Overboard: Floats delightfully

Overboard (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for suggestive content, mild profanity and fleeting partial nudity
By Derrick Bang

The rule regarding remakes is inviolable: If it won’t be at least as good as the original, don’t bother. Please.

As it happens, writer/directors Bob Fisher and Rob Greenberg’s re-boot of 1987’s Overboard isn’t as good.

Things are about to get unpleasant: Little realizing that he's minutes away from humiliating
her to an unacceptable degree, Kate (Anna Faris) initially is intrigued by the devil-may-care
playboy antics of Leonardo Montenegro (Eugenio Derbez).

It’s better.

For starters, this new version is remarkably faithful to Leslie Dixon’s script for the original film, down to the setting in fictitious Elk Cove, Oregon. (Filming actually took place in picturesque Steveston and Fort Langley, British Columbia.) The key plot beats are retained, allowing for minor shifts here and there. The stroke of genius, however, is the gender flip: It allows for entirely new levels of humor derived from droll pokes at traditional masculinity.

Adding a cultural element to the mix also brings creative opportunities for hilarity.

And while it’s refreshing to see Anna Faris in a romantic comedy that doesn’t rely on eye-rolling moron humor, she has to work hard to keep up with co-star Eugenio Derbez, who’s no less than a force of nature. He pretty much blows her off the screen. Although beloved and respected in his native Mexico, his roles in American films have been minor until now.

That’s about to change.

Derbez’s line delivery is sublime; his comic physicality has the fluid grace of a dance impresario. He can be laugh-out-loud funny while standing still ... not that he does much of that, in this well-crafted comedy. The premise was rich back in 1987, and Derbez makes the most of it here; he’s amusing, feisty, endearing or woebegone at the blink of an eye, and he makes you believe each shift, even in a silly comedy such as this.

Events begin with a prologue, as the paterfamilias of the Montenegro family corporate dynasty — Fernando Luján, as Papi — lies in bed, near death. His daughters — the imperious, avaricious Magdalena (Cecilia Suárez) and the meek, artistic Sofia (Mariana Treviño) — are stunned when, following tradition, their father announces that the business empire will be left to their ne’er-do-well brother, Leonardo (Derbez).

The fellow in question is an arrogant, insensitive, spoiled-rotten playboy currently anchored off Elk Cove in his luxurious yacht, which is complete with, respectively, hot and cold running women and champagne.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor -- Crumbling Saga

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) • View trailer for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for plenty of grody action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.1.08
Buy DVD: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor • Buy Blu-Ray: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Deluxe Edition) [Blu-ray]

I have learned, over the years, to diminish my expectations when movies open in a particular manner:

• In a psychiatrist's office (only bad thrillers and horror flicks do this);

• With a voice-over prologue inserted to compensate for eleventh-hour editing that rendered the storyline incomprehensible;

Facing a veritable army of re-animated terra cotta soldiers, Rick and Evelyn
O'Connell (Brendan Fraser and Maria Bello) are relived (?) when their small band
of defenders is joined by thousands of revenge-seeking skeletons long-buried
beneath the Great Wall of China.

• With an extended flashback sequence that begins to feel longer than the film itself.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor falls into the latter category, although this is by no means its only flaw.

Action director Rob Cohen — taking over this franchise from creator Stephen Sommers, who helmed the first two entries — has delivered precisely the cartoon one would expect from the guy who brought us The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Cohen behaves like a second-unit stunt director; he rarely wastes time with trifles such as plot logic or characterization, preferring instead to charge from one frantic chase or fight scene to the next.

His films are breathless examples of cinematic whiplash, which I suppose is fine for the video game set, but less so for everybody else. Cohen obviously never learned the wisdom of pacing, or of balancing the frantic stuff with calmer scenes, so that viewers might relax for a moment and then better appreciate the next thrilling rush.

A nonstop diet of anything becomes tiresome, and that's the major problem with this Mummy: It never lets up, and that's boring. Older fans will recall that this misjudgment also plagued Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which similarly went from one crazed action sequence to the next, with nary a pause for reflection or — God forbid — character development.

Then, too, scripters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar subscribe to the mistaken notion that anything goes in fantasy, and that consistency therefore is nothing more than a word in the dictionary, somewhere between clumsy and crummy. That's a newbie writing mistake, because of course the opposite is true: If we're to care a whit for the heroes and villains in fantasies, then they must be granted consistent strengths and weaknesses.

It simply doesn't work, as is the case here, when the villain can surmount any situation by suddenly whipping up some new power, such as morphing into a three-headed dragon. Nor is the situation helped by the sudden appearance of a magical knife — the only weapon that can defeat him! — that springs up out of nowhere, introduced by one character as an afterthought apparently inserted into the fifth draft of page 35.

Mostly, though, this Mummy doesn't work because too many key actors can't inhabit the movie.