"Shazam!"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

For this review, I was planning to watch “Avengers: Endgame”, because it is a big deal and everyone is going crazy about it. But then I thought maybe I shouldn’t, because I haven’t seen all of the “Avengers” movies (I only have so many hours set aside for this series that is reproducing with rabbit-like rapidity) and so I probably wouldn’t do it the justice its avid fans would like, or demand, of a review.

So I saw a different superhero movie. You might be thinking, “Oh, you saw ‘Captain Marvel’.” I did not. “Hellboy?” Nope. “Is ‘Black Panther’ still in the theater?” No … or, I don’t know … But, anyway, the movie I saw was “Shazam!” Now you might be thinking, “Huh, you mean that Shaq movie from the 90s?” No, that was “Kazaam” (though, I admit, I flirted with this mistake too).

“Shazam!” is not a kids’ movie featuring Shaq as a genie. But it does feature kids and magic. One such kid is Thaddeus Sivana (Ethan Pugiotto). He’s got a mean dad and brother, and, on one cold night in 1974, they are having a fight in the car when, magically, Sivana gets whisked away to another realm where a wizard (Djimon Hounsou) tells Sivana he is looking for a new champion to help round up the Seven Deadly Sins, which were released on Earth awhile back.

But Sivana is a bad boy who is tempted by the Sins, so Wizard sends him back to the car, where Thaddeus makes a ruckus, distracts his dad, and causes a car crash.

Zoom ahead to present day and another bad boy, Billy Batson (Asher Angel), is making his own ruckus around town. Like Sivana, he’s got some parental issues—namely, his parents abandoned him and so he was forced to bounce around various foster families. However, unlike Sivana, Billy finally ends up with a cool foster family (an impossibly cool foster family), including parents who care and foster siblings who are polite and caring (again, impossibly polite and caring). Billy’s roommate, Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer)—not to be confused with the Atlanta Braves first baseman—is all into superheroes and is especially cool.

Another way that Billy is not like Sivana is that Billy is deemed worthy to be the wizard’s champion. So the wizard makes him a superhero—i.e., Shazam (Zachary Levi). Shazam is super fast and strong, bulletproof, and can shoot electricity out of his body.

At first Billy/Shazam just plays around with his powers, like any kid would, and doesn’t really use them for good. But then Freddy, who, again, knows all about superheroes and so knows how they ought to act, calls him out on it (basically: “With great power comes … yada yada yada”).

And then, also, Sivana—now Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong)—reemerges as a super villain and, after killing his mean dad and brother, comes after Shazam. So Billy/Shazam kind of has to kick it into gear and play the superhero.

So there’s a fight, and it’s like kids vs. adults, and it looks hopeless, then not, and then … well, I’ll let you guess. If your guess is based on your knowledge of some very standard, unoriginal superhero plot, your guess is probably completely right.

So, yeah, “Shazam!” is unoriginal. I guess the foster-kid thing, and the parent problems in general, are supposed to be a different angle. (Though, don’t most superheroes have parent problems?) But it’s all like flat soda: No fizz. No pop.

And insofar as you like epic superhero battles, “Shazam!” is likely to disappoint you. That’s only the last little bit of the movie. The bulk of the time is spent on uncompelling backstory and adolescent hijinks.

Now, I didn’t loathe “Shazam!”—and, to be fair, it seems like a lot of other people liked it. I just didn’t know why I should care about it or its characters, or why I should be interested in it, or, indeed, why I should want to watch it.

I guess I should have seen “Avengers: Endgame”. Alas.

"Us"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Before filming “Us,” writer/director Jordan Peele had his cast watch certain horror movies so they could all be on the same page. They included “The Shining”, “Funny Games”, “Let the Right One in”, “The Birds”, and “The Sixth Sense”. These movies are all super atmospheric. They make impending doom visceral and pervasive, like a thick, noxious fog settling in around you, enveloping you, obscuring your vision, filling your lungs. These movies are horrifying in part because the malevolence they portray is readily perceptible and yet at the same time mysterious, a-rational, and utterly unknowable. It’s not supernatural—at least not always—but it sure isn’t natural either.

And that’s how “Us” starts out. A little girl in pigtails. Perfect, ruby-red candy apple in hand. A stormy night on an eerie beachside boardwalk with her inattentive, bickering parents. Glittering lights. Dark corners. Screaming rollercoaster-riders. Carnies. Freaks.

And yet Adelaide Wilson (Madison Curry), innocent and naïve as she is, doesn’t perceive these poisonous vapors settling in around her. As her drunken father distracts himself with a carnival game, she wanders off—past a grizzled man holding a piece of cardboard with “Jeremiah 11:11” written on it, by some nefarious-looking teens, and down the steps toward the beach, where Adelaide finds a funhouse-looking thing that says “Find yourself” next to a big, blinking arrow pointing into its dark depths.

If Adelaide would have had time to look up the proselytizer’s passage, she would have learned it reads, “Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.” Don’t go in the funhouse, Adelaide!

She drops her candy apple and scampers inside. Outside, the clouds rumble, lightning peals, and, suddenly, the lights go out in the “fun” house. Adelaide whistles to lighten the mood. Someone whistles back. Adelaide does not, as advertised, find herself in what turns out to be a maze and hall of mirrors. Instead she finds another child much like her. Exactly like her—her spitting image—waiting for her, calm, still … but angry.

Fast forward 30 or so years and, somehow, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is a well-adjusted woman with a lovely little family—a husband, daughter, and son, all portrayed neatly in one of those cute little stickers on the back of their car as they head to their vacation home by the beach.

Adelaide seems normal enough. But she doesn’t feel totally normal as she finds herself, by happenstance, at the same beachfront where the incident took place so many years ago. Despite her anxiety, and the pleading reminders from the score that terror is lurking, everything looks all right at first.

But then a family shows up. It’s late at night. And an unidentified foursome is just standing there, all in a row—kind of like that sticker on the car—right outside Adelaide’s house. As this other family sees to inviting themselves in, Adelaide’s son, Jason (Evan Alex), offers a partial identification: “It’s us.” Indeed, the intruding family appears to be a carbon copy of Adelaide’s family. Exactly alike in appearance.

Who are they? What do they want? What are they going to do? These are some natural questions—questions that, of course, don’t get answered right away. Instead the truth is revealed slowly and painfully amid all sorts of intensity, brutality, helplessness, hopelessness, and horror.

Though, to be honest, I say the horror in “Us” abates a bit once the second family shows up. It’s just a different kind of movie, and the intense, mysterious atmosphere dissipates and gives way to a grizzlier, more in-your-face—though I think less terrifying—kind of film.

One way or another, “Us” remains super intense throughout. And it gets more complex as it goes on, both plot-wise and thematically. Peele kicks around ideas about class structure, systematic oppression, and deep, psychological questions about the self. Which are fun to think about. This movie is also well written, acted, shot, composed, etc. In short, it’s a good movie.

But it doesn’t quite live up to its promise or cinematic inspirations (e.g., “The Shining,” “Funny Games,” “The Birds,” etc.). While the mood set in the earlier part of the film would have made Hitchcock and Kubrick proud, it does not maintain this oppressive aura throughout. We get relief, or something near enough. Which is a bad thing for a horror movie to give.

Furthermore, the thematic material—about class, oppression, the self—while interesting, doesn’t really deliver the goods either. It’s as if Peele wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do, what he wanted the doppelganger families to represent, or what he wanted to say. He had some interesting ideas and just threw them out there for us to go Rorschach on.

Which is a little disappointing. Though certainly not disappointing enough to ruin the overall cinematic accomplishment of Peele’s sophomore run.

"The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

In the past few years—since the release of the first “Lego Movie”—a lot of people have come to realize, or at least feel, that everything’s not awesome. Like, in the world—not everything’s awesome. Nor is everything cool, even when you’re part of a team.

And if not everything is awesome in the real world, well then, I suppose it may not be awesome in the Lego world either. And, indeed, in “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part,” it’s not. Just as the broader state of the world can be a major buzz kill, so too untoward environmental dynamics can rain on Finn’s (Jadon Sand) Lego parade.

The destabilizing baby-in-chief in Finn’s world is his sister. She wants to play too. But in her own way. And the pre-existing tenants of their local Lego world—which, recall, include Emmet (Christ Pratt), Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), MetalBeard (Nick Offerman), Benny (Charlie Day), and so many others—are rightly terrified by this development.

Emmett, ever the optimist, tries to reach out to the new sister-made Lego Duplo creations. But things don’t go well. And before you know it, Bricksburg is Icksburg—a dystopian “heck” scape ala Mad Max.

Some of the more heroic Lego characters—particularly a bunch of the literal superheroes—head out to baby sister’s Lego world—i.e., the “Systar System”—to fight back, but when they don’t return, those who were left behind begin to lose hope.

Except, Emmet, that is. He’s still listening to his uplifting pop music, ordering super sugary coffee from a run-down coffee shack, waiving hi to all these mean biker dudes and terrifying robots, and, well, I guess making the best of it all.

Until, that is, his best friends get taken away by General Sweet Mayhem (Stephanie Beatriz), the general of the Duplo army. It’s strange, actually. General Mayhem comes along to say that their leader—Queen Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish)—wants to marry the leader of Bricksburg (now Apocalypseburg), whoever that is.

Batman thinks it’s him, but then so do a bunch of other people, so General Mayhem takes them all away. Emmet is clearly not leadership material, so he gets left behind.

But that’s when Emmet finally sounds the alarm, gets pissed, kicks it into gear, and pursues the enemy. With the help of a familiar sounding bad boy, Rex Dangervest (Chris Pratt), Emmet makes it to the Systar System where his friends are being held.

Well but now they’re not actually being held. It’s more just where they live now. They seem happy and content. Almost too content. And Queen Wa’Nabi is nice, I suppose, but in a creepy I-may-actually-dismember-you sort of way.

But Emmet and Rex don’t buy it. Neither does Wyldstyle. They think everyone has been brainwashed. So it is up to them—or at least they think it is up to them—to shake everyone back to reality, or what they think is reality.

While watching “The Lego Movie 2” I laughed just about as much as I expected to laugh. Pretty close. Which, first and foremost, is praise for the movie, because I expected to laugh a lot. I liked “The Lego Movie” and really liked “The Lego Batman Movie”. And this sequel is cut from the same witty cloth.

Like the previous movies, “The Lego Movie 2” is funny, irreverent, fast-paced, and quirky in all the right ways. Kids will love all the fast action, exploding Legos, and slapstick humor, while parents will crack up at sharp puns and cultural references. So, yeah, this is a Lego movie. And that’s a good thing.

But, with that said, I didn’t laugh more than I was expecting. And I liked “The Lego Batman Movie” better. Also, while the moral in “The Lego Movie 2” is both well executed and timely—and I really do appreciate its addressing the not awesomeness in life—it won’t exactly blow you away with its profundity.

So “The Lego Movie 2” is, you know, good. Not great. But good.

Roma

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Cleodegaria “Cleo” Gutierrez’s  (Yalitza Aparicio) life is, in many ways, not her own. She’s not a slave exactly. She’s a live-in-maid for a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 19070s. But almost everything she does—every decision she makes—she does with an eye toward her employers’ needs.

Take the kids, for example. Cleo is basically a second mother (or more like the first mother) to the four kids in the family she works for—certainly she does more of the thankless, nitty-gritty work than Sra. Sofia (Marina de Tavira), the family’s matriarch. Furthermore, when Cleo learns that she herself is a mother-to-be, among the first things she considers is whether she can keep her job, how the family will react, etc.

This isn’t the only part of Cleo’s life that is wrong-way-round. She typically only gets off work after everyone else is in bed, so her social life is rarified, to put it mildly. And even the dynamics of the family she serves—strife and all—affect, beset, and toss Cleo about as if it was her family, her world, her life.

One could imagine this setup playing out in various different ways. For example, one could call to mind Alice from “The Brady Bunch”—an ever present part of the family who is represented as being happy and well adjusted.

On the other hand, it’s easy to take a more bleak perspective on Cleo’s plight. After all, she’s a paid actor in others’ drama. She does what others want her to do, and she does it how they want her to do it. Again, in this way, her life is not her own. Which sounds bleak.

However, in “Roma”, Cleo isn’t portrayed along either extreme. The picture is more complex and nuanced. On the one hand, Cleo’s predicament seems problematic, unfortunate, and borne of a clearly immoral system. But, on the other hand, it’s hard to escape the feeling that her life is deeply good—sad but beautiful. When Cleo, who should have never been in this situation—this life, this exploitation, this hardship, this unfair and inexcusable ordeal—embraces a family that is not her own, and clasps them together within her shielding arms, the feeling is just, thank God Cleo is here.

Now, of course this feeling is totally problematic. After all, that Cleo is desperately needed can hardly excuse her subjugation. It doesn’t somehow make it right, or even O.K.

But “Roma” is not about telling you how it is, morally speaking. This is not a sermon or stump speech. It is a look at the life and spirit, the ups and bitter downs, of a woman who the world overlooks. It does not depict the triumph of an ordinary life. Instead it shows its depth. Cleo’s life isn’t glamorous. It is hard and often boring and sometimes fun but never buoyed by sustained pleasure. Yet it is not meaningless. Far from it.

“Roma” is a beautiful film. It is careful and measured. It does not grasp beyond its reach or stumble into the traps of political or social bloviation. It is transcendently modest—in its acting, directing, cinematography, and so on. It cherishes everyday life without exaggerating or even particularly exalting it. It finds meaning in simple things—not just pleasures, but pains also. This is the stuff of life.

"Ralph Breaks the Internet"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Some people can’t help but wreck everything. Take Ralph (John C. Reilly). Whether it’s bricks and stone, windows and doors, or indeed, as it turns out, even if it’s things as diverse in kind as cityscapes, the World Wide Web, and personal relationships, Ralph—aka “Wreck-It Ralph”—was born to lay things asunder.

He can’t help it really, God bless his oafish soul. Although, as we know from “Wreck-It Ralph”, he is a sweet guy when it comes down to it, Ralph’s DNA—i.e., his gaming code—precludes delicacy. Everything Midas touched turned to gold; everything Ralph touches turns to rubble.

Which is why it is a minor miracle that, six years into his relationship with Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman)—a hotshot racecar driver from the Sugar Rush arcade game—their friendship is, not just intact, but thriving. They hang out every night in the arcade—they tell jokes, play guessing games, and sneak into other arcade games.  Vanellope sometimes says she’s bored—mostly because her game is too simple. But, if you ask Ralph, everything is perfect.

That is, until he breaks Vanellope’s game. Dammit, Ralph! He was trying to help—he was trying to fix Vanellope’s boredom by adding a track to her game. But, as usual, Ralph just mucked everything up. Specifically, he breaks a piece of Sugar Rush. So the game gets shut down. Now Vanellope is game-less—which, for a video game character, means she’s like homeless or something. Just great, Ralph.

But Ralph is going to fix it. He hears that the broken part from Vanellope’s game is up for auction on EBay. So Ralph and Vanellope use the arcade’s recently acquired wifi to travel into the world wild web. Luckily, they find EBay, move right into their auction, and quickly win the bid for the part. Easy as that.

But, small technicality: They don’t have any money. Oops.

Still, Ralph is determined to fix what he broke. So he puts together a bunch of viral videos—e.g., one of him imitating other famous characters, one where he does the cinnamon challenge, one where he just chomps his food really loudly in front of a camera—to gain likes, which of course means advertising, which of course means money money money.

Meanwhile Vanellope is off doing her own thing around the internet. And she’s loving life. Her old game was very simple, very predictable, and thus very monotonous. But the internet … oh, the internet. The possibilities are endless. She races ultra-fast cars on new and exciting tracks, has slumber parties with Disney princesses, participates in heists, and, in her downtime, shoots hoops. For the first time in a long time, Vanellope feels like she could have an exciting future in front of her.

But then there’s Ralph. That’s not how he feels—he just wants to get back to the arcade and spend his days hanging out with Vanellope. And he can’t see how anyone could feel differently. So, for all the fixin’ Ralph has done (or at least tried to do), all is not right in his world.

Maybe that’s just life. Maybe, sometimes, for someone like Ralph, the best way to not break something is quit trying to fix it.

And so, as with the original “Wreck-It Ralph”, this movie packs in a nice little moral. When the moment comes, the point, or perspective, is delivered with feeling and impressive emotional subtlety. It’s not a particularly drawn-out moment—the depths of its import are hardly plumbed here—but, still, it’s nice.

More generally, “Ralph Breaks the Internet” is consistently charming. Take just about any scene and you’ll find yourself amused and endeared.

However, one could complain—and I do hereby complain—that, for the most part, this movie is totally formulaic. It’s as if the only standard for success for movies like this is that they string together a bunch of likeable scenes. Set aside whether it all hangs together in an innovative or interesting way. Forget the fact that a story is more than the sum of its parts. Just be happy at each moment. That’s enough.

Yeah, well, maybe it is enough—and it almost certainly is for “Ralph Breaks the Internet”. It would just be nice to see the best of the best—the movies that break the box office and wow the critics—being a bit better.

"Mid90s"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Stevie (Sunny Suljic)—a 13-year-old boy growing up in LA in the mid-90s—is a sweet kid. But he doesn’t have anyone to look up to. His dad is gone. His mom is, well, mom. And his older brother is just about the biggest tool in the shed.

So I guess it’s no surprise that Stevie looks elsewhere for role models. And, to his mom’s chagrin, what he finds is a bunch of foul-mouthed skateboarders. Ray (Na-kel) is the leader of the pack. He’s the best skateboarder—he’s really good—and he’s also the coolest. Then F_S_ (Olan Prenatt) is next in age, talent, and coolness level. He’s the clown of the group. Whereas Ray is serious about his skating—he wants to go pro—F_S_ just wants to skate and party and not take anything too seriously. He thinks trying too hard is “cheesy”.

Then there is Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), who is mostly-quiet, videos everything, and apparently got his name because he’s only as smart as a fourth grader. Finally, there’s Ruben (Gio Galicia), a somewhat younger kid with a stony, brash exterior, but maybe only because he has some serious stuff going on at home (which he rarely visits).

That’s the crew. You get some vague sense that they go to school some of the time, but, really, it’s like the never ending summer for these skateboarders. They skate and hangout and skate and party (booze, cigarettes, drugs, girls) and skate, skate, skate until the sun goes down.

All this skating in “Mid90s” is occasionally interrupted with the awkward, sometimes poignant, moments that constitute growing up. Stevie has his first beer. He hooks up with a girl for the first time. He fights with his brother, but then has a talk about how their parents let them down. He hears about how Ruben’s dad beats him, how Fourth Grade can barely afford socks, and about how the tragedies in Ray’s family dwarf anything he has ever experienced.

Most of these characters are likable in their own ways. Despite teenagers in general being, well, the worst, it’s hard not to fall in love (actually, better say like) with some of these kids.

However, this is a short movie—only 84 minutes. So there’s not a lot of time for character development—especially the gradual, trickling character development that’s required for a coming-of-age movie like this. Aside from maybe Stevie and Ray, we are only left with hints of depth—we see a rag-tag bunch of larks that promise, but don’t really reveal, roundness of character.

Most coming-of-age flicks are all about the characters. “Mid90s” is also all about the nostalgia—about Super Nintendo, skateboarding videos, baggy jeans, and Nike high tops. This movie is bathed in the past, which, I expect, will be most effective for those of us who actually grew up in the mid-1990s.

This movie also reminds you—or me, at least—of how annoying teenagers are. Yeah, awkward moments can be charming. And, yeah, yeah, I know being carefree and even irresponsible is just part of growing up. Nonetheless, as I sit here on this side of puberty, watching and hearing these kids who, definitely more than average teens, are reckless, troubled, aimless, and often just plain mean, I can’t help but sympathize with Stevie’s mom, who thinks this particular gang of misfits ought to be disbanded.

I know we are supposed to feel that, dammit, these are Stevie’s people and that’s how it goes and that’s so important. But when is too much too much? Given how these kids are portrayed in the movie, I don’t know that I could fault Stevie’s mom if she decided to move to the middle of nowhere, or send her son to boarding school, or something—anything!

And I think all of this speaks to an awkward (though not necessarily damning) tension in Jonah Hill’s debut filmmaking. It’s kind of like the tension between Ray and F_S_—Ray is serious about what he does; F_S_ thinks being serious about anything is cheesy. Jonah Hill doesn’t seem quite sure whether he wants to be serious—whether he wants to make some point or rather just have some fun making a movie.

Much of the movie feels like the latter—like he’s just showing us, and reminding us, how it was growing up in a certain time and place. But then there are more serious moments, too, and, to give voice to the F_S_ side of me, many of these moments teeter, though maybe don’t quite topple, into cheesiness.

So what would I say about Jonah Hill’s first attempt at writing/directing? Uneven. But I would also say it shows promise. Maybe, hopefully, this movie is as much part of a coming-of-age tale—with all the usual awkwardness and bad decision-making—for its filmmaker as it is for its characters.

"A Simple Favor"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

The aptly named Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) is an annoyingly on-top-of-it mom. Most parents feel accomplished if just everyone still has a pulse at the end of the day. But not Stephanie. This single mom (that’s right, she does it by herself) is an ever-vigilant watcher of her son, Miles (Joshua Satine), she volunteers at Miles’ school far more than is required or needed or even wanted, she cooks gourmet dinners, and she puts Mr. Clean to shame, all while maintaining a cheerful demeanor and snappy appearance.

Oh, also, by the way, she has a popular mom’s video blog as well. Yeah, she’s on top of it.

Yet Stephanie doesn’t have any mom friends (I wonder why). She wants them. Desperately. But she just can’t find them.

That is, until Miles and his classmate, Nicky (Ian Ho), absolutely insist on having a play date. Stephanie is game. But then walks in Nicky’s mom, Emily (Blake Lively). Emily is smart and sharply dressed, but also busy, short-tempered, crass, and just wants to make it clear that she’s not having any of it, no matter what “it” is. She eventually agrees to the play date, but only because she’s lazy with her son and doesn’t want to put the effort into telling him no. Plus, it dawns on her that Stephanie is basically a free babysitter.

Stephanie and Emily end up getting to know each other a bit. And they are quite an odd pair. Whereas Stephanie is wholesome, sweet, a bit naïve, and, most of all, way into the whole mom thing, Emily doesn’t care, not ever a little bit, about the whole mom thing—path of least resistance for her—nor does she care about politeness, niceties, social convention, early-afternoon sobriety, or just about anything else other than her high-powered job in the fashion industry. Emily is doing Emily, and that’s about all there is to it.

Yet the relationship between Stephanie and Emily works for both of them. Stephanie has a mom friend—a hip one at that—and Emily has, well, someone to pick her kid up from school when she’s running late (which is a lot). It’s a strange relationship, to be sure. But it’s oddly symbiotic.

Then one day Emily goes missing. Earlier in the day she called Stephanie to ask her to pick up Nicky, which, as ever, Stephanie was happy to do. But then it was dinner time, and then bath time, and then bed time—and still no Emily. It’s only after several days that Stephanie is even able to get in touch with Nicky’s dad/Emily’s husband, Sean (Henry Golding). But he doesn’t know where Emily is either. No one does.

So Stephanie does what any good friend would do: She takes to her blog. She gives updates, encourages people to keep a look out for signs of Emily, shares her latest theories on what’s happened, and so on. Out of love for her friend, or maybe just boredom—what else is she gonna do now that her bestie is gone?—Stephanie takes on the role of detective, piecing together any clues that may lead to Emily.

As Stephanie digs deeper and deeper, it starts to look like Emily is not who she seemed. But, then, Stephanie ends up not being who she seemed either. I guess nothing is as it seemed.

Indeed, “A Simple Favor” is one big plot knot—twist after twist after tangled twist. These plot twists don’t exactly defy expectations, at least not by the end, because there are so many of them that you sort of just stop expecting things.

Which isn’t necessarily a criticism. Plot twists are nothing new, and there’s a way in which they can pretty easily start to make a movie feel gimmicky, even formulaic. But the unique set-up of this movie—a couple of martini-loving moms meeting for playdates—together with charming performances from Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, keep this movie feeling fresh and fun.

Sure, there are some moments to groan about—like when a dorky dad foils an attempted murder at the very last instant, as if that ever happens, in a way that definitely never happens, and then goes all preachy on the potential perpetrator about how parents stick together … blah, blah, blah. All right, there’s some of that. But, still, you could be doing worse than to sit back, grab a martini, and unwind with this people-pleaser while the kids do, well, whatever it is they want to do, as long as it’s in the other room.