EBC Cinema Lounge:
The Campaign & Killers
Part of the EBC Review Lounge Series
The Campaign & Killers
Part of the EBC Review Lounge Series
The theme of this review for me is pigeonholing. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's when an actor either plays a specific type of part so often or gets one big breakout role and is associated with that persona for the rest of their careers. Many actors are fine with this and work within their comfort zones, and many others try to break out of their personas, to varying degrees of success.
Will Ferrell has turned from the lovable overgrown manchild from Elf to the overgrown manchild who spouts toilet humor from Step Brothers, and Zach Galifinakis has taken his place as the former ever since The Hangover. (I love Elf, and loathe both of the latter movies.) They both star in The Campaign, which I saw on Saturday. The premise is that Ferrell is a four term Congressman of Hicktown, North Carolina and the Motch Brothers (see what they did there?) finance a doofus Everyman they can control- cue Galifinakis.
You would think that with these two titans of comedy making political satire, it would offer engaging, humorous, and incisive commentary on the effects of unlimited corporate financing post-Citizens United. And for the first hour or so, that was true. I was splitting my sides- HARD! Even the vulgar humor during that time and the overplayed trailer jokes worked. And then, like kids repeating dirty jokes in school over and over in hopes of getting repeated laughs, The Campaign lays on the extreme, shocking toilet humor that tested well with audiences in The Hangover and Step Brothers.
Over and over and over and OVER again!!!! If you really like those movies, you'll like that, but for me, that completely obliterates most of the commentary they were trying to make (to remain spoiler free, I won't reveal why), and the only laughs to be had by most of the theater from that point on were forced and awkward.[1] It pains me to say this, but Ferrell and Galifinakis delve even deeper into the personas they were pigeonholed into and what could have been a powerful and scathing political satire is merely OK.
Meanwhile, Ashton Kutcher has been his character Kelso (i.e. the lovable doofus) in almost every part he's ever played since That 70's Show (which I loved), and ever since Grey's Anatomy (pretty good most of the time) and Knocked Up (funny a lot of times, but too misogynistic to be really enjoyable), Katherine Heigl is the shrew that you love to hate on whenever she acts all "career bitchy".
So somebody in Hollywood thought it would be a great idea to have Ashton Kutcher play the straight man action hero and Katherine Heigl play...what she always plays. The result is Killers, which I watched on the train ride home from moving a bunch of furniture into my new D.C. apartment on Netflix for the new iPad with 4G LTE.[2]
The premise of the movie is this: a super spy played by Ashton Kutcher meets Katherine Heigl in Nice. They fall in love and he gets out of the agency in order to marry her. I'm going to remain spoiler-free for this one too, but from the title, I'm pretty sure you can all already guess where this movie is going, and you can probably also guess what I think of it.
The action and story, while extremely predictable, made for a pretty competent time waster, but I never found it much more humorous than a few chuckles due to Katherine Heigl being what Katherine Heigl is all the time. A lot of the problem was that because of Ashton Kutcher's career as a goofball I never really bought him as a cool, suave, hyper lethal man of mystery and couldn't suspend disbelief. And it also came out at around the same time as Knight and Day, which did the hunted super spy meets ordinary girl routine a LOT better because Tom Cruise fits the action hero with a cool edge type like a glove and Cameron Diaz was very believable as the girl next door, and there was a completely goofy early James Bond type story that you know doesn't make sense but you like anyway.
So in short, my rating of both movies is this:
The Campaign: ***
-Worth a DVD rental if you even remember getting any enjoyment out of it.
Killers: **
-It left a pretty sour taste in my Netflix queue with a spoonful of sugar to go down easier.
[size0][1]Except for a chuckle I kept to myself when I glanced at an older couple right behind me as I walked out of the theater. They seemed to be REALLY focused on the movie while they were making out.
[2]I thought that would mean blazing fast speed and high quality images and sound. But alas, the movie took about three and a half hours to watch because while the LTE was good when it was around, it mostly defaulted to 3G or the tiny roaming circle of doom and kept pausing the movie and saying "buffering". The sound was also low quality at times, especially when characters were talking lower than SHOUTING! This led me to have to pause it occasionally, and I also missed pieces of dialogue while I was watching it, but thankfully this didn't affect most of the movie.
[3]P.S.: After seeing The Campaign, I thought it would be cool to check in on Facebook via the GetGlue app. After this, I got FIFTY spam emails telling me about the fucking pointless stickers I got. Yeah, no thank you. I promptly deleted it.[/size]
