The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
by George Wolf
The efforts of a talented, veteran cast, coupled with a refreshing attitude toward the love lives of senior citizens, enabled The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to rise above a tendency for silly contrivance.
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel can’t quite measure up.
Director John Madden and screenwriter Ol Parker return, along with most of the original cast, for a trip back to India where things are busy at the eccentric hotel which caters to “the elderly and beautiful.”
Hotel proprietor Sonny (Dev Patel) and girlfriend Sunaina (Tina Desai) are planning their wedding, but Sunny is distracted by business. He wants to expand, and has reached out to a U.S. firm for financial backing. When American “writer” Guy Chambers (Richard Gere) checks in to the hotel, Sonny is convinced he’s actually a spy sent by the prospective business partners.
Guy has barely gotten his room key before Madge (Celia Imrie) has the hots for him, he has his eye on Sonny’s mom (Lillette Dubey), Sonny is jealous of Sunaina’s childhood friend “Kush” (Shazad Latif), and Norman (Ronald Pickup) is afraid he accidentally took out a hit on his girlfriend Carol (Diana Hardcastle). Plus, Douglas (Bill Nighy) and Evelyn (Judi Dench) still haven’t gotten together!
Maybe Captain Stubing can talk some sense into everyone!
It doesn’t take long to realize how much this installment misses the dear departed Graham, as played by Tom Wilkinson. Beyond Wilkinson’s immeasurable talent, Graham’s thoughtful storyline grounded part one in a graceful humanity that the sequel sorely needs. Gere is a fine addition for sheer star power, but his character only serves as a means to add more empty conflict to all the sit-comery.
It’s too bad, because even with Wilkinson gone, this cast features a vast wealth of talent that can instantly improve most any flailing script. The odd man out again is Patel, whose exaggerated histrionics serve as an annoying distraction from his sublime co-stars.
Despite a few charming moments, this sequel is overlong, overdone, and easily Second Best.
Unfinished Business
I can’t seem to remember any movies that have tried to mix sex comedy and the G8 summit, and yet civilization has soldiered on. Unfinished Business tries that and several other things, failing at them all.
Vince Vaughn again finds trouble moving from ensemble player to top of the marquee. He’s Dan Trunkman, a sales rep in St. Louis who pulls a Jerry Maguire and leaves the firm to start his own after a public dust up with his boss Chuck (Sienna Miller).
Dragging his box of shame to the car, Dan finds his first two hires in the parking lot: beaten down sales vet Tim (Tom Wilkinson! What are you doing? Don’t you know you’re Tom Wilkinson!), and Mike (Dave Franco), an impossibly naive newbie who had just stopped in to apply for his very first sales gig.
Fast forward one year, and the trio is still using Dunkin’ Donuts as an office, but the deal of their lives is on the horizon. Dan assures his guys it’s in the bag, but they all need to travel to Portland, Maine to wrap it up. Once in Portland, of course, Dan finds his old nemesis Chuck is close to stealing the business, so the guys understandably head to…Germany, to get in completely contrived and ridiculous situations which rarely approach comedy.
What’s worse, director Ken Scott (Starbuck, Delivery Man) and writer Steve Conrad (Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) also want to cue the tender music and get real. See, Dan is on the road just when his wife and kids seem to need him most, so the film offers tone deaf u-turns from tasteless gags with obvious punchlines into attempts at serious lessons on bullying and working too hard.
It’s a mess.
The one bright spot is Franco. Given little to work with, he crafts a character which at least piques your interest, and Franco continues to show the potential for some real comic talent.
Unfinished? This one should never have started.
Chappie
In what amounts to RoboCop meets Short Circuit, Neill Blomkamp’s latest, Chappie, celebrates the outsider.
Chappie is the first sentient robot, his consciousness a program crafted by the engineer behind Johannesburg’s “scout” police force. The scout robots – a simple form of artificial intelligence assisting the Jo’burg po po – have all but eliminated urban crime.
Two problems. 1) A handful of the city’s remaining thugs want one to help them pull a heist, and 2) a weirdly coiffured rival engineer (Hugh Jackman) believes AI is an abomination and thinks his own robot – controlled by a human brain – is superior.
Imagine how pissed he gets when he finds that his rival Deon (Dev Patel – everywhere this weekend) has taken the body for one of his scouts and given it life.
Blomkamp’s third film proves that he is kind of entrenched in a single story: the corrupt wealthy versus the damaged poor with an innocent outsider hero to bring it all together. But in Blomkamp’s hands, the story always feels wildly, deeply his own. The fact that he tells it through richly imagined characters doesn’t hurt.
Chappie tells this tale with more heart and enthusiasm than the director’s last effort, the middling Elysium, but it lacks the originality (obviously) and much of the tension of his impressive debut effort, District 9.
His film suffers from an abundance of sentimentality and attention-seeking. Jackman’s over-the-top aggression and bizarre costuming are almost overshadowed by the often fascinating (though sometimes cloying) oddity that is the duo of Nija and Yo-Landi Visser (South African rappers cast as Chappi’s thug-life parents).
Blomkamp favorite Sharlto Copley performs admirably as the maturing robot-child Chappie, though you can’t help but feel abused by the manipulative child-mind/adult-world theme.
Blomkamp, who also wrote the screenplay with District 9 collaborator (and wife) Terri Tatchell, finds fertile ground in the images of Johannesburg’s criminal population, and when he can keep the sentimentality in check he does a nice job of balancing drama, comedy and action.
His real aim – as is usually the case with decent SciFi – is social commentary. The consequences he leaves unexplored in his film are so big and complex they are often the entire storyline of other films, but Blomkamp has his muse to follow. Chappie is true to his creator’s intention, and though it’s certainly a flawed and limited image, the experiment is not a complete failure.
Read more of my reviews at MaddWolf.com!
Photo credit: AP Photo/Fox Searchlight Films, Laurie Sparham