“Old Dogs”“Wild Hogs,” “Old Dogs” — what’s next, “Bumps on Logs”? Truly, I would rather watch John Travolta and Robin Williams sitting on a tree trunk, doing nothing, than endure their best efforts to energize this hound.
Does no one know how to film physical comedy anymore? In the latest Disney live-action comedy, people are constantly getting their fingers crushed by car-trunk lids, or getting clocked in the groin by golf balls, and undergoing grotesque facial distortions owing to the wrong medication. And none of it is funny.
Seven years after his whirlwind 24-hour marriage to Vicki (Kelly Preston), an uptight fellow named Dan (Williams) learns he’s the father of twins. Dan and his best friend and business partner, footloose bachelor Charlie (Travolta), end up baby-sitting these two for a couple of weeks.
Camping trip: Ends in flames. Big deal with Japanese business partners: crisis. Dan is a sad sack; Charlie is obnoxious; the jokes come back cyclically to “grandpa” gags as often as they come back to the “we’re not gay!” gags. The labored premise of this setup is not worth the effort. Goodwill generated by familiar faces cannot overcome all obstacles. This is the lesson of the film, and better scripts and directors to all next time. Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
* PG.
At area theaters
“Ninja Assassin”
In Japan, where the blades are shiny and sharp and if the fake blood isn’t staining the lens, you’re not trying hard enough, there’s a tradition of sword-and-splatter pictures. It’s the foundation of “Ninja Assassin,” a run-of-the-mill Hollywood ninja movie.
For a thousand years, “The Nine Clans” have taken in orphans from around the world and forged them into cold- blooded killing machines. Meet their price, and they’ll kill anybody you say.
Raizo remembers this brutal training in flashbacks. But he got out. Now hiding in Berlin, he tries to help those the clan has marked for death. Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel
* 1/2 R.
At area theaters
“The Road”In the after-the-apocalypse tale “The Road,” the Man and the Boy enter a deserted barn. Bodies hang from the rafters.
“Why?” the boy asks.
“You know why,” his father replies.
The father in this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning fable is played by Viggo Mortensen. His young son is portrayed by Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee.
The world has met a terrible fate. It may be nuclear or environmental or cosmic. The end was radical. Cities are rubble.
As the Man and the Boy make their way across a scorched landscape, the terrain shudders beneath them in seismic death rattles. The father and son are not alone in this harrowing world. “The Road” is populated by survivors who roam in gangs — armed, hungry, mean.
Father and son carry the human torch. Lost is the capacity to rebuild, the resources that lead to culture. Surely some state of grace exists between the sentimental and the cruel. Novelist McCarthy knows this. But filmmaker Hillcoat doesn’t seem interested in finding it. Lisa Kennedy
** 1/2 R.
At area theaters
“Fantastic Mr. Fox”“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is yet another sign we’re living in an animation heyday. This adaptaton of Roald Dahl’s children’s book is a stop-motion wonder.
The cast includes George Clooney as Mr. Fox, Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox; Bill Murray as Badger, Mr. Fox’s attorney; and Jason Schwartzman as the Foxes’ son.
The story opens with Mr. Fox making a promise to stop thieving. But then he becomes restless. His job as a newspaper columnist doesn’t satisfy. And so Mr. Fox begins nightly raids on the farms of his old nemeses, the farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean (Michael Gambon). He enlists Possum (Wally Wolodarky) as his accomplice.
The “terrible shovels” and “terrible tractors” of the original story remain. Employed by the infuriated farmers, they rip holes in the earth and threaten the habitats of the Foxes.
Boggis, Bunce and Bean are gluttons. Which makes stealing from them quite natural for a fox. Lisa Kennedy
*** 1/2 PG.
At area theaters
“The House of the Devil”“The House of the Devil” is a fine little old-school thriller, set in the 1980s and devoted, fondly, to the visual syntax and Farrah-inspired hair of the era.
When the main character, Sam, a cash-strapped college sophomore played by Jocelin Donahue, listens to music, she does so on a Sony Walkman-type apparatus that could level a large forest animal.
Sam answers a campus flier, and even though the voice on the other end of the line sounds suspicious (“I promise to make this as painless as possible”), she agrees to the job and bums a ride out to a scary, old rural Victorian home. Once inside the house (of the devil!) she discovers there’s no baby to sit; her charge is the unseen mother (shades of “Psycho”) of Mr. and Mrs. Ulman, a pair of creeps played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. A lunar eclipse provides the backdrop for this sly suspense-building exercise. Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
*** 1/2 R.
At Starz FilmCenter
