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Pork & Pickles

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Hitpig

by Hope Madden

Do you ever take one look at the villain in an animated film and know exactly how things will go? I don’t mean the villainy. I mean the comedy.

The second Leapin’ Lord of the Leotard (Rainn Wilson) pranced across the screen in Hitpig, spilling over his thong and tights, I knew. As flamboyant as he is round, Leapin’ Lord is comic relief wrapped in fat jokes veiled thinly beneath homophobia.

That’s just problem #1.

The film pits a bounty hunter pig (Jason Sudeikis) against an eco-criminal (Anitta) who routinely breaks animals out of their involuntary confinement. The latest escapee is Pickles the Elephant (Lilly Singh), the Leapin’ Lord’s dance partner.

The script comes in part from Berkeley Breathed, whose delightful Pete & Pickles picture book series inspires the adventure. Hitpig needs to get Pickles to Vegas for showtime, but Pickles just seems to get them into one misadventure after another.

Directors Cinzia Angelini and Davis Feiss can’t land on a tone (except when they go tone deaf with the fat jokes). The animation, basic plotting and quick scene changes would appeal to the very young. Much of the humor might entertain older kids who’d be put off by the very silly antics. Certain jokes seem aimed at adults, who are no doubt already bored into a fugue state.

Lessons are learned, stakes are low, animation style is bland, jokes go on too long and the slight story is stretched beyond breaking. A solid cast (RuPaul, Hannah Gadsby and Flavor Flav round out the voice talent) and a few charming moments can’t overcome the film’s lack of narrative cohesion or heart.

There is a moment in this film where the nasty villain slams Pickles the Elephant in a train car, only her terrified eyes visible behind the bars. This ode to Dumbo may have seemed necessary in another animated film about a mistreated show elephant. But that particular image—recalling one of the most traumatizing moments in the history of family films—serves as a startling reminder of just how mediocre Hitpig really is.

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Part of Your World

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Ezra

by George Wolf

“The word ‘autism’ comes from the Greek ‘in your own world’. I don’t want him in his own world. I want him in this world.”

That heartfelt line in Ezra is going to hit home for many parents and caregivers, and it serves as the emotional core of a film that carves out some truly touching moments from a well-worn structure.

New Yorker Max (Bobby Cannavale) is a struggling standup comic who is co-parenting his autistic son Ezra (newcomer William A. Fitzgerald) with ex-wife Jenna (Rose Byrne). Max lives with his father, Stan (Robert De Niro), a former chef who’s now a doorman, and the two trade frequent barbs while Max and Jenna weigh the question of whether Ezra would be better off attending a special needs school.

Max can be an impulsive hothead, and when he misunderstands a conversation between Jenna and her boyfriend (Tony Goldwyn, who also directs), it leads to a series of unfortunate events and a three month restraining order.

And it takes a fraction of that for Max to break it because…road trip!

Max has landed an invite to do the Jimmy Kimmel show in L.A., so he and Ezra head cross-country while Jenna, Stan and numerous authorities try to track them down.

En route to the west, Max stops off to see an old girlfriend (Vera Farmiga) and his brother Nick (Rainn Wilson), which only adds to the stellar ensemble that elevates Tony Spiridakis’s script when it defaults to spoon-feeding and obvious sentimentality.

It’s great to see Cannavale again dig into a role that can showcase his range. Too often relegated to mustache-twirling cartoonish villains, Cannavale displays the talent that can make Max sympathetic, even when he’s a maddening mess.

Byrne delivers her usual, chemistry-filled excellence; De Niro scores with some crusty affection and understated humor (including a priceless ongoing gag about cookware); and the charming Fitzgerald ensures that the film’s big heart is consistently in the right place.

That place is here in our world, one filled with neurodivergent people of all manner and mannerisms. It’s a welcome message that Ezra delivers warmly, even if it’s a little too comfortable with convention.

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Man Bites Shark

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The Meg

by George Wolf

You didn’t think Great White-invested tornados meant the pool of shark movie premises was running dry, did you? Not so long as someone is just conscious enough to mumble “Statham fights a shark” in a drunken pitch meeting!

The Meg brings that premise to 3-D life, with Statham wet-suitting up as Jonas, the reluctant hero with a haunted past. After a tragic encounter with a giant underwater beast, Jonas hangs up the scuba mask to drink away his days in the bars of Thailand.

But five years later, his ex-wife is part of an undersea research team at the mercy of the legendary Megaladon, a 70-foot long “living fossil” of a shark thought to be extinct for over 200 million years. Jonas, of course, knew it wasn’t, and now he must tell everyone “I told you so” with his most steely glare, go back on his vow to never dive again, and take everything much too seriously.

And that’s the biggest misstep weighing down the entire film. You get the feeling that with a knowing, “Kong: Skull Island” type of monster vibe, this could have been fun, but director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) can’t settle on one charted course.

Turteltaub and his team of writers adapt the first of Steve Allen’s “Meg” novels with a host of changes, presumably meant to bolster Statham’s damaged hero quotient. The dramatics are overdone by nearly all involved (though Rainn Wilson, as the billionaire behind the research, finds a mark), and when a nicely subtle hat-tip to Jaws opens the gates for all out scene stealing, The Meg becomes a water-logged mess.

A Chinese co-production with a clear eye on international markets, the film has moments of promise that are quickly snuffed out by exposition that’s neither needed, wanted or interesting. Where’s the fun, sharky nonsense promised by the trailer? That movie might have been a guilty pleasure.

The Meg is just guilty.





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There’s No Vaccine for This

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Cooties

by Hope Madden

Welcome to the dog eat dog and child eat child world of elementary school.

Kids are nasty bags of germs. We all know it. It is universal truths like this that make the film Cooties as effective as it is.

What are some others? Chicken nuggets are repulsive. Playground dynamics sometimes take on the plotline of LORD OF THE FLIES. To an adult eye, children en masse can resemble a seething pack of feral beasts.

Directing team Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion harness those truths and more – each pointed out in a script penned by a Leigh Whannell-led team of writers – to satirize the tensions to be found in an American elementary school.

Whannell – co-creator of both the Saw and Insidious franchises – co-stars as the socially impaired science teacher on staff. He’s joined by a PE teacher (Rainn Wilson), an art teacher (Jack McBrayer), two classroom teachers (Alison Pill, Nasim Pedrad), and the new sub, Clint (Elijah Wood), in a fight for survival once an aggressive virus hits the student population of Fort Chicken.

School-based horror abounds – even Wood’s done it previously, having starred in Robert Rodriguez’s 1998 alien invasion fantasy The Faculty.

Cooties is also not the first horror film to mine tensions from the image of monstrous children turned against us. Come Out and Play (both the 2013 American version and its Spanish predecessor Who Can Kill a Child?) generate tensions based on the presumed difficulty an adult would have in slaughtering children.

Two things set Cooties apart. One: It is often laugh out loud funny. Two: It is willing to indulge the subversive fantasy of (possibly all) school teachers.

They kill a lot of children in this movie.

If Murnion and Milott couldn’t find the comedic tone to offset the seriously messed up violence, the film would be a distasteful, even offensive failure. But, thanks in part to a very game cast, as well as an insightful screenplay, Cooties comes off instead as a cathartic (if bloody) metaphor and an energetic burst of nasty fun. It might be welcome after school viewing in the teacher’s lounge.

Verdict-3-5-Stars