Daddy's Home

For F*** Magazine

DADDY'S HOME

Director : Sean Anders, John Morris
Cast : Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini, Scarlett Estevez, Owen Vaccaro, Hannibal Buress, Paul Scheer, Thomas Haden Church
Genre : Comedy
Run Time : 1 hr 36 mins
Opens : 31 December 2015
Rating : PG13 (Some Sexual References)

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg throw down in a showdown of paternal proportions in this comedy. Ferrell plays radio station exec Brad Whitaker, new husband to Sara (Cardellini) and stepfather to her children, Megan (Estevez) and Dylan (Vaccaro). Brad is having trouble connecting with his stepchildren and just when he feels he’s making progress, a spanner is throw into the works when Dusty Mayron (Wahlberg) sidles up out of nowhere. Dusty is Sara’s ex-husband and the biological father of Megan and Dylan. Rugged, capable and charismatic, Dusty’s presence is immediately an immense threat to Brad. As Dusty upstages Brad in every aspect and attempts to win Sara back, the two dads engage in a fierce battle for fatherly supremacy, regardless of the collateral damage left in their wake.

            There’s something about Will Ferrell’s comic personality that makes him an ideal candidate for films focused on one-upmanship, as evidenced by Step Brothers, Blades of Glory and The Campaign. Here, Ferrell’s opponent is his co-star from The Other Guys, Mark Wahlberg. The buddy cop send-up showed that the duo have chemistry, but the results here are lacklustre. More often than not, Daddy’s Home opts for heavily gag-based humour rather than jokes that flow naturally out of character development. Most of the comedy is derived from Ferrell humiliating himself, whether it’s losing control of a souped-up motorcycle, being electrocuted by power lines or getting drunk at a basketball game, all designed primarily to be put in the trailer – which they are.

            The film does have its moments, seeing as Ferrell is often innately funny independent of extenuating circumstances. The role of the pompous, passive-aggressive tough guy who’s both overtly manly and is a master manipulator does play more to Wahlberg’s strengths than any number of straight-ahead action hero roles he’s done. Unfortunately, most of the situations that arise are contrived and the conflicts are overblown. There are set-pieces that are so outlandish they are wont to pull the audience out of the film entirely. It also gets repetitive – Brad does something, Dusty proves he’s far better, then Brad makes a fool of himself trying to beat Dusty. Cardellini’s Sara is the stock level-headed woman who stands in the corner and shakes her head as the guys are busy falling on their faces. It’s also unfortunate that Daddy’s Home trucks out the “all women ever think about is having babies” trope.

            In order to get us more invested in this spectacularly childish “battle of the dads”, the kids could have done with a lot more characterisation. Both Estevez and Vaccaro give somewhat stilted performances, but the writing’s to blame as well – Dylan is picked on and is in need of a strong male role model while Megan is something of a sociopath. They never come across as actual kids. The opening credits unfold over a series of drawings Megan has made of their family, all of which depict unseemly calamities befalling her stepdad. That’s disturbing more than it is funny, and her behaviour doesn’t get explored.

            Daddy’s Home also serves up silly side characters with Thomas Haden Church as Brad’s boss at a smooth jazz radio station and Hannibal Buress as a handyman who believes Brad harbours racist attitudes towards him. After a while, it’s pretty clear that this doesn’t take place in the real world, despite references to The Princess Bride and Frozen. There is some joy to be derived from seeing funny actors commit to over-the-top material and the climactic comic set piece at a school dance cleverly pays off an earlier joke. However, it’s often just too broad and there’s a scene where a fertility doctor played by Bobby Cannavale gives Brad a check-up, which is wholly cringe-worthy and juvenile. While not as egregious an offender as, say, most of Adam Sandler’s recent output, the film also lazily falls back on celebrity cameos for laughs. And yes, there are half-hearted stabs at pathos and everyone will have learnt a valuable lesson or two, so the various near-death experiences Brad endures aren’t in vain.

Summary: While Ferrell and Wahlberg are often funny, Daddy’s Home indulges in too much broad silliness and exaggerated sight gags for us to get invested in this duel of the dads.

RATING: 2.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

Transformers: Age of Extinction

For F*** Magazine

TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION

Director : Michael Bay
Cast : Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Kelsey Grammer, Li Bingbing, Sophia Myles, Titus Welliver, T. J. Miller and the voices of: Peter Cullen, Robert Foxworth, John Goodman, John DiMaggio, Ken Watanabe, Frank Welker
Genre : Action, Sci-Fi
Opens : 26 June 2014
Running time: 165 mins

Lord Bay of House Boom has returned locked and loaded for the fourth live-action Transformers film despite saying he would quit the franchise, this time with a new human cast. It has been four years since Chicago was decimated in the battle between Autobots and Decepticons and the U. S. government has decided to end their partnership with the Autobots, declaring them enemies. CIA official Harold Attinger (Grammer) is in charge of hunting them down, engaging the services of mercenary Savoy (Welliver) and ruthless Decepticon bounty hunter Lockdown (Ryan). Joshua Joyce (Tucci), owner of tech giant KSI, has a lucrative government contract to manufacture man-made facsimiles of the Transformers by reverse-engineering captured and dismantled Autobots and Decepticons. Meanwhile, Texan inventor Cade Yeager (Wahlberg), his best friend Lucas (Miller), his daughter Tessa (Peltz) and Tessa’s boyfriend Shane (Reynor) get drawn into the conflict when they unwittingly come into the possession of a beat-up old truck that just happens to be Optimus Prime (Cullen) himself. With the extinction of humanity imminent, Optimus and the remaining Autobots must defeat Attinger and the Decepticons in pursuit.

            Tennis champ Boris Becker said “you get used to eating caviar and at some point it tastes as ordinary as everything else.” In the context of action movies, explosions are akin to caviar. More doesn’t necessarily mean better, but director Michael Bay has wilfully rejected this notion and continues to stuff his films with more and more. He promised a “less goofy” outing but as this reviewer has learnt the hard way, a Michael Bay cannot change his spots. The elements in the second and third films that led to them being critically panned are still here, just in slightly more controlled doses. There’s still juvenile humour, there’s still racism and sexism, there’s still obnoxious product placement, the action scenes are still overwhelming flurries of whirling, clanging metal, it’s just reined in a bit and therefore slightly more tolerable than before. Bumblebee still talks using voice clips. Instead of an annoying actual dog, there’s an annoying homemade robot dog. Instead of Linkin Park, there’s Imagine Dragons. The film’s stabs at self-aware winking at the audience (an elderly movie theatre proprietor bemoans how all major releases are remakes and sequels) are more awkward and on the nose than anything else.

            Apologists of this film series have often used the “this is not Citizen Kane” argument. Well, even Citizen Kane had a running time of 119 minutes. This bad boy clocks in at 165 minutes, the longest Transformers movie yet. It’s overkill. Were this around 100 minutes long, we might’ve been really entertained. Still, there are definitely parts of the movie to commend. Bay and screenwriter Ehren Kruger have decided to make the human villain a CIA official, which combined with the decreased role of the military, makes this less of a jingoism party than the earlier films in the series. Having human scientists attempting to create their own Transformers without comprehending the danger and complexity of the technology is a perfectly viable angle to come at the story from, if somewhat Terminator-esque. And best of all, our protagonist is no longer the useless, unbearably annoying Sam Witwicky.

            Mark Wahlberg is certainly an upgrade from Shia LaBeouf, even if Marky Mech doesn’t break into an off-key rendition of the Transformers theme song “The Touch” like in Boogie Nights. Cade Yeager is a bundle of clichés: All-American everyman turned hero, amateur inventor whose workshop is filled with knick-knacks plus he’s an over-protective single dad who utterly disapproves of his daughter’s boyfriend just on principle. But Wahlberg being significantly less punch-worthy than LaBeouf makes a difference. Nicola Peltz of The Last Airbender infamy fulfils the pre-requisites of being the female lead in this series: she can’t act and she rocks the Daisy Dukes. Reynor is a typical modern Hollywood imported pretty-boy; some kind of attempt made at explaining away the Irish actor’s accent - Cade ends up disparagingly referring to his would-be son-in-law as “Lucky Charms”. Once again, at least he’s significantly less annoying than Shia LaBeouf.

            While Stanley Tucci is subjected to a good deal of embarrassment as a send-up of tech icons like Steve Jobs, he is spared the depths of indignity that the likes of John Turturro and John Malkovich suffered in the previous movies. Kelsey Grammer takes his role as primary human antagonist surprisingly seriously and his frighteningly pragmatic Attinger is a bright spot in the film, so many steps up from Patrick Dempsey in Dark of the Moon. Titus Welliver is also quite imposing and the sequence in which he pursues Cade as they cling to the exterior of a Hong Kong apartment building is plenty of fun. As the head of KSI in China, Li Bingbing is the stock boss lady and without Sally Cahill to dub over her like in Resident Evil: Retribution, she valiantly battles the English language. The voice acting is good as well, not only is definitive Optimus Prime performer Peter Cullen back, but the legendary Frank Welker reprises his role as Galvatron from the various animated series. Thankfully, Ken Watanabe and John Goodman’s distinct voices are still recognizable even after being treated with that robot voice filter. Watanabe also gets to deliver the film’s funniest line, Drift’s reaction upon first seeing the Dinobots transform.

            One thing has been true about this series: no matter how bad the rest of the film gets, the visual effects work certainly can’t be faulted and we’d like to salute visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar and the armies of artists and technicians who brought the Autobots, Decepticons and those fan-favourite Dinobots to life. Amidst the bombast, we also get genuinely beautiful shots, like those of the Autobots convening in Monument Valley and a shot in which Lockdown’s ship is reflected in Chicago’s Cloud Gate sculpture. We saw this in IMAX 3D and even though it is often pretty to look at, the constantly shifting aspect ratios can be very distracting. Transformers: Age of Extinction is more bearable than Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon, albeit certainly not the paradigm shift in quality it is touted to be. But hey, this is a movie with a humanoid robot semi-truck astride a giant robot T-rex charging into battle, so it’s not like anything we say matters too much anyway.

SUMMARY: While relatively better than its predecessors thanks to more likeable leads and less superfluous subplots, many of the problems that plagued the earlier Transformers movies are still very present throughout the 165 minute duration.

Mark Wahlberg, Jack Reynor and Nicola Peltz do not love the smell of napalm any time of the day.

RATING: 2.5 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

Ted

For F*** Magazine, Singapore

Movie Review                                                                                                                                                      29/8/12

TED

2012

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane (voice), Giovanni Ribisi

Directed by: Seth MacFarlane

            Almost everyone has that little piece of childhood they remember bringing everywhere, be it a blanket, a Barbie doll, a G.I. JOE or, of course, a teddy bear. And many of us would have held imaginary intergalactic space battles enacted with action figures or fantasy tea parties with dolls and stuffed animals; entertaining the thought of these inanimate companions coming to life. There have been many films and TV shows about living toys, from the Toy Story franchise to Small Soldiers to the infamous Twilight Zone episode (we won’t spoil which one)– well, Ted runs on the premise of the magical living toy accompanying its owner into adulthood.

                Mark Wahlberg plays John Bennett, something of an outcast among the neighbourhood kids as a child growing up in a Boston suburb. Yearning for a true friend, he wishes on a shooting star for his Christmas present, a teddy bear, to come to life – which it does. The mysterious walking, talking stuffed toy captures the imagination of the world, becoming an overnight celebrity. As the buzz dies down, the bear, christened “Ted” (voice and motion capture performance by MacFarlane), settles into a routine living alongside his best bud John, the two inseparable after 27 years of friendship. As John grows up, so does Ted, the stuffed toy developing a penchant for marijuana and a libido he struggles to keep in check.

                However, Ted’s antics seem to be coming in the way of John’s relationship with his girlfriend of four years Lori (Kunis), who has happily put up with the rambunctious bear but feels that it would be hard for her to live with a guy whose whole life revolves around a stuffed toy. Her sleazy boss Rex (Joel McHale) hits on her relentlessly, wondering why Lori would choose a slacker like John over a wealthy and successful man like himself. Meanwhile, disturbed stalker Donny (Ribisi), who has been obsessed with Ted ever since the stuffed toy hit the big time, is intent on getting a hold of the enchanted bear for his son (Aedin Mincks) - by any means necessary. John must come to grips with living life as a responsible adult while still preserving the memories he formed with Ted, as circumstances push him to get his priorities in order. 

                 Ted is the live-action directorial debut of Seth MacFarlane, the multi-hyphenate behind the successful animated series Family Guy. The film was also co-written and co-produced by MacFarlane in addition to featuring his vocal and motion-capture performances, and has his fingerprints all over it. In the interest of full disclosure, this reviewer must say that he’s not much of a Seth MacFarlane fan – the guy can seem obnoxious and “funnier-than-thou” at times, and has come under fire for alleged plagiarism – indeed, cartoonist Lucas Turnbloom has claimed that Ted liberally rips off his webcomic Imagine THIS. However, even though many of the jokes here are in the same irreverent, pop culture-referencing mould as in Family Guy and its spin-offs, they are very effective. This is a very funny movie, and some of the gags are true gems. The tone is established from the get-go, as the camera flies past the letters of the “Universal Studios” logo and into the globe, zooming in on the little suburb. Patrick Stewart provides a warm, fuzzy, curl-up-by-the-fireplace narration to set the story up – and immediately makes an anti-Semitic remark. Later in the same narration, he makes and out-of-left-field comment about Apache helicopters.

                This is one of those movies where you don’t want to hear too much about the jokes beforehand because some are just too enjoyable to spoil. Of course several gags are straining too hard, but this isn’t blankly “unfunny”, as many often accuse MacFarlane of being. He engineers some situations (with help from some fun celebrity cameos) that are truly ripe for comedy. There’s talk of singer Norah Jones’ sexual encounter with the titular stuffed toy. Flash Gordon and a homosexual Hal Jordan in the same room. A brutal hotel room brawl between John and his beloved bear (it involves broken bottles and Ted appropriating a radio antenna as a whip). We could go on – these scenarios come flying one after the other and it’s quite the ride.

                One problem though is that many of these jokes can seem rather mean-spirited, even if there’s a grain of truth in them. MacFarlane gleefully takes the mickey out of everyone from Justin Bieber to Brandon Routh, from Chris Brown to Lance Armstrong, races and religions of all stripes – and some of it just isn’t all that pleasant. However, the movie is wholly successful in getting its audience to believe that a bear can walk, talk and smoke a bong, just as the Superman movie made us believe a man could fly. A combination of puppets, animatronics and a CGI bear created using MacFarlane’s voice and motion capture work brings Ted to vivid life, all tied together with that distinct New England twang. Ted can eat and drink, get high on narcotics and apparently perform coitus – how all of this is possible is never quite explained, but we go along with the ‘magic’. It’s actually pretty hard not to get emotionally invested in Ted, for all his idiosyncrasies, and it is to the filmmakers’ credit that we wince and cringe when Ted gets “injured” or put in any kind of jeopardy, and never say “wait a minute, that’s not a real thing”.

                Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis are a fair bit better here than they were as Max Payne and Mona Sax respectively in the awful Max Payne film, and they gamely overcome the challenge of acting opposite ‘nothing’. Giovanni Ribisi, who was also the antagonist opposite Wahlberg in Contraband, is fantastically creepy as Donny and gives off quite the serial killer vibe. It’s a shame that his subplot gets the short shrift, the bulk of it squeezed breathlessly into the film’s final act. That’s also easily the best part of the film because we get on with the plot – fun as it may be to see John and Ted hang around and go wild, the film does spend too much time setting it all up and not enough on the action proper.

                Ted is surprising in how it worms its way into your heart, how a convincingly-created character allows us to lower our guard and feel free to laugh. If we as audience members cannot suspend our disbelief then it’s all out the window, and some effort has gone into keeping that disbelief safely suspended. It’s unfortunate that the film is sometimes content with a string of gags in place of full focus on the plot, and the sincerity oftentimes get easily lost in the shuffle of bawdy humour and MacFarlane getting a little too much free rein to strut his stuff(ing).

SUMMARY: Ted attempts to blend adult comedy and childhood fantasy and does draw out the laughs, but this is one stuffed toy that could do with a bout in the washing machine and a little patching up here and there.

RATING: 3 out of 5 STARS

Jedd Jong