Snatched

SNATCHED (Jonathan Levine, 2017)

In SNATCHED Emily Middleton (Amy Schumer) loses her job and boyfriend in quick succession, meaning that the timing for her imminent, nonrefundable vacation for two to Ecuador comes when she needs it most and can least afford it. Unable to find a friend interested to take her ex’s spot, Emily persuades her mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) to tag along. Linda is a worrywart who is happy to lay around the resort reading books than seeing the sites. Hotel guests Ruth (Wanda Sykes) and her best friend, retired Special Ops agent Barb (Joan Cusack), confirm Linda’s fears about being vigilant for one’s safety while out of the country.

Emily disregards them and sidles up to handsome stranger James (Tom Bateman), with whom she has an amazing night experiencing the area like a local. Emily convinces her mother to join her and James on a day trip that ends with the validation of Linda’s worst anxieties. They are abducted and held for ransom. Their best hope for rescue rests back home with Emily’s agoraphobic brother Jeffrey (Ike Barinholtz) even as they escape from their captors and end up lost in the Colombian countryside.

Teaming up heroes across a shared universe is the go-to strategy for event pictures these days. In bringing together most prominently Schumer and Hawn, who returns to the movies after fifteen years, SNATCHED does something similar with funny women in film. It’s a good idea in theory even if it doesn’t always translate in practice. In spite of the equal billing, Hawn is often underutilized, especially because her character isn’t on screen for a significant portion of the film’s ninety minutes. She has a good rapport with Schumer but deserves more opportunities to show off her comedic chops than this second fiddle part. Christopher Meloni’s supporting role as an expedition leader produces bigger and more memorable laughs than the presumptive co-lead.

As the main character it’s hard to suggest that Schumer steals a movie that basically belongs to her anyway. Regardless, her TRAINWRECK follow-up reasserts her talents as a film comedian. She’s game for whatever Katie Dippold’s screenplay throws her way, and that comfort allows her to shrug off the humiliating lengths her character will go to in pursuit of her desires. Although Emily bares a neediness that leads her into embarrassing situations, Schumer plays it as a strength in expressing herself instead of exposing a pathetic, mewling quality. She’s good-humored about it, which is why she can pull off a scene as mortifying as the one when her date accidentally sees her in a compromising position as she gets cleaned up for a night out.

The humor in SNATCHED is certainly not refined but exudes puckish vulgarity that grants more leeway for the dirtiest jokes and a hilarious gross-out gag with a tapeworm. The playfulness also helps to gloss over the the potentially troublesome stereotypes the film imposes on many of the South American characters. SNATCHED appears to be laughing at the distorted views of this part of the world as shaped by the news, but it’s fair to consider if it is reinforcing them. The takeaway from the film isn’t such depictions, though, but Schumer’s willingness to go for broke.

Grade: B

The Night Before

THE NIGHT BEFORE (Jonathan Levine, 2015)

Fourteen years ago Isaac (Seth Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) took out their grieving friend Ethan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) on Christmas Eve for a night of chemically-enhanced celebration in New York City. Ethan’s parents had died recently, and he needed a boost to his spirits. In THE NIGHT BEFORE the three made this raucous time an annual tradition, but it’s agreed that this year’s holiday revelry will be the last. The guys are in their mid-thirties, and two now have other obligations upon them. Isaac will soon become a father. Chris is enjoying the benefits of fame from a breakthrough late in his professional football career.

Ethan, on the other hand, remains adrift in menial jobs and is moody about his break-up with Diana (Lizzy Caplan). He seems reluctant to let go of the Christmas Eve debauchery, but if this will be the final year of it, he’s prepared to do it up big. Employing sticky fingers as he works in a coat check, Ethan procures passes to the Nutcracka Ball, the city’s preeminent party at a secret location. Although the friends are looking forward to an evening of mindless fun, circumstances cause them to confront their greatest fears about the future.

Although Rogen doesn’t have a screenplay credit, THE NIGHT BEFORE touches upon a theme that pops up in several of the comedies he’s starred in, NEIGHBORS in particular. Rogen and his on-screen buddies wrestle with being responsible grown-ups while wanting to hang onto the freedom and recklessness that marked their young adulthood. Rogen’s Isaac has been taking impending fatherhood seriously, so his wife Betsy (Jillian Bell) grants him a free pass--and gives him a box of random drugs--for the good and supportive behavior he’s demonstrated through her pregnancy. Rather than letting Isaac cut loose, the permission to be irresponsible makes him face up to his anxieties about the major life changes that await and for which he feels ill-prepared. Filled with existential panic while in an altered state, Rogen is funny as he tries to keep his composure while high as a kite at Midnight Mass and in front of a friend’s mother.

As the guys’ pot supplier Mr. Green, Michael Shannon counters Rogen’s hysterical energy with a dry wit filtered through a typically intense performance. Mr. Green and his product serve a purpose akin to the ghosts in A CHRISTMAS CAROL, making Shannon ideal as someone whose presence indicates menace streaked with ribbons of humor to help his clients’ get through their cloudy mental states.

While THE NIGHT BEFORE produces a decent share of funny moments, it runs into a fair number of bumps in the road. Director Jonathan Levine and his co-writers can’t quite find the right mix of outrageous humor and dramatic material. Ethan is kind of a downer as the adventure goes deep into the night. The film’s hedonistic attitude gets tempered as THE NIGHT BEFORE advances toward a sentimental conclusion. That’s par for the course for films like this one, but it makes for a weird fit alongside Chris’s subplot regarding his steroid use to become a star toward the end of his football career. Like a sampler box of chocolates, some of it is good, and some is better left untouched.

Grade: C

Warm Bodies

WARM BODIES (Jonathan Levine, 2013)

What’s a hunky, sensitive, undead guy like R (Nicholas Hoult) supposed to do after the apocalypse?  It’s been eight years since a plague left many, including him, as shuffling, brain-hungry vessels called corpses.  When he’s not chowing down on some gray matter, R trudges around the airport, shares knowing grunts with his best friend M (Rob Corddry), and kicks back on the plane he’s made home by getting misty listening to records.  (He’s a vinyl aficionado because it delivers better audio reproduction, natch.)

Like his fellow corpses in WARM BODIES, R is unable to recall his pre-zombie life.  He can make an educated guess about who he was based on his clothes and thinks he knows the first letter of his first name but that’s it.  While zombies have no memories of their own, eating brains isn’t just part of a healthy diet.  It also allows them to absorb their victims’ memories.

While hunting for food R and company encounter human survivors who’ve ventured beyond their walled city to scavenge for pharmaceuticals.  R feasts on the brain of Perry (Dave Franco) and the poor guy’s affectionate thoughts for his girlfriend Julie (Teresa Palmer).  This has a strange effect on R.  He develops feelings for the pretty blonde and chooses to whisk her out of the situation’s immediate danger and into safe hiding on his jet.

At first Julie is understandably anxious about the arrangement, but gradually R’s gentlemanly manner puts her at ease.  She can tell that under his cold, dead skin is a warm and generous heart, metaphorically speaking at least.  He is unwavering in protecting her from the corpses and the boneys, the name given to the faster, animalistic undead who have peeled off their skin.  Julie becomes fond of R, but how can she explain this star-crossed romance to her friends or her dad (John Malkovich), who’s leading the uninfected’s fight against their undead predators?

This zombified version of ROMEO AND JULIET ups the stakes in placing the couple between rungs on the food chain rather than feuding families, but it trivializes the love story because R’s devotion is not genuine.  He might as well have sipped a magic potion in secret, except in this case he’s gobbled some choice cerebrum.  R is having a vicarious experience performing the role of adoring boyfriend to an unknowing Julie, opening up WARM BODIES to the potential satire of idealization in relationships or projected familiarity in the communication age.  Instead writer-director Jonathan Levine reduces the allegorical components to their simplest terms and recycles the love-conquers-all motif in a scenario that doesn’t earn the payoff.

Although based on a novel, WARM BODIES feels like the product of a studio executive who thinks Shakespeare’s play is great except it could use a happy ending.  Oh, and zombies are popular at the moment, so might as well add them too.  The reappropriated plot works out an acceptable revised resolution, even if it’s betraying its primary influence.  The genre trappings are en vogue, perhaps cynically so, but using the undead as a prism for viewing tragic romance could have been a valid creative choice if the protagonists’ connection wasn’t forged how it is, especially because brain consumption in zombie lore doesn’t imply or require memory transference.

The lovers’ names, main struggle, and the balcony scene make the overlays with ROMEO AND JULIET unmistakable, but R and Julie get along like Tarzan and Jane as well.  He saves her from the threats in his untamed environment.  She humanizes the savage in place of serving as a civilizing influence on him.  Whether the Edgar Rice Burroughs parallels are intended or not, combining Shakespeare and zombies creates the expectation that the text will be treated with some irreverence, but to a baffling degree WARM BODIES is played mostly straight.  To Hoult and Palmer’s credit, they don’t look ridiculous articulating the earnest romance between the living and undead.  If only the film around them reflected the humor in it.  

Grade: C