Disney

Free Guy: Leveling Up, One Cross-Promotion at a Time

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Reynolds in "Free Guy"

Once you acknowledge that it’s creatively bankrupt, Free Guy becomes a reasonably diverting time at the movies. It’s a work of benevolent fraud, like an identity thief who steals your credit card and then buys you some cool shit before jetting off to Cancun. It’s also a fascinating document for where it sits in today’s precarious blockbuster landscape: a big-budget original screenplay that nonetheless feels awkwardly bootstrapped to the superior pictures it’s imitating. It’s an original copy—an organic movie with a synthetic soul.

Free Guy was technically directed by the journeyman Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel), but its true authorship is corporate. It’s being distributed under the banner of “20th Century Studios”, which means it was initially developed at Fox before that company was acquired by Disney, the insatiable commercial behemoth that currently owns roughly 98% of the market share. The film’s first trailer, which premiered back during the Before Times of December 2019, winkingly ridiculed the Mouse House’s penchant for recycling old hits (“from the studio that brought you Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King… twice”), but Free Guy occupies a curious double-zone; even as it’s trumpeting its original bona fides at every turn, it’s continually leveraging its preexisting brand in the hope of launching yet another merchandise-friendly franchise. Read More

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Luca: Summer Loving, Glazed by the Past

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Pixar's Luca

Luca is a shape-shifting sea monster, and Luca itself is something of a transformer. It is by turns (and sometimes all at once) a coming-of-age story, an underdog sports movie, an ode to canonical Italian cinema, and a heartfelt fable of tolerance. That it ably fulfills all of these roles without succumbing to chaos or incongruity is a testament to the dexterity of its storytelling and the fluidity of its construction. It doesn’t so much offer something for everyone as it provides everything for someones—namely, for those audiences who hunger for art that is simultaneously funny, kinetic, sweet, and affirming.

It is not—and with every new Pixar release, the conversation tends to focus on what it isn’t rather than what it is—terribly imaginative. Small in scale and gentle in heart, Luca lacks the bold ingenuity that has (ahem) animated some of the studio’s more impressive recent works: the metaphysical philosophizing of Soul, the existential angst of Toy Story 4, the triumphant razzle-dazzle of Incredibles 2, the anthropomorphized emotions of Inside Out. But not every Pixar picture can be expected to stretch or redefine an entire genre, and besides, lamenting Luca’s familiarity risks diminishing some of its considerable charm. Here is a playful, gorgeous, heart-warming adventure that tells its tender story with craft and conviction. That it occasionally resembles other movies seems a small price to pay. Read More

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Soul: It’s All About Goals. Or Is It?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jamie Foxx in Pixar's "Soul"

There may not be a venue explicitly called Imagination Land in Pete Docter’s latest feature, but there’s still plenty of innovation and ingenuity. Soul, the new movie from the Pixar standout, is another triumph, an inspired mix of vibrant animation, rich storytelling, and powerful themes. It asks big, probing questions—about life and death, art and commerce, work and pleasure—while also making generous room for ticking-clock suspense and broad comedy. This is a sweeping metaphysical adventure tale, complete with fart jokes.

The signature achievement of Soul is its conception of the Great Before, a vast supernatural laboratory of sorts where human personalities are forged before birth. Advancements in technology have allowed animators to pack the frame with infinite minutiae, but Docter’s approach here is spare and restrained. The realm he’s conceived is gently pastoral, a luminous land of rolling hills, peaceful meadows, and placid lakes. The blue-and-purple color scheme is similarly serene, smoothly shifting between various hues of turquoise and lavender. And the world’s essential openness—its sense of being permanently incomplete—feels not like a failure of vision, but like a gift from creator to viewer. Some fictional environments are overwhelming in their detail. Docter lets you fill in the blanks. Read More

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: Racing to the End, and Backpedaling from the Middle

Jeremy BeckReviews
The band is together one last time in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"

Helmets matter in Star Wars. The Walt Disney Company knows this; The Mandalorian, the flagship series of Disney’s new streaming service, begins each episode with a retrofitted logo, a montage of recognizable head coverings from our favorite faraway galaxy. J.J. Abrams knows it too. So when an early scene in The Rise of Skywalker, the ninth and (supposedly) last entry in the Star Wars saga, features Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) donning a re-forged black mask—the same mask that he destroyed in a fit of pique one film ago—it is impossible to miss the metaphor. Every modern franchise production must to some extent honor the loyalty of its patrons, but The Rise of Skywalker exhibits a peculiar brand of fan service. It appears designed to cater not to Star Wars enthusiasts at large, but to the small and vocal sect of devotees who adored the seventh episode, Abrams’ The Force Awakens, yet who simultaneously despised its follow-up, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. If Johnson wielded spunk and irreverence to blow the franchise template to bits, Abrams deploys nostalgia and traditionalism to put the pieces back together.

This is not all too easy. Just as that reconstructed helmet still shows visible cracks, The Rise of Skywalker is a seamy and uneven movie, laboring to bring the saga to a stirring close while also frantically course-correcting toward a more conventional version of the Star Wars mythos. Rather than boldly exploring new worlds (whoops, sorry, wrong franchise), it retreats inward, taking refuge in the safe and familiar. This is disappointing, but it is far from devastating. Abrams’ narrative choices may border on cowardly, but he remains a skillful supplier of big-budget imagery and exciting conflict. That he lacks Johnson’s daring and imagination has not precluded him from making another boisterous adventure, with moments of glorious spectacle. Read More

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The Zombieland and Maleficent Sequels Both Fail, But for Different Reasons

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
The cast of "Zombieland: Double Tap", all clearly terrified of Angelina Jolie.

Asked to describe Claude Rains’ self-regarding police captain in Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart replies, “He’s just like any other man, only more so.” Aside from accurately summing up one half of cinema’s most beautiful friendship, that quip encapsulates what might be called The Law of the Hollywood Sequel. The motion picture industry is big business, so it’s only logical that when a movie makes money, you make another one. And because follow-ups are typically driven more by fan enthusiasm than by creative compulsion, you make the sequel just like the original, only more so: more action, more jokes, more special effects, more stars, more blood.

Last weekend saw the release of two decidedly different sequels which, if not exactly long-awaited, are certainly far-removed from their respective progenitors. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil arrives five years after Robert Stromberg’s surprise smash, which found Angelina Jolie donning pointy black horns and vivid green contact lenses for a reimagining of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Five years is an eon by Hollywood standards, but it’s half the interval between Zombieland: Double Tap and its predecessor, whose comic take on the apocalypse won moviegoers’ hearts and wallets a full decade ago. These unusually long gaps might suggest that both sequels are motivated by art rather than commerce—that their creators returned to their universes after significant time away because they’d actually developed exciting new stories rather than because greedy studios recognized an opportunity to cash years-old checks. Read More

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