It seems as though there are virtually no directors out there who are able to put Dwayne Johnson's assets to optimal use. Though he is both an insanely charismatic lead and a beast of a man, only Justin Lin has seen fit to utilize his unique skillset, and even then it was in the ensemble piece Fast Five. The Dwayne Johnson star vehicles over the past few years have done a positively woeful job of maximizing the return that could be yielded by letting the star have at it.
Ric Roman Waugh's Snitch was no exception to this.
Waugh, a long-time stunt man whose work you surely remember from Kuffs, Leonard Part 6, Teen Wolf Too, and Tango & Cash, has a relatively lackluster resume on the directorial front, so perhaps this shouldn't be surprising, but netting Dwayne Johnson and then simply putting him behind the wheel of a semi with little in the way of legitimate action sequences was a significant misstep. Proceeding to underutilize Michael K. Williams, slapping a comical goatee on Barry Pepper, and giving Susan Sarandon a less than one-dimensional role as a hard-nosed DA were just icing on the cake.
There are worse ways to spend one's time than watching Snitch, but it certainly doesn't stand out as anything other than run-of-the-mill.
Randomly having decided to take in a movie Sunday night, we went out to Cop Out with open minds.
Holy shit was it bad.
It's not like I don't get what the Cullen Brothers were trying to do when they wrote the movie. It's clear they were trying to make a buddy cop movie paying homage to the Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop franchises. What those movies (especially the first in each series) had, though, were solid screenplays. They had plots. They had laughs.
This? Pretty thin on all of that.
Really, with the exception of Seann William Scott, there wasn't anything to like. Bruce Willis seemed like he was mailing it in (and I'm a big fan of Bruce Willis) and had a shit character to start with. Tracy Morgan's schtick wore thin after about 90 seconds. The next 90 minutes were interminable. Kevin Pollack was terrible. Guillermo Diaz was horribly miscast as the Mexican gang boss. Zero gravitas. Also, someone decided that it was a good time to give Harold Faltermeyer work again. Look, I fucking love Fletch and Beverly Hills Cop. I love their scores, too.
But there was a time and a place, and it's not 2010. It didn't work in Kuffs or Tango & Cash. Why would it work now?
But what it all really boils down to is that there are not enough laughs. It's a buddy cop comedy that's supposed to hearken back to a better time in which buddy cop movies delivered both on the action and the laughs and fails on both counts. And I could go on from here, but really, what's the point? If it fails miserably at what it's trying to do, then it's a failure, right?
I had some hope for Kevin Smith after the surprisingly enjoyableZack and Miri Make a Porno, but that goodwill has been spent, even if he wasn't the screenwriter.
That's pretty much how every one of my conversations start. At least in my imagination.
But for today--and really every day for the past fifteen years of my life--that is a true statement. Anyway, here are my notes on yet another Kuffs viewing:
The Old Lady woke up in the middle of the movie (at about 10:15 am) and said, "Are you watching Kuffs?" She immediately fell back asleep.
It seems to me that the score in the film is the evolutionary step between Tango & Cash and the Misty Mundae soft-core re-imagining-of-Hollywood-hits oeuvre (i.e. Witchbabe: The Erotic Witch Project 3 and Play-Mate of the Apes).
I find it interesting that the villain in the film is the man in the world who, in 1992, was what would have happened if you mixed the genetic traits of the doctor from The Dream Team and Fisher Stevens in a super sperm cell, impregnated a passive ovum that would then allow for only the male characteristics to be passed on to the baby, and then traveled back in time to have that person be a contemporary of theirs.
It occurred to me part way through the film that I no longer know which way to pronounce Milla Jovovich's first name. Upon further research, it would appear that it is 'Mee-la'.
In case you were curious, the score I was speaking of earlier was composed by the inimitable Harold Faltermeyer. I went to sleep last night watching Fletch, in a pure coincidence. He was also the brilliant mind responsible for the Tango & Cash score.
