Ok, I’m not going to be able to contain myself…
CONTAINS SPOILERS!
This movie tells the story of two detectives. One of them is looking for no excitement in his job and after getting transferred from forensic accounting, wants nothing more than to sit at his desk and do his paperwork… and since he can’t seem to handle confrontation, everyone else’s paperwork as well. The other was a rising star in the NYPD, sure to go straight to the top if he kept his nose clean. Then one night (right before game 7 of the World Series) he was handling security at Yankee Stadium, making sure nobody tried to slip into the Yankees clubhouse when a dark figure started approaching him carrying a baseball bat. He warned the man to stop, drew his weapon and warned him again. Receiving no response, he fired, hitting the man in the leg… only to realize that it was Derek Jeter listening to his iPod (actual cameo by Jeter, very cool…).
Detective Gamble (Will Farrell) finds out that an entrepreneur has several building permits around the city and hasn’t applied for a single scaffolding permit. Detective Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) is distraught at this development because everyone else is looking into high profile theft cases and Gamble wants to look into finable offenses.
True to policework (sometimes), the scaffolding permits get the detectives to look into this entrepreneur and they find a deep reaching conspiracy and then they proceed to bungle the investigation several times, incurring the wrath of their Captain, who works both at the precinct and at the local Bed, Bath, and Beyond… yes, it’s that kind of movie.
RATING
PG-13 for crude and sexual content, language, violence, and some drug material
Again, I have to say that the MPAA hit the nail on the head with this rating. It really says it all. Except one thing…
The “some drug material” line just made me think of the role drugs played in this movie and I had to mention it since I’ve already said that there are spoliers in this review. Detective Gamble (Farrell) drives his Prius to a crime scene as he and Hoitz are attempting to step into the void left by the death of the “top cops” (played by Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson). In his zeal to get to the crime scene, Gamble loses track of what he’s doing, driving his car into the crime scene, running over a corpse and a large amount of cocaine… which settles nicely all over his car. For the next few minutes, several references are made to a red Prius covered in cocaine.
CHILDREN – 2
I wouldn’t recommend that children see this movie. There are several wisecracks that are hilarious to mature adults but are not appropriate for children.
YOUNG MALE/FEMALE – 7/3
This is very much a guy movie. Action, drugs, (some) explicit language, and (lots of) crude jokes make this an enjoyable film. I’m just not sure that the 13-18 year old Twilight crowd will enjoy them as much as I did.
ADULT MALE/FEMALE – 10/6
So if this is such a guy movie, how did it get rated at 6 for adult women? Well, it’s hilarious. There are many scenes and many jokes that are still funny even if they are a little bit vulgar, uncouth, or uncivilized.
Will Farrell plays such a “square” cop for most of the movie and Mark Wahlberg desperately wants a bit of glory and also thinks that Farrell is a fake cop. The back and forth between the two of them is very well written and had me laughing throughout most of the movie.
GORE – 7
For this movie, this category really should be renamed violence because there was a fair amount of violence but very little blood. Even the violence was funny. There was a scene where the two detectives were going to play “good cop bad cop” on the businessman and were going to get him to talk. After Walhberg strong-arms him, he looks at Farrell and says that he would like to deal with him because he “seems more reasonable”. What follows actually what might happen if a forensic accountant tried to play the bad cop.
Essentially, he went nuts. He started by yelling the face of the businessman with a strange look on his face and then he proceeded to smash up the office a bit and he topped it all off by running across the room and leveling the suspect with a flying tackle.
ROMANCE – 5
Like the violence, the romantic subplots only exist to further the humor of the film. A running joke throughout the movie is that Detective Gamble has a strange ability to attract incredibly beautiful women (as evidenced by his wife, played by Eva Mendes). The first time Hoitz meets Sheila Gamble (Mendes) he doesn’t believe that they are actually married, going so far as to slip up and say “why are you with him?” before catching himself.
Even more hilarity ensues when Hoitz chases after his “one that got away”, finding her in a ballet studio (as the instructor) and he flips out when he sees her dancing with another man. Hoitz goes so far as to call her a stripper (dancing for money) at which point she points out that all the poles in the studio are horizontal. A minute later, Hoitz says that the dancing that they do isn’t too hard and that anyone can do it. Sure that he’s going to fall flat on his face, Wahlberg does the only thing that would be funnier; he executes several ballet dance moves perfectly (albeit for someone in jeans and a leather jacket) finishing with a pose that will cause you to spew your drink out from laughter (just warning you…).
DIALOGUE – 10
Unfortunately, I can’t remember all the one-liners so you’ll just have to watch the movie to hear them. A recurring line, however, related to Hoitz’s burning desire to be the alpha cop of the precinct and whenever someone is holding him back (usually Detective Gamble) he gets a sad/angry expression on his face and says something to the effect of “I’m a peacock! You gotta let me fly!” right before storming off.
SPECIAL EFFECTS – 7
The only reason this is rated so high is because the makers of this movie wanted it to be ridiculous and they got their wish. The opening chase scene featuring Detectives Highsmith (Jackson) and Danson (Johnson) was quite possibly one of the more ridiculous scenes I’ve ever seen… and I laughed throughout it.
Imagine during a chase, the police car (which is actually a muscle car) jumps and gets stuck in a double decker bus. They take control of the bus and resume the chase when the bad guys decide not to run anymore and make their final stand. Detective Danson puts the bus into a skid and the rear end hits a parked car, vaulting the previously stuck police muscle car out of the bus like a projectile, right for the bad guys and their vehicle. (As if that wasn’t enough) the camera pans to the inside of the muscle car, where Detective Highsmith is still sitting, firing two handguns while Mirandizing the bad guys. The muscle car takes out the bad guy vehicle, goes into the building behind it, and explodes.
Ridiculous? Yes. Awesome? You bet.
STORY/ACTING – 9/7
I don’t think that Will Farrell is a particularly good actor and Mark Wahlberg is good (but not great). Together they feed off each other and get to a level that they probably wouldn’t have been able to achieve with another actor alongside them.
As for the story, it’s ridiculous comedy at its best, a Police Academy type movie for this generation.
INTANGIBLES – 10
I can’t list every little thing here so I’ll just highlight a few. After proving he’s not trustworthy with a real gun, Gamble is given a wooden one. During a peptalk to his employees at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Captain Mauch accidentally starts talking about a serial rapist before realizing he’s in the wrong crowd. Two other detectives vying for the spot of alpha cop go to an elementary school for a presentation about policework. When a call comes in that they have to take, they ask for their guns back since they had passed them to the students to look at. After Captain Mauch gets sick of Gamble and Hoitz, he reassigns them to walking the beat and traffic duty, respectively. At first, Hoitz is upset about being on traffic duty but eventually he gets into it, including a wonderful scene where he dances his way through his job. And of course, how could we forget…
“I’m a peacock! You gotta let me fly!”
TOTAL POINTS – 83/120
ADJUSTED – 69
Pretty good movie overall, just leave the kids at home.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
SALT
This film was advertised in its run-up to release as a female Jason Bourne movie and while there are similarities, I don’t think that is a terribly good comparison.
This story starts by showing CIA agent Evelyn Salt being released from a North Korean prison, bailed out not by her Agency superiors, but rather by her husband, a German national that has nothing to do with the CIA.
After this we see shots of the boring everyday existence of Agent Salt as the world isn’t constantly going up in flames and needing the attention of every super-agent out there. For instance, a Russian man turns himself into the CIA and says he wishes to defect. Salt balks on taking the lead in the interrogation because she has anniversary plans with her husband. Her superior, Ted Winter (played by Liev Schreiber), also balks because he has a plane to catch and is tired at the end of a long day.
However, they both come back and help interrogate the potential defector and in the course of the interview/interrogation, he implicates Evelyn Salt as a Russian agent, not knowing that she was the one interviewing him.
The next hour and a half is almost pure action with a few breaks to take a breath as Salt tries to outrun (literally, then figuratively) the CIA agents trying to catch her and bring her in for questioning. Before I continue, isn’t it interesting that whenever a good guy agent is implicated in some huge conspiracy, they always run, citing the need to “clear their own name”? You never see implicated agents cooperating with the investigation and letting the proper due process clear their name for them. Well, the latter makes a terrible movie… maybe that’s the answer…
So, from this point on, I’m not sure I trust myself to keep everything under wraps so…
CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!
RATING
PG-13 for scenes of intense action and violence
This movie is intriguing to me because if I had to peg a movie franchise that it is closest to in terms of action, gore, and language, my first inclination would be James Bond. Some people might say the Bourne franchise but the action sequences ring totally differently to me.
There is a lot of violence in this movie (after all, it’s about spies and sleeper cells that are very well trained in the skill of killing people) but there’s not a whole lot of gore. In the Bourne trilogy, there is a fair amount of blood because no matter how well these agents are trained, they can’t teach them not to bleed. Bourne has a limp in one leg for most of the second and third movie and he comes out of nearly every fight scene with blood oozing from somewhere that is visible.
By contrast, James Bond (before Daniel Craig that is) just didn’t seem to bleed. He would get in fights, he would get the you-know-what beaten out of him, and he would have bumps and bruises to show for it. I understand that make-up and choreography are much more believable now than they were in 1962 when Dr. No came out but still…
To wrap it all up, in this movie Salt does bleed after several fight scenes. However, if they had made the amount of blood seen more realistic like the Bourne trilogy, I have no problem believing that this movie would have been rated R. Did they reduce the visible blood to get a PG-13 rating? It would hardly be the first time…
Lastly, I would put this in the category of the James Bond films where Bond is played by Daniel Craig. This movie is suitable for a wide range of audiences but before you take your small child to see it, make sure they can handle it.
AUDIENCE
CHILDREN – 2
Some kids are advanced for their age and can handle the mature concepts and themes of this movie. As a rule, I think the rating system devised by the MPAA is pretty good at pegging when the average person is mature enough to handle the concepts of a movie. Therefore, children under 13 years old may not handle this material as well as older people.
What do I know though? I saw my first R-rated movie when I was 9 so to each his own.
YOUNG MALE/FEMALE – 7/5
Honestly, if this movie was made several years ago, the “male” side of this rating would have been a bit higher. Truth be told, in my mind, Angelina Jolie isn’t quite the movie star that she was a few years ago. She is still a good actress and a good many guys out there still think she’s one of the most attractive women in Hollywood and I can’t disagree but she seemed to inspire a flock of younger, very attractive actresses that are realizing the way into men’s imaginations is to do action movies (I’m talking to you, Scarlett Johansson).
Still, an action movie with Angelina Jolie as the lead is still a big draw for adolescent males and I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it many more; any movie that can be spun as showing how tough women can be and how they can compete in any field with men is going to go over well with a lot of women, young and old.
ADULT MALE/FEMALE – 8/6
Angelina Jolie is not getting any younger and the crop of men that have watched her become a movie star over the past ten years are aging with her, hence, the male rating goes up slightly.
My reasoning for these ratings are virtually the same as they were for the young male/female classes but were slightly higher because of the overall maturity level and the content of this movie that caters to more mature audiences.
GORE – 7
As I said before, Salt contained very James Bond type levels of gore; there was just enough to make it look real but not enough that it would bump the rating up to R. All in all, job well done.
ROMANCE – 3
There was sort of a romantic subplot and it didn’t quite ring true to me and after avoiding the subject for so long, this is when I can’t hold back the spoilers.
The main premise of the film is that Salt actually is a Russian agent but she has a change of heart and she has to “complete” her missions to make sure someone else doesn’t do it for her when she goes rogue. In other words, the only way to protect the targets that she is supposed to kill is to eliminate any potential threats around the targets. This leads to utter mayhem in which the principal targets sustain minor injuries.
The part that doesn’t ring true is why she eventually turns her back on her parent Russian organization. It appears outwardly that she did it because they killed her husband. This seems odd in movie terms at least because secret agents don’t fall in love and if they do and something happens, they never get that personal again (see, Casino Royale – 2006).
For some reason, Salt going on this rampage of death and destruction and bringing down the entire sleeper network partially because of her husband’s murder doesn’t sit quite right with me.
DIALOGUE/SPECIAL EFFECTS – 5/6
This movie wasn’t heavy on one-liners or complex special effects but the movie did seem pretty plausible, which is one of the best things I can say about a movie based on reality. Neither of these categories went out of their way to enhance the experience and neither of them got in the way of the experience; hence, middle-range ratings.
STORY – 7
This was a very odd twist on the usual rogue spy story. Traditionally, there is no truth to the rumors of being an enemy spy and after all is said and done, the superspy receives a medal for their efforts to save the world while their own parent agency was looking for them.
In this movie, she actually IS a Russian spy but has a change of heart and now has to go out of her way to avoid the good guys, find and kill the bad guys, and not get shot herself. In the end, when some of her efforts come to the attention of a particular agent, instead of getting her name cleared, which he knows will take forever, he aids in her escape right under the noses of two agents that have no job but to watch their prisoner (Salt).
In my humble opinion, this story would have been better as a 24 type TV show instead of a movie. One of the best aspects of this movie was the knowledge that enemy agents could be anywhere and you start to wonder who the next one is going to be. You especially start to wonder how high the infiltration can go if the main character turns out to be a “bad guy”. I can’t help but think that if they had turned that into a TV show, it would have been better. Of course, it also would have been compared to 24 for its entire run on TV… maybe a movie was a better idea…
ACTING – 7
Angelina Jolie is good. Liev Schreiber is good. Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of my favorite “supporting role” actors. While the plot seemed a bit farfetched, these three actors went a long way to making it much more believable.
INTANGIBLE – 8
A lot of these points come from chase scenes and escape scenes, both of which seemed to me to be the most unrealistic parts of this movie. However, they were something I’ve never seen before and when it comes to the spy genre; I can say that I’ve seen most of it. Jumping from semi to semi on a network of highway overpasses was a very novel idea even if it would have ended in catastrophe in real life. Salt’s frequent escapes from unwinnable situations start to wear thin but when it really comes down to it, nobody in Hollywood knows what an honest to god sleeper is capable of so they have plenty of latitude when it comes to an on-screen portrayal. Overall though, I enjoy a good chase scene and while this one doesn’t measure up to Bourne (any of the three movies), it was still very enjoyable.
TOTAL SCORE – 71/120
ADJUSTED – 59
All in all, it’s an action movie. It doesn’t appeal to all people but the people that it does appeal to will thoroughly enjoy it.
This story starts by showing CIA agent Evelyn Salt being released from a North Korean prison, bailed out not by her Agency superiors, but rather by her husband, a German national that has nothing to do with the CIA.
After this we see shots of the boring everyday existence of Agent Salt as the world isn’t constantly going up in flames and needing the attention of every super-agent out there. For instance, a Russian man turns himself into the CIA and says he wishes to defect. Salt balks on taking the lead in the interrogation because she has anniversary plans with her husband. Her superior, Ted Winter (played by Liev Schreiber), also balks because he has a plane to catch and is tired at the end of a long day.
However, they both come back and help interrogate the potential defector and in the course of the interview/interrogation, he implicates Evelyn Salt as a Russian agent, not knowing that she was the one interviewing him.
The next hour and a half is almost pure action with a few breaks to take a breath as Salt tries to outrun (literally, then figuratively) the CIA agents trying to catch her and bring her in for questioning. Before I continue, isn’t it interesting that whenever a good guy agent is implicated in some huge conspiracy, they always run, citing the need to “clear their own name”? You never see implicated agents cooperating with the investigation and letting the proper due process clear their name for them. Well, the latter makes a terrible movie… maybe that’s the answer…
So, from this point on, I’m not sure I trust myself to keep everything under wraps so…
CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!
RATING
PG-13 for scenes of intense action and violence
This movie is intriguing to me because if I had to peg a movie franchise that it is closest to in terms of action, gore, and language, my first inclination would be James Bond. Some people might say the Bourne franchise but the action sequences ring totally differently to me.
There is a lot of violence in this movie (after all, it’s about spies and sleeper cells that are very well trained in the skill of killing people) but there’s not a whole lot of gore. In the Bourne trilogy, there is a fair amount of blood because no matter how well these agents are trained, they can’t teach them not to bleed. Bourne has a limp in one leg for most of the second and third movie and he comes out of nearly every fight scene with blood oozing from somewhere that is visible.
By contrast, James Bond (before Daniel Craig that is) just didn’t seem to bleed. He would get in fights, he would get the you-know-what beaten out of him, and he would have bumps and bruises to show for it. I understand that make-up and choreography are much more believable now than they were in 1962 when Dr. No came out but still…
To wrap it all up, in this movie Salt does bleed after several fight scenes. However, if they had made the amount of blood seen more realistic like the Bourne trilogy, I have no problem believing that this movie would have been rated R. Did they reduce the visible blood to get a PG-13 rating? It would hardly be the first time…
Lastly, I would put this in the category of the James Bond films where Bond is played by Daniel Craig. This movie is suitable for a wide range of audiences but before you take your small child to see it, make sure they can handle it.
AUDIENCE
CHILDREN – 2
Some kids are advanced for their age and can handle the mature concepts and themes of this movie. As a rule, I think the rating system devised by the MPAA is pretty good at pegging when the average person is mature enough to handle the concepts of a movie. Therefore, children under 13 years old may not handle this material as well as older people.
What do I know though? I saw my first R-rated movie when I was 9 so to each his own.
YOUNG MALE/FEMALE – 7/5
Honestly, if this movie was made several years ago, the “male” side of this rating would have been a bit higher. Truth be told, in my mind, Angelina Jolie isn’t quite the movie star that she was a few years ago. She is still a good actress and a good many guys out there still think she’s one of the most attractive women in Hollywood and I can’t disagree but she seemed to inspire a flock of younger, very attractive actresses that are realizing the way into men’s imaginations is to do action movies (I’m talking to you, Scarlett Johansson).
Still, an action movie with Angelina Jolie as the lead is still a big draw for adolescent males and I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it many more; any movie that can be spun as showing how tough women can be and how they can compete in any field with men is going to go over well with a lot of women, young and old.
ADULT MALE/FEMALE – 8/6
Angelina Jolie is not getting any younger and the crop of men that have watched her become a movie star over the past ten years are aging with her, hence, the male rating goes up slightly.
My reasoning for these ratings are virtually the same as they were for the young male/female classes but were slightly higher because of the overall maturity level and the content of this movie that caters to more mature audiences.
GORE – 7
As I said before, Salt contained very James Bond type levels of gore; there was just enough to make it look real but not enough that it would bump the rating up to R. All in all, job well done.
ROMANCE – 3
There was sort of a romantic subplot and it didn’t quite ring true to me and after avoiding the subject for so long, this is when I can’t hold back the spoilers.
The main premise of the film is that Salt actually is a Russian agent but she has a change of heart and she has to “complete” her missions to make sure someone else doesn’t do it for her when she goes rogue. In other words, the only way to protect the targets that she is supposed to kill is to eliminate any potential threats around the targets. This leads to utter mayhem in which the principal targets sustain minor injuries.
The part that doesn’t ring true is why she eventually turns her back on her parent Russian organization. It appears outwardly that she did it because they killed her husband. This seems odd in movie terms at least because secret agents don’t fall in love and if they do and something happens, they never get that personal again (see, Casino Royale – 2006).
For some reason, Salt going on this rampage of death and destruction and bringing down the entire sleeper network partially because of her husband’s murder doesn’t sit quite right with me.
DIALOGUE/SPECIAL EFFECTS – 5/6
This movie wasn’t heavy on one-liners or complex special effects but the movie did seem pretty plausible, which is one of the best things I can say about a movie based on reality. Neither of these categories went out of their way to enhance the experience and neither of them got in the way of the experience; hence, middle-range ratings.
STORY – 7
This was a very odd twist on the usual rogue spy story. Traditionally, there is no truth to the rumors of being an enemy spy and after all is said and done, the superspy receives a medal for their efforts to save the world while their own parent agency was looking for them.
In this movie, she actually IS a Russian spy but has a change of heart and now has to go out of her way to avoid the good guys, find and kill the bad guys, and not get shot herself. In the end, when some of her efforts come to the attention of a particular agent, instead of getting her name cleared, which he knows will take forever, he aids in her escape right under the noses of two agents that have no job but to watch their prisoner (Salt).
In my humble opinion, this story would have been better as a 24 type TV show instead of a movie. One of the best aspects of this movie was the knowledge that enemy agents could be anywhere and you start to wonder who the next one is going to be. You especially start to wonder how high the infiltration can go if the main character turns out to be a “bad guy”. I can’t help but think that if they had turned that into a TV show, it would have been better. Of course, it also would have been compared to 24 for its entire run on TV… maybe a movie was a better idea…
ACTING – 7
Angelina Jolie is good. Liev Schreiber is good. Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of my favorite “supporting role” actors. While the plot seemed a bit farfetched, these three actors went a long way to making it much more believable.
INTANGIBLE – 8
A lot of these points come from chase scenes and escape scenes, both of which seemed to me to be the most unrealistic parts of this movie. However, they were something I’ve never seen before and when it comes to the spy genre; I can say that I’ve seen most of it. Jumping from semi to semi on a network of highway overpasses was a very novel idea even if it would have ended in catastrophe in real life. Salt’s frequent escapes from unwinnable situations start to wear thin but when it really comes down to it, nobody in Hollywood knows what an honest to god sleeper is capable of so they have plenty of latitude when it comes to an on-screen portrayal. Overall though, I enjoy a good chase scene and while this one doesn’t measure up to Bourne (any of the three movies), it was still very enjoyable.
TOTAL SCORE – 71/120
ADJUSTED – 59
All in all, it’s an action movie. It doesn’t appeal to all people but the people that it does appeal to will thoroughly enjoy it.
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