FILM REVIEW OF ''KIN" (2018)

Two heads are better than one, so the old adage goes.  Sadly, this doesn’t apply either to the Baker brothers or their directorial debut, “Kin” (1/2 OUT OF ****), that juggles a sci-fi thriller about a lost space gun, a dysfunctional family crisis with a juvenile-in-jeopardy, a cross-country chase, and a revenge melodrama.  Basically, Australian brothers Jonathan and Josh Baker developed “Kin” from their own fifteen-minute short “Bag Man” (2014).  In “Bag Man,” an African-American youngster stashes an exotic space carbine under his bed at home without informing his stern single mom.  Sneaking it out in a duffel bag for target practice, he winds up in a remote clearing, but rescues a man with a bag over his head from three murderous ruffians.  They were armed and abusive to the bag man and had bound his wrists behind his back.  At one point, one of the three wields a shovel and knocks the bag man off his knees onto his head.  The black kid disrupts their orgy of violence, and the shooting commences.  The bizarre alien weapon dissolves the three assailants into atoms when the kid lets them have it!  Lean, mean, and electrifying, “Bag Man” doesn’t squander a second.  Indeed, the Bakers left a lot to the imagination, but most people could probably fill in the gaps.  Not only did I enjoy “Bag Man” (*** OUT OF ****), but I could watch it again.  

Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to “Kin.”  First, the Baker brothers bite off more than they can chew. Scenarist Daniel Casey of “The Passage” has helped to expand the plot far beyond “Bag Man” with too many stock characters.  Second, the only character who deserves our sympathy is gunned down too early.  Third, the rest of the characters—except for the African-American teen who salvaged the weapon—are worthless specimens of humanity with little dimension.  Fourth, the filmmakers could have told us a little about this otherworldly firearm and its apparently infinite ammo capacity.  We never learn if it contains a battery that keeps it charged up and ready to blast.  Fifth, the mysterious weapon that the youth found isn’t deployed until halfway through the road trip.  Furthermore, our juvenile protagonist doesn’t have a chance to display its heavy-duty firepower until an explosive finale in a besieged Nevada police station.

“Kin” opens in modern-day Detroit, where a strange firefight occurs in a derelict factory building.  As noisy as it sounds, this activity doesn’t attract the attention of the police.  Later, a 14-year old African-American, Eli Solinski (Myles Truitt of “Dragged Across Concrete”), who rides his bike around to these forsaken edifices, scours them for anything of value.  Although he is black, Eli is the adopted son of a hard-working contractor, Hal Solinski (Dennis Quaid of “The Long Riders”), but the Solinskis have fallen on hard times.  Hal’s wife has died, and his oldest biological son, Jimmy (Jack Reynor of “Free Fire”), has just been released from prison after a six-year sentence.  Hal and Jimmy don’t get along, but Hal is letting Jimmy sack out at the house until he can land a job.  When Jimmy asks his father for a job, but Hal refuses to hire him because he is an ex-con.  Jimmy looks up an old friend, Taylor Balik (James Franco of “Future World”), who deals in contraband firearms, and reassures him, he hasn’t forgotten about the $60-thousand that he owes him.  Taylor demands his dough pronto, and he lacks patience.  Jimmy approaches Hal about a loan, but Hal rules it out, too.  One evening, when Hal returns to his office with Eli riding with him, he confronts Jimmy, Taylor, and Taylor’s brother.  They have broken into his office and are ransacking his safe.  Hal brandishes a crowbar, and a deadly fight ensues.  Hal dies from a gunshot wound, but Taylor’s brother bites the dust, too.  Managing to escape, Jimmy flees in Hal’s truck with Eli.  Repeatedly, Jimmy concocts one lie after another to dupe Eli into believing that Hal has dispatched them off on a cross-country trip to Lake Tahoe where they will all reunite.  Eli packs a few things, including the duffel bag with the futuristic weapon.

Earlier, while combing through a deserted factory building, Eli discovers two space soldiers in a sinister black outfits.  One of them had lost his head during the firefight.  Eli handles a strange-looking weapon that resembles a high-tech military assault rifle.  When he is toying with the weapon, he activates it, and a laser sighting system illuminates the weapon with several gauges and numbers.  Eli says nothing about his discovery.  Later, Hal learns about Eli’s behavior troubles and school suspension.  Later, he chews him out for stealing things from deserted buildings.  All of this leads up to Hal taking Eli along with him to his office where he discovers Jimmy and Taylor ransacking the company safe.  Meanwhile, a vindictive, grief-stricken Taylor loads up an arsenal of firepower along with his homicidal henchmen, and they pursue Jimmy and Eli.  Later, two space soldiers materialize out of nowhere in the building where the gun was lost.  They activate a locator device to track the weapon.  Essentially, it’s road trip time, and everybody is lined-up in hot pursuit of our heroes.

Whereas “Bag Man” delivers simple and straightforward action, “Kin” struggles with too many characters and too many clichés.  The Bakers provide little background about the aliens, who appeared after the loss of the weapon and then reappeared for the lively finale.  The last-minute revelation not only about the weapon, but also Eli’s identity seems like a last-minute addition to generate a sequel.  During the final scene, when the aliens expose their humanoid faces, actor & producer Michael B. Jordan of “Black Panther” fame makes a cameo appearance as one.  Ultimately, “Kin” amounts to little more than a remake of the cheapjack 1978 sci-fi thriller “Laserblast” about a youth on a rampage with an alien weapon.

FILM REVIEW OF ''THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS" (2018)

The fiftysomething son of Muppets creator Jim Henson, Brian Henson may have thought everybody would laugh hysterically at the sight of his father’s “Sesame Street” Muppets wallowing in puppet sex, killing other puppets, and spewing R-rated “Scarface” obscenities.  Indeed, the production company behind “Sesame Street” sued STX Films for an early poster displaying the tagline: “No Sesame, All Street.” Mind you, none of the actual “Sesame Street” Muppet characters are ridiculed in Henson’s farce.  Nevertheless, The Sesame Workshop argued such advertising “deliberately confuses consumers into mistakenly believing that Sesame is associated with, has allowed, or has even endorsed or produced the movie and tarnishes Sesame’s brand.”  Judge Vernon Broderick threw the case out.  Although they lost the lawsuit, The Sesame Workshop must be elated that Henson’ abominable police procedural comedy “The Happytime Murders” (* OUT OF ****) bombed during its first week in release.  Forging a make-believe world where “meat sacks” and “felties” bump into each other, this lame laffer earned only a quarter of its $40-million budget. Puppets refer to humans as “meat sacks,” while humans call puppets “felties.” Comparisons between “The Happytime Murders” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), where cartoon characters co-existed with humans are inevitable.  Despite its top-notch CGI of Muppets ‘behaving badly’ and its celebrity cast, featuring Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, and Elizabeth Banks, this predictable, half-baked hokum should have been called “The Crappytime Murders.”  Basically, neither Henson nor scenarists Todd Berger and Dee Austin Robertson have conjured up enough sidesplitting jokes to weather its lowest-common-denominator 91 minutes.  Moreover, the jokes are neither shamelessly nor hilariously memorable.  If you’ve seen the trailer where puppets perform “Basic Instinct” sex and the guy squirts ‘silly-string’ semen, you’ve seen the most provocative scene.  Another scene with a Dominatrix Dalmatian whipping a semi-nude, tied-down fireman while yelping, “I'm gonna piss on you like a fire hydrant” is more idiotic than erotic. 

 

This whodunit takes place in the seedy underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles.  Mankind has marginalized puppets as second-class citizens, and the filmmakers cannot resist exposing the racism with which humans belittle puppets. The action concerns the puppets who starred in “The Happytime Gang,” a popular 1990’s kiddie show. Humans embraced this groundbreaking sit-com about puppets, and puppets attracted greater sympathy from humans.  Decades afterward, the lucrative syndication rights for the show are up for grabs.  Now, a serial slayer is stalking and knocking-off the seven puppet cast members one-by-one.  Lieutenant Banning of the LAPD (Leslie David Baker of “Elizabethtown”) assigns former police detective Phil Phillips (long-time Muppeteer vet Bill Barretta) to serve as a consultant for his former partner, Detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy of “Identity Thief”), to solve these homicides.  Traces of bad blood linger between Phil and Connie.  For the record, Phil is a sky-blue Muppet with black hair who resembles former “Late Late Show” talk host Tom Synder, and he doesn’t mind kicking the crap out of anybody.  Phil was a rising star in the LAPD, until a pistol-packing puppet took Connie hostage in a stand-off.  Phil fired at the perpetrator, but his bullet ricocheted and killed an innocent bystander.  Connie caught a slug in the liver when she disarmed her truculent captor.  Desperately, Phil rushed her to the nearest medical facility, and it turned out to be a puppet hospital.  Although the puppet doctor refused to operate on a human, Phil waved the muzzle of his service revolver under his nose.  Since acquiring a felt liver, Connie contends with many of the afflictions puppets suffer on a daily basis. Puppets crave sugar as if it were cocaine, and Connie has dozens of Maple Syrup bottles chilling in her fridge.  

Now, Phil ekes out a living as a private investigator. One day, switch-hitting, nympho puppet Sandra White (Dorien Davies) slinks into his office.  She hires Phil to thwart blackmailers demanding $350-thousand from her.  The first place Phil heads is a smut shop.  He is trying to trace the cut-out letters in the blackmail note to a porno magazine.  Meantime, a masked gunman enters the store, kills the owner and his two employees, who were staging a porno about an octopus milking a slutty dairy cow with his tentacles.  The gunman blows their felt heads off with a shotgun.  BLAM!  BLAM!  During this blazing mayhem, Phil occupied himself in the smut owner’s office, scrutinizing a list of suspects who might have clipped letters from the porno magazine for Sandra’s blackmail message.  Nevertheless, the LAPD treat Phil as ‘a person of interest’ despite his story that he heard nothing in the owner’s office.  Now, Phil is on the lam, and Connie is struggling to protect him, while they ferret out clues to the identities of the killers.

Comparably, “The Happytime Murders” isn’t nearly as rude, crude, and offensive as Peter Jackson’s “Meet the Feebles” (1989), Trey Parker’s “Team America: World Police” (2004), and Seth MacFarlane’s two “Ted” comedies with Mark Walhberg.  Mind you, the prospect of a “Happytime Murders” sequel is probably as infinitesimal as “Ted 3.”  Sadly, Henson and his writers provide a far from adequate history about the origins of this strange new world where puppets talk.  Principally, when did the Muppets become sentient?  Sure, these questions may not bother you, but some explanation should have been offered.  We watch puppets play cards, orchestrate drive-by shootings, and generally act like criminals.  Puppet die violently in this murder-riddled melodrama. Bullets blow the stuffing out of these puppets when dogs aren’t mistaking them for chew toys. The puppet work is probably some of the best.  Publicity material for “The Happytime Murders” reveals that Henson and company fashioned about 125 Muppet-like puppets for it.  Indeed, the interaction between the actors and the puppets looks appropriately goofy.  While she is cast as the top-billed detective, Melissa McCarthy plays second banana to Phil. Maya Rudolph steals every scene as Phil’s radiant secretary ‘Bubbles’ who can pick locks. Neither trailblazing nor sharp-edged enough as a satire, “The Happytime Murders” scrapes the bottom of the barrel with little to show for it.

FILM REVIEW OF ''GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY" (2014)

“Slither” writer & director James Gunn’s outlandishly hysterical, but high octane science-fiction spectacle “Guardians of the Galaxy” charts an entirely different course in the Marvel Comics Universe. Unlike Marvel’s traditional lineup of superheroes, such as “Iron Man,” “Captain America,” “Thor,” and “The Incredible Hulk,” the “Guardians of the Galaxy” constitute a quintet of non-traditional, anti-heroic protagonists endowed with supernatural abilities. Traditional Marvel heroes are respectable, upstanding, productive citizens in private life when they aren’t clashing with larger-than-life adversaries.  As the son of Odin, Thor is the exception in the cinematic universe because he has no alter-ego.  Comparatively, the “Guardians” are criminals and outcasts, essentially mercenaries thrown together by the exigencies of fate.  A synthesis of Indiana Jones and Han Solo, Peter Jason Quill leads the “Guardians,” probably because they fly with him aboard his intergalactic spacecraft.  An abducted Earthling urchin turned scalawag smuggler who refers to himself as ‘Star-Lord,’ Quill makes an affable enough anti-hero. Quill’s loose cannon compatriots are Gamora, an elite, green-skinned, female warrior assassin; Rocket, a genetically-altered, foul-mouthed raccoon who searches for anybody with high bounty on them; Rocket’s ligneous partner Groot, a humanoid plant that entangles its adversaries with its tree limbs, and Drax, a vengeful, blue-skinned, hulk of a humanoid who parades around without a shirt. If earlier Marvel Comics superhero sagas required audiences to suspend their disbelief to accommodate their bizarre antics, “Guardians” requires an even greater suspension of disbelief, perhaps to the breaking point.  Any time you encounter an obnoxious raccoon that can speak in English and behave like the reckless felon, you’ve got to open your mind up to greater possibilities beyond the world of reality.  

“Guardians of the Galaxy” unfolds on a tragic note.  The setting is Earth in 1988, and young Peter Quill watches in horror as his mother Meredith (Laura Haddock of “Storage 24”) dies from cancer.  Fleeing the hospital, the grief-stricken lad scrambles outside, and an alien spacecraft promptly abducts him! Twenty-six years later, an adult Peter Quill (Chris Pratt of “Moneyball”) is plying his trade as a member of the Ravagers, pirates who “steal from everybody,” on the abandoned planet of Morag.  He tracks down a wholly sought-after Orb.  No sooner has he found this object than he finds himself surrounded by Korath (Djimon Hounsou of “Amistad”) and his subordinates.  Korath works for Ronan (Lee Pace of “Lincoln”), a tyrannical, ax-wielding super villain who wants the Orb.  Ronan plans to ingratiate himself to the ultimate villain Thanos and hand it over to him.  Quill manages to escape in his wing-shaped spaceship.  Later, the blue-skinned Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker of “Tombstone”), who abducted Quill as an adolescent on Earth, contacts Quill from Morag and inquires about the Orb.  When Quill refuses to cooperate, Yondu puts a bounty of 40-thousand units on Quill.  Yondu uses an arrow that he deploys like a dressmaker manipulates a needle for homicidal purposes.

Rocket (Bradley Cooper’s voice) and Groot (Vin Diesel’s voice) descend to Xandar and stumble onto Quill.  Meantime, Korath reports to Ronan about Quill and the Orb. Ronan dispatches Gamora to Xandar, the capital of the Nova Empire, to pick up the Orb.  When Quill arrives on Xandar, he approaches the Broker (Christopher Fairbank of “Alien 3”) about the Orb.  Quill inquires about the mysterious globe because he almost died acquiring it.  When Quill mentions Ronan’s name, the Broker sends Quill packing. Gamora snatches the Orb from Quill.  They fight. Rocket intervenes and bags Quill.  This back and forth shenanigans continue until the Nova Corps arrests them.  They ship Quill, Gamora, Rocket, and Groot to The Kyln, a corrupt, high security prison in space where they encounter loudmouthed Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista of “Riddick”) when Gamora’s life is threatened.  As it turns out, the literal-minded Drax abhors Ronan because the dastard killed his wife and daughter. During the hair-raising escape, Drax teams up with Raccoon and Groot. Eventually, this quintet sets aside their differences, and Rocket orchestrates an elaborate escape from The Kyln that involves shutting off the artificial gravity in the facility.  Our heroes recover Quill’s orange and blue spaceship the Milano and flee from the Kyln.  Before they can leave, Quill also retrieves his impregnable Walkman with a cassette of popular songs that his mother made for him.  Mind you, this constitutes only 45 minutes out of the two-hour running time! 

Eventually, our heroes land on a unique mining colony called Knowhere.  According to Gamora, Knowhere is “the severed head of an ancient celestial being.”  No regulations exist in Knowhere.  Our heroes are looking for Tivan because he knows what the Orb is.  During this interval, Gamora reveals that Thanos murdered her mother and father and tortured her until he remade her into a warrior assassin.  Gamora asks about his Walkman and its significance.  Later, Drax summons Ronan to fight him, and turmoil descends onto the colony. Initially, Ronan defeats Drax, and Yondu catches up with Peter.  Bit by bit, the Guardians begin to bond.  "Oh, boo-hoo-hoo. My wife and child are dead," grouses an angry Rocket.  Groot cannot believe Rocket's insensitivity.  "Oh, I don't care if it's mean!  Everybody's got dead people.  It's no excuse to get everybody else dead along the way."  Groot sympathesizes with Drax and they become friends.  Now, Ronan has the Orb, and he wants Thanos to destroy Xandar.

Debuting in the January 1969 issue of “Marvel Super-Heroes,” the “Guardians” were nothing like their cinematic counterparts, only the pirate Yondu Udonta, appeared in this early incarnation.  These Guardians constituted the last of their kind on Earth, Jupiter, Pluto, and a fourth planet near the star Alpha Centauri B.  Ultimately, the cinematic “Guardians of the Galaxy” imitate in their own sphere of action “The Avengers.”  They quarrel constantly with each other, and they come close to killing each other such is the instability of their alliance.  Director James Gunn and freshman scenarist Nicole Perlman furnish the “Guardians” with distinctive, often hilarious dialogue.  The characters differ enough that no one is the same, and each has characteristics that differentiate them.  For example, the tree creature Groot repeats the same three words “I am Groot” ad nauseam without change throughout the action.  Drax emerges as straight-faced comic relief because he is so literal minded. Ronan makes an intimidating villain, but Thanos (Josh Brolin’s voice) is the most powerful being in the universe.  Gunn and Perlman never let the action slow down, and our heroes find themselves hopscotching from one cliffhanger predicament after another.