Promising comic premise -- a swinging single San Diego newsman in the Seventies, and his personal attraction but professional resistance to a female colleague -- subjected to a strategy of anything-for-a-laugh: wild exaggeration, improbability, impossibility, fantasy, absurdity, ribaldry, animal abuse, cartoon interlude, musical numbers, celebrity cameos (Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, …
The term “I don’t understand” is spoken numerous times throughout the film. That’s not counting audience members. Come equipped with a sophisticated understanding of the banking collapse of the mid-2000s and you’ll be hanging on every word. For those who invest in cinema and wouldn’t know a housing bubble from …
Cop-partner comedy from Adam McKay, not to say cop-buddy, with Will Ferrell wobbly in tone as a contented desk jockey and Mark Wahlberg a steady straight man as a pent-up eager beaver. It evinces a deathly pale image, a fair amount of industry, and a few amusing ideas (a fight …
Mainstream comedy, at the broadest point in the stream, about a pair of developmentally arrested forty-year-olds (Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly), still living at home with their respective single mom and single dad, then living together after the parents meet and marry, living first at loggerheads and later in boisterous …
Will Ferrell vehicle, on the NASCAR circuit, goes too far, too fast, too often, but the excesses are usually easygoing (the bratty brothers' response to the news of their parents' divorce: "Yeah! Two Christmases!"), and the nonstop product plugging is satirically motivated (i.e., dramatically justified), and John C. Reilly and …
Where does skit-assembler Adam McKay (SNL, Anchorman) get off receiving name-above-the-title status? The Big Short wasn’t enough to warrant such an elevation, never mind the Oscar noms (and McKay’s win for adapted screenplay), and this throw-everything-against-the-screen-and-see-what-sticks attempt to mimic Oliver Stone is a giant, self-conscious plunge in the wrong direction. …