MIDNIGHT MADNESS (1980) * ½

Midnight Madness plays like a Disney version of a Crown International teenage comedy.  Since it contains teens drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, saying the word “virgin”, and playing Peeping Tom (although no nudity is ever shown), it must’ve felt like real risqué stuff to the Disney suits.  Fans of the genre will be severely disappointed as its way too tame for its intended audience.  Fans of Disney children films will likewise be disappointed as it’s mostly boring and contains very few laughs.

The plot revolves around an elaborate college scavenger hunt.  Various teams must race around from one Los Angeles landmark to another finding clues.  Each clue gives them another riddle to solve, and they must race against the clock to make it to the finish line, learning assorted life lessons along the way.

There are five teams in all.  That right there is the problem.  There’s just too many people to keep track of.  The directors Michael Nankin and David Wechter try to give the characters equal screen time and as a consequence, it jumps back and forth a lot.  None of the characters are exactly likeable either, which is another problem.  The only team we really root for is David Naughton’s, mostly because he was so awesome in An American Werewolf in London and because Michael J. Fox plays his brother.  

The scenes of the teams stumbling around and searching for clues gets repetitive and aren’t funny.  The humor is lame too.  It might’ve been okay if the crude humor was… you know… crude.  Look Disney, just because you put in an occasional joke about a woman’s “melons” doesn’t exactly make it Porky’s.  

Midnight Madness just goes on way too long (nearly two hours) and there are precious few worthwhile gags in between.  (The kids have stupid names like “Barf” and “Armpit”, which gives you the level of humor we’re working with here.)  You know you’re in trouble when the funniest gag is nothing more than David Naughton drinking a Dr. Pepper.

It does have a good cast though.  In addition to Naughton and Fox, we have Stephen Furst, Eddie Deezen, and Paul Reubens.  Even without funny jokes and hilarious sight gags, the actors make it at the very least watchable.  Now imagine this cast with a script that was worth a damn (and maybe some gratuitous T & A) and you have yourself a movie! 

AMBUSHED (2013) **

You know you’re in for it when the names Dolph Lundgren, Vinnie Jones, and Randy Couture appear above the title on the DVD box and none of them are the star of the movie.  

Instead, it’s some guy named Daniel Bonjour.  He plays a nightclub owner with delusions of grandeur who kills two mid-level drug dealers and rips off their coke.  He hopes to flip the drugs for cash, so he can move to the country with his girlfriend (Cinthya Carmona) and retire.  In doing so, he draws the ire of a drug kingpin (Jones) who orders him to sell off a major shipment in two days.  Lundgren is the DEA agent who investigates the murders and tries to bring Bonjour down.

If you’re interested in action, you’ll be gravely disappointed in Ambushed.  It’s more of a One Last Score deal.  The biggest drawback is that the names in the cast are largely absent for most of the movie.  (There's a 30/70 split of Dolph to drug dealer drama.)  The problem is that the drug-dealing “hero” isn’t likeable in the least.  The filmmakers ask us to sympathize with Bonjour, mostly because he has a hot girlfriend.  However, since he lies, cheats, and kills to achieve his goals, it doesn’t exactly endear him to the audience.

Dolph has the best scenes.  He’s especially good while showing concern for his ex, who is deep undercover.  It's a small scene, but it’s well-acted and makes you wish their relationship was fleshed out more.  He also has a tense scene where he confronts Couture (who plays a dirty cop).  Too bad their final fight is so haphazardly filmed.  The great Benny “The Jet” Urquidez was the fight choreographer, although his work is ruined by the shitty camerawork and editing.

Dolph’s role is smallish and he was never given enough screen time for my liking, but one thing is for sure, the film certainly brightens up whenever he’s on screen.  Jones seems to be having fun as the maniacal villain and it’s a shame that he pretty much unceremoniously disappears.  Couture handles his scenes quite well, although his character isn’t given much to do until the very end.

AKA:  Thrill to Kill.  AKA:  Hard Rush.  AKA:  Raging Cops.

MUTE (2018) **

Mute offers us an interesting bit of futurism we haven’t seen before.  We’ve had futuristic movies ask interesting questions in the past.  Duncan Jones’ new one asks:  “What would Amish people look like in the future?”  It’s a cool idea, but sadly, that’s just about where the inspiration ends.

Alexander Skarsgard stars as an Amish guy who works as a bartender in a swanky nightclub.  When his girlfriend (Seyneb Saleh) goes missing, he searches the seedy underbelly of the giant megalopolis to find her.  Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux co-star as back alley doctors who work for gangsters that just might have something to do with her disappearance. 

The most interesting aspect of the movie is having a futuristically impaired man trying to navigate a futuristic backdrop.  Not only that, but since he can’t speak, he must write everything down in order to communicate, making him even more alien in the situation.  I also liked that being Amish in the future means you can still listen to records and have running water (although they are still far behind on the times).

Other than the futuristic Amish hero, there’s very little here to make it memorable.  Mute’s biggest inspiration is of course Blade Runner, but there are also direct visual references to A Clockwork Orange, Walking Tall, and even MASH.  Fans of Jones’ Moon will get a nice little nod to that film too.  While it’s fun spotting how and where Jones takes his inspiration, in the end, like its hero, the movie has very little to say.

The big problem is the fractured narrative.  Half the running time is devoted to Skarsgard’s looking for his girlfriend.  The other half focuses on Paul Rudd trying to get his papers to get out of the city.  The Skarsgard plot is a lot more interesting.  The Rudd scenes aren’t bad, but they are hampered by a subplot involving Theroux’s predilection for young girls.  These scenes not only get in the way of Rudd’s plotline, but they also take away from the immediacy of Skargard’s quest for revenge.  It’s not Rudd and Theroux’s fault.  They’re both great, it’s just that their scenes lack the urgency of the Skarsgard stuff.  By the time he goes on a rampage with a big stick a la Joe Don Baker, it’s lacking in impact since he’s been absent from the plot for so long.

Like Bright, there’s a cool world here with its own set of eccentricities, but there’s not enough meat to flesh out a story worth telling.

Rudd gets the best line of the movie when he tells a Russian gangster:  “I’m AWOL.  You’re an A-Hole!”

BRIGHT (2017) ** ½

Bright works under the assumption that elves, fairies, and orcs are real and have been around for thousands of years.  It almost plays like a remake of Alien Nation written by J.R.R. Tolkien.  It’s a clever twist on your typical cops and robbers story; almost clever enough for you to overlook its weaknesses.  Almost.  

Will Smith plays a cop who is saddled with an orc partner (Joel Edgerton).  Since he’s the first orc cop on the force, he faces orcism on a daily basis.  When the duo finds a magic wand that grants wishes, dirty cops, gangbangers, street orcs, and a team of elf assassins come out in droves to steal it.  It’s then up to Smith and Edgerton to put their differences aside and protect the wand at all costs.

The best parts of Bright are the early scenes that sets up the characters and the world they inhabit.  I liked the class elements at play.  Elves were the rich and elite while the orcs were mostly portrayed as the common street thug.  I appreciated Edgerton’s predicament of being torn between two worlds and Smith’s struggle to protect his partner from harm while dealing with his own trust issues.  Both Smith and Edgerton give fine performances and have chemistry to spare.

Once the magic wand is introduced, the fun drains out of the movie.  Then it becomes one interchangeable scene of the duo narrowly avoiding one group of corrupt beings after the other.  It also doesn’t help that the villainess (Noomi Rapace) is about as boring and personality-free as they come.  

To his credit, director David Ayer (who previously collaborated with Smith on Suicide Squad) films the action crisply.  He just seems a little out of his element during all the magical shit.  It’s a shame too because there was some potential here.  Too bad Max Landis’ script runs out of invention (and gas) about halfway through.

RUPERT PUPKIN SPEAKS

Hi, everyone. I wanted to let you know I have a new list of Favorite Film Discoveries up at Rupert Pupkin Speaks.  Check it out here:  http://www.rupertpupkinspeaks.com/2018/03/film-discoveries-of-2017-mitch-lovell.html

PREDATOR: THE QUIETUS (1988) ½ *

“The Beast of Exmoor” goes around killing people in a small English hamlet.  An American reporter goes to Exmoor to do a story on the slayings and teams up with a big game hunter to track the beast.  Meanwhile this sallow dude goes around the forest reciting poetry.  Could he be the one transforming into a werewolf and killing people?  Or could someone else be the culprit?

Despite the title, this has nothing to do with the Predator movies.  It’s a slow and talky low budget British horror movie that relies heavily on POV stalking shots in lieu of actual horror.  In fact, we don’t get a good look at the thing until the film is just about over.  No wonder they were hiding the damned thing because it looks like something out of a Howling sequel.  The transformation scene is even worse.  The guy turns into a werewolf via jump cut.  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

If you like long, slow scenes of people talking in pubs, this is the flick for you.  The bulk of the movie consists of our intrepid reporter interviewing citizens in a bar about the so-called Beast.  Most of these are deadly dull.  The scenes in the woods aren’t much better, but at least you can get a chuckle out of the fact that most of the forest scenes seem to take place in front of the same couple of trees.  Add in a climax that’s so dark you can hardly see anything (although it’s probably better that way), a droning soundtrack that’s liable to put you to sleep, and a lead actress so wooden she could be Pinocchio’s sister and you have a recipe for some dopey lycanthropy.

AKA:  Moon Stalker.

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THE MERCENARY: ABSOLUTION (2015) ** ½

The Mercenary:  Absolution is a sequel to Steven Seagal’s A Good Man.  (By the clunky title, you’d think it would be a sequel to Mercenary for Justice, but you’d be wrong.)  Other than his character having the same name, I don’t think they ever reference anything that happened in that movie.  Because of that, there’s no reason to see A Good Man for you to enjoy this. 

Seagal plays an assassin who is lured out of retirement to take out an Islamic terrorist.  While waiting for his superiors to extract him and his team, Seagal saves a battered woman from a group of armed men in a nightclub.  Haunted by his past, Seagal decides that saving the woman’s life will make up for a lifetime of violent misdeeds.

It’s cracked me up just how much Seagal has been sitting down in his movies lately.  That’s not tantamount to phoning it in, mind you.  I just get a kick out of how many scenes require him to sit down and do nothing more than listen to other people talk.  In fact, if you play a drinking game while watching The Mercenary:  Absolution and take a shot every time Seagal is seen sitting down, you’ll probably be in a coma before the film is halfway over.

Of course, by that time, Seagal is up and walking around.  In fact, he spends most of the second half standing up, if you can believe it.  If you’re still hurting for a drinking to play, you can take a shot every time he calls Vinnie Jones a “bitch”. 

Another motif that has weaved itself into Seagal’s work of late is the use of the phrase, “Watch your six”.  It comes into play late in the game when Seagal talks to the villain on the phone.  It doesn’t have much bearing on anything.  It’s just one of those little touches that Seagal fans appreciate.

The Mercenary:  Absolution was directed by Seagal’s frequent collaborator Keoni Waxman.  He films the action in a crisp manner, and there's plenty of it.  I can't say it ever comes close to matching the films from Seagal’s heyday, but as far as his recent stuff goes, you can do far worse. 

AKA:  Absolution.