Okay, so we’re only about a week away from the annual 31 Days of Horror-Ween festivities where I watch nothing but horror movies for a month straight, followed by November’s Halloween Hangover where I watch all the horror movies I didn’t get to watch in October. When I started the Al Adamson marathon in August, I thought that would carry me over into October, but as it turned out, I was able to finish earlier than expected. I could start the 31 Days celebration a week early, but I figured I would instead take the time to do a little fall cleaning and watch as many movies from my DVR as I can before the end of September. Since there are a few horror flicks sitting in the DVR, I may save them for later and watch some of them as part of the 31 Days marathon if and when I have a chance to squeeze in an extra movie or two. For now, I’m going try to declutter all the films that have been sitting in my DVR for the past three years or so (over 170 hours’ worth, to be more precise).
First up is Central Intelligence. I think I added this when I had a free preview of HBO (the date on the DVR said April 25, 2017). Usually whenever we got a free preview of something, I would just tape as many movies as I could and come back and watch them later, even if it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in. Central Intelligence kind of falls into that category. I mean, I would watch it, but I wouldn’t necessarily pay to see it, so it made sense to put it on the DVR during a free preview.
Kevin Hart stars as an accountant who peaked in high school. When he was a teenager, he witnessed a fat kid being bullied and tried to help him. Twenty years go by, and that kid has now transformed into Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who friends Hart on Facebook and suggests they go out for drinks. Turns out he’s a rogue CIA agent who needs Hart’s accounting skills to stop an online transaction between a shadowy hacker and a terrorist group. Predictable action-comedy hijinks ensue.
Central Intelligence is exactly the movie you think it’s going to be. There are no surprises here as the film follows a cliched action-comedy formula that has already been done several times over several decades. That isn’t exactly a bad thing, especially when the leads have so much chemistry together and the laughs are there.
Obviously, the action will not be mistaken for The Raid. However, director Rawson Marshall (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) Thurber injects just enough humor into the scenarios to make it work. I mean, if you ever wanted to see The Rock get punched by a motorcycle, or use a banana as a deadly weapon, here’s your chance. The humor doesn’t always hit the mark (the cameos vary in degrees of success), but it’s hard not to like any movie in which The Rock threatens to rip out someone’s throat “like Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse”.
The film’s strong suit is the interplay between The Rock and Kevin Hart. You can tell they are just having a ball playing off of one another and their repartee is just funny enough to make you forget about all the cliches (it’s another one of those high school reunion movies) and predictable plot points (like the true identity of the villain). I also have to give the poster props for having the tagline: “Saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson”, easily the best tagline since The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio’s “It’s not his nose that grows!”
All involved clearly had a blast working with one another as Hart and The Rock later went on to star in two Jumanji movies together and Thurber and The Rock went on to team up for Skyscraper and the upcoming Red Notice.
No comments:
Post a Comment