Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (Brad Silberling, 2004)

When their parents die in an accident the three Baudelaire children (Emily Browning, Liam Aiken, Kara and Shelby Hoffman) bounce from one caregiver to the next. While the adults around them believe they are just unlucky, the children are more suspicious that all of these deaths have something to do with Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), a conman who is obsessed with gaining control of their fortune.

This movie sounds like a good idea - a mordant series of books about unfortunate children brought to life  in the visual style of one of Hollywood’s most distinctive stylists, Tim Burton.

The key problem is that Burton is not present, and the filmmakers have sought to bottle lightning by replicating his signature style.

This movie is a pure exercise in aesthetic replication - it has a superficial understanding of how it’s influence looks and sounds, but has no function beyond mimicry.

The people who made this want to reach for the pitch-black humour of The Addams Family (with a good dollop of Burton-style pop gothic), but the movie never comes together.

The whole movie feels dead - the art direction and the visual style weirdly lack the sense of humour and energy that the movie requires.

The key thing with Tim Burton’s work is that he believes in it, and he has a feel for how to make it feel like a living, breathing world. His movies are funny but they’re funny in specific ways that feel rooted in the real world. There is a pathos to Burton’s characters that may be heightened, but it is believable. 

A sad postscript to the film is that it ends up replicating the look and feel of later Tim Burton, when he had taken on CGI and started remaking other works that vaguely fit his established persona.

Jim Carrey’s performance as Count Olaf sounds great in concept but it feels like an improv riff with no focus or punchlines. 

The child actors’ performances are pitched for dry wit, but there is no naturalism or feeling to their characterisations. They are pieces of the mode-en-scene, moving from plot point to plot point.

Ultimately, beyond the economic motive, I just do not know why this movie needs to exist. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Haunt (Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, 2019)

A group of teens (Katie Stevens, Will Brittain, Lauryn McClain, Andrew Caldwell, Shazi Raja and Schuyler Helford) leave a party in search of more fun and end up at a ‘haunted’ house filled with contrived scares - which turn out to be considerably more lethal than they could imagine...

Haunt just popped onto Netflix.

I have been waiting to see the slasher movie Hell Fest - it is based around a group of friends getting stuck in a fairground fright house and getting stalked by a masked killer.

Hell Fest did not come out in theatres in NZ and I was not sure enough that it would be worth spending money to see it via a streamer. Plus, since it was a smaller genre movie, it always felt like perfect fare for Netflix. 

When I saw the premise for Haunt, it sounded like the perfect substitute

The movie features some effective scares, but it is never consistent in its tension or understanding what makes its villains scary.

There is something kind of anonymous about it - there are some gore-y kills and some effective jump scares but no real building tension. The effect might have been greater on the big screen, but the movie suffers from a monotonous tone that is just unrelentingly oppressive.

It is an issue that I have with a lot of modern horror movies - the tone is bleak from the outset and so when the killing starts, it does not feel like a significant development in the story.

The key issue I had was that I did not have any investment in the main characters. It is nothing against the cast - the script gives them nothing to work with.

I wanted more character development from the group of teens. I know this genre and the expediency of teens for the bodycount, but I could not even lock into what archetypes they are using - we are introduced to them at a party, which feels like a great opportunity to give us a sense of who they are, and how they relate to each other.

It means that when they start dying, I did not care and the movie became a bit dull.

The climax relies on some editing cheats and other contrivances to get our heroine out of peril that ruined any good feeling I had left.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge (Ethan Spaulding, 2020)

Earth is in trouble - if a group of human warriors cannot win an intergalactic fighting tournament, then the planet will be conquered by the evil Shao Kahn and his human emissary Shan Tsung (Artt Butler).

Can Liu Kang (Jordan Rodrigues), Sonya Blade (Jennifer Carpenter), Jax (Ike Amadi), Johnny Cage (Joel McHale) and Scorpion (Patrick Seitz) defeat this menace?

After watching Mortal Kombat 2021, I was keen to check out some of the earlier movies. I was not able to find the 1995 movie, but I did find this animated flick from last year.

It feels weird to say this, but after all the criticisms I had about MK 2021, this movie avoids all of them. This movie is leagues better than the latest movie. If they do make a MK 2, they should bring in the creative team behind this project to make it.

In fact, watching this movie, I was struck by how similar it was in concept - it opens and closes on Scorpion's story, and the main action is based around a human character who has no idea what is going on.

What is startling is how poorly the 2021 film handles this latter element, with Cole (Lewis Tan). Cole is not a character from the game, but that is irrelevant - the problem is that he has no personality. This is not Tan's fault - the script does not give him a character to play that will also be relatable to the audience.

His role as the audience surrogate is here taken by Johnny Cage, a Hollywood action star played with airhead confidence by Community's Joel McHale.Watching Cage bounce around this world really brought home how much the live-action film is missing personality. Kano has been held up as the film's saving grace, but he is ultimately a villain. Cage is a superficial guy who is forced to put himself in danger for the greater good - the movie does not really lean into giving him an arc, but he does change over the course of the movie. Cage does act as more of a second lead in this movie, and his overall dynamic with the other characters is comparable to Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China. While Cage's character is not the most original, he is a functional entry point for non-gamers like myself. I spent the movie wondering why Cage was not in the live-action movie, and why Lewis Tan was not cast as that character. 

Another strength of this movie is how unpretentious it is. This movie is 80 minutes long, and moves. Aside from Scorpion, we get the bare minimum of backstory from our characters - Sonya gets a flashback - and the other characters we gauge via dialogue and action. This movie feels like all the fat has been cut out, in the style of an old-fashioned genre movie: cut the filler, get to the money shots.

The other thing the movie does is set down clear rules for the world. My big problem with the live-action movie was that I could not follow the powers of Lord Raiden, Scorpion and Sub-Zero. That made it hard to understand the stakes of what was going on. This movie lays out the exposition of who people are and what Mortal Kombat is efficiently in the first 20 minutes. A lot of it is through dialogue, but any potential portentousness is offset by Johnny Cage's irreverence. 

The movie is not long, which was a nice change of pace. In some respects it does feel more like a pilot for a TV show than a movie, but overall it briskly gets through its premise with some good fight sequences and interesting characters. The 2021 movie could not even get to a proper tournament. So many movies are obsessed with laying out the tracks for future instalments, and Mortal Kombat 2021 is a prime example of that. 

If I have one criticism of this movie, it is that it takes its best tricks - like the ridiculous violence - and does them over and over again. While I enjoyed the movie, the blood-letting does get more repetitive as the film goes on. 

It also does not include the Immortals song, but I did not notice it was missing till the movie was over, so that's good.

Scorpion's Revenge is not a secret masterpiece - it is just a solid movie that works on its on. Hopefully the movers and shakers behind the live-action movie can take a few notes. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

OUT NOW: Mortal Kombat

Earth is in trouble - if a group of human warriors cannot win an intergalactic fighting tournament, then the planet will be conquered by the evil Shan Tsung (Chin Han).

Can Cole (Lewis Tan), Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), and Kung Lao (Max Huang) defeat the alien menace?

Some movies become successful because they hit every aspect of production out of the park. Other movies succeed because enough of those elements work that it gets over the finish line. And then there are the movies that have all the elements, but they do not work together. Within this group of movies are movies which hit certain elements so well that viewers are willing to let them go.

This accounts for a lot of genre movies and franchises with established formulas. If the filmmakers execute the elements that are associated with the series effectively, then that can be enough: jokes in a comedy; the importance of gore in slasher movies; the James Bond formula.

Mortal Kombat definitely falls into this subset of movies.

Before anyone jumps in, just know that the only thing I know about Mortal Kombat is the song. I have never played the games and I have never seen the movie. I saw the trailer to this movie, which was so good Mortal Kombat shot to the top of my 'must-sees'.

The expectations for this kind of movie are not the same as other movies - I did not go into this movie expecting great characters or a complex plot. All you want is a straightforward reason for a collection of fight scenes. If those fight scenes are well-choreographed and cleanly photographed, then you have a winner.

Mortal Kombat ís a strange beast. It is pretty earnest and tries to give its protagonist - human fighter Cole (Lewis Tan) - an arc, but those elements almost felt like a drag on the movie. 

The movie has plot points - if I wrote them down in order they would resemble a character arc and a story. But the movie does not really cohere.

I almost wonder if the movie would worked better if the movie kept the structure of a tournament. With this movie I did not expect I would want the movie to be simpler and more familiar, but this plot line - based around an original character who is an entry point for new viewers - feels like it needs to be fleshed out AND tightened.

I expected clean choreography and disgusting violence - the movie has both - but I had trouble with the structure of the movie. 

I could have used some of the cliches - some training montages; an announcer clarifying the rules (Are Scorpion and/or Sub-Zero mortal?); and I wanted way more of the iconic theme song.

At the midway point, our heroes are at their lowest point, just before the tournament. But at this point our heroes come up with a plan to control the locations of their future combat.

Convention would dictate that we would get some set up for this plan, but the movie thrusts us into each set piece and intercuts between them.

I could have used at least an establishing shot so I knew where these scenes took place, and some boring voice-over to explain why each environment was important. 

Intercutting set pieces is such a difficult thing to do - you need to ensure that each scene builds in its own terms, but also complement each other. The back half of the movie is a little haphazard and does not build in a particularly satisfying way.

All this being said/written. I kinda liked this movie. The pre-credit sequence (which is already available online) is a nice self-contained little story. The filmmakers have also tried to avoid a lot of green screen: there are a variety of different locations in the movie, including a coal mine that serves as Outworld.

The movie has scope, but the third act kinda drops the ball by throwing our heroes into a couple of obviously green screened environments that lack the same visual pop.

The elements I thought would be good in the movie - the villains - were pretty good. My only problem (and it is a good one) is that I wanted more of them onscreen.

Weirdly, while the movie takes time with Cole and the other heroes, I wanted more of the villains. I am always a fan of great bad guys and I wanted more scenes showing just how bad and powerful they were. 

Josh Lawson adds some welcome swagger as the egotistical Kano, and Sisi Stringer licks a blood-encrusted blade.

Lawson fades away as the movie goes on, while hench-persons like Stringer’s Mileena, Prince Goro and that flying woman do not get as much action as I anticipated. I was surprised we did not get a few more scenes of the villains obliterating other champions. 

While the script is not great, the acting is pretty solid. Tan is stuck with a non-descript hero role. He is not bad but the character always feels like an archetype. He also gets his thunder stolen by having to share the final set piece with Scorpion, who has the best motivation in the movie.

It is great to see actors like Tadanobu Asano (as Lord Raiden), Chin Han (as Shang Tsung) and Hiroyuki Sanada (as 

Scorpion) in a big production like this.

I was particularly keen on the appearances of Sanada fighting Joe Taslim. Sanada is a fine actor 

who I have seen in so many different projects. It is cool that he was cast as Scorpion rather than 

some action star or stuntman.

Chin Han is also good as Shang Tsung, the villain’s big bad. As with most of the bad guys, he 

does not get that much to do but he brings a preening confidence that works for the character.

The standout of the cast is Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero - he’s a great actor and carries himself 

with such confidence and physicality. He is genuinely menacing, and the filmmakers give 

him the appropriate buildup as the film’s Big Bad.

Now to the main reason people will want to watch this movie: the fight scenes.

The movie is a vaguely enjoyable collection of fight scenes - some good, others less.

Some of the fights are good but once again the CGI works against it. Apart from the beginning and The end, the set pieces suffer from over-cutting and the camera is often too close. Combined with the CG enhancements, there is a blurry quality to the fighting which made parts of the scenes hard to see.

Part of the issue is that some of the cast are martial artists and others are not. The filmmakers resort to quick cuts and close ups to mask their abilities. 

The movie features some familiar comedic beats, including a joke about the spelling of the titular contest. While the humour is not great, I kinda wanted more of it. The movie is earnest, but I wanted it to lean more into  the silliness.

 I feel like I have been listing problems but I still liked the movie. This movie feels like a promise - the cast are strong, the aesthetic choices feel correct, and that song does show up eventually. This is an overlong way of saying I would be curious about a sequel - especially if it means more Joe Taslim v Hiroyuki Sanada beatdowns.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

OUT NOW: Love & Monsters

In a post-apocalyptic world dominated by mutated monsters, humanity has retreated underground. 

One survivor is Joel (Dylan O'Brien). While the rest of his group have formed new relationships, Joel's one desire is to find his girlfriend Amiee (Jessica Henwick), who he was separated from years prior.

When he finally finds out where she is, Joel leaves the bunker to be with her once again.

Joel has one problem - he freezes every time he gets into trouble.

Will our hero find his inner mettle before the monsters get him?

SPOILER WARNING: This is not a sequel to Love & Basketball.

Netflix's original content is dubious at best. There is so much content, and such a focus on producing new content to drive subscriptions, that quality control has dipped.

I am dubious that this production model has legs but that is the world we are living in.

This is a long way of saying Love and Monsters is a surprisingly good movie. 

It probably means something that this is a Netflix acquisition, not an original production - it was produced by Paramount but got caught by the lockdowns last year. 

Boosted by a charming lead performance from Dylan O’Brien, Love & Monsters moves at a good clip, features some interesting world-building and has some good use of practical effects at certain points.

It also falls prey to some of the pitfalls of contemporary blockbuster movies: 

For one, the film is a little too clean and well-lit.

And while I liked the use of animatronics and gore, the CGI is a little too plentiful - this movie has some good moments of suspense, but like most movies nowadays they blow it by throwing to money shots of the monsters in wide frame (fully lit).

Some of the humour falls into that easy sarcasm that the Marvel movies indulge in (a minor bad guy says “We’re going to die now” as a giant beast advances on him). O’Brien is kind of a saving Grace for the movie in this respect.

He was so good I did not mind that his emotional arc is kinda undercooked. I get it that his journey is about gaining the confidence and skills to live independently, but it felt like he needed a big failure to come back from, but that never really happens.

The character always pulls through - it is not detrimental to the viewing experience, but the way the movie sets up this character, he needs to come back from a dark place.

The supporting cast - including Michael Rooker as another traveller - are good, but the real standout is the dog who becomes our hero’s friend. I could have watched another hour of O’Brien and this dog wandering through the jungle.

Overall, Love and Monsters is a fun monster movie, and considerably better than most of the stuff on Netflix.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) is an undercover cop on the trail of a group of street racers-turned-truck hijackers. 

O'Connor's investigation has led him to a team of racers led by the brooding, mysterious Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel)...

My local theatre chain is playing the entire Fast saga, leading up to the release of F9. I’ve only seen a couple entries and since I’m always looking for easy long-ish projects, this sounded fun.

That being said, I was not the biggest fan of the original movie. I caught it on video after it came out and I remember reading a book halfway through. While I love car chases, I am not a car guy so a lot of subculture stuff went over my head.

Watching it on the big screen, The Fast and the Furious was better and worse than I remembered - leaning toward the former. 

Director Rob Cohen is now more infamous for what he did offscreen but I have never been a fan of his work. Movies like xXx and Stealth suffer from bland scripts but are made worse by poor composition and confusing editing.

Perhaps because of my expectations, The Fast and The Furious is better composed and scripted than those movies. The filmmaking suffers from too much CGI and some bizarre post-production gimmicks which date the movie, but it is more coherent than these later projects. 

Plot-wise, it helps that the plot is a straight rip of Point Break. I find it pretty bland (I am not a fan of Point Break), but the broad-strokes of the story and character beats work.

All that being said, the movie was an enjoyable watch.

The movie is clearly coming out of the zeitgeist of the late 90s - the soundtrack is full of my metal and rappers of the time (Ja Rule has a small role and provides the end credits song)

What i found interesting we’re picking out the elements that the franchise would expand upon. Watching F&F1 through that frame, you can see eye thing that the franchise will turn into, but a lot of it is through a funhouse mirror.

Dom feels like a fleshed-out human being with flaws. It’s not original in any way, but Diesel is playing the pathos for the hilt.

What I was amazed by was how earnest the movie was - there are no jokes in the movie, not even earnest in-universe one-liners. You realise how important humour has become in the Fast and Furious franchise, because here the lack of wit adds to the lack of originality to the story.

That earnestness did work for some elements: I have never found Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster the most magnetic of actors, but they have good chemistry together, and I enjoyed their slow burn romance.

I really liked Brewster’s performance - she feels like a mature adult and adds a little electricity to what could have been the cliche ‘girlfriend’ role.

Watching Michelle Rodriguez in this, I realised this was the first thing I had seen her in - she does not get much to do but she is such a striking presence I am surprised she did not get a xXx of her own 

The other surprise for me was Rick Yune - I remembered him being in the movie but I did not remember him being so charismatic. This guy deserved to become a movie star - he is very good as the misdirect villain but he adds a swagger and menace that makes him a good foil for Dom. I was surprised that they never brought him back.

Fast and Furious is famous for its diversity but I was shocked by the portrayals of the Asian racers - they portrayed as pure villains and not even that formidable. There is even a moment where one henchman is picked up by a cop in slow motion like a child and thrown to the ground.

Asian women are not even granted dialogue - they are ornaments to be ogled. Ogling sexy women is part of the franchise, but there is at least a sense of self-awareness to the later movies. This just feels leery. 

It feels out of step with where the franchise would go, but in a good way - this is one area where the series has evolved.

The action is okay - Cohen does notshoot in as many wide angles as he should, and he over-cuts sequences so that geography is really hard to follow. That being said, I could follow it better than xXx.

There we’re also more car stunts than I remembered, although the effect was undermined by gimmicky virtual zooms and those cramped close-ups that Cohen favours.

The movie does become more engaging as it goes along and - on its favour - it fixes one issue I had with its chief inspiration: the third act does not feature the weird contrivance of Point Break’s’s final sky-diving set piece, which I have always found interminable.

Overall, I did not have any great revelations. On its own terms, The Fast and the Furious is too generic to really resonate. But as a launching pad for a multi-film saga? Well, I’ll leave those conclusions for a later review. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Fighting with My Family (Stephen Merchant, 2019)

Based on the true story of pro wrestler Paige, Fighting with My Family re-tells the story of how she (played by Florence Pugh) went from wrestling in her family's indie promotion to the big time in the WWE.

This movie is so much better than I thought it would be.

I caught it back when it came out in 2019. I intended to review it, but I could not figure out anything to write about it.

This movie is an enjoyable rags-to-riches story with strong performances that manages to avoid some obvious pitfalls and ends on an effective high note. Outside of the original context, there is nothing particularly original about it.

But there is nothing wrong about it. This movie is perfect in its solidness.

The film is sprinkled with humour, but there is no mean-spiritedness directed atPaige's oddball family. The jokes are based around reversals of expectations (such as the opening scene, in which Paige’s dad breaks up a childhood fight only to show the kids how to apply proper wrestling holds.  The movie shows the Knight family as outsiders, but they are loving and close-knit. They are also involved in their local community.Based on the clips of their real analogues during the credits, the movie is not that far off.

Florence Pugh brings a forcefulness and sense of self-awareness to Paige - she is very conscientious of her commitments to her family, but the movie highlights how closed off she is from the other trainees - she does not recognise them as people who are in the same boat.

As her brother Zak, Jack Lowden is just as good. He is hilarious and braggadocious in the early parts of the film - he might not have what it takes to reach the same heights as his sister, but Lowden is believable as a charismatic leader in the community. Without a lot of dialogue, he does a good job of shattering that exterior as the character realises his dream is no longer in his reach.

The subplot with Zak her brother is the real meat of the movie - the filmmakers intercut Paige’s awkward introduction to American p Professional wWrestling with her brother’s descent into depression and detachment from his family. The one sliver of reality in the American portion of the film is Vince Vaughn’s (as Paige’s WWE trainer) monologue in which he explains to Paige what would happen if her brother made it to the big leagues. The resolution of this plot line packs equal weight to Paige’s first appearance on television.

I cannot help reading the presence of Dwayne Johnson through the prism of his current place in pop culture. After watching the last couple of his movies, and reading critiques of his persona, it feels like he is increasingly unwilling to play human beings. He is the Rock, the benevolent mentor. Johnson did not even know about Paige until he saw the documentary this movie is based on.

His presence highlighted one aspect of the film that I am still conflicted about. The film feels like two halves - one a scrappy underdog story in a working-class British context; the other the sunnier and blander sports training drama.

It is this section of the film which feels scrubbed and clean. This second half of the movie does feel a little more prosaic, and probably because it is essentially a small-scale version of a sports movie: Paige starts training; it is really hard; she works hard; and she wins. Even the subplot of Paige learning to respect the other prospective wrestlers feels functional but lacks the specificity and lived-in quality of the first section of the movie. 

Ultimately, while the second half does feel familiar, it does not sink the movie. It does mean that Fighting WIth My Family does not quite have the kind of visceral thrill that the filmmakers probably intended. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

OUT NOW: Bad Trip

 Eric Andre plays Chris Carey, a schlub with no direction. The only other person in his life is his best friend Bud (Lil Rel Howery), who is more level-headed but under the thumb of his sister Trina (Tiffany Haddish).

When Chris runs into his highschool crush, Maria Li (Michaela Conlin), he becomes obsessed with rebuilding his life around her. Enlisting Bud, Chris goes on a road trip from Florida to New York, where Maria runs an art gallery.

Their big problem is that they have stolen Trina’s car. And Trina just broke out of prison. When she finds out what happened, the best friends are in big trouble.

If they do not destroy each other first...

If Bad Trip was produced as a conventional comedy, it would have been terrible - the characters and plot are cardboard. What makes Bad Trip is how the filmmakers filter this familiar bromance plot through the format of the skits on Eric Andre’s  hidden-camera prank show.

Co-written by and starring Eric Andre, with Kitao Sakurai in the director’s chair, Bad Trip is very funny, but ultimately it ends up playing as a showcase for ordinary people’s humanity. 

 What is striking is the depth of empathy displayed by the civilians roped into Andre’s pranks. No matter how ridiculous the circumstance, there are people there who step forward to help these odd strangers:. Jackie at the diner; the soldier at the recruitment bench; the bystander confronted by Trina; the doorman at Maria’s gallery…  

While the set pieces are funny, it is these real-life characters who elevate the scenes and make them unique and unpredictable. The filmmakers also find little grace notes in these people - gestures or actions - to act as punchlines to their scenes. A product of chance and great editing, these small, unintentional beats  increase the film’s strange sense of verisimilitude.

Lil Rel Howery is a great foil to Andre, grounding their ridiculous predicament and providing a bridge to the people they run into. 

While he is great, the film’s best (fictional) performance belongs to Tiffany Haddish as Trina. The character is a stereotype pushed almost to the point of ridicule, but Haddish’s gonzo performance gives Trina a sense of vulnerability and nuance that provokes some of the funniest interactions in the movie.Haddish commits so completely, never winking at the camera or offering her un-knowing co-stars an out, building a sense of comic tension that culminates in some amazing reactions. 

While there is much to enjoy in Bad Trip, I did have one gripe - a lot of the reactions from the normies are cutaways from the action (they are particularly noticeable in the juice store and during the dance number in the food court). It is not a fatal blow, but I felt like a lot of these scenes would be funnier if the people’s reactions were included in the same frame as what they are reacting to. 

Bad Trip might be the movie for 2021 - it is all about ordinary people confronted by a unique calamity and showing the best of their natures. It is a message we can take something from.  

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Kindergarten Cop (Ivan Reitman, 1990)

Undercover cop John Kimble (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is used to dealing with the worst people in the underworld. But now he has a new problem: six year olds.

On the hunt for a gangster's ex-wife and child, Kimble is forced to go undercover as a kindergarten teacher  to find them.

Will Kimble find his charges before the gangster does? More importantly, will Kimble figure out how to teach his class before they drive him out of the school?

A key text in Schwarzenegger’s filmography, Kindergarten Cop signalled that the action star’s shift toward comedy had paid off, and how Ahnuld could re-tool his established persona for a younger audience.

The first 20 minutes of the movie - sans the child-like scrawl of the title sequence - feels designed to gently move the viewer from their traditional view of Schwarzenegger into the kid film that it wants to be.

Big action stars shifting into kid movies is de rigueur now (think Vin Diesel in The Pacifier, The Rock in The Game Plan or John Cena in whatever that firefighter movie was). In 1990, Kindergarten Cop was a fresh concept - so fresh that the movie still features at least two shoot-outs and multiple scenes of violent action. It is not as explicit as Schwarzenegger’s R-rated stuff, but it is still pretty strong for a movie about kindergarten - a character dies from an overdose in this film for children. 

Even the portrayal of the kids is amped up to match the star - when Kimble first arrives at the school, we overhear a conversation between a teacher and a student who punched another student, a girl. This is serious by itself, but then we learn that the girl poisoned the boy’s pet hamsters - so there is a future serial killer at the school. 

The intention seems to be to try and emphasize the obstacles Kimble faces as a teacher. It could also be the filmmakers’ way of building an equivalence between Kimble’s past work and current role, but it comes off way too adult and weird for a kid’s movie. Or it is just an example of how much the genre has changed in the… 30 years since it came out. Ugh, I’m getting old.

What I appreciated about Kindergarten Cop - and this might just be myself as an adult - is how earnest the movie is. There is a certain style to the acting in kids movies nowadays, a layer of unreality that seems designed to avoid displeasing its target audience.

Part of the reason the movie works is that the acting never leans into the joke. Schwarzenegger is pretty good in this movie - some of his reads have justifiably become memes, but he is totally believable as the tough guy trying to rediscover his humanity.

 The romance with Penelope Ann Miller’s Joyce is fine, but the real magic is between Arnie and Pamela Reed as Kimble’s partner Phoebe. She is so fun and charismatic that I wish the pair got to make another buddy movie together.

Richard Tyson is suitably odious as Crisp, and Carroll Baker is also good as his domineering mother Eleanor. They are the most ‘adult’ element of the movie - Eleanor poisons a junkie who informs on her son - and the filmmakers do a good job of setting them up as formidable antagonists for the ex-Terminator.

I have read in the past that Ivan Reitman was instrumental in grounding the wilder tangents of Ghostbusters, and he brings a similar level of verisimilitude to Kindergarten Cop. While some of the violence is shocking, I think it is more a case of my expectations, based on the genre. As a viewing experience, the filmmakers do a good job of balancing the violence so that it does not undermine the lighter, sillier aspects of the movie.

Because of its tonal swings, Kindergarten Cop is a strange beast - but it works. And by the ending, it almost becomes touching - the script does a pretty good job of moving Kimble from hardened cop to softened kindergarten teacher, and it never feels jarring.

More than The Terminator or Predator or Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop may be the perfect example of Schwarzenegger’s savviness in picking his collaborators and projects. His choices would become shakier as the new decade wore on, but in 1990 Schwarzenegger had completed his turn from muscle man to proper movie star. 

It is an arc that should be unbelievable - but it happened. That about sums up Kindergarten Cop.

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