Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

The paths we take to movies can be strange, sometimes.  Case in point: after I first listened to an audio book of John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief more than half a decade ago, Three Days of the Condor set up shop in a tiny corner of my brain.  Grisham’s shadowy assassin loves Three Days of the Condor because it’s familiar territory for him: a smart espionage thriller set in a world of hired killer, government operatives, and code names.  All I gleaned from the brief reference was that it was a spy movie with Robert Redford, and that was enough to keep it bouncing around in my mind until the time was right to finally see it.

And when I did, imagine my surprise when Redford turned out to be a computer geek (to the extent that was even possible in 1975) dealing with arcane bits of data in a cleverly disguised CIA office.  The technology of spy movies has certainly moved on since Three Days of the Condor was released — and it seems like the world has, too.  It’s a movie I’ve never heard mentioned or seen on TV, though perhaps I’m not talking to the right people or watching the right channels.  But you’d think one of the smartest thrillers ever made — with a talented pair like Sydney Pollack directing and Robert Redford starring — would show up a little more often.

Three Days of the Condor begins innocently, introducing you to a small group of CIA researchers, which makes their murder all the more abrupt when it happens.  From that point on, it’s intensity overdrive, with Redford gradually shedding his bookworm persona to become more confident, more daring, more in control.  Unlike most thrillers, in which the gun is the weapon of choice, Redford fights primarily with information.  For most of the film he’s fighting to figure out who wants him dead, and why, he knows it’s something he knows.  So he’s constantly thinking and planning, desperate to untangle the knot of secrets surrounding him before he’s caught.

The weakest link of the movie is Faye Dunaway’s presence as a requisite love interest.  Her acting is by no means bad, but after Redford hijacks her and her car and holes up in her apartment to lie low, their ensuing romance is slightly unbelievable.  Then again, it’s pretty standard fare for these types of movies — I don’t know if we can write it of as Stockholm syndrome or simply accept that people in emotionally charged situations tend to develop feelings for each other, but the romantic subplot is the only element of Three Days of the Condors that plays it by the book.  And really, it’s pretty hard to imagine anyone could resist Robert Redford in his prime.

We’re obviously geared to love Redford from the start, but Max von Sydow utterly steals the show during the finale, driving home a magnificently taut twist ending that’s far too good to spoil.  From the first time Sydow appears on screen, we know quite clearly that he is the enemy, that he is cold, merciless, and evil.  But by the end…he is, perhaps, the most respectable character in the film.

Watch Three Days of the Condors for the fun of keeping up with the plot.  Watch it for Redford or Max von Sydow.  Watch it for the 70s charm of ancient computers and phone booths.  But definitely watch it, because thrillers that brew intensity and brains into this fine a cocktail are few and far between.

As part of an ongoing summer campaign to catch up on the all-too numerous pop culture landmarks I’ve somehow missed over the years, I recently found myself watching two of Scorsese’s most famous movies, Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, within the span of a couple days.   While both fantastic films, neither would top my list of Scorsese’s best.  But with all the acclaim Raging Bull gets, it would have to be damn incredible to outmatch my expectations.

As a boxing film, I think I prefer the story of Rocky more.  Stallone’s original manages to capture something special about boxing as a way of life.  It draws in the 70s culture, and admirably balances the sad state of urban decay with Rocky’s heart and clumsy romance.  But Raging Bull is an altogether different movie — after all, it’s based on a real man, a real story, and has a narrower focus.  And for the first time in a long time, it made me appreciate what an amazing actor De Niro is.  So when I was going into Taxi Driver, an idea was already crystallizing in my mind.  I wondered: would Travis Bickle disturb me more than Jake La Motta?

Few biographical films can match the intensity of Raging Bull.  Of course, few biographical films are directed by Martin Scorsese — but the cinematography, editing, and sound work during the boxing matches are absolutely incredible, creating this sharp, powerful edge that goes beyond the typical heavy-handed (no pun intended) sound effects of Hollywood brawls.

Still, as impressed as I was with the filming, De Niro’s acting undeniably deserves even more praise.  His portrayal of Jake La Motta had to be one of the most realistic — yet inhuman — performances I’ve ever seen.  He seemed all too believable at times, which was what made La Motta’s madness so difficult to watch.  In one moment, he clearly adores his wife and cares deeply for his brother.  In another, he stands in the ring, absorbing blow after blow as blood and sweat fly from his body, daring his opponent to continue, enjoying it.  I haven’t seen too many depictions of masochism in movies, but unlike Bill Murray’s hilarious bit part in Little Shop of Horrors, De Niro’s masochist is chillingly insane.

The way De Niro captures La Motta’s calm moments really highlights his shocking ones.  And as the film goes on, it’s not just the pleasure he pulls from violence that eats away at you — it’s his constant, neverending jealousy and insecurity, which builds and builds until it’s clear something is seriously wrong with him.

That’s about where Travis Bickle comes in.  Maybe it’s because Taxi Driver dips further into extremity than Raging Bull, or maybe it’s because I already knew more about the film’s main character, but I actually found Travis to be less disturbing than La Motta.  What’s interesting is how well De Niro plays crazy, but in completely different ways.  Travis is obviously unbalanced and deranged from the very start — he can barely relate to other people, suffers serious insomnia, and harbors a volatile anger that he gradually feels right in letting loose.  That he plans to die by story’s end indicates he simply can’t cope with the world — or how he sees the world, anyway — and has to simply mark it with destruction before leaving for good.

Given that Taxi Driver is fiction and Raging Bull is grounded in history, saying Travis is more of a character than LaMotta may seem pretty obvious.  But it’s true.  And what’s scarier to watch — a homicidal madman, only a step removed from serial killer territory, or a man subtly coming apart as his life progresses, who thrives on pain and slowly self-destructs, both in his personal life and his career?

Yeah, I guess both of them are pretty disturbing!  For my money, LaMotta is the true madman, and De Niro deserved his Oscar.  Maybe it’s time I watched Cape Fear.

For reasons I’m not sure I can fully explain — or even understand – Primer is one of the most unsettling movies I’ve ever seen.  Like the most important works of science fiction, it eschews drama for ideas, or an idea, in this case time travel.  Here is why this is great science fiction:

Compare Primer to Back to the Future.  Back to the Future is a fantastic movie; it’s a classic adventure, fun and heartwarming and flashy and entertaining, which dances around the concept of time travel with faux-concern about disrupting the space-time continuum.  Doc Brown’s eyes bug out whenever Marty tries to change the future, but ultimately this issue is dismissed and relegated to something that concerns only these characters.  Recreate the past or your whole family will slowly disappear from a photograph, culminating in the erasure of your birth!  Back to the Future is Marty’s story, and the “right” thing to do in any situation regarding time muckery is to make sure everything turns out well for Marty.  Everyone goes home happy.

In Part II, you’ve got the evil Biff who uses knowledge of the future to get rich, rule the world, blah blah.  He’s a comical villain, his ancestor was a villain, his kids will be villains.  There’s destiny at work, here, and the grand design allows for the underdog McFlys and the mean old Tannens to be at odds forever, which makes for fun call-backs in the world of cinema.  What it doesn’t do is provide any sort of genuine questions of how time travel would affect real people.  And that’s fine — it doesn’t have to.

Primer does.  We see two men — two good men, kind and hard-working and smart — run aground the rocky morality of time travel.  We first see them labor, as scientists, to understand what they have created, and the implications of it.  We see them take great pains to avoid anything dangerous beyond their understanding — to prevent any sort of possible paradox, in case such an event may irrevocably damage their lives and the lives of others.  And when, inevitably, they begin to make meticulous changes to the future, we see the damage done to their own friendship.

Primer is certainly no cheeky adventure in a badass flying car, and even the inevitable destruction of the DeLorean does little to make a real case for the moral implications of time travel.  In Primer, we see the implications of their actions eat at the characters from within, just as the effects of their device eat at them from without.  In the end, the narrative becomes almost impossibly complicated — and it starts out pretty damn hard to follow.  But following the exact series of events isn’t really necessary.  It’s not the point.  Knowing that these men are dealing with forces outside of their own understanding, and seeing how power weighs on them is what makes this great sci-fi.  And, as I mentioned at the beginning, seeing what actions such believable, rational people will inevitably take is seriously unsettling.  Primer weighs heavy on the conscience.

A rational movie about time travel?  Yup, turns out it is possible after all.

Perhaps he doesn’t deserve the credit, but ever since Judd Apatow re-branded the adult comedy scene with his balance of foul language and from-the-heart sincerity, genre movies have started to step up.  Of course, you’ve still got piles of shit like Meet the Spartans and plenty of chick flicks like Valentine’s Day that aim for the lowest common denominator.  Cheap, poorly written comedies and sappy, predictable romances will still be around to exploit the stupid and the emotionally susceptible.  But ever since Apatow came along with The 40 Year Old Virgin, and especially since he followed it up with Knocked Up, more than a few romantic comedies that looked bland and cookie-cutter have turned out to be — surprise! — quite sharp.

Enter She’s Out of My League — this is a funny-ass movie..  With the exception of Blood Diamond, no movie has surprised me as much from the trailer to the real deal.  Starring Jay Baruchel as the skinny loser guy with no self-confidence (but a heart of gold!) who somehow snags the hottest chick on the block, She’s Out of My League hardly steps outside the bounds of its genre expectations, but it sure plays well within them.  The biggest weapon in its arsenal is the supporting cast of lovable losers, who, again, couldn’t be much more predictable.  But it doesn’t matter — they’re funny anyway.

T.J. Miller, who you might have heard, but barely seen, as the likable camera-guy in Cloverfield, channels Seth Rogen in The 40 Year Old Virgin as the wildly inappropriate crazy friend with curly hair.  He threatens to steal the spotlight away from Jay, but Nate Torrence often gets to it first.  He simply radiates charming innocence, and any roly-poly grown man citing Disney movies as allegories for romantic situations is guaranteed to win a few laughs just on principle.  That he does it so well only makes his character more endearing.

With a couple great backers behind him and some laugh-out-loud dialogue guaranteed from their hang out scenes, Jay Baruchel carries the leading man position surprisingly well.  Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he’s from the Apatow school of young actors, having starred in the TV series Undeclared and popping up as a bit part in Knocked Up.  As he proved in Tropic Thunder, there’s something infectious about his nervous mannerisms and voice — which is exactly what She’s Out of My League needed, since it’s playing on our sympathy for Jay’s character Kirk throughout.  Kirk is a nice guy, though he doesn’t really know it, barraged with one horribly uncomfortable situation after another.  His job as an airport security agent actually seems pleasant next to his Nascar-loving, Branson-bound family, who have essentially adopted Kirk’s ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend into the family.

For the most part, Kirk simply absorbs the awkwardness, and only one or two moments in the film reach out of the screen and make you squirm in your seat.   It’s a nice change from comedies that revel hanging awkward terror in the air like an oppressive cloud, and it’s much more fun to gawk and how totally, dreadfully, shudder-inducingly awful Kirk’s family is.

The movie’s propelled along by an energetic soundtrack and solid cinematography.  The camera work isn’t anything revolutionary, but it puts a stamp of quality on the movie that’s yet another sign She’s Out of My League stands above the pack.  It may not quite pack the emotional power or humor of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  But it ends in the best possible way: leaving me wanting more time with this particular group of misfits.

I think there’s a piece of me missing.  I didn’t know I was missing it until about three months ago when I first saw An Education.  The film was up for three Academy Awards.  And not throwaway awards, like sound editing or hairstyling.  We’re talking real awards: Best Picture and Best Actress.

I spent a couple hours watching An Education, and afterward I started to think something wasn’t quite right with me.  And ever since, that same niggling uncertainty will pop back up and gnaw at my confidence.  But today I found out for sure.  I watched Fish Tank.

Apparently 2009 was the year for depressing British adolescent flicks.  Or maybe those are the only kinds of movies British people make outside of the Bond franchise, and the two I’ve been exposed to are but the tip of a horrifyingly vast iceberg of teenage angst.  I really don’t want to know, because An Education and Fish Tank were enough to prove something to me.  Despite critical acclaim, despite passionate writing and emotional acting, despite powerful cinematography, I just can’t seem to care about young British girls and their experiences with older men.

Whatever part of my brain dishes out sympathy, it’s missing the receptor for the plight of the British youth.  After watching both of those movies, devoting four hours of my life to them, trying to appreciate them as the movie buff I aspire to be…mostly, I was just bored.

Don’t get me wrong — there’s a lot in each film I can appreciate.  An Eduation captures its setting beautifully, applying this glossy sheen of wonder to the high society of 1960s Europe.  It’s like a perfectly-resored antique, and an absolute pleasure to look at.  I just couldn’t draw much of an emotional impact out of the story.  The problem sure wasn’t the acting; Carey Mulligan’s Oscar nomination was well-deserved, and Peter Sarsgaard exuded Child Fucker from the moment he showed up on screen (and seriously that Minnie/Bubbalub scene is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen).

Maybe that was the problem, actually.  When your movie is about a young girl falling for a dashing older guy who woos her with his charm and offers her the world, is there ever any doubt how things will turn out?  Watching An Education amounts to spending two hours waiting for something awful to happen, and then it does happen, and then people get over it and life goes on.  The story is told well, but it was destined to end the way it did from the very beginning, and didn’t bother to take any detours along the way.  It was a straight line from start to finish, and my sympathy didn’t make it far past the starting line.

Then there’s Fish Tank, which took an altogether different approach to the same coming of age dilemma.  An Education seemed to show us that life is pretty amazing, as long as you don’t get tricked by charming child predators.  Fish Tank’s motif is more along the lines of Life Is A Bit Shit, and nobody is really ever happy about anything.  The protagonist, Mia, and her ghastly mother try to out-horrible each other because they’re both pretty miserable.  The mother is the party type, still trying to have a good time and acting like she doesn’t have kids to be responsible for.  And Mia has so much rage and angst built up she just hates everbody, and has to tell them at every available opportunity.

The whole thing is recorded with handheld cameras, and the style works perfectly to capture the low-class urban social system at work, high-rise tenements and cramped spaces.  Mia spends most of her time wandering aimlessly or dancing.  And her dancing is complimented several times throughout the film, though it mostly seemed awful to me.  But if there’s anything I’m less fit to analyze than the emotional state of a 16 year old lower-class British girl, it’s probably dancing.

The worst thing about Fish Tank is that the only character who is remotely appealing is mom’s boyfriend Connor, who, of course, turns out to be a double-life leading sleaze.  The depiction of Mia’s life is raw and just terrible enough to feel authentic, but is also borderline uncomfortable to watch.

When I think back on coming of age stories, there are plenty that resonate with me.  Quite a few of my all-time favorites are coming of age tales, in fact.  But all of them are a little more nuanced, complicated, or masked than either An Education or Fish Tank.  Take FLCL, for example, which buries a very sweet growing up story underneath layers of Japanese pop-culture references, robot fights, and a level of weirdness only Japan can cram into a couple hours of television.  Or Ferris Bueller, which begins as a story about a lovable slacker and ends as a much more poignant story about Cameron, and what happens to love and friendship after high school.

Fish Tank and An Education simply didn’t resonate with me that way.  Much as I tried, I couldn’t generate the sympathy to feel much for the girls, as horrible as their situations were.  Maybe it’s because the prospect of having my life ruined by a charming-but-ultimately-evil 30 year old man is utterly foreign to me.  But I found Joyce Carol Oates’ novel You Must Remember This to be far more gripping and emotionally powerful than either film, even though it told much the same story.  The power of prose over film, I guess.  Or it could’ve just been the accents.

When I watch film noir, I’m peering through a window to an earlier time, a window to a place I never lived in.  It’s a place where men dress in pinstripe suits and trenchcoats for breakfast, rarely go anywhere without a fedora and a cigarette, and drink their liquor straight.  And they drink it constantly.

Granted, it’s a world that never really existed — not the way Hollywood of the 1940s and 50s made it out to be, where every guy’s a tough guy with a square jaw and an oblique wisecrack waiting behind a grim smile.  But it’s always felt like an authentic world, real within the confines of its own imagining, reflecting a now-departed society where people really did talk tough and mysteries really did exist, if you bothered to follow the trail of breadcrumbs from shady alley to shady alley.

Maybe that’s why Rian Johnson’s 2005 neo-noir Brick is so wildly surreal.  Set in modern-day suburban California, Brick transposes the language of classic noir into rapidfire, jargon-saturated dialogue, as heavily stylized as Juno but with none of the whimsy.  There are no men in suits and coats, no cigarette holders, no fedoras.  In their place are boys, teenagers treating high school social circles with the same gravity as mobsters and racketeers.  And they deserve that world-weary treatment; Brick presents an unrelentingly dark disturbia, in which crime and danger hardly bother to lurk beneath the surface.

Noir has jarringly and unabashedly been stuffed into a high school, bringing with it the eerily empty streets and late-night meetings of the urban underworld.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, easily one of the strongest young actors of his generation, plays the classic loner — street-smart and tough enough to take a beating — searching for the identity of his ex-girlfriend’s murderer.  Brendan knows she’s in trouble, tracks her down, finds her dead; from there he’ll do whatever it takes to flush her killer into the open, even if it means dealing with heroin dealers and the cliques of rich kids manipulating everyone beneath them.

Brendan and his acquaintances clash with words loaded with venom, delivered a youthful speed that matches or outpaces anything in classic noir.  It borders on campy, much like the film adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City, but Brick never crosses the line from heavy-handed to excessive.  Simply put, it just works.

The danger feels real, and Brick is emotionally tense throughout Brendan’s journey.  I was transfixed, trying to piece together the clues and figure out exactly how much danger he was in.  With everyone playing their cards close to their chests and Brendan stirring up the underworld with the grace of a sledgehammer, it’s easy to forget how young all these kids are…until Johnson points it out with a tongue-in-cheek scene featuring someone’s mom, or an ironic moment when a violent drug-dealer casually asks, “You read Tolkien?  You know, the Hobbit books?”

Coupled with Nathan Johnson’s score, with shifts from mournful horns and retro piano to jarring percussion to heighten the intensity of Brendan’s most dramatic moments, Brick does the unthinkable: it out-noirs classic noir, without a trenchcoat in sight.  Rian Johnson knew his material, and he knew it well — low angle shots create imposing characters, and wide shots highlight the solemnity of Brendan’s world, a series of empty rooms, empty halls, empty fields.  And in a modern touch, when there’s violence, the camerawork suddenly explodes into motion.

Brick is a film so lovingly crafted, smartly written and seriously acted that it deserves to be seen more than once…and maybe read again, on top of that.

Before Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer teamed up to direct and produce one of the most overshot, masturbatory action films of all time (Bad Boys II), they created an action flick with a clear 90s feel that nonetheless retained a hint of violent 80s grit (Bad Boys The First).

Released in 1995, Bad Boys was the first step in Will Smith’s transition from Fresh Prince to, well, Hollywood God.  The 1995-1996-1997 progression from Bad Boys narcotic cop Mike Lowery to Independence Day’s alien face-punching pilot to Men in Black’s look-h0w-fast-I-can-run Agent Jay secured Will Smith as an honest-to-God superstar.

Martin Lawrence has not risen as far, nor did he attain his fame as quickly.  But he’s done all right for himself, moving from a sitcom career into action-comedies just like Will Smith.  Granted, for the past decade he’s largely been starring in shallow buddy movies far worse than Bad Boys, or going the Eddie Murphy route with by co-starring with Martin Lawrence, Martin Lawrence and Martin Lawrence in modern cross-dressing classics.  But at least, with Marcus Burnett in Bad Boys and Bad Boys II, he found a buddy cop team-up that really jived.  Lawrence is the perfect foil to Will Smith’s ultrasmooth, ultrabadass Mike Lowery, and he strikes a great balance between comic incompetent bumbling and serious action star territory.  Which is probably what makes the climax of Bad Boys so great; when Marcus’ whiny, mumbling persona is stripped away to reveal his grim-faced fuck-the-rules mentality, the energy is palpable.

Will Smith’s character is mostly flat (his duty: look cool, talk cool, act cool, be cool), but obviously entertaining.  So overall, Bad Boys is fun, the action is solid, the bad guy appropriately eastern European, and it holds onto just enough of that 80s action grunge to feel a little dangerous (it’s no Last Boy Scout, but, then, what is?).  But that energy Martin Lawrence brings at the end somehow grabs everything good about the film and condenses it into one moment, when the writing is quick and perfect, the acting serious, and the sound and cinematography mesh to project the raw power of the Porsche’s engine and the overwhelming need for speed.

I could watch all of Bad Boys again, waiting in anticipation of that one line.  And I probably will.  Because when Martin Lawrence starts mirandizing bitches from afar, you know it’s on.

Yoon Tae-goo races cheerily across the rocky hills of an endless Manchurian desert, his dead World War II-era motorcyle fading to his back. Further behind him lie the Japanese army, a gang of treasure hungry misfits, a vicious assassin, and an unrelenting bounty hunter. Tae-goo patters on, never stopping, never slowing, cackling with glee — and just like Tae-goo, the movie he stars in is an exhilerating high-energy adventure, stuffed with dazzling setpieces and thrilling cinematography that rivals any Western western from the past 20 years.

The Good The Bad The Weird wears its spaghetti western influence on its sleeve, drawing both name and plot points from Sergio Leone’s landmark conclusion to the Man With No Name trilogy. Writer/director Ji-woon Kim is clearly a student of Leone’s work, but he tempers his appreciation of the classic style with a remarkably original Eastern western. The Good The Bad The Weird is almost constantly upbeat, delicately balancing its gun battles between graphic violence and lighthearted action-comedy.

This is mostly thanks to Yoon Tae-goo (The Weird), a petty thief whose remarkable luck and survival skills take center stage throughout the film. His antics range from entertaining to knee-slapping hilarious, and as he continues to escape one outrageous situation after another, his own stature in the film’s world is slowly revealed. By film’s end, the character we once assumed to be a clumsy fool turns out to be…well, the best clumsy fool in all of Manchuria.

The Weird crashes a train heist planned by The Bad, who sports a giggle-inducing emo haircut and enough stereotypical asian bad guy mannerisms to make him the perfect villain. He looks out of place, which is partially the point; he’s too cool for all that cowboy shit, but he’ll still walk the walk and slice you up good with a knife or two. Tae-goo makes off from the train robbery with a treasure map in hand but soon crosses paths with Park Do-won (The Good), a valiant bounty hunter out to collect on both The Bad and The Weird. Even The Good, who hunts down nefarious bounties to satisfy his own sense of justice, can’t completely resist the treasure’s allure.

The Good may skirt closest to his analogue in The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. Actor Woo-sung Jung plays the quiet badass, the lone gunman. He’s not Clint Eastwood…but he’s not trying to be, either. Rather than try to capture the grit and unmatchable screen presence of a grizzled, cigar-biting Eastwood, he plays The Good with an understated charm. He just assumes he’s awesome, and merely has to wait for us to catch on.

The Good dazzles, The Bad Sneers, and The Weird keeps us riveted, but all three are shown up by the you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it dynamic camera work. The zoom — a somewhat taboo technique in cinema — is put to brilliant use here. The camera sometimes tracks around and zooms in and out in one single long take, switching focus from an individual character to a bustling set. When you pair some of the best western action scenes ever imagined with audacious cinematography, the result is a film brimming with explosive excitement.

The Good The Bad The Weird definitely has its own Eastern flavor, set in a Japan-occupied Manchuria that encompasses the typical arid deserts of westerns and the decidedly untypical Chinese villages and bazaars. But Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns marched to a different beat than American cinema, while still retaining that western essence. Very few westerns since 1968 have lived up to Once Upon a Time in the West, and over the years spaghetti westerns have become almost synonymous with the best the genre has to offer. If another film like The Good The Bad The Weird comes out of Korean cinema, noodle westerns may well be the future. And if you’ve seen this movie, that’s a future you’ll be as excited for as I am.

“Date Night” is the kind of lighthearted comedy that panders to its audience. The kind of inoffensive PG-13 comedy that mild-mannered suburbanites can enjoy, thanks to the perfect blend of raciness and family values. The kind of comedy that, frankly, should be utterly mediocre.

And yet, with the comedic talents of Steve Carell and Tina Fey in the starring roles, “Date Night” admirably exceeds expectations.

The names of the writer and director don’t do much to inspire confidence. Helmed by Shawn Levy, whose previous directing efforts include the (not so) thrilling “Night at the Museum” and (yawn) “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” and written by “Shrek the Third” contributor John Klausner, it’s hard to believe “Date Night” is anything but kitschy family fare. But with the exception of a few weak moments, the script is surprisingly funny, and the action well-filmed.

At times, “Date Night” reaches a bit too hard for its laughs. It relies on familiar, exaggerated characters — dirty cops, sassy maître d’s — to keep the audience on familiar ground. I found the crazy, fast-talking black cabdriver to be particularly cringe-inducing, the kind of “clever” character who’s not actually the least bit original — or welcome.

Just as unnecessary are the film’s callbacks to previous jokes. The self-referential, remember-this-funny-thing-we-did technique is hard to pull off well, and “Date Night” can’t pull it off. The dialogue, too, occasionally tries harder than it should to be funny, and can end up feeling forced as a result.
Thankfully, for every line of dialogue that overextends itself to grab desperately for an unconvincing chuckle, Carrell and Fey deliver another with enough zeal to keep the laughs coming. They play Phil and Claire Foster, an average married couple whose lives are consumed by the day-in, day-out struggles of juggling marriage, jobs, and kids. When they head into the Big Apple for a special date night at a fancy restaurant, they do something a little out of character — steal another couple’s dinner reservation, since they didn’t make one of their own.

An increasingly ridiculous comedy of errors ensues, as the Fosters are mistaken for blackmailers in possession of some very lucrative information. For the most part, they react like normal people would: with panicky, incoherent babbling and a whole lot of freaking out.

Fey’s and Carell’s comedic styles perfectly suit “Date Night” — their experience playing awkward personalities (Fey in “30 Rock,” Carell in “The Office” and “The 40 Year Old Virgin”) lends the Fosters an air of credibility as normal people stuck in a screwball comedy. Their excellent on-screen rapport keeps each scene moving at a brisk pace and quickly makes them a likeable leading couple.

The biggest surprise of “Date Night’s” hour and a half adventure is its hilarious, tightly choreographed chase scene, starring a souped-up Ferrari and a beat-up taxi cab, front bumpers intertwined, careening through the streets of LA at breakneck speeds. When Carell climbs onto the hood of the careening Ferrari and inches his way across to the taxi, we know it’s ridiculous — but so do the characters, and their own bafflement makes the situation all the funnier.

For a comedy that relies mostly on the witty banter of its stars, the few sight gags “Date Night” employs are, amazingly, pretty much guaranteed to elicit laughs. Though the car chase stands out, a short scene slow-moving motorboat delivers one of the film’s best moments, and Holbrook’s (Mark Wahlberg) six-pack abs dominate the frame every time they’re in sight, to Phil Foster’s dismay (and Claire Foster’s delight).

“Date Night” isn’t a perfect film; the screenplay could’ve been something great with a bit more work, and some of the funniest lines of dialogue show up in the end credits in the form of outtakes. More improvisation from Tina Fey could’ve provided laughs in the few scenes that just aren’t that funny. James Franco is also tragically underutilized, showing up for about five minutes of screen time. Still, despite its flaws, “Date Night” defies the odds by being better than most family-friendly romantic comedies. If you’re looking for a date movie, you could do much worse.

At some point amidst the flamboyant violence, amusing dialogue and stereotypical high school trappings of “Kick-Ass,” I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Director Matthew Vaughan’s interpretation of the comic book “Kick-Ass” channels the graphic nature of Quentin Tarantino; gleaming swords dance deadly across the screen, bullets fly, bodies crumple and explode, and all the nihilistic action plays out against a pitch-perfect pop rock soundtrack.

Why, then, does “Kick-Ass” fall short of its lofty potential? When the action is on, it’s a well-greased machine of cinematic violence. But the story seems to slide into place a little too perfectly, a little too conveniently. And what was originally meant to be an homage to superhero comics that revealed their absurdity has, instead, become a flashy film that doesn’t quite ram home the fact that its characters are, in fact, quite deranged.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a normal teenager who makes a very abnormal decision. After one too many muggings for petty cash, Dave buys a comically ugly scuba suit off the Internet and decides to live out his superhero fantasies in real life. Fueled by adrenaline and stupidity, Dave’s fun pastime quickly leads to him being beaten, stabbed, and hit by a car.

He lives — barely. Undeterred, Dave keeps at it, prowling the streets in search of good deeds to be done. And when he saves a man from a gang beating, he becomes an overnight Youtube sensation.

Dave saunters around New York like he owns the place, and unwittingly becomes embroiled in a dangerous criminal underworld. His masked superhero antics inspire the film’s other principal players, father-daughter team Damon (Nicholas Cage) and Mindy (Chloë Grace Moretz) Macready, to don costumes of their own and assume the identities of Big Daddy and Hit Girl.

And this is where “Kick-Ass” begins to go astray. In Mark Millar’s comic, Big Daddy is nothing but a comic book geek, a maniac self-taught in the arts of murder and decked out with a massive arsenal of weaponry. In the film, Big Daddy is a former police officer, and his systematic destruction of mobster’s Frank D’Amico is driven entirely by revenge.

Big Daddy’s backstory may not seem like a significant change, but it’s only one instance of a tonal disconnection between the two versions of “Kick-Ass.” In the comic, there are no heroes, no supermen; only insane killers and a boy in way too deep. The pen-and-ink version is a more realistic tale, and the gouts of blood that jet from eviscerated bodies become a little sickening. And that’s entirely the point. If superheroes were real, if they were fighting criminals, they’d be insane vigilantes enacting brutal justice, not candy-colored boy scouts a la Superman.

“Kick-Ass” the film tells a different story; violent as it is, it doesn’t evoke the spirit of the comic, and the action scenes are mindless, cartoony eye-candy. Granted, they are tons of fun, and Hit Girl absolutely lights up the screen every second she has a camera pointed her way. She’s at once endearing and foul, charming and savage. If “Kick-Ass” were nothing but Hit Girl bouncing around the screen knifing drug dealers for two hours, I may have left the theater with a grin permanently stuck on my face.

Unfortunately, there’s a little too much downtime with Dave’s teenage life, and it rejects the sharper depiction of high school society Millar wrote into his comic. In Vaughan’s film, Dave gets the girl of his dreams, doesn’t take nearly as much abuse at the hands of criminals, and plays a gung-ho role in the shoot-em-up finale in mobster D’Amico’s penthouse apartment.

Overall, “Kick-Ass” is simply a cheerier, more lighthearted story than its comic counterpart. Sure, it makes for a fun night at the movies. But when the cheeriness goes hand-in-hand with graphic violence the characters shrug off like it ain’t no thang, “Kick-Ass” misses out on a chance to pack some moral depth in with its visceral action scenes.