The bad news is that the DCU cinematic is in a sorry state of affairs. Warner Brothers, IMO, screwed the pooch, opting to rush flicks out in a frenzied attempt to compete with Marvel, rather than go the slow route and build a coherent universe where all the films connect to one another, as Marvel made. They might have lost profits by going slow in the beginning but now, as the Marvel universe begins to slow down and fizzle out, DCU would be hitting its stride.
Where DCU has done its best is with characters that heretofore never had much in the way of movie fanfare. Thus Wonder Woman and Aquaman have been knocking it out of the park. Meanwhile, Shazam, who is, one might argue, DC’s joke character (like how Antman is Marvel’s joke character), is also great. You would think old standards like Batman and Superman would be best but they’ve been done so much that apparently no one knows how to weave them into this world.
For those of you who don’t remember the first Shazam, Billy Badsen is a foster kid, very sad and lonely when a wizard bestows upon him god-like superpowers. By saying “Shazam!” he turns from wayward boy to adult champion (Asher Angel plays young Billy while Zachary Levi plays Shazam Billy.)
The cool part of a sequel is it gets to build the universe. You already learned the rules from the first film so now the writers can waste no time inviting you to play in the sandbox. Billy and his foster family of siblings all have Shazam powers now and they use them to save Philadelphia from catastrophe and villainy. Alas, they are often unappreciated as the populace wonders who appointed them to watch over the city and the news media focuses on their mistakes rather than all the lives they save.
Enter into this mix Hespera and Kalypso (Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu), daughters of the titan Atlas, who have a bone to pick with the Shazam family or Shazamily for an inadvertent mistake they made in the first film. The world, of course, is at stake and the sisters have all kinds of ghastly powers from being able to make people go insane to conjuring up dragons and monsters.
It’s up to the Shazamily to save the day and they’ll do so while navigating the pitfalls of growing up. When you have a movie about kids who sometimes operate in adult bodies, there’s always a line that has to be straddled about what is and is not appropriate, and the writers and actors walk it well with various jokes where the kids in adult bodies and adult actors playing those kids come across as naive and not understanding of various situations where an actual adult would know better.
Djimon Hounsou reprises his role as the Wizard who gave the kids their powers, at times glad and disappointed he did, depending on how well the battles are going.
Perhaps you might remember there was a Superman from the neck down cameo in the last film and at that time I opined it kinda sucked that WB/DC isn’t able to bring all their talent together in the way Marvel/Disney did. There’s a cameo from another top hero, this time from the neck up, indicating Shazam has convinced the execs that such appearances are worth the money. Still, while it’s a good movie, I just think DC missed an opportunity to really build a world the way Marvel did.
I have been avoiding this show for a while. I love comedy and I have long believed that comedians are the unsung heroes of Hollywood. Laughter is an involuntary response, you can’t hold it back when the humor floodgates call, so anyone who can make it happen has a gift.
One such gifted person is Bill Hader, who I would argue is perhaps one of, if not the best celebrity impressionists of his generation. Like Dana Carvey, who I admired as a kid, Hader was SNL’s go to guy for mocking the famous. He just has that uncanny ability to change his face, to change his voice, to mimic another person, make you think he’s them for awhile, then make you laugh as he does funny things as that person.
But Dana Carvey, the great SNL impressionist of a previous generation, made cinematic forays outside of SNL and flopped, with the exception of his Garth character in Wayne’s World. Sometimes comedic actors go the dramatic route with great success, as Adam Sandler did in Punch Drunk Love or Uncut Gems, then again their dramatic efforts flop, like Adam Sandler in Spanglish.
All of this is my longwinded way of explaining why I avoided this show for years because I felt like by trying to do drama, Hader was like Michael Jordan who could have given us a few more seasons of his great NBA career, but decided to fizzle as a baseball player instead. Surely, Bill should do his own sketch comedy show and keep capitalizing on his comedy gift rather than do something different.
But honestly, this show works and I’m glad I finally started watching it. Alas, I started watching it a few weeks ago only to discover it ended this year. I’m half way through so if you know how it ends, don’t tell me.
The premise? Hader’s protagonist Barry is a battle-hardened Afghanistan war veteran, having seen and done some awful things that haunt him to this day. He is emotionally crippled, distant and depressed, yearning for a happier life but happiness is an emotion that eludes him. From the start, I wondered if this character choice was on purpose, as it allows Hader to play a dramatic role without having to display a range of emotion as usually the best comedians can only play a funny person but struggle when they have to play someone who is up, down or in the middle. Make no mistake that throughout the series, Barry experiences a range of emotion, but in such a frazzled way that you can tell he’s such a depressed guy that we should all just applaud him for getting out of bed in the morning.
The show rests that on that old Hollywood cliche that war veterans can’t function in a civilian job that doesn’t require killing. I would argue that there are cops, firefighters, security guards, veterans working in paramilitary jobs and doing well but ok, Barry doesn’t have their mental stability. Got it.
And so, at the start of the show, we learn that Barry is a hitman in the employ of his handler/father figure Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root, another veteran character actor you might know as the voice of Bill on King of the Hill).
To the show’s credit, the life of a hitman is not sugar coated. There are so many hitman shows/movies where the hitman is very suave and sophisticated and conveniently only dispatches bad people so that the audience doesn’t dislike him. All the people who ever get killed are very bad, usually criminals and killers themselves.
Sure, Barry deep-sixes plenty of baddies, but as a murderer for hire, he kills plenty of people who arguably don’t deserve it. Spouses who want revenge on a cheating spouse or the spouse’s lover, people who would stand to benefit if someone else was out of the picture, bottomline if you want someone dead and you know how to reach Fuches, and you’re willing to pay, then Barry will kill that problem person in your life, zero morality questions asked.
Oh, and if there’s a witness, just some poor schmuck who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Barry will shuffle that person off their mortal coil as well. We even get a look into the sad lives of family members of those whose loved ones were taken from them by Barry. Their suffering is very real.
All in all, this isn’t your standard hit man show. The real consequences of a death for cash biz are seen.
Then how, you might ask, is this show funny? Truth be told, it is a very dark comedy.
As our show begins, Barry tracks a target to LA, only to discover the dude he’s been hired to snuff is an aspiring actor. He stalks said target to an acting class run by the wacky Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler in literally his best role since Fonzi.)
As he sits back and watches the fledgling thespians work on their craft, Barry instantly falls in love with the acting profession, seeing it as a way to work through his own emotional problems as what is acting other than humans trying to understand and recreate emotions?
And thus our anti-hero’s journey begins. Much to Fuches’ dismay, Barry dives into the world of acting, going to acting classes, trying out for parts in plays and movies, the works. Not the best move for a man who has committed multiple heinous crimes because you know, the more famous you get, the more people will sniff around your past.
Somehow, Barry must learn to juggle his acting work with his hitman work. It’s not a profession that is easily quit. Fuches keeps dragging him back in, as does NoHo Hank, Anthony Carrigan in a show stealing role as a Chechen mobster who is a fan of Barry’s murderous skills and won’t take no for an answer when it comes to dispatching his rivals. The humor in this character comes from a guy with an outlandish Russian accent saying very silly American things. The best description I can give is if Dan Akroyd and Steve Martin’s hard partying, East European accented “wild and crazy guys” from 70s SNL had a grown up son.
As if he didn’t have enough to hide, Barry finds a love interest in Sally (Sarah Goldberg), a fellow struggling actor from Cousineau’s class. If you divide the show into two halves, one part is about Barry’s murderous secret life and the other part is about Barry and Sally navigating the ins and outs of Hollywood, from those early years where they struggle to get any part, to those later years when they find success but have to deal with schmuck executives who want to water down their success in the name of profits. And of course, Barry is always murdering people between auditions and then going to great lengths to cover it up.
The true show stealer here is our beloved Fonz. Cousineau is portrayed as one of the most despised and reviled actors in Hollywood, his behavior so boorish that he was blackballed from ever getting a part again and subsists on his own personal acting studio where he overcharges young naive wannabes for copies of his lousy book, his lessons and other products unlikely to get them anywhere. “No refunds” is his constant refrain.
As the show progresses, occasional real-life actors playing themselves stop by just to dump on Cousineau and relay to the audience the horrors of what this self-absorbed prick has done to them. People who work behind the scenes also have tales to tell. One producer humorously recounts a story about how as a young production assistant, Cousineau threw an omelette at him, plate and all, because he forgot the chives.
But like Barry, Gene is on his own journey toward growth and change, trying to make amends for the wrongs he did in his youth and convince the industry that he offended to give him one last shot as an old man. Barry becomes torn between dueling father figures, the handler that wants him to keep killing for money, the acting coach who wants him to be a success, and of course, the girlfriend/love of his life who would be horrified if she knew about his night job.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Again, don’t tell me what happens if you know, but I’m wagering the ending is not happy. While I can’t say the show is realistic (I don’t think anyone could kill as many people as Barry has without being caught in the first season) it doesn’t sugar coat things and it recognizes that bad deeds lead to bad consequences so those who do bad eventually get theirs.
My one criticism would be the episodes are a half hour and the whole series feels like it could all be just one season. It all centers around Barry trying to be an actor and being with Sally but getting pulled back into crime by Fuches and Hank and if the show had been given more seasons, who knows what villains Barry might have encountered by day while he scores those big parts by day.
Watch on HBO Max, which is now just Max. How pretentious. Bonus that some of Hader’s past SNL friends stop by once in a while.
I think Alohamight have some competition when it comes to the worst film I’ve seen in 2015.
(Although that could change if I ever bring myself to sit through Mortdecai.)
Bookshelf Q. Battler here with a review of the furry family film Max.
OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING
Movieclips Trailers – Max
Before I go on a tangent, let me begin by saying I get it. I’m not this movie’s target audience. It was meant as a family drama – a dog that the kids can root for combined with action that parents might prefer over listening to a resounding chorus of Elsa’s “Let it Go” for the 1,000th time.
To the film’s credit, it raises public awareness of the risks taken by military dogs and their handlers by pointing out the statistic that since 2003, 26 dogs and 25 handlers have died in combat. A montage of real war dogs and their handlers starting from World War I, up through Vietnam and all the way to modern wars is heartwarming and sad, so much so that I debated whether or not to make fun of this film at all.
But what the hell, I’m going to.
The movie starts off with a noble premise. Dog handler Kyle dies in an explosion in Afghanistan. Prior to his tragic end, we witness Max’s ability to sniff out guns and bombs and to even engage in recon (the furry guy marches ahead of his human companion to check out whether things are safe.)
After returning stateside, Max is having a hard time without his handler. He’s violent towards everyone except Justin, Max’s younger brother. The military wants to put Max down but instead, Justin and his parents take the pooch in.
Ultimately, the first half of the film is a glorified Hallmark Channel movie. Kyle’s family is having a tough time being without their lost son/brother. Max is depressed without his buddy. Together, family and dog bond and learn how to fight the pain that’s come their way.
Not really a blockbuster idea for a movie, but I’m not about to begrudge a film that brings the hardships of deceased soldiers’ families (and their dogs) to the forefront of a public that often forgets how tough service men and women have it.
But then the film takes an odd turn.
I don’t know how it happened, but in my mind, I picture a Hollywood suit saying something like, “We need to liven things up here!”
Enter the bizarre subplot that takes over the whole film.
As it turns out, Tyler, a soldier who was Kyle’s friend during the war, has been stealing enemy guns (found by military dogs), bringing them to America and selling them to Mexican cartel gangsters.
Because if there’s one thing family films need, it’s an international arms dealing conspiracy.
Somehow Max is aware of this and growls at Tyler whenever he’s in the room though the rest of the family just embraces him as Kyle’s beloved friend. (I have no idea how Max, who you might recall, is a dog, figured out that Tyler’s dirty. Maybe the military investigators kept him in the loop.)
Not to be outdone, Tyler treats Max as an enemy that needs to be dispatched before his ill gotten misdeeds are discovered. At one point, Tyler slanders Max to Justin and Kyle’s father, Ray, telling Ray a fib that Kyle died because Max botched his duties as a military dog (when in fact, Max was totally a pro the entire time, not to mention the best actor in the whole film, which isn’t saying much.)
In what quite literally may be the dumbest moment in cinematic history, Ray, after hearing Tyler’s deceit, pulls a gun on Max in the manner of how, say in a cop movie, one cop might draw on someone who’s betrayed him.
I was left sitting there, wondering why I wasted money and time on this stupidity, fighting back the urge to yell at Ray, “Dude. It’s just a dog!”
Other notable dumb moments:
#1 – A military man, upon turning over top secret government information to Justin states something like, “I shouldn’t really be giving this to you.” Don’t worry, military man. I’m sure army dudes always turn over top secret info to plucky teenagers with no security clearance all the time
#2- Chuy and Carmen – Justin’s best friend, Chuy, and Chuy’s cousin Carmen/Justin’s love interest form a trio of kids who take down the international arms dealing ring. In my mind, they actually prove to be two of the more enjoyable characters in the movie. However, there was a not so subtle effort to get the point across that these are a couple of hispanic kids hanging out with a white kid. It almost reeked of, “HEY! HEY EVERYONE! LOOK! THIS MOVIE IS DIVERSE! A WHITE KID IS FRIENDS WITH HISPANIC KIDS!”
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great if kids of all races hang out and become buddies. But then there’s abysmal dialog like this. (I might not have it exactly down but here’s close to it):
CHUY: You’re in love with the white boy. You’re a traitor to your race.
CARMEN: Mexican isn’t a race, idiot!
I…I don’t know where to begin with that one. Oh, and then Chuy and Carmen have like a dozen dogs living in their house. Oh and the gangster facilitating the deal between Tyler and the Cartel is a relative of Chuy and Carmen because…oh God I don’t know, I guess someone somewhere assumed there couldn’t possibly just be a nice hispanic family and a hispanic gangster residing in the same town unless they’re all related.
#3 – There were some cool 80’s style kids on bikes scenes. (The 80’s were infamous for kids’ movies in which kids rode to glory and saved the day on their bikes.) Usually, bikes aren’t exactly a match for international arms smugglers though.
(But seriously, all fun aside, Chuy and Carmen are the only characters that make the second half of the film watchable (barely).
#4 – Tyler and one of his cronies pull a frame job on Max, convincing authorities that Max was the perpetrator of an unjustified attack, just to get the canine out of the picture because…I don’t know. I guess Tyler’s concerned that Max will woof to the police or something. (It’s a dog!!!)
In short, I am a movie buff. I have seen thousands of films in my life, some spectacular, some not so much and others just in the middle. Once I’ve plunked down my cash and started watching, I stay through the end.
I stayed through the end of this one, but this was literally the first film I’ve watched where I just kept checking the time and saying to myself, “Please God, let this be over.”
In short, no I’m not a family looking for something to do over this holiday weekend. If you are, you and your kids might very well enjoy this film. Personally, I think it should have stuck with the “sad family adopts angry dog and they all learn and grow together” angle because the international arms dealing conspiracy is where it truly jumped the shark.
STATUS: An A+ for educating the public about the important role played by military dogs and their handlers, only to denigrate into D- territory once the gun running plot is introduced. Your kids might like this one, but please keep it off my shelf.
PS – It’s kind of too bad because, taken seriously, a movie in which soldiers and their dogs kick ass and take names on the battlefield, if done correctly, has all the potential for an awesome blockbuster.
Bookshelf Battle 