Review: 'PAW Patrol: The Movie' is children's entertainment so inoffensive, it's kind of insulting

Who on earth would get their first exposure to the “PAW Patrol” franchise via its first movie, imaginatively titled “PAW Patrol: The Movie?”

Maybe divorced dads who had custody of their tykes on opening weekend, having never watched the popular TV series or encountered the vast array of officially licensed “PAW Patrol” merchandise — a selection that actually gets mentioned in the movie, in the closest thing this kids-only entertainment ever gets to being meta.

Well, that’s not true. There is the moment where the PAW Patrol’s nemesis, the cat-loving and corrupt head of Adventure City, Mayor Humdinger (voiced by Ron Pardo, a series regular), says, “I’m an unqualified elected official. What could go wrong?” No word yet on how many COVID-19 cases Adventure City has reported this week.

There is a plot, flimsy though it may be: After having rescued everyone who needs rescue in their town of Adventure Bay, the PAW Patrol — six brave, resourceful and ridiculously well-equipped puppies, led by a human boy, Ryder (voiced by Will Brisbin) — heads for the big city. There, they face the newly elected Mayor Humdinger, whose new initiatives, such a loop-de-loop roller coaster track grafted onto the subway system, inevitably lead to catastrophe. Of course, it’s up to our pups to save the day.

The pups have color-coded uniforms, which is easier than giving them distinctive character traits. Only two puppies have meaningful story arcs: Chase (voiced by “Young Sheldon’s” Iain Armitage), dealing with his anxiety about returning to Adventure City, where he was abandoned as a younger pup; and a new character: Liberty (voiced by “black-ish” teen Marsai Martin), a street-smart weiner dog whose knowledge of the city comes in handy for these out-of-town pups.

Director Cal Brunker (who also made “The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature” and “Escape From Planet Earth”) knows he’s dealing with a property whose audience has a short attention span. That’s why he cuts in frequently with soundtrack cuts set to montages, to give kids the opportunity to get their wiggles out. Brunker also, smartly, enlists some familiar names for the voice cast — a list that includes Tyler Perry, Yara Shahidi, Dax Shepard, Randall Park and Kim Kardashian West — who, I’m wagering, wanted on board because their kids watch this show to distraction. 

Even by the lowered standards usually applied to kiddie movies, “PAW Patrol: The Movie” is a chore to watch. When the innocuous puppy characters hop into their rescue vehicles and hit the streets, my first thought — one that a quality animated movie would never inspire — was how many toys this movie was trying to sell me. Even if your kids are clamoring to see this movie, try to dissuade them — or, at least, get it for them streaming (it’s available on Paramount+) — because life is too short for children’s movies as drab and as studiously inoffensive as this one.

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‘PAW Patrol: The Movie’

★★

Opens Friday, August 20, in theaters, and streaming on Paramount+. Rated G. Running time: 88 minutes.

Review: 'CODA' is a big-hearted comedy-drama about a teen daughter of deaf parents finding her voice.

Family is a stronger force than music or deafness in “CODA,” a charming comedy-drama about a teen girl caught in a classic tug-of-war between familial obligation and chasing her dreams.

Emilia Jones gives a star-making performance as Ruby Rossi, the only hearing member of a fishing family in Gloucester, Mass. Both her parents, Frank (Troy Kotsur) and Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and her older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant) are deaf. (The title is an acronym for “child of deaf adults.”) Ruby works on the family’s fishing boat — and, being the only one who can hear, draws the duty of working the radio and negotiating with the fish wholesalers on the dock.

Ruby has a passion, one that she can’t really share with her family: Music. When it comes time to pick a school activity, she sees that a cute boy, Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, from “Sing Street”), signs up for choir, and she does the same. She discovers that she’s actually a good singer — so much so that her choir teacher, Mr. V (Eugenio Derbez), suggests she audition for the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Mom takes Ruby’s love of singing personally. “If I was blind, you would like to paint.” Surely, Ruby loves her family, but the relationship is a complex one — she’s heard her classmates mock her family, and has felt the pressure of being the family’s in-house interpreter. 

Writer-director Siân Heder (who has written for “Orange Is the New Black,” and whose directing debut “Tallulah” premiered at Sundance in 2016) remakes a 2014 French comedy, “La Family Bélier,” into a warmly funny and quite touching story. The comedy sometimes skirts the raunchy edge of the PG-13 rating — Frank and Jackie have a boisterous sex life, and Frank’s command of dirty sign language is impressive — and the tender moments are undercut with the right amount of humor. Two of the best moments occur when Ruby is onstage singing, and only a stony heart wouldn’t sniff back a tear or two.

In a strong cast — Kotsur and Durant are delightful, and Matlin hasn’t had a chance to be this good since she won her Oscar for “Children of a Lesser God” 35 years ago — it’s 18-year-old Emilia Jones who is hands down the star here. She captures Ruby’s love for music and for her family, even when the burden of being its only hearing member grows wearying. “CODA” is sure to go down as the first of many triumphs for this talented young actress.

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‘CODA’

★★★1/2

Streaming starting Friday, August 13, on AppleTV+; opening August 20 at Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated PG-13 for strong sexual content and language, and drug use. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'Free Guy' is a hilarious valentine to gaming culture, with Ryan Reynolds as an NPC who's more than the sum of his ones and zeros.

The action comedy “Free Guy” is perhaps the best video game movie ever made — not because it’s a faithful adaptation of a popular video game (it’s not), but because within its jokes and explosions, it carries a genuine fondness for gaming culture and the people inside and outside the console.

Ryan Reynolds stars as Guy, who has a perfect routine to his day. He wakes up, says hello to his goldfish, puts on a blue shirt and a striped tie, walks to the coffee shop and orders “one cream, two sugars,” meets his security guard friend Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), and works his job as a bank teller — where, inevitably, he gets robbed by gun-toting criminals in outlandish get-ups.

We in the audience recognize who, or rather what, Guy is long before he does. He’s a character in a video game. More importantly, he’s a nonplayable character, a computer-generated background figure who exists as something the game’s players and their avatars — “the sunglasses people,” Guy calls them — can shoot at. And in “Free City,” a hyper-violent first-person-shooter game, Guy gets shot at a lot.

One day, though, Guy notices something different in the routine. Or, rather, someone. He sees a young woman (“Killing Eve” star Jodie Comer), body armor peeking out from under a white blouse, who’s not like all the other avatars. Guy decides to follow this woman to the ends of the earth — which, in the contained world of the video game, is the shoreline.

While he pursues the woman, dubbed Molotov Girl, the woman is pursuing something else. Molotov Girl is searching the inner workings of the game for a video clip. Her player, Millie (also played by Comer), knows the clip will prove that “Free City” is illegally using software she developed with her former partner, Keys (“Stranger Things’” Joe Keery) — and that Antwan (Taika Waititi, chewing scenery with delight), the multi-millionaire owner of the company that publishes “Free City,” built his violent game on Millie and Keys’ open-world game concept.

Screenwriters Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn set the action in both worlds at once, with Millie-as-Molotov-Girl enlisting the lovestruck Guy to assist her in the video game world, while Millie tries to cajole Keys — who still works for Antwan’s company — to help her get the goods in the real world. The parallel construction works, in large part, because director Shawn Levy (who directed the “Night at the Museum” films) deftly sets up the distinction between grubby reality and the artificially clean, if often bullet-riddled, world within the video game. 

(Unlike the pixel-filled digital world of, say, “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” the video game platform here is, until the grand finale, largely free of the intellectual property of the studio’s parent company. In this case, that’s Disney — and there is a little bleed-through in the action-packed climax.)

Through the hilarity, “Free Guy” lands some sharp commentary about video game culture, such as the ease at which gamers never think about the cumulative effect of the violence they’re dishing out against digital bystanders. Levy also shows love for the gamer community by placing a raft of popular gaming YouTube stars in cameo roles (along with people the rest of us have heard of). The result is a fast-paced, wildly inventive action comedy that finds warmth and heart in the machine as it depicts the creative possibilities of both games and movies.

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‘Free Guy’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong fantasy violence throughout, language and crude/suggestive references. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'The Suicide Squad' lets director James Gunn run DC villains through a bloody and happily nihilistic action ride

Writer-director James Gunn applies a simple, but largely effective, storytelling technique to his foray into DC Comics’ villain-worship, “The Suicide Squad”: Throw everything up on the wall and see what sticks.

What sticks is comical amounts of blood and guts, an eager sacrifice of some major characters from the first movie, and a devil-may-care attitude to plot structure, character development and good taste. In other words, Gunn — who cut his teeth working for the cheap-and-dirty schlock indie studio Troma — has finally made a Troma movie on a big Hollywood budget.

If you recall the first “Suicide Squad” movie, nominally directed by David Ayer but taken out of his hands during post-production, we’re following a bunch of DC’s nastiest villains running black-ops missions for the government. The squad’s creator, the hard-as-nails Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), offers these baddies an opportunity: Work for her and get 10 years taken off your prison sentence, and if one of them goes rogue, she’ll detonate the explosive implanted in their brain.

In the opening of the new movie, Gunn starts with an odd assemblage of characters, some new to us and some returning. The most familiar faces are the psychotic crime queen Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and the Australian assassin Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), along with the first squad’s old field commander, Col. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman).

Soon, and for reasons I won’t spoil here, the action shifts to a different crew. The commander on the ground is Dubois, aka Bloodsport (Idris Elba), an assassin with an array of weapons and lethal skill using all of them. Also on his mission: The equally lethal marksman Peacemaker (John Cena); Cleo Cazzo, alias Ratcatcher 2 (Portuguese actress Daniela Melchior), who can control rats to do her bidding; King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone), a gigantic shark-man; and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who shoots polka dots — no, really — and has mother issues. Eventually, Harley and Flag join this team on their mission.

The mission, by the way, is to sneak into a South American island nation where two generals (Juan Diego Botto, Joaquín Cosio) have recently overthrown the ruling family — and are threatening to deploy something called Project Starfish. Waller’s orders are to destroy the former Nazi base where Starfish is happening, and all evidence of its existence. That may include the evil mastermind behind the project, Gaius Grieves, aka The Thinker (played by former “Doctor Who” star Peter Capaldi).

Gunn, gleefully deploying levels of violence he’s not allowed to use in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies for Marvel, keeps the story nicely off balance, mostly by leaving viewers guessing whether some characters are good guys or bad guys. That works best with Harley Quinn, mostly because Robbie puts such a cheery attitude to her carnage. But it’s a trick Gunn overplays here — though he takes the gamble that his audience will be having too much fun with the over-the-top mayhem to care.

The result is big, bruising fun in the viewing, but there’s a bit of a hangover when you think back on it. For all of Gunn’s splatter-centered action, it never really builds to anything — because with few exceptions, like Dubois’ estranged daughter (Storm Reid) or Melchior’s melancholy Ratcatcher, there’s no emotional investment. The problem with having nothing really matter in “The Suicide Squad” is that nothing really matters.

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‘The Suicide Squad’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 6, in theaters and streaming on HBO Max. Rated R for strong violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual references, drug use and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 132 minutes.

Review: 'Vivo' again shows Lin-Manuel Miranda, even as a furry animated creature, is a vibrant musical force

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s winning streak, one would think, can’t keep going forever — but the creator of “Hamilton” and “in the Heights” shows no signs of slowing down with “Vivo,” a surprisingly fun and heartwarming animated musical in which Miranda provides both the songs and the voice of the title character singing many of them.

Vivo is a kinkajou, a “honey bear,” an improbably cute tree-climbing creature from the Amazon, transplanted to the streets of Havana, Cuba. There, he performs for his human partner, Andrés (voiced by Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos), an organ grinder, for spare change in the plaza.

It’s a good life, and the musically adept Vivo sees no reason to mess with it. So Vivo — whose speaking voice is heard by us, but not the humans around him — objects when Andrés makes plans to travel to Miami to see the final concert of the singing star Marta Sandoval (voiced by Gloria Estefan). Andrés and Marta were partners, musical and personally, but Andrés never told Marta how he felt about her before she got on the plane for Miami and a stellar career.

When Andrés dies overnight, Vivo makes it his mission to deliver to Marta a piece of sheet music — with the song Andrés wrote to declare his love for her. Vivo must team up with Gabi (voiced by newcomer Ynairaly Simo), Andrés’ boisterous 10-year-old great-niece, visiting Cuba from Key West with her mom, Rosa (voiced by Zoe Saldana). Gabi and Vivo conspire to make the trip from Key West to Miami before Marta’s farewell concert that night — and the journey takes an unexpected detour through the Everglades.

Director Kirk DeMicco (“The Croods”) co-wrote the screenplay with Quiara Alegría Hudes, Miranda’s writing partner on “In the Heights,” so it’s nicely attuned to Miranda’s songwriting rhythms. The songs are loaded with Miranda’s fast-talking wordplay (he even works in a “Back to the Future” reference), and are infused with the composer’s love of Cuban music. Miranda sings most of the songs, sometimes duetting with young Simo, and his expressive voice works on the material — though Estefan, in the lovely final act, steals the show with her beautiful voice.

With a candy-colored palette to capture sunny Havana and neon-lit Miami, and some charmingly funny supporting characters — including a python voiced by Michael Rooker — “Vivo” is an animated movie that gives the grown-ups as much to enjoy as the kids. 

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‘Vivo’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, August 6, on Netflix. Rated PG for some thematic elements and mild action. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: 'Nine Days' is a wondrous and thoughtful look at life before birth, and the choices that make each of us human

Bold in its vision and heartbreaking in its humanity, writer-director Edson Oda’s “Nine Days” is a brilliant, beautiful story that asks the simplest and hardest question there is: What does it mean to be human?

In a house in the middle of a severe alternate reality — OK, really, in the middle of Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats — a man named Will (played by Winston Duke) spends his days watching a wall of dozens of TV screens, each of them showing the point-of-view of someone living on Earth. Will dutifully keeps journals and tapes of what’s on these screens, and puts them a file cabinet. 

On these screens, Will and his friend Kyo (Benedict Wong) watch entire lives play out — including a bride-to-be, a man in a wheelchair, and a high school kid being bullied. Will’s favorite screen shows Amanda, a violin virtuoso about to perform in an important concert. Then Amanda dies in a car crash, possibly a suicide, and Will is at a loss for explaining why someone with such promise could be dead.

Will has a more pressing problem: He has a screen to fill. So he brings in a handful of souls, for want of a better word, who are applying for the opportunity to be born as a human being. These souls come to the house to start a 9-day selection process.

The applicants are an eclectic bunch, including a happy-go-lucky party type (Tony Hale), a sensitive artist (David Rysdahl), and a ruthless pragmatist (Bill Skarsgard). But Will becomes most intrigued by a late arrival, whom he dubs Emma (Zazie Beetz), who takes an optimistic and artistic approach to being a potential human — the same traits that made Amanda a perfect choice and may have doomed her, and possibly the ones Will possessed in his years-ago stint as a human.

Oda has created an endlessly inventive movie, one that embeds the great philosophical question about what a human being is into a wealth of thoughtful visual signals. He claims Hirokazu Kore-Eta’s “After Life,” Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” as influences, and they’re definitely all here. And, heeding the rule that the greatest filmmakers steal from the best, there are shots that mimic classic images from “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Searchers.”

The ensemble cast is endlessly sharp, with Hale’s comic performance lightening what could be a somber tone. But it’s Beetz and Duke who shine brightest in “Nine Days,” as they engage in a running tete-a-tete about the answers Will expects and the ones she’s willing to give. From bleak beginning to triumphant end, “Nine Days” is an artful and tender examination of humanity’s worst fears and highest aspirations. 

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‘Nine Days’

★★★★

Opens Friday, August 6, in theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 124 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 28, 2020, when the film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Annette' is a dark romance, propelled by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard's performances and the emotionally direct music of Sparks

It’s unlikely that audiences at this year’s Cannes Film Festival had seen anything quite like “Annette,” director Leos Carax’s boundary-breaking romantic musical drama — and now that this bizarre, borderline magical movie is making its way to theaters (and, in two weeks, to Prime video), moviegoers everywhere can scratch their heads while tapping their feet.

The movie opens with Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers who comprise the legendary art-pop band Sparks (recently immortalized in Edgar Wright’s documentary “The Sparks Brothers”) in the studio. They’re singing the opening track of the musical, “So Now Let’s Start,” which they wrote, along with the other songs in the film. 

The Mael brothers then walk to the exits, still singing, and onto the Los Angeles streets, their back-up singers following behind. Then they’re met by the movie’s stars — Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard and Simon Helberg — not yet in character, singing the song. It’s an exhilarating opening, reminiscent of the musical break in Carax’s whacked-out 2012 anthology “Holy Motors.”

Driver plays Henry, a stand-up comedian whose confrontational style is embodied in the boxer’s robe he wears when he takes the stage at the Orpheum. Not far away, at Disney Hall, Cotillard’s character, an acclaimed opera star named Ann, is preparing for her performance. Henry and Ann love each other so much — in fact, they sing those words to each other in one number, while riding a motorcycle and later during sex.

Marriage and pregnancy follow, and Henry and Ann’s relationship appears blissful. But then it starts to fall apart, with Henry facing accusations of sexual misconduct — as he spirals out of control, drinking at home, growing jealous of Ann’s accompanist (Helberg), and blowing up his act with increasingly rage-filled rants.

Then the baby, Annette, arrives. I dare not say more about that, other than to praise Carax for a strangely compelling way to depict the alien nature of parenthood.

The songs are the script, and the Mael brothers aren’t exactly masters of clever wordplay. Their lyrics rely on repetition and directness, but they work because they leave room for the performers’ raw emotion to burst through — and with Driver’s muscular intensity and Cotillard’s ethereal grace, there’s no shortage of emotion.

Whether it’s Henry ordering his audiences to laugh or Ann reflecting on her ability to die onstage night after night, “Annette” wraps its romance and its music around an exuberant reflection on the psychic toll of an artistic life. Such a life, Carax and the Mael brothers seem to say, isn’t easy — but, when the result is a stimulating, question-raising work like this, worth the effort.

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‘Annette’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 6, in theaters; available for streaming starting August 20 on Prime Video. Rated R for sexual content including some nudity, and for language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'John and the Hole' is a maddeningly obtuse drama of suburban alienation that never gets to the point

A teen-ager’s white privilege runs amok in “John and the Hole,” a maddeningly obtuse psychological thriller centered on a family terrorized by a demon seed.

John (Charlie Shotwell) is a quiet 13-year-old rich kid, living with his parents, Brad and Anna (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle), and older sister, Laurie (Taissa Farmiga), in a big, modern house in the Massachusetts woods. He practices tennis, to prepare for an upcoming qualification tourney, and can play the piano.

What, then, to explain why he gives the family gardener (Lucien Spelman) a glass of lemonade laced with a knockout drug? That turns out to be a dry run for his big plan: To move his parents and sister, while sleeping off their Mickey Finn, into a deep hole left behind on their property by previous occupants who started constructing a bunker.

The family wakes up asking the same question the audience is left pondering for the next hour or so: Why is John doing this?

Director Pascual Sisto, making his feature debut, and screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone — who co-wrote two Alejandro Iñárritu films, “Biutiful” and “Birdman” — never make an attempt to answer the big “why?” of the story (which is adapted from Giacobone’s short story), much to the audience’s frustration. Instead, they show us the would-be comic moments of John trying to keep up the pretense to Anna’s tennis partner (Tamara Hickey) and John’s video-game rival (Ben O’Brien) that everything’s fine.

Equally aggravating is a framing story, with another mom (Georgia Lyman) and a daughter (Samantha LeBretton), that’s wedged in with no explanation or payoff. And then there’s the ending, which is where that white privilege hits its zenith.

If you can imagine “Home Alone” remade as a pretentious art-house movie where Macaulay Culkin is playing both Kevin and the Wet Bandits simultaneously. you get a sense of what’s happening in “John and the Hole.” Meanwhile, some talented actors are left in a hole, more confused than the audience.

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‘John and the Hole’ 

★★

Opens Friday, August 6, in select theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 98 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2021, when the film premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.