Walk of Shame

For F*** Magazine

WALK OF SHAME

Director : Steven Brill
Cast : Elizabeth Banks, James Marsden, Gillian Jacobs, Sarah Wright, Ethan Suplee, Bill Burr, Oliver Hudson
Genre : Comedy
Opens: : 8 May 2014

After starring in a segment of last year’s Razzie-winning Movie 43 and directing a separate vignette in the atrocity, we expect Elizabeth Banks would be feeling a good deal of shame. Director Steven Brill helmed the “iBabe” sketch in Movie 43, so perhaps it’s fitting that Banks and Brill would collaborate on a movie called Walk of Shame. Following a drunken one-night-stand with bartender Gordon (Marsden), Meghan Miles (Banks) stumbles through Los Angeles without her phone, her purse or her car. This is bad enough as it is, but Meghan is a local news anchor with a major network job on the line. Throughout her day, she is pursued by cops (Suplee and Burr), has a run-in with a drug-dealing gang, steals a bicycle from a kid and gets sprayed in the face with mace by a bus driver.

Walk of Shame is the latest entry in a comedy subgenre we like to call “attractive woman embarrassing herself”. This can easily take a turn for the tasteless and that is indeed what Walk of Shame does. The contrived narrative jumps through hoops, each situation Meghan gets entangled in more unlikely and forced than the last. Almost all the gags are built around cheap racial stereotypes: there’s a slobbering, lecherous Middle-Eastern taxi driver (Ken Davitian), a trio of crackhouse-dwelling thugs, a timid Orthodox Jewish man (P.J. Byrne), an Asian lady who runs a massage parlour…we’re surprised a Royal Canadian Mountie didn’t randomly appear. There’s an art, if you will, to being offensive – the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen and George Carlin have mastered the skill of pushing buttons in the name of comedy. There’s no art whatsoever to Walk of Shame, where a running gag in which Meghan is mistaken for a prostitute constitutes “humour”.

Elizabeth Banks can certainly be funny, charming and sexy, but Walk of Shame’s hackneyed, crass and juvenile script does her no favours. While Walk of Shame isn’t a full-on gross-out comedy, all that’s happening to this poor woman still feels demeaning and awkward instead of funny. James Marsden doesn’t do much in this, probably having around ten minutes of screen time and as the nice guy who helps and falls in love with our protagonist, he’s not playing against type or anything. Gillian Jacobs shows up as Meghan’s wing-woman with Sarah Wright as the tagalong ditzy friend, and those couldn’t be more “stock character” if they tried. The rest of the supporting cast simply plays to the hoary stereotypes written for them, though this reviewer must admit that Alphonso McAuley is moderately funny as effeminate drug-addled gangster Pookie.

  Comedies involving a sequence of misadventures can certainly be funny – everything from Planes, Trains and Automobiles to the first Hangover film has proven that. Unfortunately, Walk of Shame is flawed from the premise up: As a TV news anchor, Meghan is a public figure and characters only recognise her as such whenever it’s convenient for the story. Having directed such critical failures as Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds, Without a Paddle and Drillbit Taylor, Steven Brill can now add Walk of Shame to the list and he’s doubly responsible here, having also written the screenplay.

SUMMARY: Certainly nothing to be proud of. At least the title’s honest.

RATING: 1.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

2 Guns

For F*** Magazine

2 GUNS

Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Cast: Denzel Washington, Mark Wahlberg, Paula Patton, Bill Paxton, James Marsden, Fred Ward, Edward James Olmos
Genre: Action
Run Time: 109 mins

Everybody loves a buddy cop movie. We get a kick out of seeing two different people flung into a sticky situation, typically involving blazing firearms, working out their differences to arrive at an uneasy partnership. Sometimes they’re serious, like with Training Day or Se7en. Oftentimes they’re more lighthearted, like with the Bad Boys, Rush Hour and Men in Black films. The late film critic Roger Ebert dubbed this type of film “wunza movies”, a play on the phrase “one’s a…” that might be present in the trailer voiceover. 2 Guns is the latest entry in this subgenre, based on a graphic novel by Steven Grant.

One’s an undercover DEA agent (Denzel Washington’s Bobby) and one’s an undercover Naval Intelligence Officer (Mark Wahlberg’s Stig). Both are posing as criminals, dealing with infamous drug lord Papi Greco (Olmos). The catch is neither is initially aware that the other is actually also one of the good guys. As is often the case in films of this variety, Bobby and Stig find themselves in way over their respective heads, with no choice but to trust each other as they get embroiled in an increasingly messy web of triple-crosses and dirty deals. Their foes and allies, including Bobby’s DEA colleague and sometime-lover Deb (Patton), Stig’s commanding Officer Quince (Marsden) and the sinister, shady operative Earl (Paxton) all have their part to play in what initially seems like a straightforward drug money heist but ends up as a whole lot more.



The first reaction one might have upon hearing the summary “a buddy cop movie starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg” is “wow, that sounds like it’ll work”. The pairing of its leads is indeed the best thing 2 Guns has going for it. Washington has plenty of experience playing a cop/agent and is still a sexy stone-cold fox at 58. Mark Wahlberg, whose last brush with the buddy cop subgenre was taking the mickey out of it in the raucous The Other Guys, is pretty funny here too. It seems his true calling is comedy rather than action; he’s probably happy to get the best of both worlds with this film.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot to recommend past the Double W double act. 2 Guns feels a lot like something Shane Black might have written and possibly directed, except that it might have been lighter on its feet had that been the case. The film suffers from noticeable pacing issues, never quite getting into a proper rhythm and feeling longer than its 109 minutes. The plot does get pretty hard to follow, which isn’t something you want in your fun, late-summer action flick. 2 Guns reunites Wahlberg with his Contraband director Baltasar Kormákur, the resulting film somewhat reminiscent of The Losers, which was set in similarly dusty locales.



Bobby and Stig go up against three main antagonists: James Marsden’s Commander Quince, Bill Paxton’s Earl and Edward James Olmos’ Papi Greco. All three clearly enjoy chewing their share of the scenery and it is fun to see the clean-cut Marsden play against type as someone who clearly isn’t the “nice guy” he’s often cast as. Of the three, Paxton manages to be the most genuinely menacing as the government-linked agent with a southern drawl and a penchant for dealing out torture. Edward James Olmos’ Papi Greco is pretty much the stereotypical Mexican drug lord – oh, he uses a jumpy, angry bull as an interrogation implement. That’s pretty mean. Paula Patton is decent as the requisite girl and provider of eye candy, though we certainly would’ve preferred seeing her in the thick of the action in a role more like the one she played in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

It seems the film would have benefitted from more of a focus. The crisscrossing plot threads don’t make the film complex, they make it unnecessarily confusing. This isn’t an action flick with an explosion going off every other minute, but the central set piece involving Bobby and Stig charging into the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station is executed pretty well, as is the finale set on a cattle ranch, which makes use of an ill-fated helicopter. Studios have generally shied away from the R-rated actioners that were all the rage in the 80s and 90s in favour of teen-friendly stuff, and in the end 2 Guns is as adequate a source as any if you need that fix.

SUMMARY: It’s not paced very well and suffers from a case of “plot pretzel”, but 2 Guns scores a casting coup in teaming up Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg.

RATING: 3 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong