simmons sarcastic tirades include a repertoire of homophobic slurs, delivered by him without an apparent second thought.

All of this makes Fletcher frightening. He can be sympathetic when he chooses to be, but he'll turn brutal in a minute, presumably to spur his charges to higher levels of performance.

In a way, Fletcher is a second and much tougher father than Andrew's biological father, who raised the boy alone and seems to display (heaven help him) a degree of sensitivity. Andrew's mom left when he was quite young.

Teller shows us some of Andrew's vulnerability, but he also can be cocky. Andrew grows in confidence as the movie progresses, even dumping his girlfriend (Melissa Benoist) because he knows she'll want more from him than he's willing to give. Nothing takes precedence over drumming.

Of course, there would be no movie if Chazelle didn't build toward a major clash, and when it arrives, it hits the screen with near-explosive force.

I don't know exactly what Chazelle intended, but it's striking to see jazz as a kind of competitive, striver's pursuit for young men, most of them white.

Whatever the movie's messages (intended and unintended), the duel between Simmons and Teller proves mesmerizing, as is the music of Justin Hurwitz, who wrote original numbers for the movie, which also makes use of such jazz classics as Duke Ellington's Caravan.

The idea that artistic excellence can't be achieved without this kind of torment may be baloney. The movie's notion that greatness can be tortured out of students isn't likely to win many converts.

But I wouldn't miss the battle waged by Andrew and his mentor. It's not just about musicians pushing themselves; it's about actors pushing themselves and about the desire to stand-out from the anonymous crowd.

When it's done, you may find yourself arguing with Whiplash, but you won't be able to ignore a movie that feels every bit as driven as its characters.

'Divergent' has a derivative feel

Latest young adult sci-fi has limited payoff.

If we hadn't seen any of The Hunger Games movies, Divergent might have felt fresher, less like a medium-grade helping of dystopian sci-fi built around a young female character who learns to kick butt.

The fact that we have seen The Hunger Games may explain why Shailene Woodley, as the star of Divergent, sometimes seems to be standing in for Jennifer Lawrence, star of The Hunger Games.

It also may help us understand why a test that divides 16-year-olds into factions based on personality seems to be substituting for the lottery in Hunger Games.

You get the idea. It's difficult to watch Divergent, an adaptation of a 2011 novel by Veronica Roth, without making comparisons to The Hunger Games, the big-screen version of Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel.

Both books involve a rigidly divided society, a strong female main character and an oppressive social order. The stories, of course, are different, but on screen, Divergent has trouble staking out new turf.

To make matters worse, this first adaptation of Roth's trilogy of novels takes a long time reaching what feels like too paltry a payoff.
Set in a dystopian Chicago of the future, Divergent focuses on Beatrice Prior (Woodley), a young woman who has reached the age at which she must decide which of five factions she wants to join.

Youngsters are asked to choose one of five factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless or Erudite, depending on whether they're judged to be self-sacrificing, friendly, honest, brave or smart.

A rare case, Beatrice doesn't fit into any category. That classifies her as a Divergent, someone who doesn't belong.

Instead of turning her in, Beatrice's tester (Maggie Q) tells her to pick a faction and do her best to fake it. Beatrice opts for Dauntless, the warrior faction that serves as the city's army and police force.

Beatrice's choice surprises her parents (Tony Goldwyn and Ashley Judd), well-meaning folks who are part of Abnegation. Once part of Dauntless, Beatrice takes the name Tris.

Beatrice's brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) also raises eyebrows. He chooses Erudite, a faction that the Prior parents suspect is plotting to take over the city, all that's left after a war that devastated the rest of the country.

The Erudite faction is led by Jeanine Matthews (a blonde and icy Kate Winslet). Matthews tells young people to choose freely, but is so obviously authoritarian that there's little suspense about her character. We know from the start that she's to no damn good.

The movie focuses primarily on Beatrice's training to become a full-fledged member of Dauntless. She does this under the tutelage of the handsome Four (Theo James) and the mean-spirited Eric (Jai Courtney).

Setting all this up requires a fair amount of less-than-thrilling exposition. Although the early training sequences can be exciting, the three-stage development of Dauntless recruits doesn't generate enough episode-to-episode tension.

Most of the training seems to involve throwing recruits into sink-or-swim situations. We seldom see anyone receiving anything resembling instruction. The point may be to create a survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere, but it hardly seems the best way to develop future combatants.

Those who wash out of the Dauntless program, by the way, are relegated to living in the streets, part of the mass of folks who are factionless and, therefore, excluded from society's largess.

Woodley ably hints at Beatrice's delight in discovering her new aggressiveness and physicality, but isn't entirely convincing when she swings into action. James's character tends to be a trifle bland.

A prolonged finale is compromised by obvious dialogue about individual freedom and conformity that restates points director Neil Burger (Limitless) already has made.

Now that Divergent has broken the ground with this two-hour and 19-minute version, it's possible that the big-screen adaptations of the next two installments will be fleeter and deeper. Let's hope.

Finally, a worthy teen movie

Before The Spectacular Now, I wondered whether I'd ever want to see another film about adolescence, but director James Ponsoldt's addition to the genre qualifies as a remarkable achievement, a movie full of real feelings and real problems -- in short, a film about young people that refuses to pander.

Adapted from a novel by Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now reflects Ponsoldt's desire to find a bit of truth in a genre that doesn't always value honesty.

Ponsoldt’s cast earns some of the credit. Miles Teller) plays Sutter, an underachieving kid who's flirting with alcoholism. Sutter lives with his mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh), works part-time at a men's clothing store, parties hard and seems committed to a philosophy he calls "living in the moment."

Immersion in the present is well and good, but it's pretty clear that Sutter might be on the verge of throwing his life away. College? No. A future? Why bother? We know that Sutter’s spectacular present eventually will give way to the mediocrity that often results from squandered potential. How long will it take before the flask Sutter carries ceases to be a sign of rebellion and becomes a badge of dishonor?

Sutter is smart, amusing and glib in ways that can seem off-putting at first, as if Teller has been instructed to do a Vince Vaughn imitation. Don't give up on the kid, though; as the story progresses, he reveals depths that go beyond the surface of his clever retorts. He begins to question his views, in part because he forms relationship with Aimee (Shailene Woodley), a classmate who's not at the center of high-school party life and who’s a bit more substantial than the girl (Brie Larson) who dumps Sutter in the movie's early going, although she's no ditz, either.

Aimee and Sutter meet in an early morning scene in which Sutter awakens on Aimee's lawn. Drunk as usual, he forgot where he left his car. An exchange develops: Sutter asks Aimee to help him learn geometry; he basically schools her in how to have a better time in high school.

Lurking in the background is Sutter's father (Kyle Chandler), a heavy drinker who Sutter hasn't seen in years. His mother won't even tell Sutter where his dad lives. When he learns his father's whereabouts from his sister (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Sutter decides to visit. Dad, we soon learn, is a preview of coming attractions for what Sutter easily could become, an irresponsible jerk.

Spectacular Now provides Teller with a breakthrough role. Woodley -- familiar as George Clooney's teen-age daughter in The Descendants -- continues to impress.

Shot in Athens, Georgia -- where Ponsoldt grew up, The Spectacular Now is more than a good teen movie; it's a good movie, a look at characters we come to care about right up until the film's mildly ambiguous conclusion.

Turn 21, drink until you drop

What? You expected more than a raunchiest from the guys who wrote The Hangover?
I was still in college on the day I turned 21. I remember walking into a bar near campus and finding a seat. I secretely hoped that the bartender would look at me suspiciously so that I could whip out my driver's license and demand the service to which my new maturity entitled me. Instead, I got a half-hearted request for an ID, followed by an even more indifferent, "What'll you have?"

So went my unceremonious entry into the world of legal drinking.

The new comedy 21 and Over revolves around the events accompanying one young man's 21st birthday. He's Jeff Chang (Justin Chon), and his friends always call him by both his first and his last names. On the eve of an interview for admission to medical school, Jeff Chang veers from the straight and narrow. The reason: He's visited by two long-time friends (Miles Teller and Skylar Astin) who insist on helping him celebrate his birthday.

They don't much care that Jeff Chang's demanding father (François Chau) is scheduled to pick up his son for the interview in the morning.

Now, you'd have to be entirely blotto not to realize what's about to happen. Jeff will engage in an epic bout of binge drinking that will bring him to a near comatose state while the comedy turns into the expected ruanchfest.

Written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the writers of The Hangover, 21 and Over continues a streak that thus far has been based on partying, substance and alcohol abuse, sexual humiliation and male nudity.

In some ways, 21 and Over simply drops the Hangover formula onto a college campus, a move that presents ample opportunity for bar-hopping, parties and co-ed ogling. Judging by this and other movies, no one who attends college in a comedy ever has seen the inside of a library. In fact, college looks like a libidinous playground for young people who face adult life as if it were a prison sentence.

But about that raunchfest. At one point, Jeff Chang stands on a bar and urinates on the gathered crowd. Projectile vomiting? Of course. And before the night is done, Jeff Chang will eat a tampon.

Maybe you consider those comic spoilers, but you probably should know just how raunchy some of the raunch gets.

Early on, Jeff Chang's two companions (who remain relatively sober) walk across campus nude, except for the white socks that cover their penises. The movie then proceeds to tell us how they got that way, a story that involves retribution for a sorority invasion.

Comedies such as 21 and Over stagger from one ribald set piece to the next, but have become so familiar that I couldn't work up much by way of disgust. Besides, Astin's character proves reasonably likable, and the movie isn't nearly as mean-spirited as it could have been.

Still, 21 and Over provided me with few laughs as I waited for the inevitable interjection of some supposedly redeeming drama.

As it turns out, the stressed and depressed Jeff Chang doesn't really want to be a doctor; the more reserved of the trio (Astin's character) loosens up when he meets a blonde co-ed (Susan Wright); and the wild man and instigator in the trio decides to turn over a new leaf, but not until the actor who plays him (Teller) gets to practice sounding a lot like Vince Vaughn.

In a way, reviewing movies such as 21 and Over is pointless. The audience for this kind of movie is not review driven, and, as the saying goes, people who like this sort of thing probably will like this particular thing. They may also tend to overuse the word "awesome."

21 and Over is one more comedy that satisfies adolescent cravings for moments of pseudo-transgression. So if it's your keg of beer, I'll leave you with one simple and heartfelt thought, "Party on, dude.