Masterminds [Review by Haus]

I have done you all a great disservice of late by not watching bad movies.

I admit: I’ve chosen to see and to review chiefly films that look worth seeing, and — yes — I’ve not watched some that looked about as intellectually appetizing as granddad’s gritty dip-wad.

But this was wrong. I know that we here at The Parsing Haus shouldn’t merely drizzle our wizard wisdom into your open ears and whisper in the dark about what’s great and unmissable and worth your time. No.

We are more. We are your eyes in the dark, your clerks of DreamWorks, your jet-fueled scribes of diatribes. We are your canaries in the coal mine, your royal tasters, your vanguard, your point men. We take the bullet. We suffer so you may avoid suffering. We are your Movie Jesus.

You are right to expect this of us. And in this, of late, I have failed.

So, I saw Masterminds. It looks bad. It’s pretty bad.

But it’s not a total write off, like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, or Green Lantern, or Safe Haven, because it has something none of those bad movies had: An occasional Kate McKinnon.

I love Kate McKinnon. Her creepy/weird starey-eyed frozen-smile shtick — pretty much a constant in everything she does these days — just mesmerizes me. She’s my catnip. If I were the King she’d be my court jester, and everyone would have to laugh or they’d be banished to the snow.

Sadly for me but thankfully for her and for what little remains of my objectivity, she doesn’t star here, and the rest of this film leaves plenty to groan about.

What we have here is a strange beast: A comedic adaptation of a supposedly true late-90s armored car robbery in the American South. It’s an inside job, with double-wide dwelling mastermind Owen Wilson dangling quasi-love interest Kristen Wiig like a carrot in front of schlubby patsy Zack Galifianiakis (did I spell it? … [Googles] … I spelled it!!) who knocks over the local vault. Jason Sudeikis onboards in act two as a weird, porny-looking hitman sent to clean up the mess, and Leslie Jones is an FBI agent on the trail. (McKinnon plays Galifianakis’s fiancee.) Jared Hess directs and no fewer than eighteen producers played hot potato with this thing, including Lorne Michaels (as the SNL-rich cast will demonstrate) and, strangely, Danny McBride.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the cast, but the story is empty and — though hardly too constrained by reality — just neither altogether funny nor altogether very interesting.

The South provides a decent comedic sandbox into which the actors toss their best drawls and costumers toss their jean shorts, but that all gets old within the first ten minutes; the remainder of the movie is a curious hybrid of sight gags, pratfalls, scat jokes, mild Mexican exaggeration humor, and 90s clothing. It just never hits its stride. It doesn’t help that we’re essentially asked to root for a blundering lovestruck felon as our protagonist.

It’s not an awful film. There are a couple of laughs (McKinnon forever!!) and these are actors who’ve been funny before and will be funny again. But it’s not clever, it’s not self aware, and it’s not over the top. The laughs are commercial grade (that’s TV commercial, mind you) and cognitively available to a five year old, and the audience at the Hollywood premiere sat stunned before rustling up a golf clap and tweeting “don’t see this.” I made that last bit up.

As befits a film of this quality, even the end credit outtakes aren’t particularly funny (except a couple – McKinnon forever!!) and it looks like it was shot in about two and a half weeks for about what I’ll spend on car repairs this year. (Not a joke, actually. I drive British.)

Upshot? See it if you love Kate McKinnon!!

Oh, and your canary is back.

Haus Verdict: A bit too strange, not super funny, and after a while, actually a bit depressing. Masterminds needed one. 

Masterminds opened Friday September 30.

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