A Million Ways to Die in the West

The funniest joke and most involving character both involve a retarded sheep. Enough said.

1/4

Noah

As never-ending, wooden, and overpowered by Russell Crowe as the arc itself.

1/4

The Quiet Ones

It's such a clichéd and sloppy piece of work that not even a creepy performance by Olivia Cooke can bring it back from the dead.

1/4

Bad Words

Actors directing their own movies sounds like the stuff that nightmares are made of, but Jason Bateman has a surprising flair for being in the director's chair.

He plays Guy, a real life Grinch who sneaks through the cracks of being eligible and ends up competing in a children's spelling bee for reasons that even his reporter can't screw out of him. The whole cast is a riot. Bateman is gleefully nasty, Allison Janney holds nothing back as the president of the spelling bee, and Rohan Chand couldn't be any more charming as the Cindy Lou Who to Bateman's Grinch.

Even as the movie starts getting sentimental,  it never gets sappy and the relationship between Bateman and Chand's characters is surprisingly endearing. Bad Words is a R-I-O-T. 

3/4

The Purge: Anarchy

Ugh. The original Purge had a good idea and promise but fell flat in the execution in the last half. It's like if you cooked a great piece of chicken and left half of it out to rot before you finished it.

This one is the braindead cousin that is like if you took a raw chicken and left it out to become raw from start to finish. Instead of doing something fascinating like maybe filming the sequel based on the aftermath of the original Purge, or maybe filming it from the lead "purgers" perspective, we repeat the same old shit from the first one. The only difference is the characters. There's a mother to root for, her sassy daughter, a soon to be divorced couple working on their issues, and a father with a moral conflict of purging with a justification of revenge. 

There's very little point of listing the characters's names or the actors who play them since no one behind writing this movie seemed to want us to have any interest in the people onscreen. They're all so thinly written besides these attributes I just mentioned you don't know anything about anyone in this movie making you care very little about whatever shit happens. And what's even worse is that everything is so predictable you can see who is going to die/be in danger of dying from about a mile away.

The whole movie feels so lazy and underwritten it's as creative as someone throwing a sheet over their head for scares. Literally nothing goes on minus shooting for the entire 100 minutes, and damn is that 100 minutes stretched like Gum. And did we really need a slo-mo scene every time the lead purgers came on? There's so many laughable elements here I can't see anyone taking the central idea seriously over our government allowing and encouraging us to kill for 12 hours in order to keep the country happier.

When (there's no doubt in my mind this will become like the Saw franchise) the next Purge comes out, I'm making a public announcement that I will purge. In both senses of the word, this lackluster do-do birded entry will make me kill other human beings while forcing myself to vomit knowing that we have to endure more of this.

0/4

A Simple Plan

If there's a moment of A Simple Plan where I wasn't holding my breath it sure the fuck didn't exist. A Simple Plan is an electrifying, unforgettable downward spiral of middle class Americans who have fallen into a situation that was too good to be true, for a reason.

Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and Jacob's best friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) come across a crashed plane which turns out to be the host of a corpse and over several million dollars in it. None of them are in the best financial status to be turning down that much money so they make the decision to split the money amongst themselves. Surely enough this decision turns out to bite all of them in the asses as greed, betrayal, deception take over ruining the relationships of all the characters involved.

A Simple Plan wouldn't have worked as well if the trio of leads didn't commit to such an intense degree. Bill Paxton is a force of nature as Hank, the character who easily makes the biggest moral downgrade of all the characters. It's fascinating watching his character fall down the rabbit hole of sin as money drives him to do things he would have never imagined doing.

As easily the least morally repugnant character of the group, Billy Bob Thornton shines as Hank's dim-witted but well meaning brother. There's such an innocence and sense of vulnerability in his performance it's almost depressing watching his character fall down the hole with the others at such a rapid speed.

My favorite performance though, was Bridget Fonda as Hank's wife. The scenes with her and Paxton work so well because there's such a fascinating dynamic between the two people. Though she's apprehensive at first, she turns out to be the mastermind behind Hank's moves, giving her character a deeper layer then the throwaway, worried wife.

Once you think you know where things are going in A Simple Plan they not only avoid going in that direction but they take off in the complete opposite direction at about 90 miles per hour. There's a scene about halfway through involving the three lead males and a blackmail plan that's brilliant. You think you see one character betraying another just to see him head in the opposite direction. It's a verbal cat and mouse and the viewer never knows how things will end up.

The script in A Simple Plan shines so brightly because it never feels inauthentic. Though violent, crazy, and destructive, A Simple Plan never feels ludicrous and it's a story that could happen to anyone. And that's the most frightening thing of all, that this could be a story of anyone who falls into an opportunity for a better life that's too perfect to imagine. That this life blinds your eyes to everything around you. That those who love and care for you are simply pawns in the way of your success. A Simple Plan is bone chilling and easily one of the best movies of the year.

4/4