Despicable Me

It may not reach the ambitious heights of How to Train Your Dragon or Toy Story 3, but you have to admit: Despicable Me rates a mention if for no other reason than its ad campaign. I distrust all film trailers, but I cannot recall an animated film built up so effectively by the "Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!" approach to teasers. It's a bold gambit to use with a movie targeted to children, not renowned for their attention spans and typically sold to kids with the most condescending disregard imaginable. (It prepares them for all trailers. See: Grown-Ups.) The manner with which the marketing department kept the plot of this film under wraps while generating interest rivals the surreal teasers for Christopher Nolan's upcoming thriller Inception.

Yet Despicable Me has an entertaining, if unoriginal, blend of slapstick and pathos, enough to provide the briefest respite in what may be the worst summer of my 20 -- no, 21 now -- years on this planet. Its protagonist, Gru (Steve Carell), is a villain whose intelligence and ambition do not quite place him in the upper echelon of supervillains as his reach too often exceeds his grasp. After a brief but amusing opening sequence establishes that someone (not Gru) managed to steal the Great Pyramids of Giza, the diminutive evildoer hunts for the new mastermind responsible for the crime of the century while planning an even bigger heist to cement his own name. His idea? Steal the Moon.

Unfortunately, this plot hits the wall fairly quickly: Gru's conflict with the young upstart who rises to sudden prominence, Vector (Jason Segel), begins without steady lead-in and falls away quickly. Sparring over a shrink ray that will allow the wielder to shrink the Moon, Gru and Vector get off a few uproarious scenes of over-the-top fighting, with Gru's fondness for missiles of all sizes and payloads and Vector's penchant for bizarre, marine animal-based weaponry. Yet the storyline shifts suddenly when three orphaned girls -- Margo, Edith and Agnes -- walk around the neighborhood selling cookies. Gru turns them away, but when he sees them get through the defenses in Vector's fortress that kept the rival away, the villain decides that the girls could offer him a way inside Vector's home and a shot at stealing the shrink ray.

I'll leave to figure where the movie heads from here. The presence of the girls, one cautious and hardened from years of loneliness, one venting her own issues through destructive tendencies and the other an adorable miscreant not yet able to comprehend the rotten quality of her life in any meaningful sense, must inevitably lead the scabrous, egomaniacal Gru to become a better man. This would be fine and dandy if it mixed in with the original plot, but Despicable Me slams on the brakes at this point, almost completely tossing out the enticing idea of a fight between two villains for supremacy in a world that seemingly lacks superheroes as a counterbalance.

Thus, the film moves in such a disjointed fashion that its 95 minutes feel twice as long. The total downshift from an epic war between inventive villains with no regard for collateral damage to a pat, sentimental tale of a man learning to love grates like two metal sheets shrieking against each other. Gru uses them to his intended goal in short order, leaving the majority of the film to a plot that's rushed even as it plods along the typical path to feel-good mush.

"When we got adopted by a bald guy," Edith says upon arriving at Gru's twisted mansion and realizing that their adoption might not solve all their problems, "I thought this would be more like Annie." She must not have paid attention, because Despicable Me plays exactly like Annie with a more action-packed twist. Daddy Warbucks didn't take kindly to the orphan in his home either, only for Annie's plucky charm to eventually melt his heart.

Of the three children, Agnes is easily the most visible. An overload of cuteness, Agnes is shamelessly manipulative in design to grab the audience's heartstrings without any effort. To be sure, her mere presence bypasses an intuitive and subtle emotional arc in favor of puppy eyes and the dramatic irony that can only come from a toddler who doesn't understand how depressing her optimism really is. Yet she's such a fun character that the effrontery of her usage does not derail the picture and is instead one of its greatest aspects. Her obsession with unicorns and all things fluffy make her the cutest girl to appear in animation since Boo in Monsters Inc.

Her cuteness is counterbalanced by the hilarity of Gru's minions. A sea of tiny, yellow, gibbering creatures, the minions waver between massive incompetence and an almost Oompa-Loompa-type efficiency, devolving into infighting and office pranksterism yet proving their mettle when it counts. Directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud mine these mad blobs for all they're worth, subjecting them to the experiments of Gru's aged, hearing-impaired assistant, Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand(?)), having them punch each other over mischievous activity and even messing with their bodies when one cracks another's back and shakes him until the assaulted minion emits a neon yellow like a glow stick. Not a single scene involving the minions fails to get a laugh and, combined with Agnes' endearing adorableness, they float what would otherwise be a lackadaisical comedy.

The great shame of the film is that the potential to be a great animated picture lies in plain sight. Some more adult humor finds its way into the picture, such as a gag involving a secret bank that lends millions to supervillains around the world noting on a plaque that it used to be Lehman Brothers. The simple notion of two villains duking it out for prominence without a hero to intervene could have made for a delicious game of animated oneupsmanship, which exists at the beginning and end and could have stretched the imaginations of the animators with increasingly outlandish fights in what would basically have been a matter of two Bond villains emptying all their ridiculous devices at each other. Instead, it takes the easy way out, using a rotten, context-less score by Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira and a few close-ups to wrench emotionality that the film does not earn.

Still, it's funny enough to warrant a viewing, and even the smallest snatches of enjoyment are welcome in a year as wretched as this. I laughed a great deal and bordered on whispering an "awwww" or two despite my own best interests, and if the film was just a bit tighter I might have recommended it unconditionally over my wishes to see the villain war continue uninterrupted. But there is one lovely piece of thoughtfulness in the nexus point where the two plots meet: Gru's mother. Through her, we see a neglected boy, whose dreams of becoming an astronaut were dashed by a snarky parent, now on the cusp of ensuring that no one else could ever know his dream of walking on the Moon. At the same time, his adopted children provide him with the opportunity to break the cycle of neglect and loneliness that made him so miserable. That line is not fully explored, but it's just one more hint that makes an average movie entertaining, and could have made it so much more.

Jonah Hex

As is befitting its mangled protagonist, Jonah Hex is the cinematic equivalent of the winner of one of those Ugliest Dog competitions. It is a film that has slipped in and out of development hell so many times that it knows more about damnation than its half-dead hero, and my favorite tidbit on its Wikipedia page reads that the film is "very loosely based" on the original DC comic book of the same name. Subject to rewrites, multiple crew changes and, ultimately, pure indifference, Jonah Hex achieves a ludicrousness of execution so hysterical that you'll spend at least a portion of the time in the theater waiting for Nicolas Cage to make an appearance.

Originally set to be directed by that dastardly duo, Neveldine and Taylor, the insane team behind the Crank movies, Jonah Hex fell apart once when producers, purportedly under the guidance of star Josh Brolin, decided not to hire the action anarchists. The crew did, however, keep Neveldine & Taylor's screenplay, effectively firing the only two people who could possibly have shot the thing. Perhaps reasoning that only someone with experience in animation could handle the cartoony nature of the pair's writing -- a not altogether stupid line of thought -- producers Akiva Goldsman and Andrew Lazar brought Pixar, Fox and Blue Sky employee Jimmy Hayward, whose biggest previous credit was co-directing Horton Hears a Who!, to helm the picture.

What results is a catastrophic mash-up of audiovisual styles, mixing hillbilly, heavy metal, supernatural and Western tropes into the weirdest rip-off of The Outlaw Josey Wales you ever did see. There is always a certain joy in watching a film that does not play by the rules, that does not even seem to own a copy of the rulebook, but Jonah Hex contains all the transgressions present in Neveldine & Taylor's other works without the sense of self-awareness that they bring to those films; sketchy and vague as the pair's supposed satiric elements are, they at least give the impression that they know what they're doing deep down. With someone else trying to make heads or tails of their material, however, it's a miracle a film emerged at all, and I suppose it's not all that shocking that Wild Wild West as scored by the prog-sludge metal band Mastodon was the product.

Expository dialogue gets a bad rap, and Jonah Hex shows why, playing most of the first 5-10 minutes of an 81-minute movie (including credits) with either a voiceover narration or hysterically stilted lines spoken by characters on-screen. We see the titular hero (Brolin), a Confederate officer whose crisis of conscious led to the death of his friend, the son of his commanding officer, General Turnbull (John Malkovich), being tortured by the general. Turnbull murders Hex's family in retribution and brands Hex's face with his initials. Abruptly, the film cuts to animation -- why do so many comic movies use panel-like animation now? We know that these films are based on comic books -- jumping over the development of strange, supernatural powers and Hex's evolution into a bounty hunter as Brolin delivers the voiceover in the same slurred mumble he uses elsewhere due to the prosthetic makeup of Hex's facial scarring. By the time Hex growls, "This here's my story" when the film finally gets moving, he's told us so much we feel like the damn thing's halfway over.

It only gets worse from there. Hex's weaponry occasionally broaches steampunk territory, with horse-mounted Gatling guns and crossbow pistols that fling sticks of dynamite in an oddly straight path (no, seriously), all of which are provided by Reconstruction-era Q-substitute Smith (Lance Reddick), a freeman. (Smith lets us know that Hex's Confederate ties are not a source of contention, taking the time in the middle of conversation to randomly insert a comment that he knew Hex "ain't never believe in slavery.") For the most part, however, Hex uses traditional weapons. After all, it's weird enough that he can revive dead people by touching them.

That's what makes Jonah Hex loop around from terrible to hilarious: this is not a film that satisfies itself with merely killing someone once. No, bring 'em back for Round Two! Hex brings corpses back to life to interrogate them, yet this act of temporary resurrection for some reason causes the flesh of the reanimated being to burn and disintegrate. Once he's gotten what he needs, Hex kills them again. Matching the double-death scenario in sheer lunacy is the apparent need for no place shown on-screen to be left unexploded, and the almost casual way that Hex starts a fire in some places almost as if checking off an item on a to-do list shows where all of the film's $50 million dollar budget went.

No, wait, it gets even better. In some woefully misguided attempt to give this picture relevance, Turnbull is made into an anarchic anti-government wingnut, whom his Mexican slaves call "El Terrorista." I briefly wondered if this idea would have been expanded into a clearer slam against those good ol' boys who continue to wave their Confederate flags around and still claim to be ardent patriots, then I remembered what film I was watching. Turnbull decides to take down the country on the Fourth of July by building a secret "Nation Killer" weapon designed by Eli Whitney -- pause for dialogue about Whitney's history as the inventor of the cotton gin and father of the American Industrial Revolution -- to bring down Washington D.C. Did I mention that Will Arnett shows up as a Union soldier sporting a mustache and his deep "Michael!" voice from Arrested Development, and everyone acts if we're meant to take him seriously?

Oh, but I'll stop simply listing all the absurdities, much as I could entertain myself to no end pointing them all out. Jonah Hex, with its 73 non-credits minutes, has a lack of clear direction despite its clear revenge narrative. Most characters exist for no real reason, such as Michael Fassbender's Irish henchman named who-cares, made up in a tattoo that stretches out of his clothes and up his neck so that we might identify him among the other nondescript thugs flanking Turnbull. Both Malkovich and Brolin are slumming it, though Malkovich, who always figures out when he's on the set of something that will turn out to be a piece of garbage, goes into Maximum Malk Mode and may be the only person here playing the drama for comedy intentionally.

And Megan Fox, poor Megan Fox. I've waffled so often on how I feel about her that I just do not know what to make of her. Placed in the role of the tough prostitute/love interest Lilah, a name Brolin amusingly cannot say with his prosthetic disfigurement, for the same reason she found herself in the Transformers movies, Fox merely has to sit about and look pretty, occasionally kicking some butt so that she might look pretty whilst kicking butt. Her character serves nearly no purpose save the inevitable damsel scenario, and even those who trip over their tongues at the sight of Fox will be wondering why the hell the action breaks to jump back to her brothel room where little of consequence happens.

Despite it all, Jonah Hex reaches such a memorable level of badness, and is so mercifully short, that I enjoyed myself far more than I did any of the other summer action movies so far. There were clearly some high intentions in this film, as evidenced in its sly references, from lifting the giant cannon on the train from Buster Keaton's classic The General to the glow of the suitcase contents in Pulp Fiction -- maybe that "QT" Turnbull branded Hex with has a secondary meaning? -- and the talent involved, but something went horribly, laughably wrong. It figures that I should have this reaction, perfectly balanced between dislike of the film's clear failure and enjoyment of the ensuing train wreck, with a movie written by Neveldine & Taylor, whose Crank: High Voltage engendered a fair stronger iteration of the same reaction. Jonah Hex is as stupid as a film made by smart people can be, but if I laughed, even in a way that that the filmmakers did not intend, then who am I to pan it? Oh, indulge me for a moment as I break my promise to stop listing the inanities for one final tidbit: when Turnbull rides up the Potomac with his super-cannon, the viewfinder that targets Washington uses not crosshairs or the like but an actual outline of the Capitol building, presumably so his ignorant ex-Confederate subordinates know which building to aim at. Magnificent.