At the movies

Identity Thief
DIRECTED BY: Seth Gordon
STARRING: Melissa McCarthy, Jason Bateman, Robert Patrick
CERT: 15A

There’s plenty of laughs in Identity Thief, if your idea of fun is the Three Stooges with an added dose of Judd Apatow-style vulgarity. The comedy here is about as subtle as a punch in the throat. And there’s a lot of that going on.

Sandy Patterson (Bateman) is a nice guy with a nice life, a lovely wife (Amanda Peet) and two cute little girls. The only thorn in his flesh is a monster boss (Jon Favreau), but that’s about to change and then it’s blue skies all the way.

Or until the next gas station, where his credit card is declined and his nice life starts to unravel. Arrested for skipping court in a state he’s never been to, Sandy discovers that his identity has been stolen – probably something to do with that time he gave all his personal info to a stranger on the phone. As you do when you’re a really nice guy. Or, say, when you’ve recently suffered a severe brain injury.

The culprit is a woman way down in Florida named Diana (McCarthy), an incurable shopaholic and bona fide sociopath, with a long line of fake IDs and maxed-out stolen credit cards to her name. For reasons that make no sense – except the writers really, really wanted to make a road movie – Sandy heads for the Sunshine State, to bring the scoundrel back to Denver to clear his name.

Quite naturally, there is a certain amount of resistance to this plan. Indeed, it gets spectacularly ugly. Along with Diana’s fondness for – and apparent immunity to – physical violence, Sandy has to deal with a pair of assassins (Genesis Rodriguez and some rapper named TI) who want Diana dead for, well, something. There’s also an irrepressible bounty hunter on her trail. He’s played by Robert Patrick, but the apparent Terminator joke is lost on account of how he’s barely recognisable, looking less like an angry android and more like a wasted cowboy.

For their part, Bateman and McCarthy make the most of the material and it works better when they’re throwing dialogue back and forth than when they’re throwing furniture around and beating the living crap out of each other. But mostly it’s the latter and that gets tired fairly fast. All the cartoon battering makes it even harder to stomach when the ending rolls around and it all gets typically mushy.

It gets typically vulgar, too, along the way. One scene involving Diana and a character named Big Chuck (Eric Stonestreet) gets particularly crude.

If director Seth Gordon and his writers genuinely wanted to be daring, rather than trot out all the old lazy stereotypes, they’d have put Jason Bateman in bed with Melissa McCarthy. Better still, they’d have had the leading man fall in love with the big girl.

Clearly, in Hollywood, they don’t think we’re ready for that. So hey, punch him in the throat one more time, that’s hilarious!

Jack the Giant Slayer
DIRECTED BY: Bryan Singer
STARRING: Nicholas Hoult, Ewan McGregor, Ian McShane, Eleanor Tomlinson
CERT: 12A

Once upon a time, before he started making superhero movies (X-Men, X-2, Superman Returns), director Bryan Singer teamed up with screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie to make that great little film, The Usual Suspects. That’s a while back now, but still and all, you might have expected that when they got together again to bring fairytale magic to the big screen, they’d have come up with something a bit less, well, bland.
But that’s mostly how Jack the Giant Slayer has turned out – pretty, but almost completely vanilla.

A mash-up of two fairytales, Jack and the Beanstalk and Jack the Giant Killer, it begins well. Two children – poor boy Jack and little Princess Isabelle – hear the beloved story of a long-ago war between humans and giants. All very Lord of the Rings, though these few minutes have more charm than the whole of The Hobbit.

Ten years down the road, Jack (Hoult) lives on his cranky uncle’s farm and is having to sell the horse and cart on account of hard times. Jack flogs them off for a handful of beans, the kind we all know shouldn’t be exposed to certain elements.

Despite Jack’s humble state, he’s managed to become friends with Princess Isabelle (Tomlinson), who’s mad for adventure but not too likely to see much. Her daddy, the king (McShane) is marrying her off to the hideous and obviously villainous Roderick (Stanley Tucci).

When Isabelle is suddenly whisked off to the heavens by a massive beanstalk, Jack joins the king’s men – led by the valiant knight Elmont (McGregor) – on the mission to bring her home. Only one thing stands in their way – an army of giants led by the two-headed General Fallon (John Fassir and the excellent Bill Nighy).

There are moments when the film strikes just the right campish, comic note that would have served it well throughout – mostly thanks to Ewan McGregor and to the brilliant Stanley Tucci. But Singer and McQuarrie are determined to go for spectacle over story and while it does look great, it’s all a bit hollow inside.

Younger viewers may get a kick out of it, but a bit more heart would have done them no harm, either.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
DIRECTED BY: Don Scardino
STARRING: Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, Jim Carrey, Olivia Wilde
CERT: 12A

Burt is a lonely, bullied kid who finds his place in the world through a magic set and with the help of his new best friend and assistant Anton.

Three decades down the road, the boys – Burt Wondersome (Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Buscemi) – are the stars of a Las Vegas magic show that’s fraying around the edges. The tricks are old, the suits and hair are a David Copperfield nightmare and Burt is less interested in revamping the act than he is in which groupie gets to spend the night in LA’s biggest bed.

Worse still, there’s a new kid in town and he’s attracting way too much attention. Street magician Steve Gray (Carrey) is a cross between David Blaine and Jackass, a man whose stunts include drill bits in the head and sleeping on hot coals. His videos are viral, his TV show is through the roof and now he’s about to take the bread out of Burt’s mouth.

When casino boss Doug Munny (James Gandolfini) gives the boys the boot, Burt and Anton go their separate ways and Burt winds up scraping a living pulling off his tricks in supermarkets and nursing homes – where ultimately he happens across his childhood hero, legendary magician Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin). There may be redemption for the washed-up Vegas magic man, but only if he rediscovers that old boyhood wonder. Or some such silly nonsense.

There are laughs to had in The Incredible Burt Wondersome, most of them courtesy of Jim Carrey who’s in wonderfully manic form as Gray. But when Carrey is not on screen – and after Steve Buscemi disappears for half the movie – it’s all a bit shallow and desperate.

The problem is Burt himself, a character so obnoxious that not even Steve Carell can make him likeable. It’s as if the writers – half a dozen of them, never a good sign – couldn’t decide between light or dark comedy and ended up with a character who fits neither.

All the same, there’s a woman who sees the man he can be and Olivia Wilde does what she can in that throwaway role. Likewise Steve Buscemi before his vanishing act and Alan Arkin who, as ever, makes the most of his little time.

Overall, a missed opportunity for what could have been a fine comedy.

Red Dawn
DIRECTED BY: Dan Bradley
STARRING: Chris Hemsworth, Isabel Lucas, Josh Hutcherson
CERT: 12A

Red Dawn is a remake of the 1984 release starring Patrick Swayze, a very silly piece of right-wing gung-ho nonsense that emerged during Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign. Bad as that was, it’s a classic when put alongside this pointless rehash.

For one thing, original director John Milius at least had a credible enemy to work with, a combined Soviet and Cuban force, at a time when such an invasion of America was not entirely the stuff of paranoid conspiracy theory.

Dan Bradley’s chosen enemy is the Chinese. Or at least it was, when the film was shot four years ago. But while Red Dawn sat on a shelf after its studio went bust, China became a massive market for Hollywood product and the suits were not going to ruffle any lucrative feathers. So several scenes were re-shot and the CGI wizards were put to work in order to turn the invading army into… North Korea. Because, well, North Korea isn’t much of a market. And hey, they’re evil and they hate America’s freedoms, right?

In any case, the Koreans have arrived in Spokane, Washington. Presumably they’ve taken the rest of the coast at least, but Spokane is where they will rue the day.

Firstly because the awesome local football team, the Wolverines, have just lost a game and their star quarterback Matt (Josh Peck) has a thing or two to prove. Handily enough, he also has big brother Jed (Hemsworth), a Marine home on leave after tours of duty out there in the war zones.

Matt becomes leader of the local teenage guerilla unit, which naturally includes a tech guy (Hutcherson) and a couple of fine looking girls (Adrianne Palicki and Isabel Lucas). The local mayor has thrown his hat in with the enemy, but his son (Tom Cruise’s young lad Conner) joins the adolescent resistance, who have transformed overnight into a seasoned military unit, ready and able to take back America from the invaders – who, obviously, are a bunch of incompetent clowns.

Sure all you can do is laugh. The studio suits won’t mind. Relations remain good in all the right places and in the meantime, those Southern militia boys out in the sticks will be ordering this by the truckload.

Can’t be too prepared, you know.