Reel Entropy

The movie is supposed to be about how wonderful Vincent MacKenna (Bill Murray) is and how everyone loves him, and maybe that would work if he were Peter Venkman or Steve Zissou. Photos courtesy The Weinstein Company.

When Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy star in a movie, most people would think it would be both funny and strange. They’d be wrong.

St. Vincent follows title character Vincent MacKenna (Bill Murray), a stereotypical, cursing, drinking, gambling old Irishman. MacKenna has fallen on hard times and tries to take advantage of his new neighbor, Maggie Bronstein (Melissa McCarthy), when her movers knock into his tree. However, MacKenna and Bronstein’s son, Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) start to develop a relationship when MacKenna is forced to keep track of Oliver after school because his mother cares more about work than her son.

Oliver is assigned to argue for a modern-day person to receive sainthood and oh, crap, that’s a spoiler isn’t it. Given that information, anyone with half a brain can figure out how the movie is obviously going to play out. Don’t look at me, the assignment is delivered like 10 minutes into the movie. Meaning for the remaining 92 minutes, everyone with half a brain knows what’s going to happen, if they didn’t already.

MacKenna’s pregnant prostitute friend, Daka (a completely unrecognizable Naomi Watts), is also involved.

This movie is being marketed on the strength of lead actors Murray and McCarthy, even though Lieberher gets much more screen time than McCarthy does. The thing about actors is they play different characters in every movie, and that’s their job, and that’s OK. But the thing about stars is they have something recognizable and bankable that they do in most of their movies that people pay to see. Think George Clooney’s smoldering good looks or the one-liners Will Smith’s handlers write into every script he signs on for.

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The first known Ouija boards date back to 11th-12th century China. They were outlawed by the Qing Dynasty, but the practice spread across India and into the Roman and Greek empires and has remained to this day. The word “Ouija” was coined in 1901 by a man named William Fuld who started selling them as toys. His estate sold the business to the Parker Brothers in 1966, which sold it to Hasbro in 1991. Photo courtesy Universal Pictures.

How does Hasbro — Hasbro! — have a successful line of movies?

An obviously haunted Ouija board appears in Debbie’s (Shelly Henning) house. Weird stuff happens and she ends up dead. Her best friend, boyfriend and assorted others find the same board and the pattern repeats. The group stumbles around the edges of the decades-old mystery of the family that used to live in the house and the horrors they summoned into it.

The most bizarre thing about Ouija is that it’s kind of good. All the fundamentals of a good ghost story, a past of violence cropping up in a present of uncertainty, are in place.

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