Fumble in the Jungle

Bad movies can find a special place in your heart.  I know this is a weird thing to hear from someone who is so objectively snobby about films and TV, but it’s true.  And I’ve never hidden when I enjoy or even come to love bad movies.  2 Fast 2 Furious, Point Break, Congo, Lake Placid, Gone in 60 Seconds, etc,; these are the kinds of movies that become cult classics because of how they make you feel rather than how well they’re made.  Whether a movie is good or not doesn't always have that much of a bearing on whether you like it or not.  Sometimes it’s the subject matter, sometimes it’s someone in the cast, sometimes it’s just the vibe; how or why you like something doesn’t really matter.  As long as you like it, that’s enough.  Most of the time, anyway.  So when some friends are in a rut and they want to reboot their favorite movie from when they were kids, it’s not that strange that the movie is Anaconda, the 1997 campy creature feature starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, and Jon Voight’s accent.  In this case, it takes the form of 2025’s reimagining/soft reboot/spiritual sequel Anaconda, a meta-horror-action-comedy.  There’s no way they’re trying to do too much in one 99 minute PG-13 movie, let’s get into it.

Welcome to the jungle. It just looks like a bank in Buffalo.

We start with Ana, played by Daniela Melchior (The Suicide Squad), in the jungle being pursued by armed gunmen.  When the action is over, a giant snake eats someone.  Yup, we’re in an Anaconda movie now.  So let’s head over to the exotic location of Buffalo, NY, where Doug McCallister, played by Jack Black (A Minecraft Movie, Be Kind Rewind), lives life as a wedding videographer with delusions of grandeur but who is otherwise very stuck.  Don’t worry, we’re getting back to the jungle.  So over in LA, Ronald “Griff” Griffin Jr., played by Paul Rudd (Role Models, Ant-Man) is getting fired from a gig as an extra after a rough career as an actor.  Time for the jungle.  So he, along with childhood friends Claire Simons (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny Trent (Steve Zahn) manage to come together and surprise Doug for his birthday back in Buffalo.  While out, Griff drops that he now owns the rights to their favorite movie, Anaconda, and he wants to film it guerrilla-style in the jungle with all of them, just like they did when they were kids.  Obvious deception complete, they head down to the Amazon.

Our characters making a bad Anaconda remake while making a bad Anaconda remake. So meta.

And from there, the movie happens.  And I mean that; the movie just seems to happen.  There’s very little story from scene to scene, with random moments of attempted comedy or an attempted serpentine jump scare.  There’s no one to root for, there’s no one to like, there’s no real conflict until far too late into the movie, and when it comes down to it, the movie doesn’t have any idea what it’s about or who the antagonist is.  I heard that on the set of Jurassic Park, Stephen Spielberg banned the word “monster” from being used to describe the dinosaurs.  They were not the villains, they were not evil, they were not monsters.  They were nature.  Animals doing animal things.  It was a rule from which franchise has strayed and suffered for it (though not financially, I should note). 

In Anaconda, the snake does seem to be pretty evil for no reason, but true villain is the writing.  One second there’s a big twist and then in that very scene, the twist is rendered meaningless.  Calling it a B-plot is elevating it way above it status.  It was just stuff that happened.  The attempt to go meta and call out the lack of creativity in Hollywood right now is endearing, I suppose, but it points out how devoid of any originality Anaconda is.  I mean, a meta action-comedy about a film crew in the jungle where things go horribly wrong due to unforeseen circumstances that cause them to band together for survival has been done before.  And better.  And by Jack Black already.  They called it Tropic Thunder back then and it was an actually brilliant comedy that told a meta story and was interesting and funny from moment to moment.  There was also a movie about a group of people who go into the jungle on a boat and run into an unexpected creature that they have to capture on film as humanity and nature clash in a place where nature has the upper hand.  It was called King Kong and Jack Black was in that too!  There was nothing wrong with any of the acting here.  Paul Rudd is his usual charming self; much like my affinity for Keanu Reeves, I’m a big Paul Rudd fan and I want to go give all his movies a chance.  Jack Black is at his most palatable for me; not the over the top hallucination he was in Minecraft, but not quite as tamped down as he was in The Big Year.  Pretty good sweet spot for him.  Steve Zahn is always reliable.  And Thandiwe Newton is incredibly talented, so this was not a stretch for her.  You can tell when they’re acting as their characters in the movie and you can tell when they’re intentionally acting poorly when they’re doing their film.  As many problems as this movie has, acting is not one of them.

A will they/won’t they for the ages. Eat it, Ross and Rachel.

The biggest issue that Anaconda has is that it attempted to be so many things.  It wanted to be meta, but it came off as lazy.  In a moment that had me rewinding and putting the subtitles on, I saw that Steve Zahn’s character was called Kenny Trent and then Thandiwe Newton’s character said she divorced her husband who is also called Trent.  Now, first name versus last name and it has zero bearing on anything story-related other than to open the default romance option of Paul Rudd, but there are about a dozen named characters in this movie and the name Trent comes up twice?  They couldn’t think of any other names?  It wanted to tap into horror, but there was never any suspense or dread.  Even horror-comedies have to deliver on the horror, and this didn’t.  It wanted to have big action sequences, but they look terrible due in large part to the big CGI snake they’re running from.  It looked and felt like a movie that was being described to the actors as they had to film the scene on the spot.  It wanted to be a comedy, but it failed to deliver consistently on the laughs.  There are a few chuckles here and there, but it couldn’t ever make me feel like I was having a good time.  And worst of all, it wanted to say something and it missed the mark completely by not committing.  Every small moment of humanity falls flat because the story doesn’t emphasize any aspect of itself.  It gives you tonal whiplash as a result.  This should have been a film about a group of friends rediscovering the joy of life after getting back to the things they loved.  And the adversities they faced along the way, including giant snake shaped ones.  But they wanted to play inside baseball and poke fun at the creative process without the chops to back it up.

Hammond and Grant look over at the destruction at Jurassic Park and wonder if life truly will find a way

Look, I know this process well enough and it matters to me enough to know that caring this much is at least a little silly.  And I don’t mind having that poked fun at.  At the end of the day, most hobbies and interests are at least a little silly.  But a lot of life is lived those silly moments; I wouldn’t trade it.  That’s why we roast our friends or play the dozens; we keep each other in check.  But a joke is only funny if the joke is actually funny.  There’s more to a joke than a setup and punchline, there’s an internal logic to the joke that leads to an unexpected, but earned subversion of expectation that results in a physical response.  In this case, a laugh.  I’m guilty of holding comedy to an incredibly high standard because in many ways I think it can be the truest form of audiovisual literature.  I also think there’s something noble about setting out to make people laugh and bring joy to them by giving of yourself.  Anaconda didn’t do that.  I wanted it to.  I didn’t take notes the first time I watched this movie because I hoped that it would either be so unexpectedly funny that I wanted to be immersed in the moment or that it would be so mediocre that I wouldn’t have anything to say about it.  But it ended up that special kind of mediocre that still somehow got my attention.  Because I wanted to like this.  I wanted the critics to be wrong (47% RT at time of publication) and they just weren’t.  Not this time.  Watch it win Best Picture.

Traffic jams, am I right?

Anaconda is streaming on Netflix, but there are better movies to watch with your time.  Even if you want to stay in the family friendly realm, the Jumanji movies are funnier, more smartly written, and have better action sequences.  And Jack Black is in those too!  He ends up in the jungle almost as often as Dwayne Johnson.  Or go watch the original Anaconda, it’s also bad, but in a better way.  There are remakes of bad movies that make them better or make them different.  Ocean’s 11 immediately springs to mind.  So does The Thing, which was so much better than the 1951 movie on which it was based that most people are surprised to find out it’s a remake.  2012’s Dredd with Karl Urban leaves Judge Dredd in the dust.  You don’t have to do a bad remake just because you started with a bad film.  But this time they did.  I mean, Jungle Cruise was better.  Look at the words this movie is making me say.  I just had to say that Jungle Cruise was better than something.  What a day.

Paul Rudd searches for a cohesive narrative and some decent jokes. They’re in a jungle, but it’s a comedy desert.

Run for the Whole Family

If you have or even know someone who has a passing interest in video games, you probably don’t need me to tell you who Sonic the Hedgehog is.  But just in case, he’s a very fast alien hedgehog who loves chili dogs and is obsessed with speed.  He’s a lot like me in some ways, although I generally prefer my speed in car form and not by running.  I don’t have the knees for that.  The chili dog thing is the same, though.  Now he’s Earthbound, living in Green Hills, Colorado with Cyclops, his wife, and their dog.  Along the way in the films, he’s picked up some friends, including Miles “Tails” Prower (my favorite when I was a kid), a multi-tailed fox who can fly like a helicopter and is also a pilot and Knuckles the Echidna, who punches stuff really hard.  They’re also pretty fast, but for Sonic, speed is the be all and end all.  Sonic’s games have been a bit of a mixed bag (one day it might get its Super Mario Odyssey moment, but not yet) and the movies have been no different.  The first was an affable, but baffling road trip movie between him and a small town cop.  The second was a better, albeit convoluted and slightly too long movie with a very human-centric B-plot at a wedding in Hawaii.  Don’t get me wrong, I liked them both to varying degrees, but neither were what I was expecting out of a Sonic movie franchise.

The third movie, refreshingly plainly named Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (no Spider-Man confusion here), then, came as a welcomed addition to the franchise back when it released in 2024.  But I again didn’t know what to expect.  Let’s get into it.

Humans take a backseat in Sonic 3, and while I didn’t mind their inclusion in the first two films (even the sojourn to Hawaii, while confusing, was largely pleasant), it was nice to let the cartoon characters really shine in this one.  We have enough of them now that they can be the focus instead of supplementing them with more human protagonists.  Sonic and his team have an unwelcome visitor in the midst of some celebrations and are whisked away to deal with an emerging incident that they seem uniquely qualified to handle.  Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones, Don’t Trust the B) plays GUN Director Rockwell, who is their main contact in this one and even though her role is pretty small, it’s always nice to see Jessica Jones on the big screen.  In typical Sonic fashion, he runs full speed, headstrong and head first into danger.

In this case, the danger is Shadow, another otherworldly hedgehog with chaos energy superpowers.  Taken aback, Team Sonic is dealt a defeat and a mystery to solve.  Shadow, as we learn in the opening scene, was being held in stasis in a top secret GUN facility for 50 years.  Some poor GUN agents had the Sisyphean task of going and watching him everyday, an alien hedgehog who never so much as twitches a muscle (although, then again, no sympathy for jackboots).  Until one day he does.  The GUN system, not as secure as they think it is, gets hacked by an outside force and Shadow wakes up.  And after 5 decades being imprisoned, Shadow is very, very angry.  And he’s taking it out on Tokyo (I swear, for an agency whose every agent seems to have an American accent except for the doorman in London, their facilities seem to be anywhere but the US).  GUN is as scared of Shadow as he is angry at them.  It makes you wonder: if a top secret extrajudicial government agency is that afraid of him, is he dangerous or is he dangerous to them?  Because there is a difference.  Like I said, Shadow did handily dispatch with Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, so he’s clearly very powerful.  And he’s hell bent on doling out pain to GUN.  He’s one little fuzzball of rage.  But about 20 minutes in, we get a glimpse into why he’s so mad and I can’t say that I would feel very different.  Of course, I’m not a superpowered alien, so I’d probably just angrily tweet about it.  No one’s listening there anyway, it’s the same as screaming into a pillow (except occasionally you get called a slur).  But Shadow, oh no, he’s got the exact opposite of futile rage.  He’s angry and he has the power to do something catastrophic about it.  They don’t call it chaos energy for nothing.  It gets intense, especially as Shadow is voiced by Keanu Reeves (Hardball, The Lake House), so it gets his particular brand of smoldering intensity.  I can’t say I’m always the biggest fan of screen actors doing VA because it is a different skill and there are so many incredibly talented VAs out there that it almost seems a shame to pass one of them over for marquee appeal.  But I absolutely adore Keanu Reeves, even before John Wick rebirthed the action film and as someone who’s never even liked The Matrix movies all that much, I’ve always loved Keanu.  So I’m okay with Johnny Silverhand getting the voice here.  I’m just always happy when I hear Keanu Reeves talk, so I’m totally biased.

Returning as Sonic is Ben Schwartz (Parks & Rec, Space Force), Idris Elba (Zootopia 2, Finding Dory) is Knuckles once again, and the very talented VA for Tails pretty much across the franchise is back too, Colleen O’Shaughnessey (you’ve heard her voice before).  So too is Sonic’s de facto dad Tom, played by James Marsden (Jury Duty, Disenchanted), his mom Maddie, played by Tika Sumpter (Ride Along), and, of course, Jim Carrey returns as Dr. Robotnik/Eggman/whatever Sonic’s nickname for him is next.  Even Lee Majdoub and Adam Pally return as Robotnik’s stalwart assistant Agent Stone and Knuckles’s confidant Wade (though just for a cameo; give me Knuckles season 2 already!).  And you know what?  They all do fine.  Carrey does embody the role of Robotnik very well, even if that’s not really what I imagined him to be and Ben Schwartz does an admirable job of succeeding Jaleel White as the voice of Sonic.  But you don’t watch this movie for the acting.  There’s nothing wrong with the acting, it’s just not that important.

What is important, though, is the sense of fun that a movie like this is supposed to have.  There is a lot of joy and levity in a film like this and even if you don’t find yourself laughing out loud all the time, it’s still a very pleasant place to be.  And what really sets it apart from mindless, flashy, bright kids’ movies is that it does have depth to it and it does approach serious topics.  So while it very easily could have been A Minecraft Movie or as bad as Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s not.  It’s much better those movies; all three of the Sonic films are.  There’s actually a story here, not just a collection of references, memes, and references to memes.  So as we’re on the precipice of being subjected to another Illumination Mario film, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate Sonic; it’ll never win an Oscar, but if they gave out most improved player awards for movie franchises somewhere, Sonic would have to be in the running.

The Sonic movies have been an incredibly strange journey.  First, there was the fan backlash over Sonic’s teeth, among other things, which led to a redesign (which, fair, those teeth were creepy).  Then, the titular hedgehog, known for running everywhere, spends most of the runtime in the passenger seat of a pickup truck.  I thought it was a silly movie.  Then, against all odds, the movie grew on me. The strength of Ben Schwartz’s VA, the oddly endearing performances of the unexpectedly human cast; they wormed their way into my heart somehow.  Maybe it was nostalgia, I loved Sonic when I was a kid.  The second one was a winner for me from the first viewing.  I ended up so smitten with the franchise that I even watched and was full of praise for millennial fever dream that is the Knuckles show.  So much so that Sonic 3 was the first movie I went to the theaters to see after the pandemic.

Sonic 3 is a tale of two hedgehogs, differentiated not by their powers, but by their experiences.  Sonic found his Earth family after he lost Longclaw.  He was met with kindness and caring.  Shadow didn’t have that luxury.  Yes, he found friendship and family, but that didn’t last.  Shadow was part of GUN, held hostage at first, until the kindness he was shown was ripped from him in horrible fashion.  Where Sonic found acceptance, Shadow found only cruelty and isolation.  Given this, his anger turned to rage.  Rage into violence. Violence into hopelessness.  It’s a cycle that feeds itself ouroboros-like on the parts of you that want to believe in good things.

People say it’s easy to give up.  Easy to give up on humanity, easy to give up on yourself, easy to give up hope.  It’s not.  Giving up is no one’s Plan A, B, or C.  Someone only gives up when they feel like there’s no hope left.  No, it’s not easy at all.  Giving up is one of the hardest things a person can do.  The things they had to endure that brought them to that point.  Alone, it can be too much.  It can force you to close yourself off.  Soldiering on is difficult, of course; even harder still is trying to change things and hold on to hope that seems to be perpetually slipping out of your grasp.  This is what Sonic 3 is about.  Not the bravery of it, no.  That’s a part of it for sure, but it’s about the sheer will to continue to believe and the shoulders to lean on that it takes not to give up and give in to hate, rage, and hopelessness.  It’s a testament to the idea that no matter how powerful hate and cruelty are, kindness and empathy are stronger.  Pain can change who you are.  It can turn you cold.  It can make you feel isolated and it can make you isolate yourself.  It can sap all the joy and color out of your life.  It’s hard to move on when pain is all you feel.  And pain never goes away.  Not really.

It’s hard, but a burden shared is a burden lessened.  These things are easier to carry when someone is there to carry it with you.  But it’s also easier said than done.  Not everyone has people to lean on.  Not everyone has a support structure.  Some people even have people around them who want to plunge them deeper into that hate and rage for their own benefit.  Which makes it all the more important to reach out with kindness first.  I’m reminded of Paden, Kevin Kline’s character from Silverado, who says that he can either walk around the world like everybody’s his friend or nobody is and it doesn’t make much of a difference.  Now, I probably wouldn’t go that far; after all, when we meet Paden, he had just been robbed and left for dead in the desert in his underwear by his supposed friends.  But Sonic posits that the simple act of leading with kindness is the kind of thing that can make a difference in or even save the world.  And I think that’s a pretty damn cool message.   

Not everything about Sonic 3 works and it’s definitely not high art.  No one is going to mention Sonic 3 in the same sentence as Sinners or Breathless (except this sentence).  But it’s not just empty calories, bright colors, and mindless hypnotic distraction for kids either.  Like Zootopia, there’s a lesson to learn here and it’s one that everyone could do with, not just kids.  I think that’s part of what makes Sonic one of the most fun family franchises out there right now.  Rated PG, running 1 hour, 50 minutes, and streaming on Paramount+ and Prime Video,  this one’s worth watching through to the end credits.  Because it’s not just fun.  But it is really fun.

Caught Fuzz

So, the Oscars have come and gone.  Congratulations to the winners, condolences to their fellow nominees, and it’s time to put the disappointment of awards season behind me and get on with bringing you analysis of all sorts of media.  We’ve been going heavy for a while, so let’s lighten things up a bit.  There were two movies concerned with dismantling white supremacy at the Oscars this year.  One should have won Best Picture and didn’t, the other lost to KPop Demon Hunters, but was still very good.  Let’s get into Zootopia 2.

If you haven’t seen Zootopia, pause the post here, watch it, and then come back.  The movie does start with a very high level recap, but it’s better to just watch the thing.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.  Now that you’ve done that, I can tell you that as much as Zootopia has changed, so much still feels the same.  Just like the march of progress is painfully slow in the real world (and subject to cyclical regressive pendulum swings), Judy and Nick may have shaken up how things are done in the city, but that doesn’t meant that they’ve dismantled every oppressive systemic issue just by arresting one sheep that sounds like Mona Lisa Saperstein.

Now partners, bunny Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin (Once Upon a Time) and fox Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Game Night) go on an unauthorized undercover mission that results in a catastrophic citywide chase that ends in the statue of beloved inventor of the weather walls that make Zootopia possible being summarily destroyed.  I didn’t need to mention that Zootopia is a city made up of anthropomorphized animals, did I? Anyway, these walls create biomes suited for each kind of animal, so they all have a place to live.  It’s like the Weather Dominator, but for good stuff.  The weather walls allow animals of all kinds to live in Zootopian harmony.

Well, all animals except reptiles, who are pretty much segregated into a small area called Marsh Market and especially snakes, the likes of whom have not been seen within Zootopia since the weather walls went up a hundred years ago.  You see, when that happened, a snake attacked Ebenezer Lynxley, a lynx and the creator of the weather walls, and killed his tortoise assistant in the process.  After this, the city turned on all reptiles generally and snakes specifically.  Their biome was deserted and eventually taken over by Tundratown, blanketing it in the fluffy white stuff that cold-blooded animals don’t very much care for.  Because when you’re a minority, the majority loves to blame the entire group for the actions of one individual rather than blaming the individual, as they do the majority (or whatever the in-group is at the time).  But in the process of this chaotic chase and landmark destruction, Judy comes across a piece of shed skin that she believes might belong to a snake.  She wants to investigate further, but Chief Bogo, voiced by Idris Elba (Heads of State, Knuckles) sends them to a group counseling course for mismatched partners.

You see, in Zootopia, yes a pig is a cop, but so are many other animals.  But most notably, partnered animals tend to be the same kind.  So a warthog is paired with a warthog, a zebra with a zebra, and so on.  Put a rabbit with a fox (and not even a bag of corn) and it’s seen as some sort of dysfunctional pairing.  Seems as much as Zootopia is billed as a place for everyone, there is a full on current of racism that runs through the city’s operations that people are just cool with.  This shouldn’t come as a surprise as I felt Zootopia was one of the smartest movies about systemic racism I’ve ever seen, it only makes sense that its sequel would continue to carry the torch.  If Zootopia were in fact a furry utopia, there’d hardly be a conflict to build a movie around.

Through the course of, again, unauthorized investigation, Judy comes to believe that Zootopia’s centennial gala, in which the Lynxley Journal is being unveiled for the first time since that fatal snake attack, will be targeted and the journal stolen.  So Nick and Judy, at the insistence of Judy and unwillingness of Nick, go undercover at the gala.  When checking out the journal, Judy runs into Pawbert, voiced by Andy Samberg (Brooklyn 99, Palm Springs), the black sheep of the Lynxley family, so to speak.  The nice guy who lacks the killer instinct of the rest of his relations.  And when the snake assailant reveals himself, through a series of misfortunate mishaps and misunderstandings, Nick and Judy end up on the run after refusing to kill the the snake and cover up his murder at the behest of the Lynxley patriarch, Milton.  The snake, named Gary, is after the journal, but doesn’t seem to want to hurt anyone.  Gary is played by the endlessly charming Ke Huy Quan (Loki, Everything Everywhere) and he’s on a righteous mission the details of which I will not divulge so you can experience it on your own.  What follows is an action-heavy, chase-heavy movie with loads of visual gags and large dash of social commentary.  It’s funny, it’s endearing, and it’s going to be a great time for kids and adults alike.  There were genuine twists and turns and while the the point it’s trying to make is unsubtle, it’s media made for kids.  I’ve said before that art reflects society, but children’s media, when it’s good, does more than just reflect.  Children, being the future and all that and little sponges that absorb every message, have the burden of carrying forward with the world we create for them.  Media helps shape what they will think is right when they get older.  Now, if you tend to believe that diversity, equal rights, and empathy aren’t good messages and that certain types of people are genetically inferior to others, (1) you’re probably not reading this, (2) evaluate your life decisions, and (3) you’re not going to like what Zootopia 2 has to say about those things.  But if you’ve read this far…

Zootopia and its predecessor are the key kinds of children’s movies I love to see being made.  In the midst of all these animal puns, sight gags, and social commentary is the central conflict of the movie.  Judy and Nick are having an argument and Judy says: “The world will never be a better place if no one is brave enough to do the right thing”.  It’s a lovely sentiment, something I probably believed at one point.  These days, I’m finding myself stopping before the “if”, with a world view more similar to Nick’s.  “The world is what it is and sometimes being a hero, it just doesn’t make a difference” is how he responds to Judy.  He’s got real millennial energy; it’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just that he’s cared in the past and was burned so many times that it’s just easier to pretend that he doesn’t.  He’s been broken by everything constantly going to pot and no one doing anything about it.  So he’s given up.  Judy hasn’t.  Judy probably won’t.  This movie addresses so many different issues; corpo-fascism, for example, the oligarchical overclass, the corruption built into systems and institutions, equality, gentrification, ethnic cleansing, and a lot of other really big topics that they handle with the proverbial kid gloves on.  But this conflict is at the center of everything the movie hits on.  What does it take to make a difference and what are you willing to put on the line to secure a better future.  It’s a hard question; planting seeds for a tree under which you will never sit and all that.  What’s it worth to you to make the lives of people you will never know better in a time that you will never see?  Zootopia 2 takes the stance that justice and equality are worth fighting for, even when your life is on the line.

Judy and Nick are going up against the Lynxleys here; one of the most prominent, well-known, and respected families in Zootopia.  At least by the regular folks on the street.  The kind of animals who see what they see in the news (that they control) or hear from politicians (whom they control), they think the Lynxleys are great.  But the underworld?  The animals that see and hear everything?  They know.  They’re more afraid of the Lynxley family than anything else.  To cross them is to be marked for death.  And they have the mayor and the police force in their pocket.  This is an uphill battle in a figurative and sometimes surprisingly literal sense of the word.  The Lynxleys get what they want.  And what they want is the eviction and extermination of reptiles from their small neighborhood because they feel that reptiles are inferior.  So of course they don’t deserve the same level of dignity or autonomy as lynxes or other mammals do.   Best to get rid of them altogether if you can.  And the Lynxleys are definitely capable of it.  And capable of getting away with it too.

But all this great messaging doesn’t really count for much if it’s not packaged well and boy is it packaged well.  The comedy is every frame here, to the point where I want to watch it again and just freeze the frame during several scenes so I can soak in all the small visual gags going on in the background.  There are references abound, which are fun if you recognize them, but if you don’t because, say, you’re a child and you’ve never seen The Shining, you’ll just enjoy that there’s a hedge maze your favorite characters have to contend with.  The story is genuinely engaging as well, I was quite happy not just with how it ended, but how it played out.  It was a good journey with a good ending.  The animation looks fantastic as well; it’s not as eye-popping and style-changing as movies like KPDH, Spider-Verse, or The Last Wish, but the animation is beautiful.  The characters are so expressive and look so detailed; it may feel old school compared to some animated films, but Zootopia 2 is really lovely to watch.  It’s vibrant without burning the retinas, it’s fluid, it’s colorful, it’s really high fidelity animation.  It’s also very funny, I had many laugh out loud moments and kids’ll certainly enjoy the gags even more.  Personally, I found it a little heavy on the chase scenes, but considering the plot centers around Judy and Nick being on the run, I can’t really knock it as not being thematic.  It is a narrative that grows in complexity and becomes more engaging as it progresses, which is really well paced.  You discover things mostly as Judy and Nick do, and it’s actually fairly decent mystery at the core of it.  While I don’t think Zootopia 2 is quite as good as the first one, it’s a more than worthy sequel to one of the most exciting Disney properties to come out in recent years. It’s streaming on Disney+, has a runtime of 1 hour, 43 minutes, and is rated PG.

The Fast and the Spurious

Oscar season is fully upon us with the awards ceremony being held this coming weekend.  And every year, I try to do the possible and watch all Best Picture nominees before the show and every year I come up short.  It has led to me watching movies I never thought I would, with mixed results.  I probably wouldn’t have sat down and watched Phantom Thread were it not for its nomination (now if that title sounds heckin’ cool to you too, it’s not about a haunted spool of thread methodically taking textile-based revenge against sweatshop owners and operators as I hoped it was) which was quite the uphill climb for me, but I also would never have would have watched The King’s Speech either and that movie was a masterclass in acting that, despite period pieces not really being my thing, has stuck with me for over 15 years.  We talked about Sinners already, I’ve seen One Battle After Another, but I’ve yet to be able to share my thoughts on that with you.  But this week, I have another Best Picture nomination and I will keep going through as many of these as I can for you even after the Oscars are long in the books.

People love an inspiring sports story.  Even people who don’t love sports can be buoyed by a tale of human accomplishment in the face of adversity, even somewhat frivolous adversity in a game that is ultimately meaningless (and I say this as a man with a deep, mood-altering love for the other football).  And there is little more inspiring than seeing a veteran take a rookie under their wing and teaching them the ropes.  An upstart rookie, brash and reckless, with almost no relevant experience walks on to the biggest stage of his life.  A hard-working, diligent, more established player who needs the rookie to succeed for the team to succeed.  That’s the setup of F1: The Movie.  Except the brash, reckless rookie is known sexagenarian Sonny Hayes, played by Brad Pitt (Chanel No.5: Wherever I Go) and the hard-working, diligent, but still pretty new guy is Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris (Snowfall, Megan Leavey).  The rookie is a veteran and the veteran is a rookie.  And it’s time for the veteran rookie to come into the APX GP team and Yellowstone all over the rookie veteran.

Retired driver, owner of APX GP, and Sonny’s old buddy Ruben Cervantes, played by Javier Bardem (Collateral, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile), is $350 million in the hole and if he doesn’t deliver a win for his team, which hasn’t won in its nearly 3 year existence and is suddenly without a driver, the board will force a sale and he’ll lose the team.  So he turns to similarly aged former rival Sonny Hayes, who hasn’t been behind the wheel of an F1 car in thirty years after he was left in a lifeless heap following a horrific crash as he was chasing down Ayrton Senna.  He’s spent those three decades getting divorced, failing as a professional gambler, and racing in one-off contracts for any team that’s willing to pay and doesn’t mind him riding off into the sunset in the camper van in which he lives when the job is done.  To put that into perspective, of the 20 current F1 drivers, only six are older than 30 and just two of them are over 40.  None are over 50.  So if a driver were born on the day Sonny Hayes retired, he’d be on the tail end of his career already by the time Sonny walked into the APX GP paddock and asked for a cup of Sanka.  So we’re straining credulity at the very premise of this film, despite the fact that Ruben recites a laundry list of F1 Grand Prix winners over 50 (read: it’s less than a handful of names) trying to justify choosing Sonny.  But that line in the film comes off as the writers trying to justify choosing Brad Pitt instead.  With the team needing a win in its final nine races or he’s out, Ruben throws his final Hail Mary right at Sonny and the film makes us watch as he hems and haws and decides to join finally after receiving advice from the waitress at the diner where they meet.  Of course it’s a foregone conclusion, but the film makes us sit there and wait for something we already know is going to happen.  After all, the movie is called F1: The Movie and not Brad Pitt: Van Man Goes to the Diner.

Sonny Hayes is man of walking contradictions.  Ruben describes him as the best driver in the world, despite never having won an F1 GP and spending the last 30 years in relative obscurity.  He’s similarly described as a has-been and a never-was.  He’s reckless, but preaches patience.  He refuses to touch a trophy he won in an endurance race, wanting only his bonus check.  The race he just won, by the way, is the Daytona 24, one of the biggest 24 hour races in the world, so it’s no small feat.  He doesn’t even take Rolex Daytona that winners get, he just wants his money and to be on his way (although that Daytona is worth a minimum five times his bonus).  But when Ruben tries to throw money at him to convince him to drive, he says it’s not about the money.  Is Sonny enigmatic or just wishy-washy?  And this is just a sampling of the wildly inconsistent characterization of Sonny Hayes, who gets to be whatever the writers want him to be from scene to scene so he can be positioned as the hero of story.

And now it’s time to meet the villain.  Rookie driver Joshua Pearce, a hard-working young Black man whose father died when he was 13 and who loves his mom.  And that’s kind of all we get for Joshua.  Sounds like a total heel, this guy.  Loves his mom.  What an a-hole, right?  When Sonny saunters in to test drive the car, Ruben says to Joshua that they’re not auditioning Sonny for the open seat, but that Sonny is auditioning them for his talents.  The level of entitlement is off the charts with Sonny, never more on display than when, during a heated argument between Sonny and Joshua, Joshua says that he worked extremely hard to get where he is and he won’t just step aside for Sonny to stand in the spotlight and Sonny literally calls that a “participation trophy”, a very non-charged line choice, definitely not the kind of boomer-esque complaint that has been levied at younger generations and is rooted in toxic masculinity.  That’s right.  The washed up has-been (and that is being generous) who got a personal invite to the team by the owner because they were friends a lifetime ago told the guy who earned his seat through hard work and dedication that his seat on the team is a participation trophy because he hasn’t won anything yet.  This is after he bins the car on his test drive trying to get within one second of Joshua’s time.  This is unironic.  This is the hero of the film, not the antagonist.  An old white man coming into a role handed to him on a silver platter because of unjustified qualifications is telling a young Black man that his accomplishments don’t mean anything.  He immediately infantilizes Joshua (who goes by and is called Joshua by everyone on the team) by calling him JP and saying that you don’t get to choose your nickname.  Initials are hardly a nickname; it’s really not that hard to call people what they want to be called.  In fact it’s quite easy.  I’d go as far as to say that I’ve called literally every single person that I’ve ever met by the name they wanted to be called, ever since I was a little kid.  If a 4 year old kid can figure that out, why can’t a 200 year old adult?

And this is the man I’m being asked to root for.  Not Joshua, the kid trying to establish himself on a failing team, struggling to secure the future he and his family sacrificed everything for him to have.  No.  The entitled white guy with the boomer platitudes of the Little League coach whose funeral you go to because you want to make sure he’s dead.  Being an F1 driver is one of the most exclusive jobs in the world.  Twenty people get to do this.  Twenty.  I can’t think of any other professional sport that fewer people get to do.  20 of 8 billion get to be Formula 1 drivers at any given time.  A matchday squad for a soccer team is 23 people.  So all the F1 drivers in the world wouldn’t even have a full bench in the most popular sport.  Pearce worked very hard to be there.  F1 teams don’t carry drivers.  There’s a whole show on Netflix that says over and over again that you perform or you’re out.  But Sonny gets to be there because he knew a guy once.  That’s the hero this movie gives you.

The story offers up some extremely ridiculous moments for a movie that is pretending to be serious.  For example, Sonny pits and refuses to leave pit lane until they put on the tires that he wants instead of the tires that were part of the race plan.  In F1, a fast pit stop is about 2 seconds.  A slow one is about 4 seconds.  A very slow one is about 6 seconds.  How long do you think an argument takes?  This scene was more reminiscent of Ricky Bobby’s first shot at driving in Talladega Nights rather than belonging in a film that is up for an Academy Award for Best Picture.  He also crashes his car several times in one race to exploit loopholes in the rules.  Each one of those crashes costs the team upwards of $300,000 for the smallest of them to writing off full cars that cost around $15 million each.  He also intentionally creates dangerous track conditions for the other drivers to force more safety cars.  Normally, this would be unacceptable reckless behavior that would result in official sanctions, team sanctions, penalties, and realistically, even firing.  But here, it’s a fun look at Sonny’s maverick ways.

And I do mean maverick, because writer-director Joseph Kosinski and writer Ehren Kruger also wrote and directed Top Gun: Maverick, another film that lacked any substance whatsoever.  And just like Maverick, F1 looks fantastic.  The direction and the cinematography are incredible.  The action is up close and pulse-pounding in the way that Formula 1 racing can be at its very best.  It’s a wonderful simulacrum of actual F1 racing which can only be matched by actually watching F1 racing.  Kosinski also wrote Twisters, which I dinged a lot for not trusting its audience (among other things) and here I found a similar situation.  With all this action, there’s commentary explaining what’s going in the race, like a play-by-play.  But the commentators have an effect on their VO that makes it sound like stadium announcers, which they don’t do in F1 races.  It was like the whole stadium was getting commentary tailored to one team out of ten and it really pulled me out of the moment.  If you felt the need to explain the racing more, I don’t understand why it couldn’t have been done with team chatter over their radios or in the pit amongst the crew.  It didn’t need to be VO and it definitely didn’t need that stadium loudspeaker effect; even that would have made more sense if it were done from the perspective of TV commentators.  Kosinski and I don’t seem to mesh and I’m not sure I’m the problem (although maybe I am, because like Twisters, F1 has a shockingly high RT score of 82% and even higher 97% audience score).  Although, credit where due, he did direct Tron: Legacy, which I thoroughly enjoyed and think is underrated.  The best things about this movie are certainly how it looks.  It’s so intense and shot so well that even though I couldn’t stand Sonny, I was invested in his performance as a driver.  That’s how well the visual storytelling works, there are moments where you can’t help but feel excited about what’s going on in front of you.  Until Sonny starts to talk again and he sounds like a gym teacher from the 90s, cracking a can of beer and smoking a cigarette while telling everyone else what they’re doing wrong.

Throughout the film, Sonny gets more and more reckless, to the point that his insane race strategies nearly get someone killed.  F1 cars are the safest cars in the world.  This isn’t an exaggeration, I’m not being hyperbolic.  But when it comes to explosions, no amount of safety tech can save you from burning alive when that Nomex suit finally gives up the ghost.  And yet, a minor scuffle that causes Sonny to lose track position elicits a much larger, physical, and violent response than his decisions putting people in life and death situations.  There are moments in this film that made me hate Sonny and yet the perspective of the film is that he’s the good guy.  He’s the one people need to be more like.  Including Joshua Pearce.

This is the part of the movie that infuriated me.  Like I said, I used to love racing.  I still care about it, but my feelings are more complicated (it’s hard to have a hobby that contributes to killing the planet).  Racing is very dangerous.  It’s not nebulous, it’s not ambiguous, it’s plain.  People die doing this job.  People take it very seriously and they do everything they can to race and engineer safely and they still die.  I have heroes I grew up worshipping who died or came close to death while behind the wheel.  Ayrton Senna, the man whose name this movie holds up like shibboleth to the racing fans, using his credibility to bolster their own, is dead because of a wild lack of safety considerations.  Jim Clark, another legend, died racing.  NASCAR was never my thing, but Dale Earnhardt died in what looked like a low speed collision on track.  Just recently, current F1 drivers Pierre Gasly and Charles Leclerc lost their close friend Anthoine Hubert to a fatal Formula 2 crash.  This is a dangerous job.  This movie was meant feel real.  To be in this world, our world; that’s why other than APX GP, the rest of the teams are real.  The real F1 drivers and team principals are in this movie.  They’re at real F1 circuits.  And the movie spends over two and a half hours acting like the biggest problem in Formula 1 today is that drivers aren’t willing to get each other killed for glory.  Frankly, as a fan of racing specifically and of people not dying for no good reason generally, I think F1: The Movie is a disgrace.  A glitzy, glossy fantasy film written for Yellowstone dads who think the point of manhood is getting others to perceive you as tough, no matter what the cost is to solidify and maintain that perception.  And the worst part of all this is that it’s told through the eyes of a man who knows very pointedly how dangerous racing is because he nearly got himself killed before he gave up Formula 1.  It cost him his promising career.  Living in a van and traveling the country with a sign that says “Have right foot, will travel” may be working fine for him, hell, it might even be the purest form of racing.  But it’s not what he dreamed of doing.  He pushed it too far and made a mistake.  That happens.  But he didn’t learn from it.  He’s haunted every night by dreams of that near-fatal crash.  And his response, 30 years later, is to be that reckless again and again and encourage others to do it too.

I desperately wanted to like this movie, but, like I said, from the very premise it had issues and then the execution was beyond maddening.  I wanted to talk about how excited I was to see Kerry Condon (Better Call Saul, Banshees of Inisherin), an unbelievably talented actress, on the big screen again after undeservedly losing Best Supporting Actress in 2023.  But I couldn’t even enjoy that, as she was reduced to a token woman on the team (they do have two in this movie, but for the life of me, I can’t remember if the sole woman on the pit crew was ever given a name) and love interest for Sonny Hayes despite them having no chemistry together.  None of that matters because they’re the two prettiest white people in the movie, so they have to get together.  Doesn’t need to make sense.  It was just as wooden and forced in Jurassic World and they made a billion dollars with that.  So I don’t get to talk about Kerry Condon because her role could have been played by a cardboard standee and Kevin McCallister’s Talkboy.  Doesn’t matter that she has the ability to steal any scene from actors of the highest quality as demonstrated in Banshees, no.  Her character, Kate, could just have easily been Love Interest No.1 on the call sheet.  I didn’t count, but I’m almost certain the announcers have more lines than she does.

F1: The Movie is not devoid of moments; it’s capable of engaging you emotionally from time to time but in a way that feels cheap by the next scene.  And the action really is exciting to watch, although not necessarily better than an actual F1 race, but for the density of action.  But the rest of this movie just isn’t worth it.  It’s flashy, hollow, and meaningless.  There is so much more wrong with this film that I didn’t even get a chance to talk about it all because this is already the longest post I’ve ever made.  I rarely outright recommend against watching a movie and I think this is the closest I’ve come.  If you can enjoy the action, go for it.  It’s streaming on Apple TV.  But if you want to watch something that properly celebrates racing, you can do far better than this Yellowstone ass movie.  Rush isn’t my favorite, but it tells a real story and is done well.  Ford v Ferrari is a beautiful, beautiful film with more heart and soul to it than this piece of very corporate feeling media (I read that for the teams to agree, Red Bull especially, they had to agree not to make any look bad or like a villain; that doesn’t feel like art to me).  It’s such a good movie that I need to watch it again and write about it for you because I don’t think enough people have seen it.  And if you want even more Formula 1, Netflix has eight seasons of Drive to Survive available.  And while Senna (the 2010 documentary, not the horrible Netflix series from 2024) isn’t streaming anywhere currently, that is a movie that is worth a watch for anyone with even a passing interest in anything vaguely wheel shaped.  It’s an amazing look at Senna’s life and the first film to get the approval of Senna’s family.  And if you want something as silly as this movie can be, but on purpose, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is still good fun, even if it is NASCAR.  F1: The Movie is a 2 hour, 35 minute film that does not respect your time, your intellect, or the sport of racing.  I cannot believe F1 got a Best Picture nomination.  Did movies suck this year?  Because this one did.