Hot Pursuit: Stone cold

Hot Pursuit (2015) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, sexual candor, profanity and drug references
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.1.15

In the space of one short month at the end of last year, Reese Witherspoon starred in an inspirational drama about Sudanese refugees settling in Missouri (The Good Lie); collected a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for her persuasive portrayal of solo hiker Cheryl Strayed (Wild); and delivered a droll supporting performance as a snarky deputy district attorney in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s admittedly weird — but oddly compelling — handling of a notorious Thomas Pynchon novel (Inherent Vice).

Worried about their ability to remain on the down-low, given that every TV newscast has
been leading with their photographs, Daniella (Sofía Vergara, left) nonetheless assures
Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) that this particular sales clerk won't be staring at her face.

So ... what does Reese — a previous Oscar winner, let us not forget, for her memorable turn as June Carter, in Walk the Line — do for a follow-up?

Something rilly, rilly nifty, right?

If only.

I’ve no idea why high-caliber talents such as Witherspoon attach themselves to low-rent junk such as Hot Pursuit. There’s no way David Feeney and John Quaintance’s misbegotten script ever could have shown promise. Nor has it been dragged to life by director Anne Fletcher, which merely proves that the pudding was rancid to begin with; she did far better with previous comedies such as 27 Dresses, The Guilt Trip and most particularly The Proposal.

Fletcher clearly knows funny, and Witherspoon can do funny. So can co-star Sofía Vergara, as she has quite ably demonstrated during six seasons (and counting) of television’s Modern Family.

No, the blame here belongs solely to the numb-nuts script, which plays like a bottom-of-the-barrel television sitcom episode. No surprise there, since Feeney is a veteran of slapstick (but successful) TV work such as New Girl, According to Jim and 2 Broke Girls, while Quaintance has struggled with less successful rom-coms such as Perfect Couples, Whitney and Ben and Kate.

So if this big-screen gal-pal comedy looks, walks and quacks like a TV duck, there’s ample reason.

Mind you, I’ve no objection per se to dumb and aggressively loud TV comedies; I’ve laughed plenty hard during random episodes of New Girl. (2 Broke Girls ... not so much.) But there comes a point when it too frequently feels as if the stars in such material are trying to wring laughter from predictably stupid plots and dead-on-arrival one-liners.

That’s most definitely the case with Hot Pursuit.

Pacific Rim: Monster Mash

Pacific Rim (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for intense sci-fi violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.12.13

Guillermo del Toro must have loved Godzilla movies as a kid.

His newest action fantasy, Pacific Rim, is a valentine to the dozen or so romp ’em, stomp ’em features that starred “the big G” during del Toro’s formative years. (Quite a few more have been made since then.) This tip of the hat clearly is deliberate, since the director and fellow scripter Travis Beacham refer to their ginormous critters as kaiju, the Japanese term — literally “strange beast,” but more commonly “giant monster” — coined, back in the day, to describe Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and their ilk.

Strapped into the high-tech body suits that make them "one" with the giant robot
warriors into which they've been placed, Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako (Rinko
Kikuchi) prepare for a battle they already know is unwinnable, against a monstrous
beast with adaptive "enhancements" that have made it far stronger than their
mechanical avatar.

Throw in plenty of 21st century whiz-bang special effects, and the result is a high-tech thrill ride that blends big monsters, equally massive robot-like avatars, and the stubborn pluck of a puny human race unwilling to go quietly into that good night.

During a summer laden with end-of-the-world scenarios — zombie apocalypse and Kryptonian apocalypse, not to mention the biblical Book of Revelations — this one takes the prize for cheeky absurdity. At the same time, del Toro and Beacham pay careful attention to the human element, giving us would-be saviors who are inspiring for their fortitude, and endearing for their flaws.

Not to mention, it’s always nice when a screenplay takes the optimistic view, and shows world powers uniting in an effort to save the planet. Such all-for-one selflessness goes all the way back to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and the reminder is refreshing in this divisively cynical age.

Audacious fantasy has been del Toro’s stock-in-trade ever since 1997’s under-appreciated and genuinely creepy Mimic. He also was the perfect choice to adapt graphic novelist Mike Mignola’s lunatic Hellboy series, and — as an executive producer — del Toro has chaperoned riveting projects such as 2007’s wonderfully atmospheric The Orphanage.

And let us not forget his masterpiece: 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the Oscar-winning horror film that brought adult sensibilities to a genre too frequently willing to settle for much less, and which demonstrated that human monsters can be much, much worse than anything cooked up by our vivid imaginations.

Pacific Rim doesn’t wade through such high-falutin' waters, though; this is simply del Toro’s first stab at a crowd-pleasing, mega-budget summer blockbuster, and he has done a commendable job.

The film, set in the not-too-distant future, opens with an extended flashback: An unseen narrator recalls the unexpected arrival of the first kaiju, an enormous — and quite savage — amphibious creature bent on death and destruction. It rises from the ocean depths and wreaks considerable havoc before being brought down by conventional military hardware.

Apparently passing this off as an isolated incident — perhaps a lone, Bradbury-esque behemoth, driven by curiosity to the surface world — mankind is similarly unprepared months later, when the next one arrives. And then another. And another, at noticeably shorter intervals. Scientists realize that they’re coming from some sort of dimensional portal deep in the Pacific Ocean.