For the week of May 13th, Universal and MGM Home Entertainment are bringing Fighting with My Family to Blu-ray. There's a dynamite story to be told about Soraya Knight, otherwise known as the WWE wrestler Paige. Knight she might have ushered in the league's Women's Revolution and become a two-time Divas Champion, but she also struggled with drug addiction and a near-debilitating neck injury. She became the general manager of Smackdown but lost the position just as quickly, and she fell into anorexia and depression. But none of that material makes it into Fighting with My Family. Instead, what we get is something that feels like The Fighter But For Kids: Knight comes from a rough-and-tumble - but loving - Norwich family of ex-cons and former addicts who value wrestling above all else. I like Nick Frost and Lena Headey (as Knight's pop and mum, respectively) a lot, and there's something to the idea of these broken people using wrestling as a means to heal, but the film is sitcom-level condescending in how it reduces the Knights to easy working-class stereotypes. For that, I blame writer/director Stephen Merchant. Merchant, you may recall, was the co-creator of The Office and Extras, but he jettisons their biting satire for biopic formulas that feel disingenuous and way too broad. Merchant looks at Knight at age eighteen (the wonderful Florence Pugh) and follows Knight through her WWE audition and subsequent struggle through the NXT development process. Here, too, Merchant goes for the obvious three-act structure. The prickly, Goth-styled Knight butts heads with the rigor of the program (and the giggly models/cheerleaders who normally audition for the WWE), but eventually she learns the value of hard work and how to be the best version of herself. And all with the help of Dwayne Johnson, playing himself. As affable as Johnson is, his presence further sandblasts the interesting edges off Knight's story. We see The Rock as the face of the WWE - tough, kind, affirming - and he's so charming that Merchant hopes we won't notice the virtual lack of controversial issues (sexism, abuse, malpractice) plaguing this film's version of the WWE. I get it - Johnson co-produced Fighting with My Family alongside the WWE - and I wouldn't mind this sanitized version if Merchant didn't go for the expected beat every time. When Knight starts bonding with her female teammates during practice, we get a metronome-timed montage set to "Takin' Care of Business." It's that kind of movie. What works, then, is Pugh, who's playing a type but somehow finds a character underneath the formula conventions. Pugh had one of the most striking debuts in recent years with Lady Macbeth, and she's even better here. Fighting with My Family confirms she's a movie star: I give it five years before she's playing a superhero and making $10 million a movie. And of the many conventions the film trots out, precisely one works - against all odds, Merchant gets a loose, funny performance from Vince Vaughn (as Knight's WWE coach). Vaughn might want to pivot into serious actor mode, yet he's at his best when he's a snarky jerk, and he plays a great one here. With actors, typecasting can be a good thing. When it comes to real life, however, we need a little more.
Also from Universal comes the horror-comedy Happy Death Day 2U. The first Happy Death Day got a light pass for applying Groundhog Day-style temporal mechanics to an otherwise unremarkable slasher movie: meet Jessica Rothe's Tree Gelbman, a sorority girl doomed to relive her death over and over again until she stops the masked slasher who kills her. It's only fitting that when Happy Death Day 2U begins, it's ripping off the best of the Grounding Day imitators, Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow. To wit, we open on Ryan Phan (Phi Vu), who spent most of the last movie sleeping in his car while Tree occupied his dorm bed. Writer-director Christopher Landon follows Ryan through his morning routine, which ends in his murder at the hands of the first film's baby-masked psycho, only this time, when Ryan resets the day and starts freaking out, Tree is battle-ready and joins his side. She's like a peppier Rita Vrataski, and I was excited by the possibilities of how she'd use her knowledge to help the infinitely more terrified Ryan. Better still, after she takes out the killer, the film drops this insane twist that brings us straight into Back to the Future 2 territory, one that involves time loops and parallel universes and multiple iterations of the same people running wild. Most sequels are content to reheat the same old, same old, so I was thrilled that Happy Death Day 2U had fully jumped genre tracks. Here's the thing, though. I just described the first fifteen minutes to you. After piling complications on top of one another - including a friggin' quantum whatzit with the power to unstick people in time - Landon goes the road most traveled and shoves Tree back into another time loop for the vast majority of the film. Aspects of the film do work. Rothe continues to prove her skill at light comedy; she reminds me of Gene Wilder in that she's funniest when she's completely freaking out. And stranding Tree in an alternate version of the time loop lets this sequel tweak many of our assumptions from the first film. The killer, for instance, isn't who we think it is this go-round, nor has Tree's mom (Missy Yager) died tragically in this reality. But for the most part, Landon delivers Tree dying over and over again. I wouldn't have had as big an issue with this choice had the film been a little more mercenary in its leanings, except the early goings get you to expect a better, more inventive film. As is, the murder stuff is so tangential as to almost not matter (the new killer doesn't care about Tree, and even his/her/their victims' deaths won't count if Tree gets sent back to her own dimension), although I find that narrative dead-end less egregious than Happy Death Day 2U's surprisingly cloying sentimental streak. We spend way too much time moping over Tree's relationship with her newly living mom as well as Tree's agita when she finds out that her boyfriend from her reality (Israel Broussard) is actually dating her sorority frenemy (Rachel Matthews) in the alternate one. And the less said about the interminable, mid-90s studio-comedy slapstick involving Steve Zissis' stuffy dean, the better. His scenes are almost as bad as the Larry Miller stuff from The Nutty Professor. Look, Happy Death Day was always a thin little venture. Happy Death Day 2U just reveals the franchise's limitations. It doesn't have the scope, budget, or skill to realize its ambitions, so it ends up feeling like a bigger missed opportunity. Here's the Blumhouse model at its least inspired: a financial ethos desperately in search of something to say.
Happy Death Day 2U doesn't have enough to say; Michael Haneke's 1997 version of Funny Games, which gets a Criterion release this week, might have too much. You might assume that Funny Games is a slasher movie, and not unwisely: Haneke takes a loving family (Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, and Stefan Clapczynski) and strands them in their summer house with two sadistic killers (Arno Frisch and Frank Giering) completely devoid of empathy or remorse. That's practically the setup for the recent The Strangers: Prey at Night or any number of home-invasion chillers. The difference, however, is Haneke. Never one for traditional genre, Haneke makes polemics disguised as traditional movies - in films like The White Ribbon or Cache, he's often commenting on the nature of the relationship between the subject and the spectator, and Funny Games uses this dialectic to examine our obsession with violence in cinema. In some ways, Funny Games feels like Haneke's reaction to the previous year's horror hit Scream. If Scream dabbled in some light postmodernism (all its characters could name-check slasher movies as they were evading their own masked killer), Funny Games is a full-on semiotics experiment. Frisch and Giering's killers know they're in a movie - Giering is constantly debating the mechanics of narrative filmmaking and whether or not they apply to this current situation, and Frisch talks to us as much as he talks to his victims, breaking the fourth wall in order to ask us questions, explain his actions (he full-on cops to letting the family live longer than would be expected simply because Funny Games would end too early if he didn't), and expound on the nature of fiction vs. non-fiction. No matter how viscerally Lothar, Mühe, and Clapczynski try to win our sympathies, Haneke uses his killers to undermine the very constructs that cast them as prey for our entertainment. What makes Funny Games upsetting isn't any particular act of violence (Haneke keeps most of the bloodshed off camera); it's the larger conceit that the universe is cruel and life is meaningless, and that art provides no escape. I'm conflicted about this approach. On one hand, Haneke maintains such rigorous control that the film always satisfies as an intellectual experience. On the other hand, I tire of Haneke's now-customary pose of hip nihilism, blaming us for our interest in horror movies even while he's as cruel as an artist can be to his own creations. The whole movie is an exercise in finger-waggling. That might be the point, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.
We live in a post-irony world now, and I can think of no better example than the long, strange tale of how Liam Neeson torpedoed his most recent revenge thriller Cold Pursuit (which Lionsgate releases this week) during the film's pre-release press tour. For those not in the know, Neeson responded to a reporter's innocuous question with a disturbing anecdote wherein Neeson revealed that he was so disturbed by a friend's rape that he spent a week wandering the streets of Dublin hoping that a black person would pick a fight with him so Neeson could kill him. The whole situation was a publicist's nightmare: yes, the full context of Neeson's story is slightly more nuanced than my description might suggest, but in no way does this B-movie warrant the gravely serious racial politics Neeson dredged up during a softball interview question. And so the press tour turned into a Liam Neeson apology tour, leaving Cold Pursuit to flounder at the box office. It's unfortunate, both for Neeson and for the film, which is far more idiosyncratic than Neeson's standard January/February schlock oeuvre might suggest. Lionsgate sold the film as another Taken clone, with Neeson driven to bloody vengeance after a group of drug dealers murder his son. While that thread provides Cold Pursuit's narrative spine, the revenge plot is but one thread of many. As Neeson starts plowing through Colorado scumbags (sometimes literally - he's a snow-plow magnate), his action create a ripple effect, unsettling local law enforcement (personified by Emmy Rossum and John Doman's mismatched partners) and Denver's biggest crime lord (Tom Bateman) alike, the latter of which becomes convinced that his Ute Indian rivals are mounting a hostile takeover. It took me a little while to figure out what director Hans Petter Moland (remaking his own 2014 film In Order of Disappearance) and screenwriter Frank Baldwin were up to, but about halfway through it hit me: they're riffing on Elmore Leonard more than on Neeson's fearsome presence. The plot feels like a mix of Pronto and Mr. Majestyk, and like Dutch Leonard, Baldwin tries his level best to give the villains more personality than we normally see in these junky programmers. Bateman is an elitist fussbudget who obsesses over his young son's diet; his right-hand man (Domenick Lombardozzi) is a sweetly sensitive bruiser with an affinity for the Cleveland Browns; and the two hitmen (Benjamin Hollingsworth and David O'Hara) surrounding the periphery are laconic sadists who bicker about the ins and out of motel behavior. If Cold Pursuit were a little bit snappier in his patter, we'd be looking at a B-movie gem. Still, even without truly clever dialogue, the film makes enough quirky moves to justify its existence. Neeson should make weirder programmers like this. And keep his mouth shut during the press junket.