One has to admire the bravery of the performance in this movie from Ben Affleck.  He has recently suffered from alcoholism and had checked himself into a treatment center and this could not have been easy to play this role.  Yet he did it and he was tremendous in it.

The Way Back is a sports movie with more.  Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck) was a former star high school player at the Catholic High School.  The basketball world was at his feet, but he chose to leave it behind.  A troubled life followed which included a separation with his wife (Janina Gavankar) and an alcohol problem.

When his old high school’s coach had a heart attack, Jack is offered the position of head coach, working alongside assistant coach Dan (Al Madrigal) of a team with a group of problematic players who have not been successful.

The basic basketball scenes in this movie are nothing new.  In fact, it would be fair to say that most of the basketball scenes here are extremely formulaic.  Not to say they were not well done, but there was absolutely nothing new about any of them.  Everything that happened was something that we had seen before.

However, the scenes with Jack and his troubles were very well done and brought an uncertainty to the story.  The final act of the film was just strong and really took the film into an area where you were not sure what was going to happen.  That was a refreshing switch from what had been a predictable tale.

Ben Affleck was magnificent here.  He brought a depth and an anguish to Jack Cunningham that was relatable and understandable.  You wanted to see this guy overcome his demons, but the film does not take that easy route.  Just because his basketball team was having success, it did not mean that the problems that had haunted him and had driven him to hide in a bottle were gone.  In fact, it may have made those issues all the worse.

I do think the film felt a little long, but I am not sure where you would have cut.  The film was more about Affleck than it was the game of basketball.  Because of that, some of the characters on the basketball team were shorted in development.  The movie was Affleck’s story and it gave him the minutes to show it.

Directed by Gavin O’Connor, who also directed feel good sports movies Miracle and Warrior, found a way to subvert the expectations of the genre with this movie.  It seemed that this was going to be just another formulaic sports movie, until it wasn’t.

Powerful and difficult to watch at times, The Way Back is a good movie with a strong lead performance.

3.8 stars

Back in the 1980s, there was a TV program on ABC called Spenser for Hire and starred Robert Urich and Avery Brooks.  I never loved this series, but I watched it a few times.  So you can forgive me that I did not figure out that the new film on Netflix, Spenser Confidential is a return to that character, this time starring Mark Wahlberg and Winston Duke.

Based on the novel “Wonderland” by Robert B Parker and directed by Peter Berg, Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) was a cop convicted of assaulting his police chief.  After serving his time, Spenser returned to his life with the intent of leaving his home in Boston and heading out west to drive truck.  However, a group of crooked cops and drug runners throw problems in his path.  Spenser has to team up with Hawk (Winston Duke), a MMA fighter who was living with Spenser’s mentor, Henry (Alan Arkin), to try to solve the murders of a couple of Spenser’s previous colleagues.

I had some problems with this movie.  First and foremost, it felt as if the film did not know what kind of film it wanted to be.  At first it felt flashy and dumb, like a Michael Bay movie.  Then it seemed like it wanted to be a buddy cop movie.  Then, it tried to be a slapstick comedy.  Then there was serious drama with the crime story.  All of these different styles did not fit together in this case and really clashed.  By trying to be it all, this movie was never able to be itself.  It failed in all of the different tones.

Wahlberg and Duke were fine.  Duke will always be M’Baku from Marvel’s Black Panther, and, unfortunately, this version of Hawk was nothing like the Avery Brooks version.  I understand the attempt to take the character in a different direction, but this was a real tangent.  Arkin was the same basic character that Arkin is in every movie these days.  There is a character named Cissy (Iliza Shlesinger), Spenser’s former girlfriend, but the less mentioned about her the better.  This character is easily the most annoying and least engaging character on the screen.

And Marc Maron is here too, but he is wasted.  His character is so disposable that I am not even sure what his role here was.

The story is totally messy.  It was convoluted and confusing.  It wanted to be a mystery as well, but that played like every low-level buddy cop film you’ve ever seen.  The bad guys are woefully underdeveloped and are basically one-dimensional crooks from your typical crime movie.  Nothing special about any of them.  They kept referring to Boylan (Michael Gaston), the police chief Spenser assaulted, but we knew so little about him that their use of him felt like lazy writing.

The comedy in the movie was just such a flop. There is one scene with Spenser and a dog that is as dumb as it can be.  I am not sure I can recall any of the humor actually hitting.

This was just a bad movie and a failed attempt to bring the character of Spenser back to relevance.  Wahlberg and Duke worked okay together and would be the best part of this movie.  They are absolutely not enough to save this silly reboot.   I do not think fans of the Spenser for Hire series or the Robert B. Parker novels featuring the character of Spenser will enjoy this movie much.

2.3 stars 

I was able to see an early showing of Pixar’s latest animated movie, Onward, and I was extremely pleased that I had the chance.

This is another fantastic film from Pixar Studios.

Ian (Tom Holland) is an elf living in a fantasy world that has lost its magic and become very much like today’s real world.  His brother Barley (Chris Pratt) is a gamer who treats his Dungeon and Dragons-like game as history of the world.  They live with their mother Laurel (Julia Louis Dreyfus), who had been widowed for years.

In fact, Ian had never met his father and that loss had always challenged the character.  So, on his 16th birthday, Ian’s mother gave him a gift from his father.  It was a magic staff and a spell that could resurrect the father for one day only.

The big problem was that the magic caused some trouble and, when they attempted to bring the father back, they were only able to resurrect half of the man, from the waist down.

Having a day left to try and find another magic gem that could finish the job, Ian and Barley headed out on an adventure of self-discovery and brotherly bonding.

Honestly, the first part of Onward was a bit slow and it was fine.  However, when you are watching a Pixar film, fine does not cut it.  As the film progressed though, the emotional bond between Ian and Barley started to carry the movie and it was not too long until Onward was firing on all cylinders.  Honestly, the third act of this movie was just tremendous and took Onward to a different level.

Pixar certainly knows how to create emotions among the viewers.  They tugged on the feelings throughout the movie and I am not ashamed to admit that the final act saw me with tears running down my face.  It reminded me, in good ways, of both Coco and Inside Out.  It also absolutely had a ton of homages to Indiana Jones movies in fairly obvious ways.

The voice cast was outstanding.  I have already mentioned Holland, Pratt and Louis Dreyfus, but I have not yet mentioned Octavia Spencer, who voices the Manticore, an amalgam of several animals (like a griffin) that had a legendary history in the fantasy world.  Spencer was great and had some of the funniest lines in the film.

Of course, the animation in the movie was continually great.  Pixar films are always above the line for CGI and character creation.  It is a beautiful film to look at through the entire run.

In the end, the movie truly dives into the brotherly connection between Ian and Barley, providing a relationship that is undeniably relatable and powerful.  The sentiments of loss that are interspersed in the script is done deftly and in a way that expertly draws out the emotions in the viewers, both young and old.  The third act of this movie is as good as it gets and really takes what was being set up as a decent Pixar movie and makes it an excellent Pixar movie.

When this opens nationwide next weekend, make sure you take your family to see it.  Or go on your own.  It is worth your time.

4.5 stars

This is how the Dark Universe should have gone.

The brand new version of the classic Universal Monsters movie, The Invisible Man, came out this weekend with Blumhouse’s Jason Blum as a producer and he showed, once again, that you can make a movie with a small budget and make it compelling and intriguing.

Cecilia Kass (Elizabeth Moss) was in an abusive relationship with tech magnet Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and she tried to escape.  With the help of her sister (Harriet Dyer) and friend James (Aldis Hodge), Cecilia was able to escape from Adrian’s controlling clutch.

When news of Adrian’s suicide reached Cecilia, she was not as relieved as she should have been because she began to suspect that Adrian was still alive and stalking her by somehow turning himself invisible.  She found herself becoming more paranoid with each passing moment and the people in her life believed that she was falling into madness.

I really enjoyed a lot of The Invisible Man and my first watch of it was very enjoyable.  I must say, upon reflection, there are more moments in the film that I found pressed the level of plausibility and might make this one of those films that I like less over time.  As of right now though, I thought it was fun.

Elizabeth Moss was great in the lead, really showing the tension and the potential descent into madness for her character.  I wish the film had not revealed so quickly that this was what was happening because, although they hinted at the fact that this might just be Cecilia’s paranoia and mental state, this was never in question.  Part of that went with the promotional material for the film as the trailer certainly gave much of the film away.  It would have given the film another level that would have helped the story.

The performances were all great and the use of the invisibility was very well done.  There were moments in the film that were very tense because you were never quite sure if Adrian was actually there.  I know I always assumed he was there.

Some of the things that I would quibble with are spoilers so I won’t be specific, but there were several moments when it felt as if the characters responded in ways only because the film needed them to do so.  There were a bunch of horror tropes here too that took away from the overall quality of the film.  These are minor points though as they did not bother me too much during the movie.  I found myself several times wondering why she did or did not make certain choices.

Directed by Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man creates a world of suspense and terror that comes from the unknown.  We have all walked into a room in our house with that creepy feeling that someone is watching us, even though we know for certain that is not the case.  Whannell successfully mines that naturally unnerving feeling and takes it to its nth degree.

Sure there were some ticky-tack things that could have been tighter or could have been scripted better, but that is nitpicking.  In the end, The Invisible Man is a solid horror/thriller film in a year where horror/thriller needed a good one.  Elizabeth Moss is a star and her performance steals the show.

4.2 stars

I love the Movie Trivia Schmoedown, an online trivia show with some WWE and UFC tendencies.  It is remarkably enjoyable and has only grown and improved every year.  The reason why I watched this movie was because of the Movie Trivia Schmoedown.

One of the top competitors in the Movie Trivia Schmoedown is named “The Kid” Brendan Meyer.  He is a young and popular competitor that has an encyclopedia knowledge of movie trivia.  I also knew that Meyer was an actor and that he had been in the OA.  When I heard his Schmoedown team partner, critic William Bibbiani talking about Meyer’s new movie, Color Out of Space, and how he would not be reviewing it to avoid any cries of potential bias, I wanted to see it.

So I found the film on Vudu and waited until it became available for rental (which was today).  Who knew that this was a film that was starring Nicolas Cage?

Color Out of Space was a science fiction/horror mash-up where a meteorite crashed on the farm of the Gardners in rural New England.  After the meteorite crashed, the whole family found themselves acting differently than they had before while some kind of mutant organism infected them.

Brendan Meyer was the oldest son to Nicolas Cage.  Joely Richardson played the wife of Cage and mother to Meyer.  There was a sister, played by Madeleine Arthur and a younger son played by Julian Hilliard.  Elliot Knight appeared as Ward, an investigator there to try and help the family.  Finally, playing stoned hippie Ezra was the one and only Tommy Chong.

Nicolas Cage was at his very best, over-the-top craziness in this movie.  It is an area within that he has absolute carved out a place for himself.  Brendan Meyer was quite impressive in the role of Benny as well.  Watching the kid work here, one believes that he has quite an impressive future ahead of him.

I felt the first part of the film was a little slow, but it built nicely as the tension continued to grow.  By the third act, the film had grabbed hold of me and created a wild and crazy conclusion.

This is based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft and it is directed by Richard Stanley.  This is a weird and bizarre film that is energetic and entertaining.  I am glad that I watched it.  Thanks The Kid.

3.7 stars

I discovered this on Netflix this weekend and saw a cast of very impressive actors. I mean… Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Willem Dafoe, Rosie Perez, and Toby Jones are all some of the greatest actors working today.  It makes one wonder how this film, which should have been truly successful as a political thriller,  went so off track with such a top flight cast.

But The Last Thing He Wanted, based on the novel of the same name by Joan Didion, was convoluted and confusing.  The story kept having events happen that make little sense and made the narrative difficult to follow.

Journalist Elena McMahon (Anne Hathaway) walked off the presidential coverage she had been assigned to follow in order to help complete her sick father’s (Willem Dafoe) business deal, which was dealing arms to Central American countries.  She suddenly found herself over her head, involved in the very story that she had been trying to reveal prior.

Set during the heart of the Iran-Contra Affair, Elena’s motives were not always clear.  Was she doing this for her father?  Her daughter?  The story?  Her country?  None of it is clear.

Anne Hathaway is solid in the role.  Ben Affleck, who played Treat Morrison, a government official who becomes involved with Elena.  Willem Dafoe is probably the most interesting character in the film, but the end results of his character arc is disappointing and occurs off-screen.

The end of the film is messy and sloppy.  It hardly is worth the time that you have to put into the story to understand what is going down.

I find it difficult to believe that Elena is any sort of international journalist.  She seemed fairly lacking in skills.  I would think a journalist of this caliber would have a few more tricks up her sleeve.

This was a pretty disappointing film.   I certainly expected more when I saw who was involved.

2 stars

I really am more of a cat person.

I do love Harrison Ford, and he is great in this movie.  Unfortunately, I had checked out way before Ford ever showed up in this adaptation of the classic Jack London novel.

The Call of the Wild is the story of a dog named Buck who gets abducted from his domestic bliss and winds up in the Yukon as a sled dog under the control of a variety of masters.

I was out of this movie immediately because of the fact that Buck (and all of the other dogs as well) were CGI in this movie and it was CGI that was simply not very well done.  Buck felt more like a cartoon character you might see in a Scooby Doo movie than a real dog involved in an iconic story.  I just could not get past the manner in which Buck was portrayed in this movie and, despite the fact that I enjoyed the Harrison Ford component of the story and that the look of the scenery was lovely, this animated dog just was so poorly done I could not forgive it.

Sure, the film is heart-warming and a pretty solid film for the family.  If you can get past the way that Buck looks and the fact that the dog is more human than many of the other characters in the film, then you probably will love this movie.

However, I could not get past it.  Besides Buck, there was a villain involved here named Hal (which I had no idea and had to look up on IMDb to get his character name).  Hal (Dan Stevens) is the total mustache-twirling villain with zero motivation outside of “gold” and… “evil.”  Hal has to be an early year leading candidate for Worst Villain.

There needed to be considerably more Harrison Ford here than what we got.  He does not come into serious use until late in the movie.  The first forty-five minutes to an hour had only a few slight uses of Ford.  His character had an interesting background and a real reason to be the way he was, and I could have used more of that.

Yes, I know that the movie was following Jack London’s book more and there is a chunk of time spent with Buck as a sled dog with French mail delivery man Perrault (Omar Sy), but I needed more of Ford and there was no reason they could not have set this up as two characters who were destined to meet and then we spend time with both.

Dog lovers may love this movie.  I found the CGI terribly distracting and unnecessary.  There were some laugh out loud moments of unintentional comedy that distracted from the deadly serious survival tale of the original novel.  The film could be worse, but it could also be much better too.

2.5 stars