For the week of June 27th, DreamWorks is bringing Kung Fu Panda 3 to Blu-ray. With this picture, the latest in the Kung Fu Panda franchise, we see the Law of Diminishing Returns in effect. To wit: the first Kung Fu Panda was a welcome surprise (DreamWorks Animation's best film until How to Train Your Dragon), the second was fun but inessential, and now the third is...fine? Building off the cliffhanger ending of Kung Fu Panda 2, kung-fu master and orphan Po (voiced by Jack Black) has found his birth father (Bryan Cranston), but that new relationship doesn't bring him inner harmony. If anything, Po's life only gets more complicated as he a) tries to reconcile that discovery with his adoptive parent (James Hong) while b) preparing for battle against an evil spirit warrior (J.K. Simmons) who wants to be the most powerful kung-fu warrior in the world. That's all well and good, but even though the film is spirited and watchable, you can feel the formula clanking in ways it didn't during Kung Fu Panda 1. Everything pretty much plays out the way you'd expect: the emotional rivalry between fathers that ends amicably (the darkness of something like How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the exception, not the rule), the evil villain who can only be defeated through the power of teamwork and friendship, and the hero who needs to learn self-confidence to succeed, despite the fact that it seemed like Po learned it twice before. All good lessons, and all super-acceptable for children. It just feels like product, carefully marketed uplift designed to deliver its message in just over ninety minutes, and with all the cutting-edge CGI and movie-star support staff (Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Lucy Lui, Seth Rogen, David Cross, and Angelina Jolie return as Po's primary mentors and teammates, and they're joined by Kate Hudson, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Al Roker) that money can buy. You can certainly do a whole lot worse - this is no Shark Tale, people - but I suspect the Kung Fu Pandas may have outlived their usefulness.
From Paramount Home Media Distribution is the war comedy Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. A story of war correspondents in Afghanistan, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot represents the latest passion project from writer-actor-national treasure Tina Fey. Just as Fey's Mean Girls saw her adapting Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes for the big screen, so does Whiskey Tango Foxtrot take inspiration from journalist Kim Barker's The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fey seems attracted to insider cultures (high-school social cliques; sketch-comedy writers; underground-bunker escapees), and this new film lets her examine the often raucous day jobs of war correspondents, with her Barker proxy getting a crash course in geopolitics when she gets assigned to cover the U.S. Marines' Afghan operation. Certainly, that means facing bureaucratic standoffs (personified by Billy Bob Thornton's no-B.S. General) and the expected dangers of the front line, but Barker also finds herself contending with horny Afghan politician Ali Massoud Sadiq (a funny Alfred Molina) and the Animal House-esque shenanigans of the press correspondents, particularly given her professional rivalry with Margot Robbie's ambitious young journalist and her far more personal one with Martin Freeman's charming photographer. It's all very entertaining, if more than a little sanitized. Barker's nonfiction memoir took a complex approach to the life of a war correspondent, while Fey, writer (and her 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt partner) Robert Carlock, and directors Glenn Ficarra & John Requa are a little too content to simplify the truth in order to fit a three-act structure and then add sitcom-ready gags (albeit funny ones). All that's to be expected, I guess, and at least Whiskey Tango Foxtrot does such an entertaining job of adhering to convention, with Ficarra & Requa helping to maintain a snappy pace and getting terrific performances from the likes of Freeman, Fey (who's never been this good in a movie-movie before), and especially Robbie, who displays some nicely self-aware comic chops (she's definitely not just a pretty face). More problematic, however, is the film's depiction of Afghan culture. The broad strokes are fine, considering this isn't a documentary, but I do wish the filmmakers had wandered out of central casting. Sadiq and Fey's guide (Christopher Abbott) are the two most significant Afghan characters, and they're played by two mostly Caucasian actors of no Middle Eastern descent. Sure, Molina and Abbott are terrific, but I'm sure a Middle Eastern actor would have been, too. Hollywood comes by its whitewashing reputation honestly.
For a more serious study of wartime tensions, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is adding Eye in the Sky to the discussion. Director Gavin Hood's thriller shifts the focus to one of modern warfare's most controversial element: drones. When an international strike force identifies an infamous terrorist entering an African safehouse, Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) is ready to order a drone strike on the target...but the reality is so much more complicated. After preparing the drone pilot (Aaron Paul), Powell informs her superiors (including Jeremy Northam and the great Alan Rickman, in his last on-screen performance) and unwittingly kickstarts a bureaucratic nightmare; see, everyone wants the target dead, but no one wants to take responsibility for any negative outcomes, which means that Powell's initial decision moves further up the administrative foodchain and farther from anything resembling a resolution. And all the while, the situation on the ground intensifies, compounded by both the presence of an innocent young girl (Aisha Takow) who'll surely die if the drones attack and the knowledge that with every passing minute, the terrorist cell is nearing the completion of a suicide-bombing plan. Ultimately, Eye in the Sky hinges on a moral discussion - to what extent does a moral ill (killing an innocent civilian) outweigh a moral good (stopping a future terrorist attack) - in a way that reminded me of the Playhouse 90 dramas of the 1950s and 1960s. Like those live TV programs, Eye in the Sky reduces complicated ethical dichotomies into discussions between all-too flawed human beings. And that would be a great thing, if the project were up to the standards of, say, Reginald Rose's great 12 Angry Men. But Guy Hibbert's script doesn't have the same kind of punch and focus (the scenes with Paul's conflicted drone pilot feel like they belong in a different movie), and Hood's direction doesn't make as good a use of space as Sidney Lumet did in 12 Angry Men. It takes a lot to make office buildings inherently dramatic, and Hood can't quite pull it off, cutting a little too frequently between his various locations in an effort to build tension. Still, Eye in the Sky offers a sobering debate, and something more, in its best moments: as the administrative ineptitude grows ever more staggering, we realize the future of the free world rests in the hands of a bunch of dithering, painfully inadequate bureaucrats (I doubt it's an accident that we find Iain Glen's foreign secretary stalling the decision from a toilet seat), and we could be watching an updated version of Dr. Strangelove. How funny, and how scary, that so little has changed in fifty years.
Heck, part of the reason it's so hard to muster up too much enthusiasm for Eye in the Sky (which is flawed but noble) is because we've got the real deal on Blu-ray this week. Criterion has reissued Stanley Kubrick's seminal military satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Even though Kubrick and co-screenwriters Terry Southern & Peter George were reflecting directly on the Cold War paranoia of the early 1960s, their film has endured because it focuses on the broken institutions that control us. To wit: a simple, horrible administrative screw-up begins the countdown to World War III, and the more various government parties try to correct the error, the more they realize the very infrastructure that they created violently resists any changes. No one gets away clean here. RAF Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) and U.S. President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) are thoughtful, reasoned, and utterly ineffectual, while it's a toss-up as to who's more loathsome: the hawkish U.S. General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott, giving the best performance in a film full of great ones), who can't contain his glee at describing his pilots' flying prowess, even though their success will mean total annihilation; Air Force Brigadier General Ripper (Sterling Hayden, deranged and terrifying), who sends the planet hurtling towards destruction because of his more-than-a-little insane theories about Soviet fluoridation and sexual purification; or the title character (Sellers for a third time), a scientist for whom the adjective "mad" seems inadequate and who was probably a Nazi before he defected to the U.S., if we're to assume the worst from his malfunctioning, seemingly sentient right arm (it keeps springing into the "Heil, Hitler" salute). The most brave, noble people in the film are probably the bomber pilots (let by Slim Pickens, who, legend has it, didn't know he was making a comedy), and Kubrick complicates their uncomplicated courage with the gravity of their mission. It's a testament to his brilliance that Dr. Strangelove isn't just a study of grotesques. At ninety-five minutes long, the film is one of Kubrick's shortest (after Strangelove, the only movie he'd make under two-and-a-half hours would be 1987's Full Metal Jacket), yet he packs it with so much thematic density, from Kafka-esque surrealism (Ken Adam's brilliant production design helps so much in this regard) to slapstick comedy to even honest-to-God war movie; the combat scenes outside Ripper's compound have a vérité charge that I'm willing to bet influenced Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Kubrick even works in a beyond-subtle gender study. It is not an accident that all the principal roles are men, or that the one female character (Tracy Reed) is not only Turgidson's mistress but also a Playboy centerfold: when left to their own devices, men will turn women into sex objects and subordinates, and of course that way lies madness. Vide the chilling final sequence, where the denizens of the War Room move from shock to eager acceptance of nuclear winter once they hear about Dr. Strangelove's 10:1 women-to-men breeding recommendation in order to repopulate the planet. For some, Dr. Strangelove is the funniest scary movie ever made; for others, the scariest funny movie. It's a masterpiece either way, and maybe the finest film of Stanley Kubrick's storied career.