Joe Johnson Writer

Tag: Movie

  • Novocaine

    Novocaine

    Jack Quaid is Nate Caine, a man born with a rare genetic disorder that makes him unable to feel pain. Comes in handy during a fight, but it makes dinner awkward when you have to remember not to bite your tongue off. Every superpower has a weakness, I guess.

    Nate is the assistant manager at a San Diego bank. He falls head-over-heels in love with Sherry (Amber Midthunder), the perky new girl who looks past his social awkwardness and discovers in him a kindred spirit. Then armed gunmen kick in the door and take Sherry hostage. They gun down a few cops and make their getaway, damsel in tow, and Nate gives chase in an abandoned squad car, kicking off the plot.

    As premises go, it’s a fun one. Nate is lousy in a fight and worse with a gun, but has that ace up his sleeve. His enemies can kill him, but they can’t hurt him. This leads to a couple good laughs when his opponents realize what they are up against. Like when Nate sticks his hand in a boiling deep fryer to retrieve a pistol without hesitating. It makes for some great spectacle.

    But, unfortunately, there’s not much else worth your time here.

    Novocaine is a great idea for a movie, and therein lies the problem. It feels more like an idea than the exploration of one.

    We care about Nate, because he is played by Jack Quaid with his trademark charm and wide-eyed earnestness. But we never really worry about him, because the script is simple and takes no real risks. Regardless of whether he can feel pain, shouldn’t the accumulation of injuries start to slow Nate down? It never seems to be an issue. There’s one scene where he patches a bullet wound with some super glue. Then he just moves on.

    There are other things that undermine the drama. You would think a few police officers being shot dead in the line of duty would elicit a big response from law enforcement, but nope. Everyone is on vacation. I guess the movie takes place during Christmas? They make a few comments about it being the holidays and never mention it again. Die Hard, this ain’t.

    There are only two cops on Nate’s trail. Budget cuts, I guess. At first, they think he was the inside man who aided the robbers. This sounds like it is going to twist the story in a fun direction, but no. The situation gets cleared up one scene later with a phone call. Nothing to see here.

    The movie can’t seem to decide whether it wants to go all-in on the comedy or the action. I think this could have been a great film if it leaned harder to the left or the right. I’d love to see what someone like John Wick director Chad Stahelski would do with this material. Instead, the directors of Novocaine opt to be a jack (see what I did there) of all trades and master of none.

    It’s okay to be a movie with a gimmick, but you have to transcend it if you want people to care. Novocaine doesn’t even try.

  • Mickey 17

    Mickey 17

    Robert Pattinson, a.k.a. Mickey 17, lies at the bottom of an ice crevice. Blood pools beneath him. He cannot move. A shout echoes from above. A person waves. It’s Steven Yeun. He repels down. “Oh, thank goodness,” he says. “Your flamethrower wasn’t damaged. These are expensive, you know.” He fastens it to his back and prepares to climb back up. Then he hesitates and kneels down next to our hero.

    “Hey Mickey,” he says, his grin widening, “what is it like to die?”

    It is sometime in the future. Mankind has perfected the science of cloning. Humans who die can be brought back to life with their prior memories intact. The practice is outlawed on Earth. The creator of this technology used it create multiple versions of himself as an alibi to cover up his crimes as a serial killer. That seems like a lot of effort to get away with murder, but never mind. Why the rest of humanity would forgo any the chance at immortality is never adequately explained.

    The hero, Mickey, is played by Pattison as a mumbling halfwit. He signs up to join a corporate-run expedition to colonize another planet. He doesn’t dream of being a pioneer. He’s just looking to escape his debt to a loan shark. There are thousands of other applicants. To stand out, Mickey signs on to be an “expendable.”

    The recruiting agent stares at him. “Did you read all the fine print?” Mickey blinks half-glazed eyes. “…uhm. Yeah?”

    See, duplicating people is illegal on Earth, but acceptable once you get to international waters—err, I mean, outer space. The only restriction is that if you discover multiples of the same person, they must be destroyed on sight and the memory data purged.

    As the only expendable on the crew, Mickey is assigned all the worst jobs. He dies a lot. I think it is meant to be funny, but there’s no comic timing or payoff. A swinging antenna lops off one of his arms. “Oh man, did you see that?” a voice on the radio howls. A crew member notices Mickey still breathing inside his body bag. “He’s still alive!” Another man shrugs. “Not for long.” He tosses him into the incinerator. Sometimes, the science team forgets to pay attention while Mickey’s new body slides out of the printer. In one scene, he just plops out headfirst on the floor while people go about their business. Whoops. Ho ho ho.

    I imagine this is supposed to endear us to Mickey and his plight. It’s a shame, then, that he’s insufferable. Pattison plays him as pathetic sad sack who narrates the proceedings in a nasally whine. There’s never any attempt to give him a drive or a goal. He exists to suffer abuse at the hands of the supporting cast. A young security officer falls in love with him, presumably because he looks like Robert Pattinson.

    Every other character is an aggressively unpleasant caricature. There is nothing funny about them, because we do not believe them as characters. There is no kernel of truth or understanding or relatability to make the humor ring with truth. Instead, they wobble about, shouting and gesticulating in a constant stream of idiocy that is intended to be a satire, but of what, I couldn’t say.

    Mickey is eventually left for dead on this new planet but is saved by the enormous potato bugs that inhabit it. When he returns to the ship, he discovers they have already printed another Mickey. Number 18 is smarter and more aggressive for reasons that are never explained. At first, they fight, then they conspire to stay alive.

    The villains are Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and Ylfa (Toni Collette). Marshall is a former politician and secretly has some sort of vague eugenics scheme for the new world. His wife, Ylfa, is obsessed with sauce. They don’t so much chew the scenery as they devour entire sets. Ruffalo seems to be channeling some sort of Donald Trump character, but it’s hard to fathom what director Boon Jung Ho is trying to say.

    I guess this is all supposed to be a scathing indictment of late-stage capitalism and the plight of the working class. Mickey is the earnest employee who gets chewed up by an uncaring system. If that’s the metaphor, it’s muddled by the 47 other ideas the director crams in and seemingly forgets about, often within the same scene. The film exists in such a heightened state of reality that you might only be able to approach it if you are high to begin with.

    It’s fueled by the delusion that it has something to say, but what, and to who, I know not.

    Was there anything I liked in this movie? I think the creature effects were nice. The “Creepers” manage to be disgusting and cute in equal measure. That’s an accomplishment. Well done, CGI department.

    Everything else, I hated. After enduring two hours and 17 minutes of this farce, I, too, wanted to know what it would be like to die. And the quickest way to bring it about.

  • Happy Howlidays

    Happy Howlidays

    Guy meets girl. Girl hates guy. But girl must spend time with guy so she can write a blog about their dogs falling in love.

    Welcome to Hallmark movie land, where blandly attractive people with no chemistry stand next to each other in furnished model homes. It’s a winning formula.

    In Happy Howlidays, Mia Park writes a blog for the Seattle Tourism Board. She sleeps in a bed full of potato chips. Her parents want her to move back to Miami, but she pretends to be too busy with work to even talk to them. She also doesn’t like Christmas for some reason.

    On her way home from work, she rescues a dog stuck in a fence, then is bewildered when the pup follows her home. She feeds him some noodles, heads upstairs to bed, then wakes up to find him tearing apart her pillows. She charges downstairs and lands in a puddle of urine.

    “There’s only room for one hot mess around here!” she says, still standing in the pee.

    She tries to dump the dog at Puptown, an animal shelter run by Max Covington — a name that has never existed outside a Danielle Steel novel. Max won’t allow it, but his own mopey mutt takes a shine to Mia’s troublemaker.

    Mia ends up posting a video of the two dogs on the Tourist Board website. Her boss demands more of this scintillating content. “Our site traffic is up 25 percent!” Mia has no choice but to spend more time with Max. Will love blossom? Will Mia find common ground with her parents? Will the shelter find funding to stay open another year? Will someone vacuum Mia’s bed?

    Full disclosure: I don’t really “get” Hallmark movies. My brother Daniel loves them, especially around the holidays. He was the one who insisted we watch this.

    To my untrained eye, the thing that makes a Hallmark movie work is the right amount of sweetness and camp. If you get the balance right, you can overlook the wooden acting, the bland sets, and the lapses in internal logic. “It’s just a Hallmark movie,” people shrug.

    Happy Howlidays is a Hallmark movie. It’s also terrible. There’s no craft or artistry to it. It’s a dumb meet-cute between two unlikable characters that drags on for an hour and a half. The plot is predictable and full of dumb cliches. Even the dogs are an afterthought that exist to bring the characters together and nothing more.

    They do repeat the dog pee gag a few times, though. So if that’s your idea of comedy, then buckle up.