Terminator Genisys, Magic Mike XXL, Love and Mercy, The Overnight Reviews

Terminator Genisys
Dir. Alan Taylor
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Terminator Genisys feels like the backbreaking result of dozens of board meetings demanding the next Terminator film include Arnold Schwarzenegger. After the Arnie-less critical and financial disappointment of Terminator Salvation (aka, the Christian Bale-freakout movie you forgot existed), it seems to me that writers Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier manipulated the time travel aspect of the series to its absolute "jumping the shark" point in order to bring the once-box office king back to the franchise. Like Jurassic World, Genisys seems to exist only as a product of pure nostalgia pandering.

To describe the convoluted plot of this film in simple terms is pretty much impossible, but I'll give it a shot: In the post-Judgment Day future, John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) from a human cyborg called a Terminator (Schwarzenegger) - pretty much following the plot of the first movie exactly. In fact, when "Evil Arnie" travels back, there's a nearly identical recreation of the beginning of the first Terminator (minus Bill Paxton). But soon we find that we are in an "alternate" timeline, one where the "Good Arnie" Terminator from T2 has taken Sarah under his wing since she was nine years old. So essentially, instead of waitress Sarah, we start off with "badass" Sarah, who commands Good Arnie - who she refers to as "Pops" - to help kill Terminators sent back from the future to kill her, even including the liquid metal Terminator, who's now Asian for some reason. Hopefully you aren't confused so far. THEN, Sarah, Pops, and Kyle time travel AGAIN, this time forward to 2017, in an effort to stop Skynet the day before before it launches, this time via a program called Genisys that connects everyone's electronic devices to each other - which somehow enables this AI computer to launch nukes and blast humanity into oblivion. And that's just the SET-UP to this mess of a movie, it only gets more complicated from there.

It's hard to escape convolution in a time travel movie, but this is just sort of insane. The worst thing is, there aren't even any stand-out action setpieces - they're mostly just a lot of explosions and tensionless re-hashes of sequences from the earlier films. The characters are also really terrible; the actors who play Sarah and Kyle have no chemistry whatsoever, and even Arnold, who's playing a robot that isn't supposed to emote, phones it in here. Multiple times throughout the film, there are "comic" moments where Arnold attempts to smile, but it's awkward because smiling was not in his programming (a moment taken from the T2 Director's Cut). The thing is, during his "normal" robotic stare after the smile, he has a smirk. A SMIRK. The whole point of the joke is that you're telling essentially a killing machine to display human qualities, and in T2, Arnold actually expressed that inconsistency really well (maybe it helped that he had shades).

Terminator Genisys doesn't have much going for it, but I think it could have been interesting if they put some more thought into its crazy premise. Due to the time travel logic, they literally could've gone in ANY direction, but they chose to return to the same well of cliches - running away from a "new" Terminator, trying to stop Judgment Day, etc. I love the idea of this Terminator re-appropriated as "Pops," and that there are alternate realities within this universe, but it all just kind of falls apart under pointless fan service, overly complicated timeline logic, a cliched anti-technology "cell phones are bad!" conflict, and some REALLY dull characters and dialogue. This honestly feels more like a big budgeted fan film than a legitimate movie.

Rating: C-

Magic Mike XXL
Dir. Gregory Jacobs
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Magic Mike was an unexpected hit a few summers ago, as it turned into a sort of "girls night out" movie where wooing perfect V-shaped abs was highly encouraged. Its sequel, Magic Mike XXL, however, was a comparative dud at the box office, which I attribute to the lack of Matthew "arrght arright arright" McConaughey and the fact that the first movie wasn't really all that fun (in fact it was more of a straight drama). XXL attempts to lighten the mood a little with a road trip structure and more of a focus on the actual dance sequences, but I think this summer the middle aged soccer moms kept their singles in their handbags after being disappointed the first go-round. Though I'm clearly not the target demographic for this movie, I do think the dancing is still really impressive on a pure technical and physical level. It is in total sincerity that I say Channing Tatum is the Fred Astaire of air humping.

After leaving the stripping biz after Magic Mike, Mike (Tatum), misses his life on stage, and has an opportunity to re-join as the ol' crew passes through town. Mike of course can't resist, and together they all bro out on a road trip to a Stripper convention out in Myrtle Beach. It's a pretty simple plot, so it's really important to like these characters, but whenever they open their mouths it's beyond dull. Any moment the movie doesn't spend on the dancing is pretty terrible (especially the half-baked romance between Mike and some random girl). The attempts at humor are cringeworthy, there's pretty much nothing to the script, and the way this movie posits male strippers as "healers" of women was so weird - they treat these dunderheaded pelvic-thrusters as superheroes.

The final dance scene at the convention (which, in my mind, seemed like the last 15-20 minutes of the movie), was honestly amazing. Every dancer in the "Kings of Tampa" crew had individualized numbers that were really creative and intensely physical. There's one involving a "mirror" with two strippers on either side of the frame, exactly imitating each other's movements, almost like a sexual version of the mirror gag from the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. As a movie that tells a story, this was pretty horrible, but if you want to see ridiculously ripped and talented super-hunks at the tops of their semi-nude game, you'll probably have a good time. Also, if you're a guy: without a doubt this film will give you a negative body image.

Rating: C

Love and Mercy
Dir. Bill Pohlad
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One of the problems I find with most music biopics is that they focus so much of their effort on the musician's personal troubles that their actual musical genius gets lost in the shuffle. What I love about Bill Pohlad's Love and Mercy, a film about The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, is that it spends a great deal of time in the studio with Wilson, and we actually get to watch his process and famous songs develop before our eyes. Featuring a split performance - Paul Dano plays the young, ambitious Wilson and John Cusack plays the older Wilson with some psychological issues - the film is also a somewhat refreshing diversion from the genre's conventional a-to-b structure.

In the 1960's, after a long string of hits, Wilson (Dano) resigns from touring with an intent of creating the "greatest album ever made," Pet Sounds. But slowly he starts to lose grip of reality, hearing voices in his head. All the while we flash to and from Wilson (Cusack) much later, in the 1980's. Here he's grown fond of a car saleswoman, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who falls for Wilson despite his condition and overpowering psychotherapist Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Besides the "flashback" structure, in the end Love and Mercy felt very similar to other biopics: the tortured creative "saved" by the love of a woman. We've seen this again and again, so the Cusack sequences were a little stale to me. I personally think Dano outshines Cusack here, if only because you really get an up-close glimpse at how these songs were developed, written, and performed, which is fascinating to me - even if some of the musical jargon went over my head.

Rating: B-

The Overnight
Dir. Patrick Kack-Brice
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The Overnight, which premiered at Sundance, is a comedy that's fearless of going to awkward places. Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling) are parents who have just moved to Los Angeles. Having trouble meeting new people, they are invited for a dinner party by an eccentric couple (Jason Schwartzman and Judith Godrèche) and jump at the chance to make friends in their new surroundings. However, as the night progresses, their free spirited "California" lifestyle starts getting more and more uncomfortable, and Alex and Emily go through more than they bargained for - everything from a room filled with paintings of a certain body part to having the nature of their relationship called into question.

The Overnight is really well shot for a movie of its type (great use of color), and the performances and writing are really sharp. It's a crazy, yet believable, story of how to keep the passion going in a long-term relationship. This is not for the faint of heart (a little old lady, who I don't think knew what she was in for, walked out around the time the characters discuss their penis size), but I honestly really enjoyed this movie. The awkwardness is ramped up to the nth degree (if you don't like that kind of humor this will be torture for you), and it's refreshing to see a sex comedy like this written for adults, and not the American Pie/Hangover crowd.

Rating: B