Reel Entropy

This July 4 weekend looks to be the most boring since 1986, when Psycho III was the headliner. Between Transformers: Dinobots, McCarthy, Another Exorcism Remake and WALL-E Phone Home, there is literally nothing appealing out right now. But these films are all fantastic specimens of the kind of repetitive tripe that Hollywood is always giving way too much money to. We’re not going to validate these films with an actual review — that would be one word, “derivative.” What we’re going to do is pick them apart and examine what makes them so like everything else.

Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures

Disaster movies follow several primary characters from different walks of life as they deal with massive, destructive sequences of CGI that are completely beyond their control.

The term evokes natural disaster movies, but weather movies are some of the worst members of this story structure. In truth, they’ve taken over for action movies as the most titillating, high-profile affairs of the summer. There are some transition movies — several recent superhero movies have featured massive destruction in their plot — but large, extended scenes of destruction have mostly taken over for taut action sequences in the past few years.

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How were these guys popular? They’re just nasal! It’s like Frankie Valli has convinced the whole world to give him credit for the hold-your-nose-and-talk-funny trick. Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Motion Pictures.

How many synonyms are there for the word “lifeless?”

That’s the only word to describe Jersey Boys, but for descriptions sake there need to be more. Based on the smash hit Broadway musical, the film follows the development and dissolution of the Four Seasons, a band that, somehow, was popular in the ’60s. The movie is narrated by each in turn — Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), a thug who wants to earn a fortune with a calculated attempt at music; Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), a songwriting genius who makes the band popular; Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda), an extra person so the band has four; and Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young), a singer more nasal than a sinus infection.

They grow popular… somehow, I mean they’re just terrible, and then fall apart because of DeVito’s severe behavioral and gambling problems.

Inert, empty, extinct, dead…

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Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) has the coolest flight suit in this movie. And a lightsaber, apparently. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox

What is there to say about How to Train Your Dragon 2?

Its several plot lines defy any strong description. The movie starts with Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his dragon, Toothless, mapping out the surroundings of their island home, Berk. During their cartography, they come across another group building up a dragon army to take over the surroundings. This yields the movie’s main antagonist, Drago Bludfist (Djimon Honsou).

Hiccup’s father, Stoick (Gerard Butler) wants to make him chief, but Hiccup doesn’t want to be chief, and so there’s a whole “But father, I just want to sing!” element. He also runs across his long-lost mother (Cate Blanchett) in a plotline that’s mostly there to make people sad later.

The movie definitely isn’t good, but it’s not exactly bad either. It’s a kid’s movie and a sequel, and it comes with a lot of generally accepted indiscretions for kids’ movies and sequels. There’s a lot of muted toilet humor, the kind of draw-laughs-through-discomfort jokes that fit the profile of raunchier, more adult-oriented comedies but are toned down for kids and won’t make anyone else very uncomfortable. There are also quite a few short-attention-span breaks, scenes that don’t contribute much but are fun to look at and function mostly as a random dance break.

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I could deal with some WHYPHY. Four hours (FOUR HOURS) of extreme focus followed by a killer high, no indication of a chemical dependency and the only person who died fell off a roof? Not all drugs are bad, kids. Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures.

22 Jump Street is just like 21 Jump Street. And it isn’t. And they make a lot of jokes about how it’s going to be just like 21 Jump Streetand then subvert those jokes. Sometimes. Kind of.

The movie starts by fulfilling the first one’s promise — sending Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) to college. Just like the first one, they immediately delve to the level of their cover, adopting the basest possible stereotypes. The duo try to find the supplier for a new drug called WHYPHY (work hard, play hard).

This is a franchise of parodies that don’t break free of the genre they’re parodying. 21 Jump Street, a big-budget remake,went out of its way to make fun of Hollywood for all the big-budget remakes it’s been producing. 22 Jump Street, a big-budget sequel, goes even further out of its way to mock sequel conventions.

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After half a decade of self-ostracizing and controversy, there is still no one who can carry a film quite like Tom Cruise.

General Brigham forges papers saying Cage is a deserter to get the ground forces to go along with forcing him to the front line. With his character arc, the film would be much better if that actually were the case. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Motion Pictures.

His new film, Edge of Tomorrow, is based heavily on the Japanese light novel All You Need is Kill. Earth has been invaded by hive-minded aliens called mimics. After scoring a major victory in Verdun, France because of the cartoonish heroics of Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the global army goes all in to reclaim Europe. For absolutely no reason, General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) assigns William Cage (Cruise), a public relations officer with no combat experience, to the campaign’s front lines. Cage dies covered in the blood of an alpha mimic, and he gains their blood-born power — to reset time after death, making him as invincible as he’s willing to die to be.

Edge of Tomorrow is pretty much everything you could want from a blockbuster in sequence. At the beginning — and this is the only time the film is difficult to watch — it’s ridiculous. The idea that a general would put a PR major on the front lines, first on a whim and then out of spite, pushes the suspension of disbelief much further than it should go in act 1. Soldiers, prospective comrades, are constantly taunting Cage about how he’s going to die. Anyone with even a basic understanding of group combat will be put off.

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