Carry On, Red One, Gladiator II
Brief reviews of new movies that don't exactly need to exist
I find myself in the unusual (for me) position of having watched three reasonably new movies over the last month or so. Which is a decent excuse for a blog post commenting on them, since they share a common theme of not exactly being essential, but not being all that objectionable, either.
Carry-On:
This is a new thriller from Netflix, in the classic mode of “Die Hard in a [place].” Only, you know, if you say “Die Hard in an airport” people reply “Oh, you mean Die Hard 2,” and the conversation gets awkward.
This puts Taron Edgerton in the Bruce Willis role (he’s a water-treading TSA agent whose significant other is more successful than he is, who has to rise up to save the day) against Jason Bateman taking the Alan Rickman “charismatic villain” role. The plot revolves around a scheme to get a carry-on bag through LAX on Christmas Eve by blackmailing a TSA screener; this was initially supposed to be Edgerton’s best friend at work (Sinqua Walls), but he tags in as part of a late attempt to show some initiative, and ends up trying to thwart the bad guy without getting his girlfriend shot by a sniper.
Nothing about this Evil Plot makes a lick of sense if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, but then the same can be said of Die Hard 2. The movie stands or falls on its ability to keep you from spending that half-minute thinking about anything, and Bateman plays evil-and-kind-of-smarmy with enough verve to mostly make it work. There’s one laughably awful bit of CGI in a side plot involving Danielle Deadwyler as a LAPD detective who stumbles across the case from another angle, but otherwise, it’s competently done.
This isn’t going to be an enduring Christmas classic like the original Die Hard, but if you’ve got a Netflix subscription and a couple of hours to kill, you can do a whole lot worse.
Red One:
This is the new Christmas feature from Amazon in which JK Simmons’s weirdly jacked Santa Claus is kidnapped by parties unknown, and The Rock as his head of security has to find him with the help of Chris Evans as a more redeemable version of the asshole he played in Knives Out.
I had heard really dire things about this, but The Pip asked for it specifically on multiple occasions, so I reluctantly gave it a shot. And, you know, it was way less bad than I was expecting. The main problem is that everybody other than The Rock seems to know what movie they’re in, but he’s playing it way more seriously than it deserves. Charitably, he might be going for a “Michael Caine surrounded by Muppets” thing, but it doesn’t land that way because there’s a showiness to Caine’s playing of Scrooge that isn’t here— it just feels like The Rock has misunderstood what the script is, and the rest of the cast and crew were too afraid to tell him.
Anyway, it’s not remotely good, but it wasn’t as grievous a crime against cinema as I feared going in. Admittedly, I had several beers while watching it, which may have colored my impression, but it wasn’t a bad time.
Gladiator II:
This became available on demand over the holiday week, so The Pip and I fired it up as a rental. It is, of course, the unexpected sequel to the 2000 Russell Crowe sword-and-sandals epic, made because Ridley Scott is old, easily bored, and has run out of fucks to give.
This is basically a fried-rice version of the first one, with a bunch of key elements left over from the first sort of chopped up and tossed in a pan. Paul Mescal is basically playing 9/11ths of Russell Crowe, Pedro Pascal picks up the other two bits plus all of Richard Harris’s Marcus Aurelius and then some. Denzel Washington is in the Oliver Reed role plus about half of Joaquin Phoenix’s part, while the other half of Phoenix is split between Joseph “Eddie Munson” Quinn and Fred Hechinger. Connie Nielsen is still Connie Nielsen (though with less sexy, because 2024), and incredibly, Derek Jacobi is still Derek Jacobi. All of these characters are given names that come out of the index to a history of Rome, though they don’t really map to those actual people because Ridley Scott is old, easily bored, and has run out of fucks to give.
As a friend noted elsewhere, the main thing that watching this does is remind you how magnetic Russell Crowe was in the original. Mescal gives a game effort, but isn’t nearly as compelling, and Washington’s villain turn isn’t quite enough to make up for the lack.
That said, though, it wasn’t a bad way to kill an evening with a few beers and an Internet-connected big-screen TV. There’s no particular reason for this movie to exist, but I’m not that sad that it does.
So, yeah, there’s some faint praise. If you like this sort of thing, here’s a button:
And if you want to tell me how wrong I am about any of these, the comments will be open:
I'm really coming around to the "The Rock can't actually act, he can only perform, and people just write movies around his performances" viewpoint. And, I mean, I've enjoyed every one of The Rock's movies that I've seen, including Red One, but I think putting him next two as versatile an actor as Chris Evans really highlights his limitations.