Some spark in a superfluous sequel

   

  Early in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the fourth in a series of Bad Boy films that began in 1995, Marcus Burnett, a Miami detective played by Martin Lawrence, has a near-death experience. It’s tempting to view the entire movie as a near-death experience for a buddy team (Lawrence and Will Smith) that has passed its expiration date.

   It doesn't take long before another character — the late Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliono) -- appears in a video he made prior to his death. Do I hear a death rattle here as well?

   OK, enough gloom. Ride or Die is no action comedy masterpiece but -- and this comes as a surprise --  the movie holds its own. Credit directors Edil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who made the last movie, with breathing life into an unnecessary sequel in which Smith’s character issues a number of apologies and is slapped in the face (three times) by Lawrence’s character. 

   Any connection to Smith’s Oscar fiasco may be purely ... well ... you know.

   Our beloved cops are getting long in the tooth. Smith's Mike Lowrey struggles with remorse and panic attacks, and Marcus, now a grandpa, suffers a heart attack while dancing at Mike's wedding. Mike marries early in the film, perhaps so that his new wife (Melanie Liburd) later can be placed in danger, thus raising the personal stakes for Mike.

    When Marcus recovers, he believes that he's impossible to kill. It's not his time, so he stands on the ledge of the hospital roof to prove his theory.

    The story tasks Mike and Marcus with clearing the name of the late Captain Howard, assassinated in the last installment. The captain has been linked to drug cartels. 

   A ridiculously complicated script concocts a scheme in which a former special forces officer (Eric Dane) becomes the primary villain.

    When the Florida law enforcement establishment tags Mike and Marcus as corrupt, they scurry to evade capture while also working to clear Captain Howard’s name.  

     Smith and Lawrence remain the main draw, but other actors punctuate the film's heavy and excessive gunfire. Rhea Seehorn, of Better Call Saul, turns up as Howard’s daughter, and Vanessa Hudgens reprises her Bad Boys work as a Miami cop.

     John Salley does cameo duty as Fletcher, a character who has branched out from the first two movies. Tiffany Haddish turns up as a stripper, delivering some off-color humor -- hardly a novelty in Bad Boys movies.

     Mike's son (Jacob Scipio) finds his way back into the plot, adding a slightly serious note to the proceedings.

     Frenzied editing defines much of the action, and the story culminates in an abandoned amusement park that’s home to a giant alligator. 

      You know the drill. A helicopter spins out of control. A small plane crashes into a building. Automatic weapons are fired. Stuff blows up.

      Smith and Lawrence generate enough comic chemistry to keep this Bad Boys from going totally bad but it’s difficult to watch Ride or Die without wondering what’s at stake beyond kick-starting the summer box office with an outsized helping of fan food. Think of it as a formula movie -- albeit with a bit of spark.

      One more note: Smith never has trouble commanding the screen -- even when he's in easygoing mode. Martin brings most of the comic juice to this edition. For my money, he's  the best Bad Boy.

Two very different teen stories

Anyone who regularly attends movies has more than a passing familiarity with adolescence, but Maidentrip -- a documentary about the round-the-world solo sailboat voyage made by 14-year-old Laura Dekker -- brings a new dimension to adolescent adventure. After Dekker and her father won a court battle aimed at stopping the youngster's journey, she set sail in her boat, Guppy. Director Jillian Schlesinger, working with footage that Decker took during her voyage, presents a somewhat fragmented chronicle of Decker's travels. To be fair, Dekker had plenty of other things on her mind during her 17-month-long journey besides recording her trip. Mostly, Dekker was isolated, but during her trip, she spent time with an older couple on their own sailing expedition. She also toured various ports in which she stopped for breaks. Of course, she sometimes was called upon to navigate treacherous waters. Would I allow a 14-year-old embark on such a voyage? No. I think 14 is too young to decide to risk one's life. Did I think that Schlesinger may have been a little too accepting of Dekker's mission? Yes. Was I caught up in the story, even though I already knew its outcome? You bet. The sheer audacity of Decker's achievement makes Maidentrip worth seeing.

Another kind of teen story

The movie Gimmme Shelter tells another kind of teen story. In it, Vanessa Hudgens, who worked against her High School Musical image in Spring Breakers, continues to chart grungy new territory. This time, Hudgens plays Agnes, an unruly 16-year-old who's pregnant and at odds with her drug-addicted and abusive mother (Rosario Dawson).

On the run, Agnes seeks out her biological father, a well-heeled stock broker played by Brendan Fraser, who seems entirely baffled about how to deal with the daughter he abandoned.

Fraser's character is now married to prim and proper Joanna (Stephanie Szostak), and has two additional children. Joanna has difficulty accepting Agnes, who goes by the nickname Apple.

Director Ron Krauss hasn't exactly made an overt piece of pro-life propaganda, but his movie suffers from a lack of character nuance and it certainly stacks the deck in favor of Apple having a baby.

Apple, who refuses to have an abortion despite Joanna's urging, eventually finds her way -- with help from a clergyman (James Earl Jones) -- to a home for pregnant teens. There, she gradually sheds her punk image and turns into a potential mom. Say goodbye to the nose and lip rings.

The shelter is run by Kathy (Ann Dowd), a Catholic woman whose pro-life position (thankfully) isn't over-emphasized.

Best part of the movie: A convincing Dowd (based on a real-life character) and the young women Apple meets at the shelter.

Hudgens' performance tends to be unmodulated, and at times, the movie sounds like an ad for the shleter. Some of the scenes -- particularly those involving Dawson -- are rendered in a harsh, bruising style that struck me as attempts to sell us on the movie's commitment to realism.

A better drama would have found room for scenes that amplified Apple's plight, possibly adding a real discussion between Apple and her father about the wayward 16-year-old's ability to be a competent parent. The movie also might have addressed questions about how Apple -- who seems intelligent but has no demonstrable skills -- intends to support her child. And the fact that Hudgens is 25 -- and doesn't look 16 -- makes it easier to accept the idea that she's ready for motherhood.

Although it isn't pedal-to-the-metal propaganda, Gimme Shelter didn't strike me as a movie that wants us to give any thought to alternatives for Apple.

On trying to turn exploitation into art

Spring Breakers is full of energy -- and maybe full of something else as well.
I finally caught up with Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, a propulsive hunk of cinematic energy that has been hailed in more than a few quarters for its willingness to go wickedly against its genre grain.

It's difficult not to see the movie as a kind of perverse trick. The title seems to have been calibrated to lure unsuspecting teens into an entertainment that they think will serve up screenfuls of scantily clad women, wild gross-out humor and outrageously dopey behavior. For better (and sometimes for worse) that's not the film that Korine has made, which is precisely what you'd expect from the director who wrote the screenplay for Kids (1995) and who has directed movies such as Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) and Trash Humpers (2009). If you've seen any of those movies, you know that Korine's work tends to polarize even the most tolerant of viewers.

Werner Herzog praised Gummo at a long-ago Telluride Film Festival. I didn't see Gummo at that festival, but I knew people who had and who were appalled by it. That's understandable. The movie opened with a scene of a boy drowning a cat in a garbage can.

Spring Breakers isn't quite in that mode, and it might be Korine's most accessible movie yet. Glutted with bare-breasted women, the movie begins by indulging itself in collegiate excess, a beach bacchanal that serves as a prologue to a story about four college girls from Kentucky (Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens and Rachel Korine) who head to Florida for spring break.

Korine turns the girls' Florida romp into an orgiastic riot of shoulder-to-shoulder partying that leaves you feeling woozy, sort of in the same way that an amusement park ride that initially looks like fun can leave you feeling slightly nauseous. The movie more than earns its "R" rating with nudity, cocaine snorting and scenes of sexual abandon.

Just about everyone will notice that two of Korine's actresses are associated with shows that are the antithesis of what he's after here: Gomez (Disney's Wizards of Waverly Place and Hudgens (Disney's High School Musical).

In case we had any doubts about his intentions, Korine quickly injects a shot of malignancy into the party-hardy swells that break over St. Petersburg's packed beaches. To finance their spring break, the girls stage a robbery at a roadside diner.

Their new-found criminality provokes giddy excitement, although Gomez's Faith (a young woman with religious impulses) has reservations about all the bad-girl high jinx.

As Spring Breakers unfolds, it becomes clear that Korine wants to turn his sybaritic romp into a form of contemporary horror. He suggests that a flirtation with danger can turn into a full-scale love affair; it's as if he's presenting his characters with a series of twisted challenges, pushing them to see just how far they're willing to transgress.

As a result, it's difficult to watch Spring Breakers without experiencing a burgeoning sense of unease.

The introduction of hard-core danger starts when the girls hook up with wannabe gangsta (James Franco in a strangely effective turn.) Cornrows and a metallic grill make Franco almost unrecognizable; he's playing a character named Alien, a figure who's both ludicrous and menacing. Alien says he grew up among blacks, and learned a black gangsta style. Alien shrieks with pride at the stuff he's been able to acquire as the result of his drug dealing. He's part menace and part clown, a character who teeters on the edge of self-parody.

Franco's Alien becomes involved with the girls when he bails them out of jail after a drug bust, presumably one of many conducted by the St. Petersburg police during spring break.

As the story develops, Korine allows two of the girls to fall by the wayside. Faith realizes she's out of her depth and heads for home. She starts talking about how uncomfortable she is in the gangsta milieu, giving the movie an infusion of jitters that would be right at home in an after-school-special. Later, another girl is forced into inaction when she's wounded in a drive-by shooting.

Perhaps to keep Spring Breakers from turning into a finger-wagging cautionary tale about the dangers of consorting with thugs, Korine adds a tables-turning finale that's as excessive in gunplay as the early picture scenes are excessive in skin.

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that a movie in which the female characters spend most of their time in bikinis begins to feel as if it's less interested in saying something than in standing a variety of archetypes on their ear, and, in the process, doling out punishment to the gangsta world.

Spring Breakers is not without interest, but Korine is able to carry his colossal goof of a movie only so far before he stretches credibility way beyond the breaking point.

Spring Breakers practically bursts with end-of-picture violence. Korine's bloodbath of a finale takes Godard's famous axiom -- all that's needed for a movie is a girl and a gun -- and restates it as, "All you need for a movie is a couple of girls and many guns."

To take pleasure in any of this, you probably have to enjoy watching Korine trample the archetypes of a thousand vapid beach movies. But by the end, I wasn't sure that Korine knew what to do once he and his characters had transgressed. In the end, it's the same old story. When in doubt, break out the heavy artillery and open fire.

Korine hits some wild notes in what amounts to a bona fide oddball of a movie, but for all its willingness to subvert expectation, Spring Breakers, ultimately, is not to be believed -- or, I think, taken as a coherent look at anything.

No, it's not the usual teen tripe, but it's not necessarily anything else, either.