FILM REVIEW OF "UNBREAKABLE" (2000)

Writer & director M. Night Shyamalan's fourth film "Unbreakable" refers to its protagonist, football stadium security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis) who has been born with an almost perfect body because his bones cannot be broken. Far less introspective and surprising than the enigmatic "Sixth Sense," this atmospheric melodrama depicts the friendship between Dunn and an African-American, Elijah Price, nicknamed Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), who suffers from an unusual bone disease designated 'Osteogenesis Imperfecta.' Basically, 'Osteogenesis Imperfecta' is a genetic disorder where bones break easily. In other words, Glass' surname reflects the extremely fragile nature of his body. The first scene in "Unbreakable" details the birth of Mr. Glass in a department store apparel fitting room.  One of the men who takes charge of the infant discovers to his horror that the little boy's arms and legs are misshapen from where he fought to get out of his mother's womb. Later, we learn that Mr. Glass has become obsessed with comic book superheroes.  Shrewdly, his mother (Charlayne Woodard of “The Crucible”) used comics to coax her son out of the seclusion of their apartment. Glass becomes a leading authority on comic books as well as the characteristics of super heroes and super villains. He represents a strong villain because he reckons if he occupies one end of the spectrum then an 'unbreakable' hero occupies the other end. In his fiendish efforts to find the other end of the spectrum, Mr. Glass commits incorrigible crimes which eventually land him in a mental asylum. For example, he engineers a train wreck where everybody on board dies, except for our protagonist David Dunn. 

Eventually, Mr. Glass catches up with David after his miraculous survival without a broken bone makes news’ headlines as the sole survivor of the deadly train wreck.  Moreover, he takes a bizarre interest in him that Dunn doesn't reciprocate.  Nevertheless, David’s curiosity prompts him to search for information about his health that he has taken for granted.  For example, he has never missed a day at work owing to illness.  Later, he realizes that he was never injured in an accident that broke his future wife’s leg.  After the wreck, David cites an injury that convinced him from pursuing a promising career in college football.  His wife, Audrey Dunn (Robin Wright of "Forrest Gump"), is relieved to learn David has decided to hang up his cleats.  Glass' inquiries arouses the curiosity of David's son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark of "Gladiator") who loads up more free weights than David thinks possible to press and winds up impressing both of them.  David pushes 350 pounds!  Later, when Joseph is convinced that his father cannot be hurt by flying lead, a standoff occurs in the kitchen with Joseph threatening his dad with a revolver at point blank range. Of course, neither David nor his terrified wife Audrey believe that he is invincible where bullets are concerned, and they manage to persuade Joseph to put the pistol down.  Reportedly, when George Reeves portrayed the Man of Steel on the television program “Superman,” a child approached him with a gun during a public appearance and tried to shoot him, but Reeves talked him out of it.  He warned him that the bullet might ricochet off him and wound somebody else.

The $75-million "Unbreakable" boils down to your basic clash of the titans. Mr. Glass has spent his entire life searching for David. Initially, David refuses to believe anything about him made him special.  After the tragic train accident, David has second thoughts.  One scene demonstrates both of David's two usual capabilities. A maniac forces his way into a residential home, kills the husband, ties up the two children, assaults the wife, and leaves her tied up with bleeding wrists. Meantime, David has the power of insight that enables him to tell who constitutes a threat to the public. Glass is on hand at the football stadium when David displays this power.  Scrutinizing the spectators filing into the stadium, David points out a suspicious character wearing a cameo shirt.  Our protagonist suspects this fellow may be packing a pistol out-of-sight under his shirt. At the last minute, the suspicious fellow steps out of line.  Desperately Mr. Glass pursues him and falls down a stairway in his efforts to learn if he was toting a firearm which matched David's description. Indeed, this suspicious guy was carrying a concealed weapon!  Later, David spots a maintenance man.  They brush past each other, and David follows him to the house where the husband lies dead and the children are tied up.  David attacks the maintenance man and gets his arms around his neck.  The maniac slams David repeatedly against walls, smashing up those walls, but he cannot dislodge David who keeps him in a choke hold until the brute loses consciousness.  At first, David and his family didn’t trust Elijah, and they classified him as a nuisance. Their attitude changes, and the two become friends, until the final quarter of the action, when Elijah reveals his true colors, and David realizes that Elijah poses a threat.  He orchestrated three terrorist attacks in an effort to find the man at the other in of the spectrum.  Once, David recognizes Glass as a threat, he alerts the authorities. 

Clocking in at 106 minutes, “Unbreakable” seems to take forever to unfold.  The ending is a let-down because Glass and David never tangle, but the character-driven action is momentarily engrossing until it concludes with an anti-climactic situation. Bruce Willis delivers a beautifully restrained performance, and he behaves just as we suspect a normal person would.  The scene on the train before the accident is liable to draw the wrath of married women.  David removes his wedding ring and makes a play for a female passenger who sits beside him.  Samuel L. Jackson is just as good as Elijah but never really seems menacing enough.  Despite the strong character study of two rivals, “Unbreakable” is by its dreary pace and its anti-climactic ending.  

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.