'Bad Boys For Life' brings a deservedly dead franchise back for more testosterone-fueled carnage

The makers of “Bad Boys For Life” — the third movie in an action franchise that lay comatose for 17 years — must have been thrilled when this week’s Academy Award nominations came out. 

After all, if toxic masculinity was good enough to get rafts of nominations for “Joker” and “The Irishman,” certainly this slab of testosterone-driven spectacle will be in clover.

It turns out that Miami Police detectives Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) have been doing what they were doing in the first “Bad Boys” back in 1995: Busting bad guys and living large. For Mike, that high living means driving his Porsche at high speeds — but, in the movie’s prologue, it’s to get his family-centered partner, Marcus, to the hospital to be there for the birth of his first grandchild.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, Isabel Aretas (played by Mexican superstar Kate del Castillo), the wife of a deceased drug kingpin, is busting out of prison and plotting her revenge. Her weapon is her son, Armando (Jacob Scipio), a talented assassin and sniper who starts knocking off his mama’s list of everyone who took down her family’s drug empire. At the top of that list is Mike — who barely survives Armando’s first attempt at murdering him.

When Mike gets back to good health, he wants to go after whoever shot him. His boss, Capt. Howard (Joe Pantoliano — wow, it’s been a minute), tells him to leave the investigation to Miami PD’s new task force, with the unfortunate acronym AMMO. The group of young tech-savvy hotshots (played by Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig and Charles Melton) is led by an ambitious lieutenant, Rita (Paola Nuñez), whom Mike briefly dated. Mike considers going rogue, and gets pushback from Marcus, who is retiring from the force.

Of course, Marcus gets pulled back into the action, as Mike and the AMMO crew track down a chain of players, each one getting his own over-amped action set piece. The directing team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah — they go by All & Bilall — never face an action sequence where they couldn’t add more smoke, more gunplay, more fire, just more, more, more. Michael Bay, the director of the first two installments (and has a laughably awkward cameo here), would be proud.

The most striking thing about “Bad Boys For Life” is how the script — credited to three guys, Chris Brener, Peter Craig and Joe Carnahan — shifts erratically from the loud, jokey style of its predecessors into histrionics about Mike and Marcus’ loyalty to each other, summed up in their creed of “ride together, die together.” It’s as if the filmmakers are trying to reverse-engineer this idiotic franchise into the self-important seriousness of the “Fast & Furious” films.

To do so, though, requires a plot twist that’s meant to give Smith a moment of hardcore acting, but is so ludicrous as to prompt gales of audience laughter. As the movie devolves to an overblown ending, and a mid-credit scene suggesting a pre-planned sequel, the title “Bad Boys For Life” feels like a threat.

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‘Bad Boys for Life’

★

Opens Friday, January 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout, sexual references, and brief drug use. Running time: 123 minutes.

'Dolittle' is a hot mess, but Robert Downey Jr.'s charms captures the audience's attention

As one might expect for a movie with a lot of animals in it, “Dolittle” is a mess — though not quite the giant pile of poo that industry wags have been expecting since its April 2019 release date was pushed back for reported reshoots and tinkering.

That rebuilding has left a rickety story structure, with comic voice work thrown on like a slapdash coat of paint. One can see the seams at every turn, along with the grinding labor it took to get this movie over the finish line. But even in its disheveled state, there are moments of charm and wit.

An animated — in the literal sense, not the figurative — prologue shows us a young Dr. John Dolittle, a veterinarian with a caring tone and an uncanny ability to understand what animals are saying. The good doctor falls in love with Lily (Kasia Smutnaik), an explorer, and together they have adventures around the world. But when Lily attempts an ocean crossing and dies in a storm, Dolittle retreats from the world in his animal sanctuary, unseen by other humans for years.

That solitude is broken by two young people. Tommy Stubbins (Harry Collett) brings a wounded squirrel, shot by Tommy in a hunting accident. And Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado), a lady in waiting for Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley), summons Dolittle to Buckingham Palace, where the queen is gravely ill.

Dolittle arrives at the palace and instantly deduces that the queen has been poisoned, and the only cure is a rare tree on a far off island — the very island Lily was trying to reach when her ship sank. Dolittle sets sail on his own ship, with Stubbins as a new apprentice learning how to care for the many animals, a group that includes a friendly polar bear (voiced by John Cena), a cowardly gorilla (voiced by Rami Malek), a helpful goose (voiced by Octavia Spencer), a panicky ostrich (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani), and a parrot, Poly, who provides (in the voice of Emma Thompson) both sage wisdom and the story’s narration.

There’s also a plot afoot, a conspiracy between the devious Lord Badgley (Jim Broadbent) and the queen’s personal physician, Dr. Blair Müdfly (Michael Sheen), who knew Dolittle back in school. Mustache-twirling villainy ensues, in scenes that greatly resemble Inspector Fix’s pursuit of Phileas Fogg in “Around the World in 80 Days.”

How Antonio Banderas, as the king of a far-away land where a clue to the tree’s location, factors into this is anyone’s guess. The Oscar nominee is game to be silly as a rejected “Indiana Jones” villain, in a sequence so choppy that one suspects it used to be a lot longer and noisier.

“Dolittle” remains quite noisy in other ways, namely with all those celebrities giving voice to the various animals. Besides those already mentioned, there are unremarkable voice turns by Tom Holland, Craig Robinson, Selena Gomez, Marion Cotillard and Ralph Fiennes.

One wishes director Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”) had gone the opposite direction, showing Dolittle making animal sounds that he could understand but the audience couldn’t. Downey, who struggles mightily with a Welsh accent and a script overloaded with fart humor, could have performed the entire movie chirps and roars, and it would have been glorious. As it is, Downey tries mightily to keep this leaky vessel moving, and he can’t be blamed when it sinks.

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‘Dolittle’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some action, rude humor and brief language. Running time: 102 minutes.

A modern 'Les Misérables' captures the energy and tension of a Paris neighborhood on the brink

In director Ladj Ly’s incendiary debut, and Academy Award nominee in the International Film category, “Les Misérables,” you won’t find a 19th century student revolt or Jean Valjean trying to protect his adopted daughter. But Victor Hugo would have no trouble recognizing the tensions between police and the people living in his old neighborhood.

In this modern tale, a rural cop, Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), is a new transfer to a police station in the Paris suburb or Montfermeil. That’s the area where the Threnadiers’ had their inn in Hugo’s novel, and now there’s a school there that carries Hugo’s name. It’s a low-income area, dominated by a housing project called Los Bosquets, whose residents deal with crime, poverty and an uncaring police force — embodied by Stéphane’s new partners, Chris (Alexis Manenti) and Gwada (Djebril Zonga).

While making their rounds, the three cops try to make an arrest, but the incident turns violent in a hurry — and while the officers are trying to deal with the aftermath, they notice a drone with a camera flying above. Fearful that video of the incident will go viral, Chris and Gwada go on a rampage to track down the operator of that drone.

Ly was born in Mali and grew up in Los Bouquets, and like Jean Valjean spent some time in prison. (He served two years for being an accomplice in a kidnapping, according to the French paper Libération, which wrote about the case last month while debunking claims in right-wing papers that he was charged with attempted murder.) Ly brings a chilling authenticity to the scenes of civic unrest and police intimidation, with the fish-out-of-water Stéphane as the observer being shocked and then appalled by what he witnesses and is forced to take part in.

Los Bosquete is a powderkeg, as Ly depicts it in “Les Misérables,” and the cops are the gasoline — a situation familiar and all-too-real to people in Paris or any major American city. The question Ly asks provocatively, but leaves for us to consider, is what to do when a spark lands on it all.

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‘Les Misérables’

★★★1/2

Opened January 10 in select cities; opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language throughout, some disturbing/violent content, and sexual references. Running time: 102 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

'Varda by Agnès' is a great director's final masterclass, capturing the humanity and sweat of her films

If all my professors were as knowledgeable, as caring, and as fun as Agnès Varda — as demonstrated in her final film, the self-reflective documentary “Varda by Agnès” — I wouldn’t have skipped class so often.

Shot shortly before her death last March at the age of 90 — and shown on French TV as a two-episode miniseries — this lively documentary is set up like a masterclass. Varda sits on a stage in a grand opera house, talking to her audience about how she made her films, working roughly in chronological order.

Varda begins with her 1954 debut, the rough-and-tumble “La Pointe Courte,” and her early masterpiece “Clèo From 5 to 7” (1961), a semi-improvised slice of life of a self-involved pop singer (Corinne Marchand) wandering the Rue Daguerre — the street where Varda lived — while waiting for the results of a cancer test. Varda talks about how she structured the film so Clèo would sing a song at the movie’s exact midpoint, and everything before and after would radiate from that moment.

The class doesn’t stay in the opera house, though. When talking about her 1985 drama “Vagabond,” about a teen girl, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, walking across the French countryside, Varda is suddenly outside, sitting on a camera dolly similar to the one she used in the film for its trademark tracking shots. A minute later, Bonnaire, who’s now 52 and a big star in France, is on the dolly with Varda, reminiscing about the shoot.

The first half of the film covers Varda’s work in the 20th century, and the second half her work in the 21st, with a diversion to talk about her photography and exhibition work as an intermission. The turning point for Varda was her 2000 documentary “The Gleaners and I,” in which she followed people who made their living picking up what others threw away — whether in potato fields in the country or the dumpsters of Paris. Varda’s camera mirrors its subjects, considering the value of people that others would ignore.

For fans of Varda or those unfamiliar with Varda’s work — from her early standing as “the godmother of the French New Wave,” in the same circles as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy (her husband until his death in 1990), to her end-of-career rediscovery partnering with street artist JR in “Faces Places” — “Varda by Agnès” is an eye-opening look at an artist dissecting her works and revealing the threads that connect them. Watch it, then make time to binge-watch her earlier films.

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‘Varda by Agnès’

★★★1/2

Opened November 20, 2019, in select cities; opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for some nudity and sexual content. Running time: 115 minutes; in French with subtitles.

'Cunningham' documentary features dance legend's beautiful steps, but not much information on how he decided to place them

Merce Cunningham — the choreographer, dancer and icon of modern dance, whose career is chronicled in the documentary “Cunningham” — resisted when interviewers asked him to describe his style. “I don’t describe it, I just do it,” he would say.

That may be a good way for a choreographer to cut through the labels and traditions of dance, but it leaves a documentarian — in this case, Alla Kovgan, who also wrote and edited the film — in a bind. If Cunningham refused to describe the themes behind his art, how the hell does a filmmaker do the job? And how does an audience who isn’t versed in dance history make sense of it all?

Kovgan does it by showing rather than telling. She employs a troupe of dancers to re-create Cunningham’s classic choreography, from 1942 to 1972, strikingly captured by cinematographer Mko Malkhasyan. The moves are sometimes fluid and graceful, other times energetic and angular.

How it got that way, and how Cunningham developed his unique and often-imitated style is harder for Kovgan to pin down. Through archival footage and excerpts from Cunningham’s letters and diaries, she is able to chronicle the high points of Cunningham’s remarkable career — and get some of his dancers to comment on the process, through rehearsal and performance, that Cunningham used to draw from his dancers’ individual abilities to fuel his works.

One fascinating feature of Cunningham’s career that Kovgan explores is the influence of his collaborators, and Cunningham had some heavy hitters. Much of his music was composed, sometimes on the spot, by John Cage, Cunningham’s partner until Cage’s death in 1990. And the first artist to create set backdrops and costumes for the troupe was Robert Rauschenberg — and when his painting career took off, artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns stepped in.

A hole in the narrative is how little is discussed of Cunningham’s home life with Cage. That could be attributed to Kovgan relying exclusively on archival interviews, from a time when homosexual relationships weren’t talked about in public.

With so little of “Cunningham” covering his private life or his themes, it leaves a dance novice with little to grasp onto except the images of the dance itself. Experts may get a lot more out of the documentary, but the rest of us get gorgeous but inscrutable motion. 

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‘Cunningham’

★★★

Opened December 13, 2019, in select cities; opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some smoking. Running time: 93 minutes.

Well-acted and painfully earnest, 'Just Mercy' is Oscar bait of another era

The legal drama “Just Mercy” is the sort of heart-in-the-right-place movie that would have been a shoo-in for Academy Award glory a decade ago. The fact that it’s not in the award conversation, despite a powerhouse cast, says a lot about the changing landscape of prestige pictures.

Based on a true story, the movie follows the fortunes of Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan). We first meet Bryan as an eager law student at Harvard, working a summer internship in Georgia for a group trying to provide legal help to death-row inmates. The experience helps guide Bryan’s future, to use his law degree to do the most good.

Two years later, in 1992, a freshly graduated Bryan is leaving his family in Delaware to move to Alabama. With a federal grant and the support of an anti-death-penalty activist, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), Bryan sets up the Equal Justice Initiative, to provide legal aid to soon-to-be-executed inmates.

Bryan isn’t given a warm welcome upon arrival. The landlord Eva paid for office space backs out at the last minute, leaving Bryan to do his office work in Eva’s living room. And the guards at the state penitentiary order Bryan to a strip-search on his first visit — something other attorneys never have to do. Bryan maintains his composure, but Jordan shows the simmering anger underneath.

One case in particular draws Bryan’s attention: Walter “Johnnie D” McMillan (played by Jamie Foxx), facing execution for the murder of an 18-year-old white woman in 1986. Bryan quickly discovers there was no evidence linking McMillan to the crime, plenty of witnesses who could testify McMillan was elsewhere at the time of the murder, and the state’s only witness was a criminal (Tim Blake Nelson) who only avoided Death Row himself by testifying against McMillan.

Bryan confronts the racist sheriff (Michael Harding), a district attorney (Rafe Spall) unwilling to open old wounds, and a judicial system stacked against the convicted — especially when they’re black. That racism is so engrained in the Alabama psyche that McMillan himself tells Bryan, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into here in Alabama … when you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.”

Director Destin Daniel Cretton (who helmed Larson in “Short Term 12” and “The Glass Castle”) — who co-wrote the screenplay with Andrew Lanham, adapting Stevenson’s memoir — finds its most moving passages in the conversations between Bryan and Johnnie D, as the young lawyer shows respect to the condemned man’s dignity and gives the inmate a glimmer of hope. Equally moving are the scenes of Johnnie D in the cellblock, talking to other inmates (played by Rob Morgan and O’Shea Jackson Jr.) who know their days are numbered, too.

If only those scenes were enough to counter the by-the-numbers moments of predictably lofty courtroom speeches and one-dimensional racists in pickup trucks. That’s where, I think, “Just Mercy” misses out on the next-level appreciation that an issue-driven movie like this once would have gotten from Oscar voters. As good as the performances by Jordan and Foxx are, the eat-your-vegetables feel of the inspirational dialogue and change-the-world narrative hold the movie back. 

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‘Just Mercy’

★★★

Opened December 25 in select cities; opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic content including some racial epithets. Running time: 137 minutes.

‘Underwater’ is a thriller that doesn’t quite embrace its weirdness enough

The generically titled thriller “Underwater” veers between being too crazy and not quite crazy enough, without ever hitting the sweet spot a ludicrously premised movie like this requires.

Caught at the nexus of “Alien,” “The Abyss” and “The Blair Witch Project,” “Underwater” is set in a drilling facility at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, nearly seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean. There lies the Kepler station, housing 316 crew members that control the nearby Roebuck drilling rig. When an earthquake hits, the Kepler station is severely damaged, and the pressure of the depths starts buckling sections of the massive facility.

After some scrambling about, six survivors land in one room. The one we’ve seen the most of is Norah (Kristen Stewart), a mechanical engineer who seemingly can hack or rewire anything. There’s also Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie), Paul (T.J. Miller), Smith (John Gallagher Jr.) and his marine biologist girlfriend, Emily (Jessica Henwick), and Capt. Lucien (Vincent Cassel), who managed to evacuate a fair number of people before the escape pods ran out. Weirdly, except for the captain, the guys don’t have actual jobs — and only Miller’s Paul is allowed any personality quirks.

Capt. Lucien devises a plan for them to get out alive as the Kepler crashes down to the ocean floor. The plan requires them donning diving suits and traversing the ocean floor to the Roebuck drilling site, a mile away, where there should be more escape pods. That’s if the pressure of being that far underwater doesn’t kill them.

Once they get going, though, the crewmembers learn there’s something else they haven’t considered: Something else is down there with them, and could kill them, too.

Director William Eubank (who made the effective low-budget alien thriller “The Signal”) devises some nasty set pieces full of creepy effects, knocking members out of the party one at a time. But there’s a rote feeling to some of the jump scares, as well as the sort of narrative confusion when you put all six of your cast members in identical diving suits.

That’s the not-crazy-enough part of “Underwater.” The too-crazy part comes in the monster mash of a finale, which plays more like a video game’s final boss battle than a sensible action ending. But the cast, particularly Stewart, is game for anything — even crawling through the guts of a slimy beast, which is something no one needs to see.

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‘Underwater’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action and terror, and brief strong language. Running time: 95 minutes.

Cringe-worthy 'Like a Boss' isn't half as funny as the people in it

There’s a vast gulf between a funny movie and a movie with a lot of funny people in it, and within that gulf rests “Like a Boss,” whose raunchy humor misses more than it hits.

Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne star as Mia and Mel, women who have been friends since middle school, through high school and college, and launching their cosmetics line as a garage start-up. They do good business online, with a “one-night stand” mini make-up kit as their top-selling item. Their brick-and-mortar store, where Mia has the color ideas and Mel keeps the books, is hemorrhaging money — though it doesn’t keep the partners from leaving their employees, awkward Syd (Jennifer Coolidge) and flamboyant Barret (Billy Porter, stealing every scene), alone while they party with their wealthy, married-with-kids gal pals (Jessica St. Clair, Ari Graynor and Natasha Rothwell).

One day, in walks what could be the answer to Mia & Mel’s financial woes: Beauty mogul Claire Luna (Salma Hayek), a cosmetics CEO who wants to invest in the partners’ operation, in exchange for 49% interest in the business. The hitch is that if Mia and Mel ever break up, Claire gets controlling interest in the company. Mel, always eager to please, talks the more temperamental Mia into signing — but soon Claire is picking at the cracks in the partners’ relationship.

There’s certainly room in this premise — credited to two male screenwriters, Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly (sharing story credit with Danelle Sanchez-Witzel) — and director Miguel Arteta (“Beatriz at Dinner”) gathers together plenty of funny people to fill the space. But there’s not enough jokes baked into the script for the stars to latch onto, and the hope of spontaneous on-set hilarity doesn’t pay off as much as you’d like. There are occasional flashes of humor in “Like a Boss,” but the stars are in the position of trying to pretty up a bad situation without enough foundation.

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‘Like a Boss’

★★

Opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, crude sexual material, and drug use..Running time: 83 minutes.