FILM REVIEW OF "THE PURGE: ANARCHY" (2014)

Eighteenth century Irish author and satirist Jonathan Swift would have enjoyed writer & director James DeManaco’s violent, sanguine, urban crime thriller “The Purge: Anarchy” (***1/2 OUT OF ****) even more than its predecessor the home invasion epic “The Purge.”  The premise that our government has allocated one day annually for citizens to assuage their violent urges by committing criminal acts of any kind without fear of punishment is audacious.  Moreover, since America has been purging for 6 years, the economy has improved significant and crime has been cut to the bone.  “The Purge: Anarchy” is comparable to Swift’s immortal essay “A Modest Proposal.”  Written in 1729, “A Modest Proposal” urged destitute Irishmen to sell their children as fodder to feed the insatiable appetites of the wealthy.  In “The Purge: Anarchy,” a terminally-ill senior citizen, sells himself for $100-thousand to an affluent family so they can purge in the confines of their palatial mansion without risking their lives on the streets. Mind you, DeMonaco doesn’t advocate the idea of an annual government-sanctioned crime holiday any more than Swift expected his impoverished counterparts to cannibalize their children.  Hollywood doesn’t often attempt to be as satirical as the “Purge” movies.  Lately, “The Hunger Games” movies with their annual tournament of death is the closest that Tinsel town has come to incisive political satire for mainstream audiences.  Unlike “The Hunger Games,” the “Purge” movies occur about a decade in the future.  Nevertheless, everything looks and sounds like contemporary America as we know it.  The New Founding Fathers, who rule America, appear to be ultra-conservatives, and they place a high premium on religion, but the God that they worship bears little resemblance to the popular, mainstream religious denominations. 

 

“The Purge: Anarchy” opens two hours and 26 minutes before the annual purge scheduled each March.  Waitress Eva Sanchez (Carmen Ejogo of “Absolute Beginners”) and another waitress Tanya (Justina Machado of “Torque”) are waiting on their boss to let them go home for the evening.  Things tonight are drastically different because it is purge night.  Essentially, you can do anything criminal during this twelve-hour period, but the authorities cannot prosecute you.  Eva tries to persuade her boss to raise her salary since she is finding it difficult to pay for her father’s pricey medicine.  Papa Rico (John Beasley of “The General’s Daughter”) hates this medicine and refuses to take it.  Rico’s granddaughter, Cali (Zoë Soul of “Prisoners”), convinces him to take it.  Rico warns Eva and Cali not to awake him from his slumber; all he wants to do is sleep through this terrifying holiday.  Meanwhile, Eva informs Cali that her boss balked at her pay raise request.  Later, these two women are shocked when they discover Papa Rico has sold himself to the highest bidder to be slaughtered.  He has arranged matters so Eva and Cali will receive a small monetary fortune for his sacrificial act.  Eva and Cali are sitting safely in their apartment when intruders in black combat gear with automatic weapons burst in and abduct them at gun point. 

 

In another part of the city, an anonymous individual known only as Sergeant (Frank Grillo of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”) is arming himself to the teeth for an evening of purging.  He knows how to wield a variety of lethal firearms.  Sergeant is one tough looking dude, and he drives an evil black sedan with a trunk crammed with an arsenal of firearms.  Sergeant is set to purge until he spots the thugs-in-black dragging Eva and Cali against their will from their apartment building.  A menacing looking man in a baseball cap and a long butcher’s apron, Big Daddy (Jack Conley of “Payback”), who is standing in an 18-wheeler, wants the women.  Against his better judgment, Sergeant intervenes.  He riddles the thugs manhandling Eva and Cali, and one of his bullets creases Big Daddy’s left cheek and knocks the villain off his feet.  Sergeant escorts Eva and Cali back to his car, but he finds a surprise awaiting them.  Two more innocent bystanders whose car broke down on them have taken refuge in his back seat, and he cannot force them to get out.  Sergeant understands the old saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  Big Daddy recovers in time to open fire with his machine gun that spews armor-piercing rounds.  Our heroes escape his wrath, but Sergeant’s car conks out on him because Big Daddy’s bullets have blown out the engine.  Sergeant and his quartet of refugees set out on foot through the city with Eva assuring him that he can get another car from her waitress friend Tonya at her apartment building.  More surprises ensue for Sergeant and his new friends.

 

Watching either “The Purge” or “The Purge: Anarchy,” you might be tempted to reprimand DeManaco for his implied advocacy of firearms and murder.  In fact, however, DeManaco deplores the overt use of gunplay.  What makes “The Purge: Anarchy” even more relevant is the class warfare theme that DeManaco has developed with even greater intensity than he did in “The Purge.”  DeManaco hammers home the theme of haves versus have-nots emphatically throughout this superior, slam-bang sequel.  Meantime, the only link between the sequel and the original is an African-American supporting character that you might have missed, even if you’ve seen the original.  He was referred to simply as the Bloody Stranger in “The Purge.”  In “The Purge: Anarchy,” he is designated strictly as the Stranger.  If you have not seen “The Purge,” you won’t appreciate the irony in actor Edwin Hodge’s encore performance.  Whereas “The Purge” occurred in a gated, elite neighborhood, “The Purge: Anarchy” expands the playing field to the city at large.  For example, obese woman roams a bridge with a bull horn and a machine gun urging citizens to test her marksmanship.  Busses set ablaze cruise through the night. DeManaco makes maximum use of his sinewy, 103 minutes to forge a palatable atmosphere of paranoia.

FILM REVIEW OF ''LUCY" (2014)

You'll love "Lucy."  French filmmaker Luc Besson, who helmed "Le Femme Nikita," "Angel-A," and "Colombiana," takes the feminist-oriented action thriller genre to the next level.  This outlandish but entertaining hokum chronicles the mutation of a defenseless damsel-in-distress into an invincible dame with heretofore unimagined mental powers.  Our provocative protagonist comes to rely more on her brains than her biology.  Comparably, "Lucy" reminded me a little of the 2004 foreign movie "Maria Full of Grace."  Columbian drug traffickers planted cocaine in the stomach of a teenage girl in "Maria Full of Grace" and used her to smuggle their smack into the United States. Happily, this savvy babe turned the tables on her captors!  Similarly, our heroine in "Lucy" finds a pouch of exotic synthetic drugs sew into her tummy and given a plane ticket for America.  The last thing that her savage, cold-blooded captors are prepared for is her improbable reprisal.  Lucy turns the tables on them in ways that not even she could have thought before she encountered these merciless hooligans.  Indeed, actress Scarlett Johansson would be the whole show if Morgan Freeman weren't lecturing in cutaway shots as a prestigious physician, Professor Samuel Norman, whose ranks as the foremost expert on gray matter.  When Professor Norman isn't delivering lectures to enthralled audiences about the percentage of use that humans derive from their noodles, Besson treats us to illuminating Animal Planet excerpts of jungle animals that punctuate the running battle Lucy carries on with the heavily-armed Asian drug smugglers.  Korean actor Choi Min-shik, who starred in director Chan-wook Park's first version of the revenge thriller "Oldboy" (2003), makes a memorable villain named Mr. Jang.  You will love to hate Mr. Jang.  Furthermore, Mr. Jang's immaculately tailored henchmen are as homicidal as he is until he meets our feminist heroine after she experiences a massive change in her attitude.  Interestingly enough, before she made "Lucy," Scarlett Johansson appeared in "Under the Skin," a 2013 sci-fi thriller about an alien who masquerades as a human to prey on lonely men in Scotland.  For the record, Besson had cast Angelina Jolie as Lucy, but Jolie had to drop out, so Johansson stepped into the role.

The first time we see Lucy (Scarlett Johansson of "The Avengers"), she is arguing with her scummy boyfriend, Richard (Pilou Asbæk of "The Whistleblower"), clad in a straw cowboy-hat and red sunglasses in front of a fashionable, high-rise motel in Taiwan. Richard is struggling to convince Lucy to deliver a sleek briefcase to a motel guest named Mr. Jang.  Richard insists that he cannot personally hand the briefcase over to Mr. Jang.  He says that he has seen the man too many times.  Lucy refuses to deliver the briefcase.  She asks Richard about the contents of the briefcase.  As it turns out, Richard doesn't have a clue about what is in the briefcase.  Their entire argument sounds like something that Quentin Tarantino's characters argued about in "Pulp Fiction."  Everything in the seminal crime thriller "Pulp Fiction" turned on the mysterious contents of a cryptic briefcase.  Just as Lucy is about to walk away from Richard, this reprobate of a boyfriend handcuffs the brief case to her wrist so she cannot get it off. Eventually, Lucy relents and enters the motel while Richard watches her with great anticipation.  Suffice to say, things go downhill like an avalanche for both Richard and our heroine.  The action sequences in "Lucy" are breathtaking, especially the predictable but exciting car chase through Paris with Lucy at the wheel of a police car.  Besson charts the action according to the percentage of brain power that our heroine is able to harness until fadeout when she concludes her incredible metamorphosis.  During this haywire ride, Parisian detective Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked of “Syriana”) sees things that he never thought possible.

Initially, "Lucy" unfolds as a standard-issue, dark-themed, revenge thriller in the vein of something notorious horror maestro Eli Roth of "Hostel" fame would perpetrate.  About half-way through its lean, mean 90 minutes, this nimble Universal Pictures release changes our protagonist from a Shanghaied schoolgirl into a pistol-packing mother who doesn't need a guy to save her bacon.  She becomes the equivalent of Liam Neeson in the "Taken" thrillers and then she even surpasses him!  She doesn't even have to rely on guns.  Earlier, the fiendish villains rounded up not only poor Lucy but also three other guys and sewed a kilo pouch of strange blue crystals called CPH4 into their intestines. Basically, CPH4 amounts to the equivalent of stuff that pregnant moms produce to cultivate their fetuses.  Somebody utters ominously enough about the substance: ""For a baby, it packs the power of an atomic bomb."" Our ingenious heroine manages to escape the clutches of the bad guys, and she alerts the authorities about herself as well as the other mules.  Unfortunately, the police are in no way prepared for the commitment that the criminals have for their product.  They will kill anybody who comes between them and their junk.  As the bullets fly, the bodies whether innocent bystanders or gunmen stack up in piles.  These villains are armed with more than just fully automatic weapons. Before the dust settles, however, Besson's crime thriller transforms into a mind-boggling science fiction actioneer reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey."  Literally, the heroine becomes the equivalent of the monolith in the Kubrick film.  Indeed, the ending is a mind blower in itself, but you may feel cheated by this ending.  In another sense, the ending of “Lucy” is reminiscent too of the wrap up to “Star Trek: the Motion Picture,” where a female android mated with a human to take mankind farther into the future than humanity had ever gone!  Nevertheless, nothing that you have seen this summer will prepare you for “Lucy” and its supercharged little saga.

FILM REVIEW OF ''EDGE OF TOMORROW" (2014)

The soldier that Tom Cruise plays in “Edge of Tomorrow” (*** OUT OF ****) gets his butt kicked all over creation.  “Bourne Identity” director Doug Limon’s supercharged, imaginative, science fiction time-loop thriller synthesizes elements of “Starship Troopers” and “Source Code.”  Surpassing Cruise’s earlier desolation Earth outing “Oblivion,” “Edge of Tomorrow” differs chiefly in terms of story and setting.  Although “Oblivion” occurred on post-apocalyptic planet Earth, “Edge of Tomorrow” takes place before the apocalypse, with mankind desperately pitted against aggressive extraterrestrials with no compassion.  Lightning-fast, squid-like creatures called ‘Mimics’ have invaded Earth.  These invincible whirling dervishes with tentacles have been on the warpath now for the last five years, blitzing their way across the European continent, and advancing toward England without any sign of slowing down.  Predictably, Cruise lands on his feet in the middle of this catastrophic, life and death mayhem.  He doesn’t play the usual heroic character that he played in “Top Gun.”  This represents the first time Cruise has portrayed a yellow-livered skunk.  He goes from being a coward to a hero in an arc that is as entertaining as the film is exciting.  You can differentiate Tom Cruise movies by how often he gets his butt kicked.  Remember “The Last Samurai?”  Cruise had to grovel in that splendid fish-out-of-water spectacle set in Japan.  Usually Cruise doesn’t grovel.  His groveling, however, makes his subsequent acts of heroism all the more convincing.  Mind you, “Edge of Tomorrow” would still qualify as a good, solid movie even if Cruise weren’t getting kicked all over creation.  Mankind is poised on the brink of extinction as these insatiable aliens decimate populations.  The futuristic, 80-pound, exoskeleton combat suits that the soldiers wear looks as cool as the aliens are imitating.  Everything about “Edge of Tomorrow” looks great.  This isn’t a shiny, chrome-plated, sci-fi epic, but a tarnished, grungy-looking one.  Some of the performances stand out.  As Master Sergeant Farrell, Bill Paxton steals every scene that he has with his Southern-fried drawl, while Brendan Gleeson makes a curt supreme army commander and reminded me of Norman Schwarzkopf.  Last but not least, lean-muscled Emily Blunt is pretty hard-nosed and business-like as the pugnacious ‘Angel of Verdun.’  Alongside these fine performers, Cruise holds his own as a disgraced officer who redeems himself in the crucible of combat.

Oscar winning “Usual Suspects” scenarist Christopher McQuarrie and “Fair Game” co-scribes Jez and John-Henry Butterworth have adapted Japanese author Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel “All You Need is Kill,” which came out in December 2004.  As a military public relations officer for the United Defense Force, Major William Cage (Tom Cruise of “War of the Worlds”) has never fired a shot in combat, but he does a commendable job as long as he is stationed far behind the lines.  Imagine Cage’s horror when UDF General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson of “Braveheart”) decides to embed him with ground troops as they storm the French beaches in a last ditch effort to thwart the Mimics.  Cage flatly refuses Brigham’s orders to follow the troops into battle.  Not only does Brigham order Cage arrested and demoted to buck private, but he also assigns him to join a first wave combat unit.  Although “Edge of Tomorrow” is a sci-fi saga, the beachhead scenes where Cage and his unit are flown into action against the Mimics is reminiscent of Spielberg’s classic “Saving Private Ryan.”  Like “Starship Troopers,” the soldiers are flown into combat and dropped from helicopter-style planes.  Once on the ground, the troops rely on their heavily armed battle suits to shred the Mimics with fusillades of gunfire.  The Mimics are slaughtering soldiers left and right until one of them smashes headlong into Cage.  Our terrified protagonist uses a mine to kill one.  When Cage kills a large ‘Alpha’ Mimic, the slimy critter douses him with its blood.  Incredibly enough, despite dying from the Mimic’s blood, Cage discovers that he gets another chance to live and fight again!  Essentially, like the Jake Gyllenhaal character in “Source Code,” Cage relives the first day over and over until he encounters another soldier, Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt of “Loopers”), who experienced the same sensation when a large ‘Alpha’ Mimic killed her.  Before he meets Rita, Cage is killed several times in combat.  Meantime, each time that he dies, Cage awakens just as suddenly to find himself back at Camp Heathrow alive and well.  Director Doug Limon displays quite a bit of flair in handling the same scene over and over again.  Each time that Cage reawakens from his death, he devises new ways to contend with the Mimics.  Sergeant Rita explains to Cage that the same thing occurred to her at Verdun until she received a blood transfusion.  Eventually, as he relives the same day over and over again ad nauseam, Cage becomes so familiar with the turbulent events of that day that he can anticipate when and where the  Mimics will strike.  Before long, Rita trains Cage so that they become a dynamic duo, and they discover that the Mimics have a secret that makes them invincible.  When they try to convince their superiors, especially General Brigham, that they can destroy the Mimics, they are treated as deserters.

Although it boasts some fascinating as well as formidable alien adversaries, “Edge of Tomorrow” doesn’t emphasize horror so much as tension and suspense.  Meaning, you can watch it and not worry about leaving your lights on when you sleep for fear of nightmares.  Basically, it boils down to a crackerjack mission movie with Cruise and Blunt assembling up their own crew of misfits to destroy the aliens and save the day.  Director Doug Limon and his writers steer clear of romance in any way, shape, or form.  The single drawback to this otherwise atmospheric, first-rate actioneer is that the filmmakers don’t provide enough details about the invaders from space.  Nevertheless, watching Tom Cruise get killed dozens of times until he knows what to do is as stimulating as it is amusing.

FILM REVIEW OF ''22 JUMP STREET" (2014)

The shenanigans are far more silly, and the pandemonium far more preposterous in the farcical “21 Jump Street” parody sequel “22 Jump Street” (*** OUT OF ****) co-starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum.  Several actors from the original opus reprise their roles in this side-splitting sequel.  Mind you, even Rob Riggle, who played dastardly Mr. Walters, the H.F.S. drug dealer whose penis got shot off, shows up with David Franco as his cell mate in a prison scene.  Schmidt’s mother and father turn up, too.  Of course, since original TV “Jump Street” headliner Johnny Depp suffered multiple gunshot wounds in “21 Jump Street,” he doesn’t come back.  Rarely does a remake have the nerve to liquidate the leads from the show that spawned the remake.  Nevertheless, comedy is a genre that evolves with each generation.  Meantime, “21 Jump Street” co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller do their level best to bring audiences up to speed after a two-year hiatus.  They rely on the television rehash convention where a narrator informs us what ‘previously’ happened.  Audiences are treated to a condensed version of “21 Jump Street.”  When they aren’t delivering funnier jokes and staging bigger Keystone Cops action set-pieces, Lord and Miller ridicule the formulaic conventions of sequels in general as well as “22 Jump Street” in particular.   Lord and Miller also explore the bromantic relationship between the two protagonists in greater depth.   Indeed, while “22 Jump Street” adheres to the blue-print plot of its predecessors, our heroes’ new college-oriented assignment, the beefed-up, $50-million budget, and the clever end credits constitute some of the most imaginative comedy you’ll ever see.  One of the most outrageous gags features “Neighbors”comic Seth Rogen in a droll cameo near the end of this crackerjack comedy of errors.

 

Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) are not actually attending a traditional college when “22 Jump Street” opens.  Indeed, Captain Dickson (Ice Cube of “Friday”) told them at the end of “21 Jump Street” that they were going to college because they had grown too old to pass as teenagers in high school. Instead, they have been assigned to monitor internet communication at an on-line university.  Specifically, they must listen for either suspicious keywords or phrases that might serve as code words for potential crimes.  Our heroes learn about a meeting time and location at the docks.  Remember, Schmidt and Jenko are not brainiacs.  The professor states the location in no uncertain terms during his lecture.  Like they did in “21 Jump Street,” Schmidt and Jenko find themselves outnumbered by the opposition.  Schmidt masquerades as a laughable Mexican. The Ghost (Peter Stormare of “Armageddon”) and his henchman have a tractor-trailer load of contraband exotic animals.  Predictably, Schmidt tangles with a large pink squid.  This idiotic moment makes you want to laugh because comedian Jonah Hill is clearly doing all the work with his ersatz squid.  If you’ve seen horror icon Bela Lugosi wrestling with an obviously bogus rubber octopus in Ed Wood, Jr.’s “Bride of the Monster” (1956), you can truly appreciate what makes this scene such a howler!  Afterward, our heroes struggle to stop The Ghost,” but this wily opponent eludes them with ease.  The truck stunts in this scene get “22 Jump Street” off to an adrenaline-laced start.  Naturally, Schmidt and Jenko make big buffoons of themselves, while Ghost escapes. 

 

Our heroes wind up in Deputy Chief Hardy’s office to face the music.  Hardy (Nick Offerman of “We’re the Millers”) assigns them to 22 Jump Street, and they find themselves reunited with the profane Captain Dickson.  The new office is located across the street from a church with a Korean Jesus.  Schmidt and Jenko must find the villains behind a new synthetic drug called WhyPhy.  According to Dickson, WhyPhy is a mixture of Adderall and Ecstasy with something else.  You focus for the first couple of hours and then you party like never before and then you die. The only clue that they have is a photo of the student who bought the drug and later died using it.  Schmidt and Jenko start hanging out with likely suspects.  Jenko acquaints himself with two football players, Zook (Wyatt Russell of “Cowboys & Aliens”) and Rooster (Jimmy Tatro of “Grown Ups 2”), who belong to a fraternity.  Meantime, the athletically challenged Schmidt attracts the attention of an art major, Maya (Amber Stevens of “The Amazing Spider-Man”), when he performs slam poetry.  Gradually, Schmidt and Jenko fall out of touch with each other, and this creates friction between them.  Jenko has taken up big time with Zook and joins the college football team.  These two are literally wired into each other because Jenko is always where he is supposed to be to catch Zook’s passes!  Eventually, our frustrated heroes consult Mr. Walters (Rob Ripple) about the best strategy for ferreting out the WhyPhy suppliers.

 

Happily, “22 Jump Street” never takes itself seriously and never loses sight of its origins as a sequel.  “21 Jump Street” should be best remembered as the first buddy cop movie to address the relationship dynamics between male partners.  “22 Jump Street” pokes fun at Schmidt and Jenko, and our heroes have to endure a droll counseling session with a shrink. The African-American twins Keith & Kenny Yang (The Lucas Brothers) who live across the hall from them in the dorm will keep you in stitches with their antics.  Similarly, Mr. Walters’ prison scenes are hysterical.  Our heroes experience some changes themselves, particularly Schmidt.  Schmidt loses his virginity, and the real surprise is the identity of the girl’s father.  Jenko indulges in malapropisms. He says ‘anals’ when he means ‘annuals.’  Instead of saying carte blanche, he says “Cate Blanchett,” He also uses Parkour to shimmy up any edifice.  I didn’t laugh as often at “21 Jump Street” so “22 Jump Street” took me by surprise.  Not only does it live up to its predecessor with its goofy “Saturday Night Live” sketch-type humor, but “22 Jump Street” also surpasses the original.  

 

FILM REVIEW OF ''TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION" (2014)

Although he scrapped the original cast for a company of fresh faces, “Transformers” director Michael Bay has changed little else in this sci-fi, fantasy franchise about Hasbro’s enormous, shape-shifting, alien robots that exist to smash each other to smithereens.  Cast as an entirely different character from Shia LaBeouf’s twentysomething Sam Witwicky, Mark Wahlberg portrays a paranoid, single-parent father in the third sequel of Paramount’s “Transformers” franchise.  Wahlberg isn’t the only newbie.  Five-time Emmy winner Kelsey Grammer of “Cheers” skulks around as a sinister CIA spook, while chrome-domed Stanley Tucci behaves like a Victor Frankenstein-style inventor in league with the notorious Grammer.  For the record, I rank the original “Transformers” marginally above “Dark of the Moon,” followed by “Age of Extinction,” and then “Revenge of the Fallen.”  “Reindeer Games” scenarist Ehren Kruger, who penned the two previous “Transformers” tales, assigns everybody, Man and Transformers alike, with more than enough onerous tasks in this fourth installment to rival “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” with its colossal Windy City apocalypse. Inevitably, everything culminates in a larger-than-life smackdown between the Transformers with collateral damage galore.  Furthermore, Bay and Kruger have anted up some other surprises.  Not only do the Dinobots appear, but also mankind miraculously manages to manufacture Transformers in their research laboratories.  Naturally, you’ll have to channel your inner adolescence to appreciate the fanciful heroics and outlandish mayhem that this PG-13 blockbuster delivers with predictable regularity throughout its bladder challenging 165 minutes.  Whereas the previous “Transformers” outings were essentially screwball comedies about titanic toys using major cities as arenas for their pandemonium, “Transformers: Age of Extinction” (*** OUT OF *****) doesn’t consciously strive to be as absurd as its predecessors.  The hare-brained antics of Shia LaBeouf and his dysfunctional family were more amusing that anything Wahlberg and his teen daughter with her rally race car driver boyfriend dream up.  Indeed, the quirkiest character in “Age of Extinction” doesn’t survive the first hour.  Meaning, “Age of Extinction” isn’t a Looney Tunes extravaganza. 

“Transformers: Age of Extinction” takes place four years after the monumental battle of Chicago in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”  Just as they suggested in the previous “Transformers” epic that NASA embarked on lunar exploration simply as a ruse to locate a crashed Cybertronian spacecraft on the moon before the Soviets, Bay and Kruger fantasize that the dinosaurs disappeared as a consequence of aliens exterminating the massive creatures with extreme prejudice.  Bay and Kruger waste no time introducing the Dinobots, and the scene in the Arctic where mankind has discovered a Dinobot fossil is eerie.  The next thing we know we’re in Texas.  The new protagonist in “Age of Extinction” is Cade Yeager.  A crackpot inventor who operates a fix-it service, Cade is a nice guy who wouldn’t swat a fly.  Cade and his partner Lucas Flannery (T.J. Miller of “Cloverfield”), a surfer dude out of water, are inspecting a movie theater that the owner wants to renovate when they spot a big-rig truck covered with debris.  Cade buys the rig with Lucas’ cash, and they haul it back to his barn.  Cade plans to strip it for spare parts.  Imagine Cade’s surprise when Optimus Prime (original “Transformers” voice-over artist Peter Cullen) changes his shape.  Cade is floored.  Not long afterward, a Top Secret commando outfit nicknamed ‘Cemetery Wind,’ that tracks and destroys Autobots and Decepticons alike, show up at his door.  Since the devastating battle of Chicago, the President has dismantled the combined Autobot & Pentagon operation to mop up stray Decepticons.  Furthermore, the administration has placed a bounty on all Transformers good or evil.  Lucas freaks out at Optimus Prime and alerts Cemetery Wind.  Sadly, Lucas is not prepared for the Storm Trooper tactics of James Savoy (Titus of Welliver “Mulholland Falls”) who resembles a shark in sunglasses and commands Cemetery Wind.  Savoy musters more villainy based on his menacing facade and this propensity for violence than his scheming boss, Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer), who belongs to the Central Intelligence Agency.  Attinger has recruited a brilliant inventor, Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci 0f “The Hunger Games”); to conduct experiments on Megatron’s severed head.  Attinger wants Joyce to create a man-made line of Transformers, and Joyce possesses the genius to make it happen.

My trifling objections with “Age of Extinction” lay with the new cast and the change of atmosphere.  Basically, I’ll watch Mark Wahlberg in just about anything.  He makes consistently interesting movies.  Moreover, Wahlberg radiates greater charisma than Shia LaBeouf.  Unfortunately, Wahlberg plays a largely colorless character.  He worries constantly about his teenage daughter, Tessa Yeager (Nicola Peltz), and struggles to keep her on a short leash.  Naturally, Tessa hates his micro-managing parental skills.  Imagine Cade’s surprise when he learns that Tessa has been dating an older fella!  Jail bait-looking Nicola Peltz makes a poor substitute for somebody as drop-dead sexy as Megan Fox.  Mind you, Fox is no Meryl Streep, but she was built for the “Transformers” franchise.  Tessa Yeager exists so Cade will fear for her welfare.  She serves as the resident damsel-in-distress.  As Tessa’s reckless boyfriend Shane, Jack Reynor brings little to the action aside from his driving skills that a stunt double performed.  The stunts that Shane’s daredevil character pulls are impressive, but little about Shane’s one-dimensional character is as impressive.  Neither Kelsey Grammer’s rather ho-hum villain nor Stanley Tucci’s deluded inventor overshadow the memory of the insane shenanigans of John Turturro’s Agent Simmons in the first three “Transformers.”  Nobody takes over the roles that Josh Duhamel as Captain Lennox and Tyrese Gibson as USAF Tech Sergeant Epps created.  Remember, the military is excluded from “Age of Extinction.” 

No, you need not have seen the earlier “Transformers” trilogy toplining Shia LaBeouf to appreciate this entertaining reboot.  The best “Transformers” movies boast a multiplicity of shape-shifting robots, and the fourth “Transformers” movie meets the quota and then raises the bar.  Happily, quiet moments are few and far between in “Age of Extinction,” and the battling robots make the third sequel worthwhile escapism.

FILM REVIEW OF ''A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST" (2014)

Seth MacFarlane’s half-baked horse opera “A Million Ways to Die in the West” (** OUT OF ****) qualifies as a saddle-sore saga.  This lowest common denominator sagebrush satire boasts low-brow bowel humor, highly offensive language, and gory death scenes.  Despite all these unsavory elements, this western spoof emerges as fair at best and routine at worst.  Sporadically funny jokes and gags cannot conceal the conventions and clichés.  The first problem is the trite Alex Sulkin, Wellesley Wild, and Seth MacFarlane screenplay.  Recently, I watched an Eddie Albert comedy “The Dude Goes West” (1947) that covered similar ground with greater success.  MacFarlane and his co-writers rant about the deplorable conditions governing life on the frontier in the 19^th century American west.  The hero and the heroine hate the west.  This revulsion of all things western neither distinguishes MacFarlane’s movie nor makes its humor any funnier.  The only place where “A Million Ways to Die” breaks ground is with its raunchy R-rated jokes.  Some of the jokes hit, but most miss. Some jokes are so vile they might gag the guys in the “Jackass” movies.  Indeed, MacFarlane gets away with a lot in this lame oater, especially during the opening “Gunsmoke” showdown.  The good jokes are really good.  One of the best turns out to be badly told but this serves to accentuate the humor.  The second problem is most of the dialogue sounds like stand-up, comic routines.  Some standup comedy routines are better than others.  The best gag concerns Old West photography.  The running joke is nobody smiles in a photograph in the 19^th century.  Nevertheless, the grinning photo attained the status as an urban legend.  Those who aren’t appalled by MacFarlane’s infantile as well as scatological sense of humor will no doubt want to roll in it like a dog in its own feces.  “A Million Ways to Die in the West” struggles to emulate “Blazing Saddles,” deliver dialogue like “Deadwood,” and show off like “Faces of Death.”

The setting of “A Million Ways to Die” is the town of Old Stump in the Arizona Territory in the year 1882.  Our pusillanimous sheep farming protagonist, Albert Stark (Seth MacFarlane of “Ted”), sinks into a state of depression after his schoolmarm girlfriend, Louise (Amanda Seyfried), dumps him for a snotty lothario, Foy (Neal Patrick Harris of “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle”), who owns a mustache shop.  No, nice-guy Albert doesn’t sport a mustache.  Louise left Albert because she classified him as too cowardly.  During the opening Main Street showdown, Albert drops his six-gun in the dust rather than shoot it out with another gunman.  Later, Albert challenges Foy to a duel.  Meantime, a mysterious woman, Anna (Charlize Theron of “Monster”), shows Albert how to handle a hog-leg.  Anna, as it turns out, is the wife of notorious outlaw Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson of “Taken”) who eventually decides to shoot Albert for flirting with his wife.  Basically, boy loses girl, boy tries to get girl back, but takes up with a different girl describes the storyline.  An imbecilic subplot concerns the romance between a hard-working saloon prostitute, Ruth (Sarah Silverman of “Evolution”) and a timid male virgin shoemaker (Giovanni Ribisi of “The Mod Squad”) who has agreed not to have intercourse with her until their wedding night.  Albert and his friends emerge as likeable, sympathetic characters, while Foy, Clinch, and his henchmen are as repulsive as rattlers.

Although best known as the creator of the respective animated series “American Dad” and “Family Guy,” not to mention his previous blockbuster comedy “Ted” with Mark Wahlberg, MacFarlane must have been gambling that he could resurrect a moribund franchise with his impertinent humor.  Westerns have not performed well at the box office since the early 1990s, and even then the genre was riding on borrowed time.  After John Wayne died and Clint Eastwood got too old plains, westerns have never regained their former grandeur.  Disney’s “Lone Ranger” tanked last summer, and only AMC’s “Hell on Wheels” on television has survived with any success.  The Jeff Bridges “True Grit” remake and Quentin Tarantino’s slave saga “Django” are the sole examples of successes.  Nothing about MacFarlane’s approach to the genre justifies its use.  He looks out of place himself with his hopelessly clean-scrubbed, Shoney’s Big Boy looks.  Aside from his profanity, MacFarlane plays the same tenderfoot that Bob Hope, Eddie Albert, Gary Cooper, Don Knotts, or Tim Conway have done in earlier movies and television shows.  Neil Patrick Harris usually steals the show no matter what the material, but he makes only a minor impression with his Snidely Whiplash villain.  Unfortunate Amanda Seyfried has little more to do than bulge her beautiful eyes and swish an umbrella.  Charlize Theron and Liam Neeson wander through their roles.  Colorful cameos by the likes of Christopher Lloyd, Gilbert Gottfried, Ewan McGregor, Jamie Foxx, and Bill Maher prove more stimulating.  “A Million Ways to Die in the West” could have been a million times better.