Takers

Takers is the kind of movie where tough guys walk away from an explosion, in slow-motion, without looking behind them. But don't worry! It is also the kind of movie where a man leaps sideways, in slow-motion, while firing two guns at the same time! And the kind of movie where that man is Hayden Christensen!

If you're not hooked already, I don't know what else I can tell you. Directed generically by John Luessenhop from a screenplay written blandly by him and three others, Takers is a buffet of Gritty Crime Drama clichés that offers no surprises but nothing egregiously stupid, either. Basically, you shouldn't see it on purpose, but if you are abducted and required to see it, don't feel like you need to struggle too hard to get away.

Our heroes (I think) are a group of suave, handsome bank robbers. Always dressed to the nines and prone to lounging in the finest nightclubs after a job, these are fancy thieves! And a good-looking bunch they are, too. Christensen plays A.J., who is a street-wise Ivy Leaguer, which means he has tattoos AND a stupid hat. Idris Elba is Gordon, a British cat with a drug-addled aunt (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) causing him problems. Michael Ealy and noted Rihanna-puncher Chris Brown play brothers Jake and Jesse, and Paul Walker is their leader, John.

What's that you say? Paul Walker and Hayden Christensen in the same movie? That's like having a movie with a plank of wood in it, and then also, in that same movie, having an identical plank of wood!

These guys, the takers, are the ones we're supposed to sympathize with, of course, what with the natty clothing and general smoothness. But pursuing them are a couple of cops, Jack (Matt Dillon) and Eddie (Jay Hernandez). One is a loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules, while the other is a family man with a sick kid.

The takers have just finished a job when their old associate, Ghost (Tip "T.I." Harris), gets out of prison with info on a new heist they could pull. Ghost got caught during a robbery back in '04, and the crew isn't sure whether they can trust him or if he's bitter about doing time. They're also on edge because Jake is now dating Ghost's ex-girlfriend (Zoe Saldana).

You see all these elements and you think: These spare parts could be fashioned into something reasonably entertaining. It's not necessarily a bad thing for a movie to be formulaic. You do wish for just a hint of originality, though. Just a trace? Just one thing that we haven't seen in every other Gritty Crime Drama? Alas, no, it's the usual Internal Affairs breathing down a cop's neck, and a squirrelly informant saying, "I don't know nothin' about that!," and detectives using a hand gesture caught on a surveillance camera to determine who a masked bandit is.

Luessenhop (whose only other film, 2000's Lockdown, was a violent prison drama) directs the action scenes chaotically, as is the style of the day, so that even a sequence where Chris Brown does parkour (!) is rendered less exciting than it should have been. Thematically, the story itself is just as jumbled: Whose side are we on? The question of who's "right" and who's "wrong" seems to have been decided randomly, or perhaps based on the relative fame of the cast members. You can't take the movie as seriously as it wants to be taken, but it will not bore you when it shows up in heavy rotation on HBO in a few months.

Centurion

Imagine a flick like Braveheart, 300, Gladiator, or King Arthur, only those films have just been stripped of all those boring scenes about kings and princes, peasants and slaves, taxes and trades, and all that jazz. The result would be a movie that looks a lot like Neil Marshall's Centurion, a fast-paced, visually stunning, and action-heavy period piece that focuses on what matters most in a Saturday afternoon matinee: the good stuff. Boasting nary a subplot or an extraneous character to deal with, Centurion seems fully intent on delivering an old-school action adventure that tickles the eye without taxing the brain. And it succeeds on all counts.

It's the story of Centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), a trusted officer in the Roman army. Following a brutal attack by the barbaric Picts (ancient Scots are what they are, I do believe), Quintus finds himself stuck deep inside an enemy village -- but not for long. Quintus' escape is aided by the last few survivors of the legendary Ninth Legion, and together the small band of soldiers must make their way to a friendly border. Not only do they have a long way to go, but they also have on their tails a tenacious group of Pict trackers, which is led by the ferociously unwavering Etain (Olga Kurylenko).

So that's it! A brief bit of monumental mayhem to kick-start the tale, just enough set-up to keep the main characters interesting, and a whole lot of escapes, chases, sword-fights, and flying arrows. (To those who may be unfamiliar with Marshall's previous films, I can warn you that Centurion is a rousingly gory affair. Those with an aversion to physical nastiness should look elsewhere.) Of course Centurion does slow down often enough to offer a few colorful character moments, but it never cuts away to a bunch of guys talking about the action from 500 miles away. This gives the flick a welcome sense of urgency; Marshall does a fine job of illustrating precisely how ruthless the "evil" Picts truly are. Even our hero and a captured Roman general (the always fun Dominic West) have no problem admitting that they're well outmatched and deep behind enemy lines.

Ever the genre fan, Marshall punctuates his action scenes with explosive geysers of blood, set against an ironically beautiful background, and with an impressive amount of attention paid to editing, timing, and orchestrating the action to its maximum effect. (There's a great sequence best described as "a chase up a mountain.") Aside from Fassbender and Liam Cunningham as a gruff veteran soldier, the five other survivors are a fairly interchangeable troop, but we're not exactly talking about a dramatic ensemble piece here; the Roman guys are suitably heroic, even if they're not exactly as colorful as a "dirty half dozen" might have been.

Michael Fassbender, however, does deliver an enjoyably effective lead hero. Not nearly as gruff and commanding as the heroes found in 300 or Gladiator, Fassbender's Quintus Dias is instead a quietly confident warrior. His butt-kicking abilities and leadership skills are undeniably evident, but his calm exterior is that of a soldier fighting to stay alive, and not one who craves an extra battle or two. Ms. Kurylenko is also quite entertaining as the inescapable tracker / warrior woman known as Etain. She has no dialogue whatsoever, but the actress has no problem conveying an insidious sense of menace. In fact, I'd say Etain is one of the coolest female movie villains we've seen in quite some time.

Whether or not Centurion is an improvement over Marshall's earlier flicks is up to the Marshall fans to decide for themselves, but I applaud the director who is willing (nay, intent!) on attacking a new sub-genre each time he touches a camera. He's like the Danny Boyle of Saturday Afternoon Matinees, and after seeing him tackle warring werewolves, claustrophobic carnage, post-apocalyptic anarchy, and now some old-school "swords and sandals" craziness, I (as always) look forward to what the filmmaker concocts next.

The Last Exorcism

If there's one thing that binds the best exorcism films, it's that the really good ones all offer some great acting. The major players in The Exorcist give amazing performances, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is believable through the work of its solid ensemble, and, now, The Last Exorcism delivers a potentially star-making performance from Patrick Fabian. What seems to be a "me too" attempt at creating another Paranormal Activity is actually a fascinating, uncomfortable, character-driven look at matters of faith and fear.

I expected the typical thrills of a demon possession flick, and while The Last Exorcism delivers, beat-for-beat, almost every creepy trope of the genre, its mature focus on characterization really sets the film apart. This is a welcome approach -- a horror film about people and not just kills and thrills -- but because the scares take a back seat to the characters, it also never quite reaches the fever pitch of terror that it also seems to be working toward. It's engaging, but is it scary? I can't quite say that it is, which is a peculiar criticism of a movie that still stands as one of the best horror films of 2010.

Fabian plays Cotton Marcus, an evangelist and preacher's kid, raised in the church his whole life, but struggling somewhat with his logical self-awareness of the power he holds over others. He's not modest about the fact that he's the one moving the congregation, not God, and it's a bit of a lark to him. What he does take seriously is when people become so fixated on the spiritual world, that they accidentally harm others. Marcus allows a documentary crew to film him performing an exorcism, a long-standing Marcus family specialty, so that he can reveal that the effects of the ritual are more mental than spiritual. If someone can be convinced that they're possessed, they can be equally convinced that the exorcism rites will make them well again. It's psychosomatic Deviltry.

It's no surprise then that Marcus' first request with a film crew in tow turns out to be more than he's ready for. He's called out to assist the Sweetzer family, not just God-fearing folk, but people-fearing folk as well, having burned all their bridges with everyone in town by trying to live a Godlier life. Marcus is quick to do a little old time showboating for the camera in his attempt to rid the virginal teen Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell) of her demons, but when the first exorcism doesn't take, he can't seem to convince Louis Sweetzer to get some real help for his daughter. To tell Sweetzer the exorcism was fake exposes Marcus as a fraud, so the preacher is reluctantly drawn deeper into the Sweetzer's lives, frantically discussing scripture with Louis one second, and pleading for modern medical help for Nell the next.

Fabian just nails the role. Cotton is dishonest, but with good intentions. Although he's a faker, his personal faith in God is never quite addressed, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions about how much of a charlatan he really is. His sense of responsibility keeps him at the Sweetzer farm until the matter is resolved, and there's something oddly heroic about that commitment. Horror films rarely have heroes.

That's not to say that things don't get really bad down at the Sweetzer place. The more things got worse, though, on their way to The Last Exorcism's big ending, the farther away the film seemed to be getting from the things in it that I really loved. I've seen a demon-possessed girl contort on a barn floor before (in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, actually), but I've never quite seen a character in a horror movie like Cotton Marcus. I could have used less handheld POV footage of people running around in the darkened Sweetzer home, and more scenes like the one in which Sweetzer turns a Bible verse on Cotton in a twist-of-the-knife way. Those moments that director Daniel Stamm films as straight-forward drama are the ones that really shine here.

I'll gladly trade compelling and thought-provoking for scary. Scary is relative anyway. The Last Exorcism's tension comes from its characters and situations, not from its genre cliches like foul-mouthed demon voices or a sweaty, panting little possessed girl. Those dusty, tried-and-true bits are fine, but the real reason to care about the film is because it's more spiritually complex than even most faith-based films. You want to see Marcus come to some kind of conclusion about what he truly believes, you want to see him heal Nell, even if it does mean that it's all in her head, and you want to see him prove to the world that there's no such thing as demon possession. As the old song goes, you can't always get what you want.

Eat Pray Love

Among Julia Roberts' many talents is the ability to be likable even when she's playing a character who isn't. She'll star in something dreadful like Runaway Bride or Mona Lisa Smile, and despite what a shrill stereotype the character is, Roberts herself will be infectiously pleasant.

This skill is taxed to its limits in Eat Pray Love, in which Roberts plays a privileged, self-absorbed narcissist who takes a year-long vacation to "find herself." (You're always in the last place you look, amirite?) This lady, Elizabeth Gilbert (also the name of the author from whose memoir the film was adapted), isn't happy married, isn't happy single, isn't happy ever. She figures she needs to spend some time with no one but herself. Speaking as one who has spent 140 minutes with her, I would advise against that.

At the outset, she's been married for several years to Stephen (Billy Crudup), a slightly goofy fellow who adores her. One night she reveals that she is not happy and wants a divorce. Stephen is stunned to hear this. Sharing his surprise: the audience. We knew Stephen was a little flighty with regard to choosing a career path, but that's literally the only indication we'd been given that anything was awry. Whatever dissatisfaction had accumulated in Liz must have done so before we arrived. (Perhaps there's a prequel? Cook Kneel Like?)

Stephen is hurt that Liz would suddenly call it quits without ever telling him that she was unhappy. He's right, of course; amazingly, the film expects us to be on Liz's side anyway. Stephen is painted as a doofus, a bit of a basket case who loses his cool in the divorce proceedings. Liz, on the other hand, prays very earnestly, asking God for direction, apologizing for never having prayed before. "But I do hope I have always expressed ample gratitude for all the blessings that you've given me in my life," she says, in tears, oblivious to the fact that so far in the story her defining characteristic has been ingratitude.

This should be irony. The director, Ryan Murphy (Running with Scissors, TV's Glee), who adapted the screenplay with Jennifer Salt, should be conveying that Liz is critically lacking in self-awareness. She thinks she is grateful when in fact she is not. But everything about the scene -- the soft lighting, the gentle tone, the close-up on Roberts' pain-stricken face -- suggests that we're meant to sympathize with her. Either we're not supposed to have noticed that she's a spoiled ingrate, or we're not supposed to mind.

She is similarly unhappy with her rebound boyfriend, a bohemian actor named David (James Franco). She's unable to articulate why she's dissatisfied, just that she is. She finally concludes the only possible solution is to spend a year in a series of foreign countries, working out her vaguely defined issues. As she exits David's apartment building for the last time, David says he wishes she would work out her issues here, with him. She says, "You never asked me to stay." It's supposed to be an "Oh, snap!" moment: In all Liz's talk of leaving, David apparently never specifically asked her not to. David is supposed to spell everything out, while Liz is permitted to mope uncommunicatively. For about the tenth time in 30 minutes, the movie wants me to be on Liz's side and I'm not.

This is the pattern for the rest of the movie.

Liz goes to Italy, then India, then Indonesia, in each locale learning personal lessons relating to one of the three title verbs. In Rome, she befriends a nice Swedish girl (Tuva Novotny) and a handsome young Italian tutor (Luca Argentero), learning the language while eating a lot of pasta. Her epiphany is to not care so much about whether she gains a few pounds, but to simply enjoy the food. She will embrace her muffin top! There's a comical scene in which she tries to put on jeans that don't fit because she's "too fat," i.e., she is now a size 4. She has really let herself go!!

In India, she meditates at an ashram, where a no-nonsense Texan (Richard Jenkins) gives her down-to-earth advice. And in Indonesia (the lush island of Bali, specifically), she faces the question of whether she can love again. (Javier Bardem is involved.) The answer she arrives at is disappointingly conventional. For a movie about a woman trotting the globe to find herself, its "you can't last long without a man" message is a little odd.

"But Eric D. Snider!" you say, addressing me by my full name, out of respect. "You are not a woman! How could you possibly relate to Liz and her feelings?" I cop to the charge of not being a woman, and it's true that some of Liz's angst might be gender-specific. But the movie is also structurally unsound. The protagonist doesn't have a clear-cut goal or obstacle to overcome. The vagueness of her problems makes it hard to know what the lessons are, or at what point she has learned them, or when the seemingly interminable film will, in fact, terminate. (Did I mention it's 140 minutes long?) There isn't a "story," per se, with rising action and climaxes and all that; Liz just sort of goes around doin' stuff for a while, until it's time to go someplace else and do different stuff. We know she's learned something only because the movie finally ends. This has the whiff of a film that believes it is 10 times more powerful and meaningful than it actually is.

The Switch

Sperm is in the air. It's probably fair to assume that the 2007 success of Knocked Up had Hollywood scrambling to green-light the next preggers-centric rom-com, and this year, we find ourselves greeted by the artificial insemination trifecta of The Back-Up Plan, The Kids Are All Right, and now The Switch. The first was a gratingly broad sitcom fixated on the scenario itself, the second a winning take on the family dynamic several years after the fact, and the third initially heads off into wacky sitcom territory before coming back to our characters a few years later and assessing the implications with proper poignancy.

Wally (Jason Bateman) and Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) have been the best of friends for about six years. They tried the dating thing at first and then didn't pan out, and when Kassie announces that she's on the hunt for a sperm donor in lieu of the complete package, she doesn't even consider Wally. After all, if the father's this much of a pessimist (he prefers 'realist'), how might the kid turn out? Wally doesn't mind, at least not enough to say anything. He snipes at her decision, but supports her all the same, showing up to her "artificial insemination party" and drinking his true feelings away in between pot shots from her BFF (Juliette Lewis). The problem is, Wally's a little too drunk when he stumbles into the bathroom and sees the sample left by chosen donor Roland (Patrick Wilson). One accidental spill later, and he's hard-pressed to find a substitute...

Cut to seven years later, and Kassie's back in NYC, having fled the city in order to raise her six-year-old son, Sebastian (Thomas Robinson), in a more wholesome environment (read: Minnesota). Wally's happy to have her near again and yet wary to meet Sebastian, whose looks and personality bear a far greater resemblance to those of neurotic Wally than those of the headstrong Roland, whom Kassie has taken up with. Once he corroborates the story of that fateful night with colleague and confidant Leonard (a welcome Jeff Goldblum), Wally finds himself playing an increasingly prominent role in Sebastian's life and faced with the burden of breaking the news to Kassie.

As I understand it, writer Allan Loeb (21) left out the seedier elements of Jeffrey Eugenides' original short story, in which Kassie had already aborted a baby belonging to Wally, prompting him to make the titular swap and generally making matters fairly darker. The direction of Josh Gordon and Will Speck (Blades of Glory) still conveys a fitting sense of melancholy, with Jess Hall's crisp cinematography playing no small part and with Bateman more than meeting everyone halfway. If anything, The Switch is a showcase throughout for his remarkably wry charm and surprisingly potent frustration. Whether spending a date rambling on endlessly and effortlessly about how awry this fledgling relationship could go or spending a day ridding his sudden son and an entire apartment of lice, he fleshes out his sarcastic sad-sack routine enough to make one wish that his pat voice-over narration at either end of the film had been done away with entirely.

In turn, nearly every relationship is defined primarily by his regret towards Aniston's character, his animosity towards Wilson's, and his rapport with Goldblum, Lewis and Robinson (a cute kid who thankfully eases off the Jonathan-Lipnicki-in-Jerry-Maguire throttle after a while). Their performances are all serviceable, their parts underwritten in comparison. The story beats are predictable as all get-out and the laughs are sporadic at best. But that performance by Bateman is enough to take a wacky-creepy premise and elevate into something gentle and sweet...

...which is more than I could say about The Back-Up Plan.

Piranha 3D

Piranha 3D is a horror movie bar mitzvah. It turns boys into men, cleaving their lives into two distinct periods: Before Piranha 3D, a time we shall refer to as The Darkness, and after Piranha 3D, also known as The Awakening. Now that I have thankfully awoken in its glorious elysian fields of excessive gore and outrageous nudity, I never want to return to horror films that require fewer than 800,000 gallons of fake blood spilling forth from 500 bikini-clad extras. Anything less is an insult and, frankly, a malicious waste of my time.

Now, of course that's all hyperbole, but that's also the point. Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D is a movie that thrives on constantly pushing things over the top. The gore, the nudity, the language, the gags, the characters-- it's all always on the rise. Just when you think things could not possibly get more ridiculous, that the film has peaked, Aja and screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg manage to ram another syringe of adrenaline into its heart, completely bypassing any exhaustion it, and by extension the audience, may have been feeling. This is the kind of movie that refuses to stop indulging in B-movie cliches that other recent films of its ilk clearly feel guilty about having fun with.

Piranha 3D doesn't know the meaning of the word guilt. All it knows is that the Spring Break hot spot Lake Victoria has an unexpected infestation of a particularly violent species of piranha believed to have been extinct for thousands of years, and that the only thing that stands in the way of the lethal swarm of fish and the co-eds who have taken to the lake like its their holy mecca, is a small sheriff's department (run by Elisabeth Shue), a trio of underwater seismologists (led by Adam Scott), and a crew of nudity-seeking filmmakers (captained by the stupendously arrogant Jerry O'Connell) who have hired the sheriff's son (Steven R. McQueen) to show them the best local spots to film their Wild, Wild Girls (Kelly Brook and Riley Steele).

Yes, the plot is threadbare, but what it lacks in narrative complexity it makes up for with memorable characters. In fact, the strength of the characters is one of the most unexpected elements in Piranha 3D. From the typical hero characters of Shue and Scott to the gorgeous goddess that is Kelly Brook, the core players are slightly more than just fish food waiting to happen, and you do actually feel an emotional attachment to a few of them. It's not to the point where anyone is bound to shed a tear when their faces are bitten off or their legs are left looking like human tooth picks, but it is unusual for killer animal movies to make you feel remorse for characters beyond a primal 'that looks painful' reaction.

Of course, there is still plenty of 'that looks painful' going around in Piranha 3D. The eponymous fish may often arrive in a frenzy of indistinguishable CGI blurs, but the aftermath of their feeding is a grizzly body count supplied by the always-outstanding (and Academy award winning) special make-up effects team of Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger. The amount of carnage they cook up in this film is simply awe inspiring. People aren't just nibbled on by fish, they're torn limb from limb. I imagine walking through whatever building housed all of the team's make-up effects would have been a gut wrenching experience in the best of ways. In particular, the body parts required for the scene in which the throngs of co-eds try to make it ashore must have been especially staggering. The carnage on display there makes the opening scene ofSaving Private Ryan look like an ad to come relax on the beaches of Normandy.

As much as I loved Piranha 3D, however, there are naturally a few problems with it. The aforementioned CGI can be hard to keep track of at times, but the only major disappointments are a few dangling character threads that we never see cut from the cloth or patched back together. There are a small number of side characters that are established in ways that are never given the noteworthy send off that they warrant. The script keeps the larger events so engrossing, however, that you may not notice until the credits roll that certain people were unfortunately lost in the blood drenched shuffle.

That a few unresolved fates for side characters can be pegged as the film's biggest problem is pretty remarkable, all things considered. All of the other elements that one could justifiably expected to have gone horribly wrong go completely right. Even the post-production 3D conversion looks top notch, which just goes to show that not all movies that use the process will look as ghastly as Clash of the Titans or The Last Airbender. (I should note that, though it looks great, the extra dimension is hardly what makes Piranha 3D worthwhile, and that there is no doubt in my mind that it will be just as much fun in 2D.) Naturally the film isn't for everyone -- there are five minute stretches of it that have more crimson mayhem and nudity than most Hollywood horror movies sport throughout their entire running time -- but if the idea of such a free-spirited horror movie doesn't scare you off, then I can all but guarantee the execution of it will put a smile on your face for days.

Lottery Ticket

Employing a scatter-shot approach has its benefits. The genial yet thin moral comedy Lottery Ticket takes aim at so many targets, from such a low angle, that it's bound to score a few hits. Indeed, two or three set-ups and/or pay-offs deliver big laughs, and the atmosphere is friendly and convivial. Too often, however, Lottery Ticket relies on overly-roasted chestnuts and stale Sunday school lessons, with an occasional "naughty" moment scattered in for good measure. Your chance of enjoying the film in its entirety, therefore, is about 185 million to 1.

Those are the odds given in the movie for buying the winning lottery ticket in a drawing to give away $370 million. Everyone in the Fairmont Fillmore * neighborhood is excited and lines up at the local convenience store for their chance to be an instant millionaire, but industrious high school senior Kevin Carson (Bow Wow) knows better. The lottery is a game 'designed to give false hope to poor people,' he scoffs, as he heads to the mall for his job at Foot Locker.

Kevin owns dozens of carefully-tended sneakers and dreams of owning his own shoe design company one day. He's a good kid who looks after his loving grandmother (Loretta Devine), enjoys the loyalty of his best friend Benny (Brandon T. Jackson), is respectful and polite to all his neighbors, and even runs errands for old Mr. Washington (Ice Cube), a recluse who hasn't emerged from his basement apartment in many years. Kevin is frustrated, though, that he can't see a way clear to attend college, like his comely, platonic friend Stacie (Naturi Naughton). When will his dreams come true?

After a terrible day in which he's threatened by menacing drug dealer Lorenzo (Gbenga Akinnagbe, who played a soft-spoken villain to much greater, chilling effect in The Wire) and his gang, and loses his job to boot, the discouraged Kevin gives in and buys a ticket. When he arrives back in the friendly confines of Fairmount Fillmore *, no doubt seeking a quiet place to lick his wounds, he's been branded a snitch for supposedly setting up Lorenzo to get busted; everyone in the neighborhood believes the unfounded rumors, and Kevin quickly finds himself an outcast. He can barely drag himself into bed.

Everything changes the next day when he discovers he owns the winning ticket. Maybe now his dreams can come true!

Swearing his grandmother (Loretta Devine) to secrecy, Kevin heads off with Benny to collect his winnings, only to learn that the lottery office is closed for the 4th of July weekend. Now he must survive the long weekend, avoiding revenge-bent Lorenzo and the entire neighborhood. It seems that everyone has forgotten about his being a snitch and is begging their longtime friend for help. And the hot girl who spurned him the day before, suddenly wants to have his baby -- after some hot sex, of course.

In the script by Abdul Williams, based on a story by Williams and Erik White, who also directed, neighborhood is meant to be a key element of the film, the glue that holds together the disparate lives of hundreds of people living in close proximity, dealing with pressures and problems unique to that community, yet universal in their concerns.

In that regard, there's a resemblance to the Friday series of films starring Ice Cube. (He serves here as executive producer.) Those three comedies consisted of loosely-structured episodes that shone a light on proud, lower middle-class, African-American neighborhoods and the struggles of the common man. In Lottery Ticket , the Fairmount Fillmore * neighborhood is meant to be a microcosm of larger issues, but the ideas are talked about rather than shown.

Based on the righteous platitudes trotted out on a regular basis, the film wants to make us feel the pain of all the good people in the neighborhood who are suffering on account of a few bad apples. It also wants to decry negative trends in the community: an unhealthy obsession with material things (like expensive shoes), the predilection of young women to get impregnated by wealthy athletes, and the tendency to judge people based on outward appearance.

At the same time, Lottery Ticket wants to celebrate those few fortunate ones who make it big financially and are willing to give something back to the community. Implicit in all of these concurrent good intentions is the acknowledgment that neither government officials nor law enforcement officers care, at all, about what happens in such communities. In a do-it-yourself world, folks need a hand up, and if the government's not going to do it, it's up to each one of us.

Especially if you've just won $370 million.

Lottery Ticket has many good intentions, but they weigh the film down. It works best in those few, fleeting moments when it's silly and lunatic: Kevin and his grandmother celebrating their good fortune; Kevin's inability to keep the secret from his buddy Benny on a public bus; the neighborhood chasing Kevin for no good reason; Benny devising a plan for escape; a gangster (Keith David) and his driver (Terry Crews) who aren't as tough as they think they are; a flamboyant preacher (Mike Epps) who senses that the time for a new church and personal mansion have come.

There aren't nearly enough of those moments, though. You'd probably be more entertained if you set up lawn chairs across the street from the nearest theater playing the movie, cracking jokes with your friends. Alas, Lottery Ticket is not worth the price of its titular instrument of currency.

Vampires Suck

Quick! Think of the first Twilight joke that pops into your head! Was it about sparkling vampires? Maybe it was about shirtless werewolves? Either way, congratulations! You are now a professional screenwriter, on the same level as the writers of Vampires Suck, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (the writing-directing pair who brought us Epic Movie and Disaster Movie).

Let me get the positives out of the way first -- Vampires Suck represents a small step forward for the pair: actually channeling their anti-creative energies on one specific target, the overwhelmingly popular Twilight Saga film series. Because of this, they've actually challenged themselves as filmmakers. They've moved away from the usual pop culture parade that's more costume catalog than cinema ("I'm Miley Cyrus!", "I'm Iron Man!", "I'm Britney Spears!" -- all typical dialogue from their previous films, as lookalikes parade onto the screen only to have cows or meteors or whatnot fall on their heads with a bonk, immediately after their introduction). Here, Friedberg and Seltzer are forced to write actual gags instead of lazy flash-in-the-pan referencing.

Now, however, having seen Vampires Suck, I'm not sure which is worse.

It's one thing to not be funny; it's another thing entirely to assume the reason I'm not laughing is because I didn't get it. Friedberg and Seltzer don't earn my disrespect because they can't time a joke to save their lives; they earn my disrespect by patronizing their own audience with open contempt. Look, it's obvious from frame one that this is a Twilight parody. Becca is Bella, Edward Sullen is Edward Cullen, I get it. I don't have to have characters constantly break from the action to remind me this is a Twilight parody through their own dialogue. I don't need someone to take a second to tell me why this is supposed to be funny, as it relates to Twilight. Imagine if every few seconds, someone in Blazing Saddles took a moment to tell another character that there were making fun of Westerns. Uh, duh.

Do the "filmmakers" think I stumbled blindly into this film, completely unaware of Twilight? Do they think their whole audience is that stupid? The answer is a resounding yes. If you don't get the joke, they'll stop the film dead in its tracks and all but break the fourth wall (they do that sometimes too) to explain why they inserted the gag ("You see, this Black Eyed Peas bit is funny because these vampires bear a somewhat passing resemblance to the Black Eyed Peas, which are a musical group comprised of a woman and some other folks of distinguishable and indistinguishable ethnic origin. It is to laugh.")

They get the Twilight look down, they get a pretty spot-on Kristen Stewart impersonation from Jenn Proske (the only time I laughed was when Proske would channel Stewart with eerie precision), and the directors seem to actually understand the material. This is more amazing than it sounds; if you've seen their other work. Vampires Suck is, at times, like watching a chimp learn to sign -- but they simply can't write jokes because they don't trust their own material (they shouldn't) and they don't trust their audience (they should).

I'm just about ready to declare parody as dead, unless someone can come along and save us from fad du jour junk like Vampires Suck. At the very least, we need a moratorium on Jersey Shore references and running gags about the Kardashians and, yes, even Ken Jeong. There are few things worse than watching a comedy flatline for over an hour, tossing its "funny parts" into a vacuum of uncomfortable silence. Vampires Suck is almost bad enough to make me pity the Twilight film series for being the subject of such limp, toothless mockery.

The Expendables

Katey Rich received some absolutely ri-dick-ulous comments on her thoughtful review of The Expendables over at Rotten Tomatoes. Her review probably took more time to write than the entire script of The Expendables, and was certainly a more insightful look at the action genre than the movie itself deserved. She's not the only person who gave The Expendables a bad review; she just happens to be a woman who did so. This got the manpanties of the commenters in a ferocious wad, and they showered her with hateful, misogynist bulls*t. Some are just childish and stupid, although this one used some big boy words and even name-dropped a David Lynch movie:

"I don't mean this to be as misogynistic as it's going to sound -- but women aren't qualified to review testosterone-fueled action movies.

It's like having a two-year-old child review Mulholland Drive."

In response, Scott Weinberg threw down the gauntlet to any of the female Cinematical staffers to take a crack at The Expendables. I took him up on that offer because I am a masochist. And I like it when things blow up.

Just so you know, I am writing this review with my vagina. Literally. I can't tell you how because I'm getting the technique patented, but since The Expendables is being called man-tastic, covered in man-sauce, man-a-licious, and so manly you'll grow extra chest hair, I thought that turnabout was fair play.

The plot of The Expendables doesn't matter. And even though all the characters have names in the script, it doesn't matter because The Expendables is all about the Pavlovian response engendered by the very sight of these muscle-bound action stars. Sylvester Stallone plays a guy named Barney Ross, but that doesn't matter either. What does matter is when Arnold Schwarzenegger pops up for a cameo that's a nod and a wink to the Governator's action past and everyone giggles and cheers. "What's his f*cking problem?" asks Bruce Willis after Arnold leaves. "He wants to be president," deadpans Stallone.

In all honesty, it is these short scenes where the characters interact that are most enjoyable. They're just dudes, man, and they're hanging out being dudely. Their clubhouse is Tool's Tattoos, which is owned by former Expendable Tool (Mickey Rourke). They practice throwing knives. They talk about broads and broken hearts. They talk about how screwed up they are from all the action they've seen. Tool tattoos Barney for a few minutes without gloves on, and then Barney puts his shirt back on without bandaging up the tattoo first. Because they're men, dammit! Tool even has a touching monologue about why he quit the Expendables that involves Bosnia and a bottle of Slivovitz. The actors seem like they're having fun, so even if a joke lands with a thud, as they often do, it's somehow forgivable. It's all a big gag, and we're in on it. It's a fun gag at first, seeing everyone from the cheesiest, most fun action movies all together in one film -- hell, in one scene! -- but after a while, the novelty wears off.

The novelty of the action sequences also wears off. As creative and time-consuming and expensive as it was to choreograph fights between so many characters in so many different configurations -- by hand and foot, small weapons, large weapons, knives, rocket launchers, bazookas, truncheons, rabid weasels, and explosives that go off like dominoes falling -- they all began to look the same. Who cares if they save the small island of Vilena from the grip of a greedy, sleazy American and his thick-necked henchmen? Who cares what happens to the sexy Latina who is, for some reason, helping them try to overthrow the government? This isn't an action movie with any subtext like, say, First Blood, so let's not pretend otherwise by wedging in dreary subplots about politics or women. Let's just blow stuff up, save the day, and go back to Tool's to have another beer and kick it, okay?

As a footnote, these guys (except for Jason Statham) have had so much plastic surgery done that any insults critics lobbed at the Sex and the City 2 stars go double for The Expendables. They are plucked and tucked, oiled up and 'roided out, with carefully painted on tattoos and scars as fake as anything you would see walking down Rodeo Drive.