FILM REVIEW OF ''THAT'S MY BOY" (2012)

Adam Sandler can turn anything into a joke.  Whether you laugh at the former “Saturday Night Live” comic’s degenerate sense of humor is an entirely different matter. Typically, juvenile delinquent fantasies fuel Sandler’s gross out antics. “Sex Drive” director Sean Anders and “Happy Endings” television series scribe David Caspe have ramped up Sandler’s impudent humor far beyond anything the lowbrow comedian has attempted.  “That’s My Boy” (*** out of ****) casts Sandler as a shrill, low-life, irresponsible, adult-adolescent who neglected to mature.  Imagine the protagonists of either “Billy Madison” or “The Waterboy” as unrepentant hemorrhoids, and you’ll have a good idea what to expect from “That’s My Boy.”  Actually, from premise to performance, “That’s My Boy” qualifies as Sandler at his raunchiest.  At the same time, “That’s My Boy” may challenge even the staunchest Sandler’s fans. Mind you, we’re not talking the caliber of crude and rude that Sasha Baron Cohen doled out in either “Borat” or “Bruno.” Nothing aberrant like the thoroughly unwholesome “Hangover 2,” however, happens in “That’s My Boy.”  Nevertheless, Sandler hasn’t made anything this tastelessly hilarious since either “Big Daddy” or “Little Nicky.”

Most Sandler characters, such as Billy Madison, Robert 'Bobby' Boucher Jr., from “The Waterboy,” Happy Gilmore, and Sonny Koufax in “Big Daddy,” emerge as saints compared with Donny Berger. Before his second-to-last movie, Sandler had shown signs of mellowing.  He made movies about middle-aged guys and their families, such as “Grown Ups” and “Just Go with It.”  Earlier, he appeared in two genuinely memorable films: “Funny People” and “Punch-Drunk Love.” Admittedly, Sandler’s last movie “Jack and Jill” dredged the bottom of the barrel.  “Jack and Jill” amounted to a cretinous comedy about identical twin siblings. Sandler dressed up in drag when he wasn’t playing it straight.  Nonetheless, he played a middle-aged father with a middle of the road family. Happily, no matter how egregiously awful “That’s My Boy” is, “That’s My Boy” is still ten times better than “Jack and Jill.” 

The premise of “That’s My Boy” is audacious.  This lightweight sex abuse comedy unfolds in the Boston suburb of Somerville in 1984.  Thirteen year old Donny Berger (Justin Weaver) lands in detention. He made the mistake of asking his ultra-hot looking, nymphomaniac math teacher, Mary McGarricle (Eva Amurri Martino of “The Banger Sisters”), out for a date in front of his two friends. What he encounters in detention is nothing like “The Breakfast Club.”  Donny’s teacher takes him into a backroom and rapes him without a qualm.  Indeed, she teachers him how to satisfy her sexual urges.  Of course, “That’s My Boy” refrains from depicting sexual relations between an older woman and an underage child. Later, during a middle-school function in the auditorium, Donny and his naked teacher are caught in the act on stage.  She flees in humiliation with a flag wrapped around her body, while Donny enjoys a standing ovation from both students and faculty. Never has the double standard in sexual relations been more skewered.  A sign in the auditorium heralds Donny’s makeover from nobody to somebody: "Some have greatness thrust upon them." Never has statutory rape been celebrated in such a cynical manner. Donny emerges as a tabloid celebrity, while his teacher winds up pulling a 30 year stretch in the Massachusetts Women’s Prison.  Worse, not only has Donny gotten Miss McGarricle pregnant with a son, but also McGarricle admits no shame in their liaison.

For the record, director Sean Anders, scenarist David Caspe, and Sandler have drawn their comedy from the infamous Mary Kay Letourneau case in 1997. Mary Kay was a married school teacher who seduced one of her 13-year-old students, Vili Fualaau, in Des Moines, Washington.  Eventually, she had two daughters from their illicit romance.  Difficult as it is to fathom, the people who produced “That’s My Boy” have displayed a modicum of discretion in their depiction of Mary Kay and Vili’s notorious romance.  In real life, Vili claims he never felt like he was a victim of sex abuse.  Later, after Mary Kay left prison, Vili married her and wrote a book about their shenanigans.  Some of this transpires in “That’s My Boy.”  Similarly, Donny and his teacher have little boy, but Donny turns out to be the worst parent imaginable.

In an expository dialogue scene between Donny (Adam Sandler) and his grown-up son Todd (Adam Samberg of “Hot Rod”), we learn about Donny’s shortcomings as a daddy.  Initially, Donny named his son Han Solo after Harrison Ford’s “Star Wars” hero.  Not only does Todd scold his father for this ridiculous moniker, but also for pandering to his  sweet t00th so he packed on hundreds of pounds and contracted diabetes.  Donny turned his 8-year old son into an obese urchin and exploited him as a designated driver when he was too drunk to drive. Once he was old enough to disown his dad, Todd changed his name, claimed his parents had died in an explosion, and became a profitable businessman as a hedge fund manager.  Todd is poised to marry his sweetheart, a wealthy heiress, Jamie (Leighton Meester of “Date Night”), and live happily ever after.  Forty-year old Donny learns about his son’s wedding in Cape Cod and crashes it.  Things haven’t been too good for Donny.  The I.R.S demands $43-thousand for delinquent taxes or they will put him in prison.  A reality TV show producer promises Donny the dough if he can persuade Todd to appear alongside him on camera at the woman’s prison where his mom is incarcerated.

“That’s My Boy” concerns reconciliation as much as dysfunctional families. Donny ranks as Adam Sandler’s least sympathetic, most outrageous, but best role to date.  At times, he looks like a cross-between of Al Pacino and Paul McCartney in 1980s garb.  The running joke is everybody adores Donny except Todd.  Donny struggles for the better part of “That’s My Boy” to win back Todd’s love and respect.  Most of the action takes place at Cape Cod where Todd’s future boss, financial guru Steve Spirou (Tony Orlando), has planned their wedding.  About a third of the action occurs in a strip joint that serves breakfast. Tony Orlando is not the only leftover from the 1980s.  White rapper Vanilla Ice appears in an extended cameo as one of Donny’s friends, while James Caan wears the collar as a pugnacious man of the cloth.  This politically incorrect, 116-minute farce received an R-rating for pervasive vulgarity, sexual humor, nudity, drug use, and some comic violence.  Most of “That’s My Boy” will either make you grimace in disbelief or laugh without restraint.  

FILM REVIEW OF ''OPERATION ENDGAME" (2010)

Freshman director Fouad Mikati's "Operation Endgame" is a contrived actioneer about two rival teams of top secret government assassins who try to wipe out each other with office products.  Okay, this mildly funny 81-minute thriller never scrapes the bottom of the barrel, but it squanders a good cast.  Ellen Barkin, Maggie Q, Zach Galifianakis, Ving Rhames, Rob Corddry, and Jeffrey Tabor struggle to make the best of a second-rate situation. Some of the close quarters combat scenes conclude with a surprise or two.  Corddry spouts the best lines of dialogue laced with profanity. Mikati and “Bandits” scenarist Sam Levinson spend the first twenty minutes providing hopelessly loquacious exposition about the Factory as well as the agents and their reputations.  They do an adequate job of sketching at least one dimension into a gallery of oddball characters, but they emerge a little more than caricatures.  Mikati alternates the action between the personnel in the underground facility and two men and one woman who maintain surveillance above them.  These two guys furnish commentary about what happens in “Operation Endgame.” Essentially, they represent another perspective on the plot that we would not get from the assassins below them. The CGI depiction of the Factory is reminiscent of the graphic depiction of the Hive in the first “Resident Evil” epic.

“Operation Endgame” opens as a new agent, Fool (Jon Anderson of “The Grey”), shows up for his first day on the job. Undoubtedly, some of the humor is fueled by the irony that the first day at work for our protagonist could be his final day.  According to Alpha agent High Priestess (Maggie Q of “Priest”), the Factory is an elite espionage cell that the U.S. government doesn’t acknowledge. Unofficial covert operatives staff the agency.  Another agent, Chariot (Rob Corddry of “Semi-Pro”)  informs the naïve Fool that the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff created the Factory in 1962 primarily for ‘false flag operations.'  He adds that President Lyndon Johnson instituted the two team system in 1967 to create a balance the power.  The Omega team intervenes when presidents, UN officials, and American politicians condemn the military industrial complex and urge Congress to halt the spending hundreds of billions of dollars on endless wars.  Conversely, Alpha exists to thwart Omega “from bringing forth the apocalypse."  Fool concludes that the two team systems achieve little more than a stalemate.  One individual designated as ‘the Devil’ (Jeffrey Tabor of "The Hangover") supervises both teams. According to Chariot, the Devil is “a portly bastard with manicured nails, no real field experience, and the sharp wit of a six-year of autistic boy.”

All agents must disarm themselves and place their firearms and other weapons into lockers before they can descend by elevator into the bowels of the Factory.  The Devil makes them disarm themselves because he fears one of them may attempt to kill him.  Despite this precaution, somebody does kill the Devil and all Hell breaks loose.  The action takes place in an underground complex called 'The Factory' and the opposing bands of killers draw their names from Tarot cards.  Devil summons them for a conference, but he doesn’t live enough to convene it because Hermit (Zach Galifianakis of “The Hangover”) stabs him to death with several pencils.  The demise of Devil, however, triggers a system the augurs ill for the Alpha and Omega agents.  Operation Endgame commences with a two hour countdown to destruction.  According to Alpha agent Magician (Adam Scott of “Step Brothers”), “Project Endgame is The Factory’s be-all, end-all contingency device.  It activates a physical and communicative lockdown before setting a time that will vaporize this place at the end of two hours.” The two teams decide to team up to find Hermit and try to escape before everything blows.  The most imaginative that "Operation Endgame" gets occurs when the assassins have to improvise to create weapons so they can kill each other.  Empress (Ellen Barkin of “The Fan”) utilizes a staple remover to rip a man’s neck open, while another woman, Hierophant (Emilie de Ravin of “Public Enemies”), wields the leg off a chair to kill a man, Judgment (Ving Rhames of “Pulp Fiction”), who is twice her size.  Chariot takes a paper shredding cartridge to kill an adversary.

Altogether,“Operation Endgame” is like “Reservoir Dogs” done with a government spin.  Something goes horribly wrong in the first half-hour, and everybody tries to slaughter each other with ordinary, everyday office products.  Mikati does a fair-to-middling job staging the action scenes.  He doesn’t shrink from showing blood and gore, but not enough occurs here to gross anybody out. Unfortunately, despite its modest production values and its competent but misused cast, "Operation Endgame" isn't memorable, either for its combat sequences or its hilarity. The sight of Chariot swilling liquor from a bottle shaped like an automatic pistol gets old fast. The gals all look pretty good, except for Ellen Barkin. She looks like a monster in her tight-fitting outfit.  I bought this lackluster shoot'em up on Blu-ray from a discount bin at Walgreen's Drug Store and paid $5.99 plus tax for it. As comedies go, "Operation Endgame" is neither funny nor fresh.  This film fares better as a standard issue shoot'em up rather than a satire.

FILM REVIEW OF ''ROCK OF AGES'' (2012)

“Hairspray” director Adam Shankman’s cinematic adaptation of the 2006 Broadway juke box musical “Rock of Ages” (*** OUT OF ****) qualifies as a predictable but entertaining tear-jerker enhanced by an oldies soundtrack of Top-40 hits.  Watching this agile musical comedy romance is like attending a concert, except instead of Styx, Journey, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Steve Perry, Poison and Europe warbling their own songs, we get Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Russell Brand singing them.  Lip-synching or not, the cast performs the lyrics well enough to make you want to tap your toes, clap your hands, and perhaps join in on the vocalizations.  Of course, the old-fashioned, boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wins-girl back love story that brings everything together is sheer hokum.

Although Tom Cruise is billed last in the opening credits, the “Mission Impossible” superstar steals “Rock of Ages” from young, star-crossed lovers Diego Boneta and Juliana Hough.  They represent the usual, dewy-eyed hopefuls who pour into Hollywood each day yearning for the success, fame, and immortality.  Unfortunately, despite their sympathetic personalities’, Boneta and Hough emerge as cosmetically captivating cookie-cutter hero and heroine.  You know from the get-go they will survive the trials and tribulations that they encounter and come up none the worse for all the wear. 

Meantime, Cruise is the only character with shades of depth, and he isn’t afraid to ridicule the larger-than-life character of veteran rocker Stacee Jaxx.  Oddly enough, when he stars in his own movies, Cruise is serious, straightforward, and as shallow as the “Rock of Ages” leads. Here, Cruise delivers a performance brimming both with bravado and abasement.  In the movies he doesn’t produce, Cruise has fun skewering his image as well as playing outlandish characters.  Remember that obnoxious Hollywood producer that he played in the war epic parody “Tropic Thunder?”  Cruise is every bit as hilarious there as he was here.  Even if you hate him, you’ll enjoy the way that he skewers himself without mercy, while looking cool in a cretinous sort of way.

“Rock of Ages” opens in 1987.  Tulsa, Oklahoma, native Sherrie Christian (Julianne Hough of “Footloose”) has packed all her autographed classic rock albums—we’re talking vinyl—and has boarded a Greyhound for Hollywood with the dream of becoming a rock and roll starlet.  No sooner does our cute heroine hit Hollywood than a low-life hits her.  He steals all her albums.  A bartender’s assistant, Drew Boley (Diego Boneta of “Mean Girls 2”), consoles her about the loss of her valuables.  Later, Diego manages to land her a job at the popular Sunset Strip nightclub called ‘The Bourbon Room.”  The owner, Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin of “The Departed”), hires Sherrie against his better judgment.  Dennis detests young girls yearning to yowl their way to stardom.  Something that he sees in Sherrie prompts him to make an exception.  Sherrie assures Dennis that she can waitress with the best. 

Meantime, Dennis is struggling to keep the doors of The Bourbon Room open.  He owes a mountain of unpaid taxes.  Dennis’ right hand man, Lonny (Russell Brand of “Get Him to the Greek”), believes rock and roll will save them.  Dennis doesn’t share Lonny’s optimism.  Ultimately, Dennis books rock star sensation Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise of “Risky Business”) because the veteran rocker plans to go solo.  This engagement will mark Stacee’s last show with his band Arsenal.  Dennis and Stacee have known each other from the get-go.  Stacee got his start at The Bourbon Club.  The news that Stacee Jaxx will appear at The Bourbon Room comes at the same time Los Angeles conservatives are poised to launch a campaign against Dennis' notorious night club.  L.A. Mayor Mike Whitmore (Bryan Cranston of TV’s “Breaking Bad”) responds to pressure to sanitize the Sunset Strip.  As it turns out, the mayor’s secret weapon is none other than his trophy wife Patricia. Mrs. Whitmore (Catherine Zeta-Jones of “No Reservations”) rallies the churches together to protest against “sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll." Patricia and her fervent supporters turn out in droves to condemn not only The Bourbon Room but also Stacee Jaxx.  According to Patricia, Stacee Jaxx spews “sex, hateful music, and sex.” Ostensibly, Patricia abhors the rocker because he seduced her vulnerable roommate at UCLA and took advantage of her.

As the crowds assemble outside, chants and protests mingle in the evening air.  Dennis dreams about the mint that he will make until he learns that the act scheduled to open for Stacee Jaxx has bowed out.  At the last minute, Dennis agrees to let Drew and his band warm up the house for three songs only.  Earlier, Drew had lamented to Sherrie during a romantic encounter at the famous Hollywood sign that he suffered from stage. Fright.  Now, he fears the paralysis will strike the next time he climbs on stage.  Miraculously, Drew sheds his fears and lights up the crowd, so much so that the man who promotes Stacee Jaxx, Paul Gill (Paul Giamatti of “Shoot’em Up”), wants to immortalize him.   At this moment, Drew catches a glimpse of Stacee Jaxx adjusting his jeans as Sherrie turns away from him.

Director Adam Shankman and “Tropic Thunder” scenarist Justin Theroux, original Broadway musical writer Chris D'Arienzo, and “Just Go With It” scribe Allen Loeb never let things slow down during this two-hour plus musical.  Indeed, they have made changes.  First, Patricia Whitmore replaces the characters of German developers, Hertz Klinemann and son Franz, who wanted to demolish The Bourbon Room.  Second, Stacee and Sherrie never have sex.  The problem is that "Rock" lacks a genuinely treacherous villain.  Meantime, each song punctuates the plot and serves as commentary.  The assortment of songs captures the cacophonous 1980s when flamboyant, long-haired rockers ruled.  Everything about “Rock of Ages” reeks of nostalgia, especially the way it makes fun of the boy bands.  Occasionally, the filmmakers allow a glint of reality, such as when our heroine winds up pole-dancing.  The choreography is nimble as well as interpretative.  Aside from the rather obvious love story, “Rock of Ages” contains two other romances.  Stacee Jaxx plunges for a “Rolling Stone” reporter, and Lonny and Dennis discover why they love to sing duets.  “Rock of Ages” celebrates the spirit of rock and roll without wallowing in its decadence.