Delayed Reaction: Brigsby Bear

Premise: A grown man finds out that he was kidnapped as a baby and his favorite TV program is a show that his fake parents made.

This is a weird movie that anyone who watches SNL will immediately identify as coming from the brain of Kyle Mooney (and his collaborators). He reminds me a lot of Will Forte. Both of those guys have a peculiar sense of humor. They like when things fall apart more than when they come together. Mooney in particular loves to find humor in amateurishness. So, Brigsby Bear makes a lot of sense. It's like Room meets Son of Rambow.

I don't like to do plot summaries for Delayed Reactions, since I assume people have either already seen the movie or don't mind getting spoiled, but I feel like it needs to be done for this one. Just so I can sit on how weird the idea is.

Kyle Mooney lives in a bunker in isolation with his parents. The set looks cheap. It's hard to say whether that's intentional or the filmmakers just didn't have a great budget. He's obsessed with a show called Brigsby Bear which is a daily children's show that's the only thing he watches. One day, the FBI raids his family's bunker. He finds out that he was kidnapped as a child and raised by these people who hid him for 3 decades. Also, it turns out that Bridgsby Bear is a show that his fake father made just for him. So, Mooney moves back in with his real family. In addition to having to interact with the real world for the first time, Mooney finds himself in a unique situation. His biggest pop culture obsession is something that literally no one has ever heard of. Brigsby Bear has decades of mythology and he can't discuss it with anyone. Worst of all, thanks to the FBI, the show never got an ending. So, Mooney and some newly acquired friends [he got through his teenage sister] make their own Brigsby Bear movie to wrap things up.

It's a weird movie, and it works very hard to construct a very specific scenario. The number of scripted TV shows a decade ago was well under 200. In 2019, it was significantly over 500. The number of movies has ballooned similarly more. The rise of streaming has put everyone on a different schedule for when they digest their pop culture. It's increasingly common that I'll watch something amazing and have no one to talk to about it. Brigsby Bear literalizes that soloing of pop culture, and it's an intriguing idea. It works very, very hard to set that up though, and it ends up rushing to an end once it finally establishes that premise.

I love the idea that this movie exists. The humor isn't quite on my wavelength, but I see the potential for greatness in this creative team's future. I wish more Sundance movies were this crazy and inventive.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: The Gentlemen

Formula: Seven Psychopaths / Snatch

It's official. I have a new movie trope that I'm over. I'm don't like movies being self-referential about the fact that they are a story. I'm over it. That's a bummer too. I used to love that idea. The episode of House "Three Stories" remains one of my favorite TV episodes ever. My favorite movie ever is Stranger Than Fiction, about a man whose life is literally a story. But filmmakers have killed the idea. What once was a clever way to show the unreliability of narrators or a way to upend other story tropes has become a lazy way for filmmakers to avoid criticism. Sure, it's funny when The Dead Don't Die continues to refer to itself as a movie, but it reads to me like Jim Jarmusch protecting himself from criticism. If someone likes the movie, great. If someone doesn't, that's cool too, because he knows the things you didn't like are bad and his commenting on the fact that they are bad by including them out. See what I mean? It's a cop out. This is also the reason why I really couldn't connect with Joker. That movie is massively inconsistent, but then it applies a band-aid at the end by suggesting it was all in his head. What bothers me about this is that it forces the audience to assume that everything that's inconsistent about the movie was done on purpose, whereas, a movie without that narrative device has to own its mistakes.

It's a lot like TV showrunners who call a show a 13-hour movie. When a show is really a "13-hour movie", it's something incredible, like The Wire. Most showrunners just look at is as an easy way to avoid crafting actual episodes and evenly juggle narratives. "13-hour movie" is actually incredibly hard to do and needs meticulous planning that few showrunners are capable of. The same goes with writing a meta narrative into a movie.

The Gentlemen is Guy Ritchie's long-awaited return to the crime movies like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch that he made his name on. Story-wise, it's all standard stuff. Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) is a marijuana kingpin in England looking to sell off his operation to a businessman played by Jeremy Strong. First, he has to take care of a rival upstart boss named Dry Eye (Henry Goulding) who threatens his operation. What makes this movie a little different is that it's mostly told by Hugh Grant as a weasley reporter talking to Pearson's chief lieutenant (Charlie Hunam). Eventually, it's also revealed that Grant wrote the screenplay the the very movie you are watching.

As your typical big-personality crime movie, I found The Gentlemen to be quite enjoyable. Ritchie is great at coming up with criminals defined by a couple quirks or personality traits. For example, Michelle Dockery plays Mickey Pearson's wife. She doesn't really have a discernible character, but I liked her in this just based on her look and how she carries herself. Colin Farrell gets to play a weirdo, which he always seems to enjoy more than his traditional leading man roles. Henry Golding still hasn't proven that he can act, but he holds the screen and looks arch when needed, which is all the movie needs. Charlie Hunnam is very natural as a well-dressed, loyal henchman who has a super-human proficiency at his job. This is a perfectly entertaining distraction.

This movie gained nothing from the meta narrative though. It barely even plays with the unreliable narrator aspect. And when it's revealed that the whole movie is actually a movie pitch that Grant is making to a studio, I was the bad kind of surprised. All I could think was "Why did they think this was needed?"

Viligant readers may remember that I praised Little Women for exactly the same kind of "twist" ending. Well, that's because there was a point to doing it in that movie. There's no point to it in The Gentlemen beyond being a sort of nifty way to work in some reveals. I would've rather just watched a straight-forward story.

Honestly, I'm harping on this one aspect of the movie because I don't have much else to say about it. It's a fine movie. Guy Ritchie fans should be pleased that he's making something like this rather than Aladdin. There are a few jokes that probably belong more in 2000 than 2020. I could see Hugh Grant's performance rubbing some people the wrong way. That's sort of the point of it though. Everyone else calibrates their performances well. The comic violence mostly worked. It's a perfectly fine movie that just happened to solidify my opinion of one of my least favorite tropes.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Bad Boys 4 Life

Formula: Bad Boys ^ Gemini Man

It's easy to not realize that Bad Boys was a pretty important movie for American cinema over the last 25 years. It was a modest hit at the time, finishing just below Waiting to Exhale at the box office, but it launched the careers of two of the most dominant box office forces of the next two decades: Will Smith and Michael Bay. I know we like to make fun of Michael Bay now for his excess. He is to movies what Nickelback is to music. You really can't talk about blockbuster filmmaking in the 90s or 00s without bringing him up though. Transformers alone solidified the major studio obsession with using intellectual property for everything. Will Smith needs less reminding. Since he started making movies, he's been THE movie star of this generation, even more than Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, or - we forget - Adam Sandler. In both cases, Smith and Bay probably would've been fine without Bad Boys. It's also possible they wouldn't've been though, and imagine how things would've been different.

Personally, I have no fondness for the Bad Boys series. I'm not against them. They just never made a dent for me. In my mind, Bad Boys is the buddy cop series that wanted to look cool above all else. I remembering being less impressed by Bad Boys 2 than the original. Bad Boys 4 Life sounded like an awful and desperate idea. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are too old to be the coolest cops in Miami. While Michael Bay is no auteur, if he wasn't even willing to return to direct, what does that say about the idea? Even calling it Bad Boy 4 Life - a title clearly intended to be for a fourth installment - sounded desperate. They'd only use that title now if they felt certain this wouldn't earn another sequel, right?

To its credit, Bad Boys 4 Life addresses many of the concerns I had pretty directly. Mike (Will Smith) and Marcus (Martin Lawrence) aren't the spry young cops they used to be anymore. Marcus accepts this, deciding to go into retirement. Mike insists that he's the same physical specimen he's always been; that is, until he gets shot in a convoluted assassination attempt. You see, there's a Mexican witch (their words, not mine) who tasks her son with getting revenge on everyone who did their family wrong. And Mike did them wrong. By the time Mike is back in action, his job has been handed to a special task force called A.M.M.O., employing the likes of Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Charles Melton, and Paola Nunez. Nunez plays an old flame of Marcus'. This is a pretty obvious "pass the torch" movie, even though, let's be honest. Just like there's not Fast and the Furious without Vin Diesel, there's no Bad Boys without Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. The story actually gets a lot more needlessly complicated than this, but that's all I care to get into.

It's hard to say whether the movie believes the thesis that Marcus and Mike are too old for this. They say it a lot. Martin Lawrence certainly didn't commit to an intense training regiment to prepare for the movie. However, it takes Mike getting shot to slow him down. And it doesn't really slow him down. He's still doing a lot of "young man stunts" despite being less than a year removed from a life-threatening gunshot. I really would not have minded a couple scenes in which a more easily fatigued Mike tells Charles Melton to take this fight. Smith has been good lately about ceding the spotlight to others. Then again, I understand that, as much as I like her, Vanessa Hudgens wasn't the draw to this movie for anyone. I'd be fine of this was a launching pad for Melton, Hudgens, and Ludwig to get more action movies though. They fit in this movie well.

I'm told that Michael Bay didn't direct this movie, but I hardly noticed. This movie is still filled with explosions, hero shots, and over-the-top staging. This series is still as much about excess as ever. So, props to the directing pair of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah in what I believe is their Hollywood directing debut. It probably helps that the Smith and Lawrence's chemistry works in nearly any scenario.

Bad Boys 4 Life is a movie I enjoyed through all the eye rolls. I got a few good chuckles. The action is constant enough that I wasn't bored very often. Smith still holds the screen like few others. The movie certainly plays more to established fans than casual or unfamiliar viewers. It's just all very extra. Mike can't just be slow because he's getting older. He has to get shot. Marcus can't just be "getting too old for this shit". He has to have a grandson named after him to rethink his priorities. They can't just get pulled back into the case because Mike was shot. Someone else close to them has to be killed. Then there's the third act twist that is an insane story escalation. A movie like Bad Boys 4 Life tends to need to win me over with the details: how it stages action scenes in the middle of the movie, the banter between the leads, etc. BB4L is missing a lot of that. It gets the big stuff right though, which is why it's a movie I happily enjoyed once and have no intention to see again.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend