"Hop"
Richard's Review: 1 star
"Hop," a new Easter themed flick starring Russell Brand and James Marsden, is probably the only kid's movie to feature a scene set at the Playboy Mansion. You see, it's about a wayward rabbit named EB (voice of Russell Brand) searching for a place to live and since bunnies live at Hef's place it seems like the perfect place for him to crash. Funny? Not really, but that's what passes for jokes in the literal minded "Hop."
The movie starts on Easter Island -- there's that literal thinking again -- the home base of the Easter Bunny (voice of Hugh Laurie) and his son EB. On the other side of the planet Fred O'Hare (James Marsden) is an unemployed SoCal slacker house sitting for his sister's wealthy boss. Both EB and Fred have one thing in common -- daddy issues. EB wants to be a drummer but his father wants him to come into the family business and Fred's dad wants him to get a job -- any job. When EB and Fred hook up in Hollywood the pair might be able to help one another with their problems and in the process save Easter.
"Hop" feels more like an hour-and-a-half advertisement for plush stuffed bunnies than it does a movie. EB and his bunny and Easter chick friends are cute but clearly more time was spent on the marketing angle than the story.
It's not that the story is bad really. It's just average, like it was an afterthought. Movies for kids have taken strides forward in recent years but "Hop" feels like a jump backwards. Its humor and broad acting style is directed at little kids, yet the movie is rated PG, which means that parents can't just send their kids solo. Grown-ups might get a chuckle out of EB's jellybean gag -- he poops jellybeans and says at one point, "I just jellybeaned all over your dreams." But the odd cameo from David Hasselhoff -- he's going for the William Shatner self-aware shtick -- is as funny as you'd imagine a cameo from The Hoff to be. Trust me, there's not much here for anyone over 4 years old. "Harvey" this ain't.
There are many reasons to hate "Hop." Some will find the secularization of Easter offensive; some will be annoyed by the obvious shilling for Easter Bunnies Are Us. But the real reason to dislike the movie is that it is a lame and lazy excuse for children's entertainment. Kids get fed enough pabulum in their formative years; they don't need it at the movies as well.
"Insidious"
Richard's Review: 2 ½ stars
The names James Wan and Leigh Whannell may not mean much to you…unless you're a horror fan, in which case the pairing will send a chill down your spine. The director- writer team brought one of the most influential horror movies of the last decade to the screen -- "Saw" -- and are back together for "Insidious," a new exercise in eeriness starring Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne.
The "Insidious" trailer doesn't give away much of the plot and neither will I. I can tell you that Wilson and Byrne play parents whose child slips into a deep trance-like state. He's not in a coma, the doctors say, adding, "I've never seen anything like it." Not exactly the words you want to hear from your GP. As the months pass strange things start happening in the house and when ghostly figures appear it becomes clear that something insidious is happening in the young couple's home.
"Insidious" is one of those movies that requires a great deal of suspension of disbelief. For instance, when Byrne's character starts experiencing odd things -- strange sounds, children appearing out of nowhere, faces in mirrors -- they aren't chalked up to the sounds of their new house settling or some kind of hallucination. Nope, instead of looking for a worldly explanation this bunch's first assumption is that something supernatural is happening. Luckily Wilson's mother (Barbara Hershey) happens to have a psychic investigator on speed dial. Get past those leaps of faith and you're left with a movie that is shrouded with loads of atmosphere but short on actual scares.
Eerie rather than scary, "Insidious" will play on your fears of displacement and feelings of helplessness, but unless you find the idea of an otherworldly spirit listening to Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" terrifying you won't be crawling out of your skin. Wan puts away the torture porn of "Saw," replacing it with lots of dry ice and creepy costumes but keeps the fear level on a par with that of walking through an amusement park's haunted house.
"Source Code"
Richard's Review: 3 stars
"Source Code," the second film from "Moon" director Duncan Jones, is a tough one to describe. Imagine "Groundhog Day" with a terrorist subplot, a romantic angle and an explosion every eight minutes or so and you start to get the idea.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Captain Colter Stevens, a helicopter pilot, who wakes up on a Chicago commuter train in the body of a suburban high school teacher. Baffled, he makes small talk with the stranger across from him until the train is blown to bits by a terrorist bomb. Turns out he's part of a high level government project called Source Code that allows him to inhabit the last eight minutes of a person's life. Posing as this teacher he has a finite amount of time to discover and dismantle the bomb and help avert a much larger subsequent attack. Heroics aside, Colter begins to wonder what would happen if he went back into the source code permanently.
"Source Code" is sci-fi in the mode as "Inception" and "The Adjustment Bureau," stories that have metaphysical premises but are firmly rooted in the physical. In each case a wild plot is brought back to earth by strong characters that put a human face on the script's fanciful ideas.
"Source Code" is a moderately less successful than "Inception" and "The Adjustment Bureau," mostly because it doesn't have the mind boggling depth of the former or the human touch of the latter. It exists somewhere in between, but it gains points from me for not being based on a video game or comic book.
Jones skillfully takes a premise that could easily have become tired very quickly -- the replay of the same eight minutes over and over again -- and adds in enough variation, enough detail to keep the viewer on board as Colter revisits the scene of the crime and slowly pieces the terrorist plot together.
Less successful is the romance angle. It's sweet and ends on a hopeful note but isn't as compelling as the love story in "The Adjustment Bureau."
Despite that "Source Code" remains an interesting and novel piece of sci-fi.
