Summary Judgment Megapost – Frozen, Divergent, Grand Budapest Hotel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Sabotage

I’m experimenting with a new format called Summary Judgment, wherein I’ll post quick & pithy reviews. Normally I’d post these one at a time, but since I’ve been traveling and have several to post, I’ll inaugurate this new format with five all at once. Don’t worry, they’re quick. That’s the point.

 

Divergent

Ever wonder what you get if you mix an impossibly long and much more boring Hunger Games with the production values of a German soap opera? Neither did I. This film blows so hard it’s putting orcas in the bread line. (No lumps to Shailene Woodley, who I continue to adore despite this threadbare sack of crap.)

Haus Verdict: If you ever listen to anything I say, skip this movie. If you don’t, I know no better punishment than sitting through this.

 

Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson’s latest. If you’ve seen the preview then you know precisely what to expect: Essential life-truths spun to a knobby pellet and resuspended in 95% quirk with a rich pastel wrapper. The chief risk here was that Anderson’s cartoonish, cameo-ridden take on prewar Eastern Europe wouldn’t carry water for two hours. But it does, and it’s a fun little story.

Repeat fans will enjoy what Anderson does with this arch concept, and the puzzling majority of the public that hardly ever goes to the movies will emerge emboldened by whimsy — as if some benevolent pickpocket went rogue and jammed viewers’ sweatpants full of quasi-cultural allusions. I figure Wes Anderson likes to leave people feeling just a wee bit more adventurous, like they’ve swallowed some gateway drug to the illicit world of arty cinema, but haven’t actually done anything inexcusable yet. Like, you know, watching an actual foreign film.

Haus Verdict: Very pink, very arch, very self-aware, and still fun.

 

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Though I didn’t get much from the first installment, the second Captain America film is better than it has any right to be. The action is tight, it’s well acted, and Chris Evans brings surprising depth amidst some admittedly silly plot stretches. It’s not a great hero film: it lacks the gee-whiz charm of the Iron Man films or the nihilist navel-gazing of the recent Batman outings. But given that Captain America is essentially a pretty boring do-gooder, and since the multicolored fireworks of the Avengers finale left ol’ Cap with not much to do besides mount police cars and bark orders at puzzled cops, this sequel makes the most of what it has: A man of the past with a strong sense of duty, who’s also uneasy with what modern agencies might ask him to do. Thus, the Winter Soldier tills modest turf, eschewing the fantastic for a grittier, Michael Mann-style urban-gunfight vibe that suits Captain Rogers nicely. The film also does a nice job bridging the 70-year gap to the Captain’s enemies. My lone complaint really is the unwelcome recurrence of the Robocop phenomenon: That is, popcorn flicks pitching a flag on the whole government surveillance / drones / wiretapping battlefield. Leave it to the discount-bin law journals, folks. Fun fact: Though set in DC, Winter Soldier was filmed largely in The Mistake on the Lake. You heard it here first.

Haus Verdict: Surprisingly enjoyable. Give the first one a miss, but this is a fun ride.

 

Frozen

Well, here’s something I didn’t expect: A Disney princess film that reboots the trusted true-love motif to trumpet instead a modern, Beyonce-quits-Destiny’s Child, I-depend-on-me ethos. With at least one catchy song (coming on infinite repeat to a kindergarten near you), a cute snowman, rivers of fresh pow, and a pair of oh-so-different love interests, it pushes all the right buttons. It rang a little hollow to me in the end, but what do I know? Kids will love it, and like many things Disney, it’s bound to become a modern classic.

Haus Verdict: A cute and fun Norse-ish fairy tale that even the Lean In crowd can love. Can’t miss, really, and Disney doesn’t.

 

Sabotage

I confess that one of the unintended and often unwelcome side effects of my recent reviewing pace — easily timed along with seismic shifts and moss growing on your wall — is that I sometimes catch wind of public sentiment before I see a film. And boy, the public hated Sabotage. I nearly missed it myself, so short was its stint in theatres. But I didn’t miss it, and you know what? I liked it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger returns, and not in some cheeseball one-line Expendables cameo either. No, he’s starring in an honest-to-goodness, tongue-nowhere-near-cheek action film. Sure, I get the complaints: It’s quite violent (eh), and gory in a tac-team sort of way (eh), and the meandering plot makes absolutely no sense in the end. But come on: This pretty much perfectly describes every early Arnold film we know and love. And this one is positively dripping with hard-drinking, hard-shooting, bad-stink machismo. And it tries so hard to be gritty and real, all the while ladling on a gravy of tough-sounding names (surname: “Breacher”) and trying to sell Arnold as a “legendary” DEA agent. (Does such thing exist?) Inevitable tactigasms aside (this team has more Picatinny rails than a zombie-prepper’s AirSoft), Arnold is actually really good here. Grizzled and hard, it’s probably his best acting ever.

Haus Verdict: Forget what the herds say. See it for its totally earnest moon-shot of SWAT-grit. (And never mind the plot.)