For the week of April 20th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing the hit sequel Bad Boys for Life to Blu-ray. For a franchise that existed to provide audiences with one boneheaded, ludicrous thrill after another (and I mean that as a compliment), this third entry attempts the truly unthinkable: to make its lead characters grow up. It's been almost twenty years since 2003's Bad Boys II, and stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith are certainly no longer the strapping young men they once were. Strike that: Lawrence is no longer strapping. As in his great Beach Bum turn, Lawrence seems content to have thickened out of his once-nervy agitator role into a kind of drawling, wannabe statesman, and some of Bad Boys for Life's best scenes find his Marcus Burnett enjoying his time off the force, whether that's watching telenovelas during his spa days or heckling Will Smith's Mike Lowery over the latter's fondness for dying his goatee. See, Lowery is still ride or die on the Miami PD, but he's also on the wrong side of fifty, and the film acknowledges there's something more than a little sad about this aging playboy trying to dodge bullets and banter like he's a younger man. And a little surprising, too: despite the film's screenplay-by-committee (the likes of Chris Bremner, Peter Craig, and Joe Carnahan all contributed drafts over the years), the film forces Mike into a violent confrontation with his mortality when you least expect it, and we're off to the races, pitching the leads' advancing years crisis against a brutal cartel assassin (the very charismatic Jacob Scipio) with a possibly supernatural mother (Kate del Castillo), a host of cannon-fodder confederates, and a backstory that most of you will probably guess before the film is half over. But the proceedings are so fun, and surprisingly sweet, that the clichés go down much easier. This is easily the silliest of the Bad Boys, with a lovably corny center that owes as much to The Avengers and Fast & Furious as it does any move with Bad Boys in the title. Note the hotshot "AMMO" squad that Mike and Marcus cross paths with. At first, it seems like they're just younger foils to Lawrence and Smith (they're played by the High School Musical-ready group of Vanessa Hudgins, Alexander Ludwig, Charles Melton, and Paola Núñez, who deserves to be a huge star in the States), except they stick around, and by the end, we're looking at a whole squad of Bad Boys raring to carry on through god knows how many sequels. I don't want to talk up Bad Boys for Life too much. As fun as it is, the action scenes are kind of a whiff (Belgian directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah bring a lot of flash, but they don't have Michael Bay's sociopathic gift for staging mayhem and carnage), and I'm little loath to over-praise a movie that not only casts the loathsome D.J. Khaled in a sizable cameo but also indulges his fondness for saying "**** boi." Still, Bad Boys for Life freed me from thinking about anything upsetting or existentially terrifying for two hours. For that, I owe.
I've read reviews suggesting that The Gentlemen - the latest crime caper from Guy Ritchie - represents a return to form for its director. On the surface, I get it. Since 2009's Sherlock Holmes, Ritchie has found varying degrees of success servicing big-budget Hollywood blockbusters (besides the Downey Holmeses, Ritchie has helmed King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, the live-action Aladdin remake, and - best of all - his underrated caper The Man from U.N.C.L.E.). The Gentlemen, on the other hand, more closely resembles Ritchie's profane, hyperkinetic gangster films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. And like those earlier cult classics, The Gentlemen is almost deliberately baroque, doubling back in on itself as it details the complications that arise when an American marijuana kingpin (Matthew McConaughey) in London tries to sell his business amidst some very bad people (Jeremy Strong's billionaire investor, Henry Golding's Chinese mobster, and Eddie Marsan's unscrupulous tabloid editor). Much of the movie unfolds as a faux-screenplay pitch that Hugh Grant's sleazy investigator delivers to McConaughey's right-hand man (Charlie Hunnam, whose studied glumness is a long way away from his glorious Undeclared weirdo), and that's not even counting the string of reversals and reveals and twists that occupy the film's third act. I enjoyed Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch well enough, and if The Gentlemen were playing in the same sandbox, I think I'd like it more. Unfortunately, the film is less a return to form for Ritchie than it is his long screed at his role in the Hollywood community. You don't have to stretch to see his own narrative in McConaughey's suave gangster - they're both self-made men who turned scrappy backgrounds into financial success - although if the character's lazy entitlement is any indicator (and McConaughey's logy leading-man turn does not help - I have never seen him more checked out on camera), Ritchie seems to believe he's far better than all the pretenders who've tried to ape his breakout features after he stopped making gangster movies. Whether you agree with that premise or not is one thing, but you can't deny how offensively loathsome Ritchie makes almost everyone who isn't McConaughey. There's Strong's broad Jewish stereotype; Golding's hostile Asian stereotype; Grant's rapacious gay stereotype: everyone here is a tone-deaf type. All the better straw men for Ritchie to tear down, I guess, while he's ranting about the British celebrity-gossip rags and the state of the film industry. I knew Ritchie could be crass; it's the self-absorption that surprises me. The Gentlemen isn't wholly dire. As offensive as his character is (he might as well be playing "Gay Panic"), Grant is having a lot of fun playing the kind of scumbag Michael Caine popularized in the '80s, and Colin Farrell walks away with the movie as an Irish boxing coach with a foul mouth and unexpected realms of sensitivity. But on the whole, so much of The Gentlemen feels like Ritchie screaming at you to get off his yard. No thanks.
Still, despite its lapses in taste, at least The Gentlemen is more engaging than Floria Sigismondi's The Turning, which limps onto Blu-ray from Universal Studios Home Entertainment. As the title might suggest, the film is the latest adaptation of Henry James's classic The Turn of the Screw. For something written in 1898, the novella has proven uncommonly fertile creative territory. It's inspired at least two masterpieces (Jack Clayton's The Innocents and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and yes: Taxi Driver is a loose adaptation of The Turn of the Screw) and one very good PBS TV movie (this version with Colin Firth). And with good reason - the story has a great hook wherein a governess (played here by Mackenzie Davis) comes to care for two children (Finn Wolfhard and The Florida Project's Brooklynn Prince) only to suspect that they are under threat from spectral apparitions. The Turning gets the look of such a shivery tale. It's set in a spooky mansion, and all to the strains of Nathan Barr's terrific, menacing score. But something clearly happened to The Turning in between the end of production and its final cut. Even though this film hinges around disorientation and temporal confusion, there's no reason it should be this incoherent. Scenes happen as if at random, and nothing gets any chance to breathe. The whole movie takes on the tenor of a jump scare: jarring and quick, but ultimately unsatisfying. Nowhere is that sensation worse than in the ending...and here's where I have to tread carefully. The great thing about The Turn of the Screw is that about halfway through, we begin to suspect that the governess character might not be the most reliable narrator. So in theory, I can see how The Turning's third act is meant to draw our suspicions away from any ghosts and right onto Davis' frightened protagonist. But in practice, we get haphazard ambiguity: the film has three non-endings stacked right on top of each other, none of which satisfy either dramatically or thematically. It just feels like Universal couldn't end the movie, and so they let a bunch of execs loose on it with "first thought, best thought" instincts at play. Everyone here - and I include Henry James - deserves better than this.
From Paramount Home Media Distribution comes the first in the studio's new "Paramount Presents" series. I might quibble with how Paramount has handled its flagship run - the collectible art and packaging is nice, but where are the 4K Blu-ray discs? - but I can't say much that's bad about the first three films in the series. To start, we get one of Alfred Hitchcock's most iconic films: the 1955 romantic thriller To Catch a Thief. As a thriller, I've always found To Catch a Thief a little underwhelming. It adopts the same intensity of pace as its beautiful French Riviera environs - breezy, relaxing, languid - which isn't exactly the best course of action to take when assaying how a reformed thief (Cary Grant) sets off to prove he isn't involved in a series of jewel heists. But the romantic element wholly redeems the film. To Catch a Thief is less about crime than it is about two of the most beautiful people on the planet (Grant and the luminous Grace Kelly) trying - and failing - to keep from devouring one another, and all under the allure of Robert Burks' rapturous VistaVision cinematography. Their sexual chemistry is off the charts; we often forget that as good as Hitchcock was at building suspense, he was just as skilled pairing Hollywood elites together in the most attractive ways. He was obsessed with star quality, which also proves essential to the second Paramount Presents film, the 1958 melodrama King Creole. See, King Creole stars Elvis Presley, who'd already found huge box-office fortunes with Jailhouse Rock and Love Me Tender. But those movies only succeeded at letting Elvis sing and dance - as an actor, he's patently terrible in both. Not so with King Creole. Director Michael Curtiz (who made The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca) treats his star seriously. While the film is as conventional as conventional gets (Elvis' struggling musician tries to make it in New Orleans' seedy bar scene), Curtiz uses it as a way to get at Elvis' latent aggression: his fear of being overlooked, and his anger at being underestimated. You watch Elvis in King Creole, and you realize there's an alternate universe where he could have had James Dean's career if he'd wanted it. Yet the best of these Paramount features might be Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction, which is one of the most influential erotic thrillers ever made. To be sure, it's still a crackerjack entertainment: you will find few scarier Big Bads than Glenn Close's Alex Forrest, a lonely editor who seduces Michael Douglas' hapless suburban stooge and then proceeds to dismantle his family when he spurns her. Close was nominated for an Oscar, and she probably should have won, so visceral (and strangely heartbreaking) is her character's rage. But Fatal Attraction also inspired dozens of similar films (and Douglas starred in many of them, from the gonzo Basic Instinct to the more pedestrian Disclosure) and a whole subgenre of American cinema: we wouldn't have "Skinemax" without Fatal Attraction.