The Flintstones

Brian Levant, 1994

Rotten Tomatoes score: 23%

The Flintstones may not be a work of art, but surely it deserves better than the ice-cold reception it got from critics.

...I can do better than that. Let me start over.

The Flintstones is a brilliant work of art, like Michelangelo’s David, Beethoven’s ninth symphony, or Megaman 2. There are so many layers to it: It's live action imitating animation, the 1990s imitating the 1960s, the 20th century imitating the stone age, and John Goodman imitating a cartoon character imitating Jackie Gleason.

I'm amazed at how many prehistory-themed jokes they manage to wring out of this thing. Not just the obvious ones, like using a "number-two chisel" to take an exam, but things like Dann Florek's line, "I can't endorse this modernization if it means laying off all these workers. Some of them have been here since the beginning of time!" Or Fred's boss's use of the expression "until the poles freeze over." Or Fred's comment that he doesn't need a friend like Barney because "There's four thousand other people in this world!"

Who would think of making a joke about the size of the human population during the stone age? Did they have jokes like that in the cartoon?

There's even an offhand reference to human sacrifice that kind of shocked me in a PG movie, but maybe they figured that would be over kids' heads.

The casting is pitch-perfect, even though Rick Moranis doesn't have tiny black dots for eyes, and John Goodman wanders in and out of Fred's New York accent. (Or I guess that's a Bedrock accent. I don't know.) I had never heard of Elizabeth Perkins, but she looks and sounds exactly like Wilma Flintstone. Halle Berry appears as a made-up character called Sharon Stone, which is weird, but I guess the real Sharon Stone wasn't available. Or else they just couldn't think of a rock-related name that sounded like Halle Berry.

Harvey Korman plays a bird.

The plot is of decidedly secondary importance. Barney wants to repay Fred for having loaned him the money he needed to adopt Bamm Bamm, so he helps Fred cheat on an IQ test that determines which low-level quarry employee will be promoted to an executive job. (Since when is Barney smart enough to help Fred cheat on an IQ test?) But it turns out that the promotion is part of a scam by Sharon Stone and her lover to loot the company. That’s about it.

Oh, and the bad guy gets encased in concrete at the end and is clearly dead, though no one says so. That came as a surprise. They don't usually kill nonviolent villains in these movies.

Critics complained that the plot was too adult-oriented—meaning that it will alienate kids, not that it’s X-rated—and that’s certainly true. Embezzlement and office politics are not major concerns of child moviegoers. But we can’t forget that the cartoon was always intended to appeal to adults as well as kids. Just be grateful John Goodman didn’t do any cigarette tie-ins.

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Bruce Almighty

Tom Shadyac, 2003
Rotten Tomatoes score: 49%

Oh, God, where's John Denver when you need him?

This movie depicts what might fairly be described as a worst-case scenario for the universe. Almighty God (Morgan Freeman) temporarily cedes control of the world, including his infinite supernatural powers and the responsibility for answering prayers, to the most self-centered, self-pitying idiot on the planet. He does this, apparently, for no other reason than to teach him a valuable lesson about—something.

Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is a moderately successful local TV newsman in Buffalo, who lives in a handsomely appointed townhome with his beautiful girlfriend Grace (Jennifer Aniston), who is a kindergarten teacher or something, and their dog. In the early scenes, we discover that Bruce is mildly frustrated with his inability to advance in his career beyond the level of fluff pieces about cookie shops. He is also frustrated by his dog's tendency to relieve himself in the living room.

And that's about the extent of Bruce's woes, as far as we can discern. Nevertheless, he rapidly descends into despair, culminating in his discovery that smarmy Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) has beaten him out for a seat at the anchor desk. In Bruce's defense, the station makes the conspicuously poor decision to announce this staffing change seconds before Bruce goes on the air for a live broadcast from Niagara Falls, but Bruce's response to it—on live television—is so explosive and unhinged that we instantly lose all respect for him.

After being bodily ejected from his place of work, Bruce goes home and pours out his rage against God for allowing him to come to such unspeakable, undeserved misery. Surely this upper-middle-class newscaster who has been justly fired is cursed among men.

In the Old Testament, when the undeserving sufferer Job poured out his indignation against God, the Lord appeared to him in a whirlwind and reminded him what a hassle it is to control the universe, so mere mortals should give him a break. Apparently, he's decided that a lecture wasn't good enough this time, so he decides to give Bruce first-hand experience at wielding cosmic powers.

Bruce of course takes selfish advantage of his new omnipotence—otherwise there wouldn't be a movie—by giving himself an expensive sports car, a new wardrobe, and super lovemaking skills, as well as returning to the network to oust Evan from the coveted anchorman job. But many of his petty miracles (like using a divine breeze to lift a lady's skirt, or materializing marijuana in a rival network's news van) are downright cruel. Aren't we supposed to find this character relatable? Look, I'm not pretending to be a saint, but if I had superpowers, I honestly don't think it would occur to me to frame somebody for drug possession.

Maybe the idea is that, if you were a godlike being, the morals of us lowly creatures just wouldn't matter to you anymore. But Bruce knows his omnipotence is temporary, so you'd think he'd have some residual human qualms—and anyway, the movie never suggests any deeper explanation of his behavior than the fact that he's an ass.

There's nothing inherently wrong with an unsympathetic comedy protagonist. George Costanza is proof enough of that. But if I'm not supposed to like this guy, what reaction am I supposed to have? The movie is obviously meant to be heartwarming on some level, so shouldn't the hero be someone the audience has a shred of sympathy for? After he uses his divine powers to aggrandize himself at the expense of his relationship, Jennifer Aniston leaves him, and his desire to win her back gives him a conventional goal for the final act of the movie. But why the hell should she go back to him? And why should we want her to? And what possessed God to leave the universe in the hands of this psychopath in the first place?

The story becomes so ludicrous, with Bruce causing impossible things to happen left and right, that it was necessary for the people of Buffalo to become oblivious cartoon characters. It reminds me of Pinky and the Brain, where they eventually gave up on offering any explanation for why people don't realize that the Brain is a mouse. But Pinky and the Brain never asked you to take it seriously, so it was OK. Here, we've got a movie about a jerk surrounded by clueless idiots who can't tell that the laws of the universe have been suspended, and we're apparently supposed to care what happens to any of them.

To give blame where it's due, I don't think Jim Carrey's performance is at fault. Carrey was definitely on his way down from the peak of stardom by 2003, and this was probably the first time most people realized it. A few years later, he would be starring in tiresome retreads like Yes Man and total nonsense like The Number 23, but he's fine here. After Bruce's climactic redemption, he becomes warmer and fuzzier than we're used to seeing him, and maybe they would have been better off just going the PG route for the whole film.

After all, isn't this thing supposed to appeal to religious people, or families? There's nothing in it to suggest that it was intended as subversive or antireligious, and it ends on a very aw-shucks note. But then what was with the creepy divinely-enhanced sex scene? It's nothing explicit, but you wouldn't want to watch it in front of your mother.

Overall, the movie reminds me of the 2000 version of Bedazzled, but I liked that movie a lot better. Maybe it was because Bedazzled kept the Sunday school schmaltz down to a much duller roar, or maybe it was because Brendan Fraser's character was more loser and less megalomaniac. Interestingly, that movie got exactly the same Rotten Tomatoes score as this one.

But as little good as I have to say about Bruce Almighty, I did find it watchable. I think what really sums this one up for me is that, when I first saw it, the only gag that made me laugh out loud was this:

(Okay, turn it off. Just the "Yahweh" part. Turn it off.)

It's a two-second reference to a TV ad campaign that was ubiquitous at the time but totally forgotten today. And you could criticize the movie for being so shallow and ephemeral, but you know, they didn't think they were making a classic. There are a lot of movies that didn't make me laugh even once. And there are movies (like the 2007 sequel to this film) that I couldn't even sit through.

I guess I have only myself to blame for rewatching movies that have earned their place in obscurity. Nobody put a gun to my head and made me watch Bruce Almighty, let alone write a long, detailed review of it on the internet. What am I doing with my life, anyway? What kind of fool watches fifteen-year-old bad movies and then writes about them?

Hey, I think I'll review the Flintstones movie next!

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Bean

Mel Smith, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes: 41%

The 1990s were the era of "Preexisting Franchise: The Movie". Not only were they adapting every TV sitcom and cartoon that was even mildly popular in the 60s into a feature-length semi-parody movie, they were also cranking out movie versions of current TV shows that didn't quite call out for big-screen treatment.

Mr. Bean was, admittedly, a tremendously popular British comedy series that had attracted a large following on this side of the drink as well. I remember watching reruns on PBS as a kid, and I loved it. But when your main character is a misanthropic, mumbling, bumbling buffoon who never speaks in complete sentences and has no first name, let's just say the screenplay doesn't exactly write itself.

In the movie, Mr. Bean is a security guard at London's National Gallery whose incompetence and tendency to blow his nose loudly in front of colleagues has made him unpopular. Instead of firing him, the board of directors decides to fob him off on a Los Angeles art museum that needs a guest speaker to unveil its most valuable new acquisition, Whistler's Mother. It's a truly nonsensical setup that doesn't bother to try to justify itself in terms of plausibility or plot. But it accomplishes two things: it brings Mr. Bean to America, and it forces other characters to interact with him as if he were a normal person.

Bean's foil for most of the film is David Langley (Peter MacNicol, one of our most underrated actors), the L.A. gallery curator who has been foolish enough to vouch for "Dr." Bean's stature in the world of art scholarship. David's wife Alison (Pamela Reed) and daughter (Tricia Vessey) for some reason despise Mr. Bean before they even meet him, which seems unfair, but their reaction is retroactively justified when he arrives. Only the Langley's son (Andrew Lawrence of the Lawrence Brothers) seems to like him.

Bean makes an ass of himself in front of David's coworkers (Harris Yulin, Sandra Oh, and Pat from Heavyweights) and creeps out his family, but David keeps his faith until Bean ruins a dinner engagement by blowing up a turkey in the microwave. (In the American version, this scene is preceded by a gag borrowed from a TV episode, where Mr. Bean gets his head stuck inside the turkey, but the sequence was removed from the UK release for whatever reason. The UK version is currently appearing on Netflix as of this writing, so if you watch it, don't be surprised that the turkey gag is missing.)

Forty-five minutes into the picture, the slapstick sequence that provides the movie's main plot point finally occurs, in which Mr. Bean sneezes on Whistler's Mother, then accidentally dissolves her face while trying to clean the canvas. If you like physical comedy, this is a funny bit—especially when you see his attempt to restore the face with a ballpoint pen—but it's not much to hang a feature film on.

After some encouragement from Andy Lawrence, Bean hits upon the brilliant idea of disguising a life-sized poster of the painting as the real thing. As a twelve-year-old, I found this ridiculous resolution very satisfying, and I still do. It plays out as a well-executed slapstick heist sequence, and it's set to a weirdly uplifting music track. The poster is a call-back to a throwaway joke earlier in the movie, and it's an example of the surprisingly rich setup/payoff structure of the otherwise paper-thin plot.

When called upon to give his big speech at the unveiling, hosted by Burt Reynolds of all people, Mr. Bean breaks his ten-year mumbling streak and delivers an entire monologue in clearly audible English. We're about 70 minutes into the movie at this point, and they might as well have called it a day. Unfortunately, they decided to stick it out for the full hour and half.

To fill time and for no other possible reason, a police detective (Richard Gant) shows up at the gallery and tells David that his daughter has been in a motorcycle accident. To fill even more time, the detective is shot on the way to the hospital. Then, at the hospital, the nursing staff mistakes Mr. Bean (who has picked up a dropped stethoscope) for a surgeon—I guess anyone carrying a stethoscope will do—and rushes him into the operating theater to treat the injured detective.

Bean successfully saves the cop's life by accidentally dropping an M&M into his open wound, which is mildly funny but also very uncomfortable to watch. (It would be funnier if they hadn't already done it on Seinfeld, using a Junior Mint.) Then, in an even less inspired bit of surgical comedy, Bean also brings the Langleys' daughter out of her coma by accidentally shocking himself with a defibrillator.

Now that the day is saved, after a montage of Mr. Bean doing stupid things while Randy Newman sings "I Love L.A.", the movie finally fizzles out.

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It was predictable that a Mr. Bean movie would end up being a series of slapstick set-pieces strung together by a flimsy plot, but they more or less made it work up until the denouement with the Whistler's Mother poster. If only they had quit while they were ahead. A lot of people disliked that Bean was allowed to speak so much in this movie, but I think we can allow the film that liberty. If they'd put their minds to it, they probably could have told the same story around Bean without giving him any of the dialogue, but at least he doesn't speak during the physical-comedy scenes.

Aside from Mr. Bean and David, the characters contribute nothing to the plot or humor, and that goes especially for the Langley family. Why do they hate Mr. Bean so much? I know he's annoying, but at one point Alison threatens to leave her husband if he doesn't throw the man out of the house. The dialogue suggests that their marriage is under a terrible strain, but the only apparent reason for it is the presence of Mr. Bean in the home. Couldn't they have included one scene before Bean shows up, where we learn that Alison thinks David is obsessing over his work too much or something?

Anyway, I shouldn't complain about the plot. If you're watching Bean: The Movie for the plot, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

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Gremlins

Joe Dante, 1984
Rotten Tomatoes score: 84%

While we're on the subject of scary Christmas movies, here's a favorite of every kid I went to school with. I, for one, never saw it until a week ago.

When it comes to movies that everyone but me saw and loved as a kid, I'm always wary of a Christmas Vacation situation, where I am the only person alive who doesn't get what the fuss is all about. But this time, I do get it. I am a little nonplussed by the overwhelmingly positive critical reaction, but I have no trouble seeing why my elementary school peers were obsessed with Gremlins.

Actually, this is the rare case of a Hollywood blockbuster that the critics liked better than the viewers. The audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is only 77%.

Like Batman Returns, this movie was well-received but criticized for being too scary for children. In fact, it's often cited (along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) as the MPAA's impetus for creating the PG-13 rating category. It's fairly mind-boggling that this film was rated PG, since that rating is now reserved for the kiddiest of kiddie movies, but in the early 80s, that was not the case.

What's strange, though, is that the movie starts out in clear PG territory, only to verge closer and closer to R-rated horror as it goes on. It's as if the movie was cobbled together out of a PG script and an R script, and the final product ended up with bits and pieces of each. In fact, I'm prepared to offer that as a serious hypothesis.

Think about it. The main characters, Billy and Kate, look and act like teenagers, but for some reason they're supposed to be adults. Billy lives with his parents, has a rambunctious pet dog that follows him around, butts heads with the curmudgeonly lady down the street, goes to a high school science teacher for advice, and has a teenage crush on Kate. He's even best buds with Corey Feldman. If it weren't for the handful of scenes where you see him working as a bank teller, I would have no doubt that he's supposed to be sixteen. Kate, for her part, works a part-time job at a local bar and grill after school—sorry, I mean after work.

Billy's dad Rand, too, is right out of an 80s kids' movie, what with his wacky inventions and his hapless sales pitches. He blunders into a shop in Chinatown that seems to have been relocated out of a bad western, where the cartoon-character owner sells him a mysterious but adorable creature called a mogwai. The owner's son gives Rand three important warnings: never expose the mogwai to sunlight, never let him get wet, and never feed him after midnight.

As Billy discovers, there are very good reasons for these rules. Sunlight is deadly to the mogwai, water causes him to reproduce by budding, and if he eats after midnight, he transforms into a hideous animatronic creature. Actually, Billy's pet Gizmo never makes the transformation himself—he did in an early draft screenplay—but several dozen of his water-generated duplicates do.

At the same time, the movie transforms from a wacky kiddie film to a gory monster movie. Probably the most memorable scene in the whole picture is where Billy's mom is ambushed by the gremlins at home and has to do battle with them using household appliances. She kills one gremlin in a blender and another in the microwave, and the effects are realistic and moderately disgusting. If I were watching this movie in 1984 with my six-year-old Care-Bear-loving kids, I would probably have started getting nervous after that microwave scene.

The movie is not all that graphic, really, and it gets away with as much as it does because the violence is all committed against puppets rather than people. The gremlins do kill a few humans, but always bloodlessly and off-camera. Actually, I remember one on-screen human death, and it was the only scene in the movie that made me laugh out loud. I know that's a horrible thing to say, but just look at it:

The problem is, once you realize you're watching a movie where it's okay to laugh at an old lady flying through the window on a stair lift, you know you're not watching a movie where you can possibly care about any of the characters. And that's my biggest complaint about Gremlins. I'm not opposed to gallows humor, but it definitely clashes with the lighthearted, corny family film we began with. Maybe that was the point, but I liked it better the way it started. (Remember, I'm the guy who said Bushwhacked was underrated.)

Where was the scene where Billy's scientist pal makes the discovery that helps defeat the gremlins? Or where dad's zany inventions save the day? Why wasn't Corey Feldman involved in the final showdown? Why put Corey Feldman in a movie just to have him sit in a bedroom window doing nothing? (Was Corey Feldman famous in 1984?)

And what was the point of having a crusty World War II veteran neighbor who has a preexisting fear of gremlins? He should have been involved in the finale too, but instead, he was the very first gremlin casualty. Why bother with this character if you're not going to give him so much as an "I told you so" scene? And speaking of World War II gremlins, I think these monsters should have confined themselves entirely to technology-related murders. Gremlins aren't supposed to just maul people to death.

Most baffling of all is the scene where Phoebe Cates relates the story of her father's gruesome death. It's neither scary nor funny—it's just sad—and it has absolutely nothing to do with any other event in the plot. What was the purpose of that? Apparently, Steven Spielberg hated the scene but wasn't willing to pull rank and have it cut.

But enough of these gripes. It's a good movie. It didn't quite know what it wanted to be, but it did a good job of whatever it was doing.

Most of all, Gremlins gave me a sense of nostalgia, even though I never saw it in its own day. It's charmingly unassuming. There is no big picture, no sense of self-importance. It's just a silly movie for the sake of being a silly movie. If they made it today, it would be two and a half hours long and miserably bogged down with teasers for the 75-film Gremlins® Cinematic™ Universe™. Based on the critics' reviews alone, I'd have to say this was overrated, but taking the audience rating into account, I'll settle on

Batman Returns

Tim Burton, 1989
Rotten Tomatoes score: 80%

When I reviewed The Nightmare Before Christmas, I mentioned that Tim Burton had directed two other scary Christmas movies in the 1990s. This is one of them. (The other one is Edward Scissorhands. I wasn't trying to keep anybody in suspense.)

This is also one of those movies where I have no idea why it takes place at Christmas. It was released in June, and the fact that it's Christmas has nothing in particular to do with the plot. And supposedly it was very hot during production, so they had to have huge refrigerated trailers to keep the penguins safe.

Batman Returns, of course, is a sequel to 1989's Batman. But there's very little in terms of continuity. We have a new villain, a new love interest for Bruce Wayne, a new mayor of Gotham City, and even the city itself looks totally different. Apparently, an early script would have brought back Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent, whose absence is unexplained and disappointing. (I think they even wanted to set up Two-Face, which would have been a little much in this already complicated plot.) The same script also would have contained Robin, and I'm glad they thought better of that idea.

Instead of Two-Face, the ringleader of this jolly Yuletide adventure is Christopher Walken as Max Shreck (named after a famous silent film actor, not to be confused with the famous green ogre), a crooked industrialist who plots to install a puppet mayor to facilitate his fraudulent schemes. If I were writing such a story, I might make Shreck a securities fraudster, or maybe a price fixer—after all, the nature of his crime is irrelevant, since the story is really about the cover-up plot—but they went in a different direction. It turns out Shreck has built a power plant that secretly siphons electricity off the grid instead of generating it. I guess you just put it in reverse.

Evidence of Shreck's malfeasance is uncovered by the Penguin, a mysterious sewer-dweller who for some reason is also the boss of a crime syndicate called the Red Triangle Gang. Shreck and the Penguin reach a mutually agreeable solution whereby Shreck will help the Penguin transform from a shadowy weirdo into a mayoral candidate, and the Penguin, once elected, will be Shreck's loyal ally.

Meanwhile, Shreck's nervous, bashful executive secretary Selina Kyle has also learned about the power plant caper, so Shreck throws her out a high-rise window to her expected demise. Unbeknown to Shreck, Selina crashes through a series of conveniently situated awnings and survives the fall. While she lies stunned on the pavement, a swarm of cats gather around her and chew on her fingers. I have no idea what this is about, but it's the most disturbing cat-related scene I've ever witnessed, with the possible exception of this:

Apparently the finger-chewing gives Selina a new lease on life, and she emerges from the ordeal a fearless thrill-seeker. She miraculously transforms a vinyl jacket into enough yardage to form a full-body cat suit and embarks on an ill-defined quest for revenge against Shreck.

All of this mayhem inevitably catches the attention of Batman, who gets around to making a cameo appearance in his own movie so he can use wildly excessive force to defeat the Red Triangle Gang. He suspects that the Penguin and Shreck are behind the gang, but the rest of the city sympathizes with the Penguin, especially after he reveals that his wealthy parents cast him out upon the waters in a basket like Moses, and he was raised by penguins. (Why is there a flock of Penguins inhabiting Gotham City's cavernous, seemingly non-functional sewers?)

The plot goes on and on. Catwoman and the Penguin team up to defeat Batman, while Bruce Wayne simultaneously falls in love with Selina Kyle; the Penguin frames Batman for the murder of a beauty queen; Batman exposes the Penguin's criminal connections in time to spoil the election; the Penguin tries to take revenge by killing all the first-born children of Gotham—remember when they made kids' toys and McDonald's happy meal tie-ins to promote this movie?

Then there's an ending where Batman kills the Penguin and Catwoman kills Shreck, and then you think Catwoman's dead, and then there's a shot where you see that she's still alive. And then she didn't come back in any of the sequels, so I guess she's dead after all.

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This movie was (justifiably) criticized for being too dark and frightening, but I've always liked that about it. That, of course, makes it even more bizarre that it takes place at Christmastime, but I think bizarre was the name of the game here. According to the making-of DVD features, Tim Burton was reluctant to make a Batman sequel until they gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted with it. He certainly exercised that prerogative—if it had been twenty years later, he would have cast Johnny Depp as Batman and Helena Bonham-Carter as Commissioner Gordon.

Longtime Batman fans were uncomfortable with some of the ways the movie deviates from the comics. They made the Penguin much scarier-looking and more psychopathic, but I don't begrudge them that artistic license. More controversial was the movie Batman's propensity for killing crooks. For some reason, that criticism is usually leveled at Batman Returns in particular, even though he was equally homicidal in the 1989 film.

The writers justified their scripts by saying that 1990s audiences would not accept a hero who ties criminals up and drops them off at city hall. Maybe not, but the Dark Knight series proved that a marginally kinder and gentler Caped Crusader is still accessible to today's jaded viewers. The pendulum seems to have swung the other way lately, as Ben Affleck's bloodthirsty, scruffy-looking, patently unhinged portrayal makes Michael Keaton's version look downright cuddly.

Tim Burton also argued that his darker and edgier Batman harked back to the early comic books of the 1930s, and I can't argue with that:

I have to admit, it's hard enough to root for a hero who dresses like a bat and beats up criminals in the middle of the night, and it doesn't make it any easier when he goes around setting clown-people on fire. Or shooting bad guys in their sleep.

Anyway, there's plenty to like in Batman Returns, from Danny Elfman's haunting music score, to Michelle Pfeiffer decapitating mannequins with a whip, to Pee-Wee Herman as the Penguin's father, to Danny DeVito biting a man's nose and eating an actual raw fish, for real, on camera.

What an iconic holiday image.

Well, I can't say this movie is underrated, because it was quite well-received in spite of its reputation for giving people nightmares. It's good, but

A Bad Moms Christmas

Jon Lucas, Scott Moore, 2017
Rotten Tomatoes score: 27%

I blame Billy Bob Thornton, really. Ever since he starred in Bad Santa, we've been treated to a litany of movie titles beginning with the word "bad". You've got your Bad Teacher, your Bad Grandpa, your Bad News Bears... Oh, sorry, that was a critically-acclaimed Walter Matthau movie from 1976.

Anyway, there was also Bad Moms, the sleeper hit of 2016 that spawned this sequel.

Somehow it seems the word "bad" has been watered down quite a bit in the process. Bad Santa was a truly bad person—a criminal, even—and the story he inhabited was unrepentantly subversive and antisocial. The great accomplishment of that movie was to present this awful person so sympathetically that his half-assed redemption actually feels uplifting. When Bad Santa says, "I beat up some kids today. It made me feel good about myself," it actually makes sense in context.

But the badness of the bad moms mostly just amounts to childishness, and it's haphazard at that. They're generally normal people, but they say cuss words and periodically indulge in a college-student-like obsession with booze and male nudity. Is this "bad" behavior? It's certainly a far cry from looting a department store on Christmas Eve and beating up children. It's the kind of thing we all kidded ourselves into believing was "wild and crazy" when we were 21, but really it was just mildly embarrassing.

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Well, I don't often review contemporary movies, so I don't usually worry about spoilers. But in case you for whatever reason are considering seeing A Bad Moms Christmas, consider this your warning. That's assuming I can remember the plot.

The three "bad" moms—Amy (Mila Kunis), Kiki (Kristen Bell), and Carla (Kathryn Hahn)—have returned for more hijinks just in time for Christmas. But this time, their own even worse moms (Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines, and Susan Sarandon) have arrived in town to make life miserable for their daughters. Amy's mom is a rich snob hell-bent on making Amy feel like a failure (but adopting a completely random scattershot approach to doing so); Kiki's mom is a dangerously psychotic lunatic who watches her daughter and son-in-law make love from the corner of their bedroom; and Carla's mom is a pitiful, drug-addled drifter who blows into town to bum a few bucks from Carla.

The bad moms try to work off some of their holiday stress by getting drunk in a mall food court in the afternoon (am I missing something, or do mall food courts not serve liquor?) and then giving a department store Santa a lap dance. The problem with this scene—apart from the fact that it isn't funny—is that it's completely out of character. Two of the three bad moms are depicted as basically normal people, but normal people don't do things like this, or even fantasize about doing things like this. The movie makes no pretense of trying to justify this mayhem in terms of plot of character. It's in the movie so it could be in the trailer.

And because the scene was fabricated to generate trailer material rather than to tell any part of a coherent story, there is no need for the other mall patrons to call security to stop the three drunken madwomen, even when they steal a Christmas tree from a Foot Locker. You might think such a senseless act would result in a visit from the police, or at least a raised eyebrow from the dads and kids back home, but no. It serves its "comedic" purpose and is forgotten. The tree itself is seen once in Amy's living room in the immediately following scene, and then never seen or mentioned again.

The conflicts between the moms and the moms' moms continue to tread water for the next hour or so. Amy's mom is dedicated to realizing her own ideal of a perfect Christmas, but she goes about it in a clumsy and inconsistently written way. In one scene, she hires a work crew to build an expensive Disney-World-style animatronic Christmas display, which Amy's children implausibly find exciting (no real kid would give a crap about it), but moments later grandma is the kids' nemesis when she drags them to a production of the original Russian version of the Nutcracker. It's as if she has no motivations of her own and exists solely to create conflict.

Luckily, Amy saves the day by skipping the ballet and taking the kids instead to Sky Zone. (For those like me who were not in the know, Sky Zone is a real-life indoor trampoline park. So the entire scene is an extended product placement, a little bit less intrusive than the Krispy Kreme plot of the Power Rangers movie or the cringe-inducing Dunkaccino commercial in Jack and Jill. Or, hey, does anybody remember Mac and Me?)

Meanwhile, Kiki and her mother go to see a psychotherapist played by Wanda Sykes. The sequence plays like a Goofus and Gallant tutorial on how not to direct a comedy scene. Every time a joke manages to hit the mark, the scene goes right back off the rails moments later. At one point, when Kiki is just about to confront her mother about her disturbing behavior, the mom abruptly announces that she has cancer. Ironically, the movie's unevenness works to its advantage here, because after a half-hour of jarring shifts in tone, we can't be sure this isn't a genuine, ineptly-written plot twist. Then, seconds later, the mom breaks the tension by specifying her condition as "stage-12 heart cancer", which clues us (and Wanda Sykes) in to the desperate manipulation the mom is engaging in.

But for some reason, Kiki, who is not otherwise depicted as stupid, still thinks her mother is telling the truth. Having missed an obvious exit strategy from a joke that really doesn't have any more to give, the screenwriters instead have Kiki's mom admit her deception, then retract the admission, then try again with several more nonexistent diseases. In fact, she spends the rest of the movie retreading this flimsy gag. And once she walks out on the therapy session (in another sloppily-timed bit), Wanda Sykes forgets she's playing a character and launches into a bizarre standup-style put-down of Kiki.

I'm sorry to belabor this one scene at such length, but it illustrates the movie's refusal to follow through with its comedic premises. There is funny stuff in there somewhere, and another rewrite or two might have resulted in a great scene. They just couldn't be bothered.

So that brings us to the final mom, Carla, and her mom, Susan Sarandon. They spend very little time together, aside from the Sky Zone scene and another bit where they steal groceries from patrons on their way out of the supermarket. At first they dust off the old routine of pretending to be charity bell-ringers, but that quickly devolves into physically removing groceries from people's carts.

I have to admit the rapidly escalating ridiculousness of this gag had promise, but once again, the lazy writing and direction get the better of it. Outrageous behavior by the main characters is not funny in and of itself; the humor comes from the way the rest of the world reacts to the outrageous behavior. Here, the victimized patrons just stand there and allow themselves to be mugged—why should they care any more than the filmmakers did?

Apart from that escapade, Carla mostly shares her screen time with Justin Hartley, playing a firefighting stripper in need of a bikini wax. (I forgot to mention that Carla is a professional bikini-waxer at a spa. In her first scene, she refuses to service a rather hirsute young lady, whom she calls "Sasquatch", and passes her over for a senior citizen, whom she calls "Betty White". And that's the scene. They must have been delighted with their day's work. "Well, we've ridiculed hairy people and old people; let's hit that catering table!") The Justin Hartley waxing scene is very, very broad and obvious, but the way the two characters treat it as if it were a conventionally romantic encounter is within arms' length of being funny. But, of course, they go nowhere with it.

There's not much else to mention. I could describe the ending, but there's not much to say except that the moms and the moms' moms make their peace. The one thing I will say is that the reconciliation scene takes place during a Christmas Eve mass, and none of the congregants seem to care that the main characters are having a full-voice conversation in the middle of the church.

In a movie about moms, one thing that seemed conspicuously missing was any interaction between the main characters and their children. I can't even remember which kids belonged to which mom, except for Carla's kid, who is so slow-witted it makes you worry about his mental well-being, but it's supposed to be funny. In addition to kids, Amy has a boyfriend—Jesse—possibly the flattest character in the movie, who is a 100% perfect guy with no flaws whose only purpose is to be the butt of Amy's mom's snobbery.

I guess Jesse's other purpose is to have a child who repeatedly says the F-word. She says it about six times, and at first the joke is that she overheard Amy saying it (in bed), and Amy is embarrassed. Then, she says it a few more times for no comedic purpose, unless you happen to think it's inherently funny when little kids say the F-word. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't offended by this gag. There just wasn't anything funny about it. (Little kids love to say the F-word. That's old news.)

And that about sums up A Bad Moms Christmas. It's not hopelessly unfunny. It's just really, really lazy. Nothing in it made me laugh, but there were a few moments that made me think to myself, "Hey, that was a joke!" Amy's mom had a few scenes that had real potential, like when she turns up the car radio to treat the children to a particularly dissonant snippet of the Russian Nutcracker, or her grudging pseudo-apology in the big reconciliation scene. I liked the decision to allow her character to stay basically unlikable at the end of the story, but I think that was more the product of aimless writing than a conscious choice.

Were they in a rush to get the movie out by Christmas? Or did they just not care? I guess I can't blame them. They couldn't possibly have believed they were making a good movie. They just figured the title alone would draw in enough people to make it financially justified, and any more than the bare minimum of effort would be a waste. I don't disagree.

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So that concludes my thoughtful, in-depth review of this motion picture. Obviously a person of my exquisite taste and discernment can't enjoy such a commonplace film.

Now to watch Ernest Saves Christmas for the fiftieth time.

Kazaam

Paul Michael Glaser, 1996
Rotten Tomatoes score: 6%

This was the most confusing experience I've ever had watching a kids' movie. And, no, I'm not talking about the bizarre urban legend where people think this was a ripoff of a nonexistent Sinbad movie called "Shazam". I'm talking about the film itself.

The basic premise—basketball great and flat-earth troll Shaquille O'Neal is a magic genie who befriends a tough 90s kid with bad teeth—made perfect sense. But they kept throwing in new characters and subplots without warning or explanation, and the whole thing is cut together with the frenzied pace of a cheap music video. It gave me the feeling that I was watching a 3-hour movie that had to be cut down to 90 minutes in postproduction.

Like most tough 90s kids, our 12-year-old protagonist is named Max, and he has a strained relationship with his single mom. Within the first thirty seconds after the mom character is introduced, we learn that she is about to marry a firefighter named Travis, that Travis desperately wants Max to like him, that Max's mom has not yet finalized her divorce with Max's estranged father, that Max wants to reconnect with the father, and that mom has been trying to hide the fact that the dad has recently returned to New York from some other place.

Meanwhile, while fleeing from some bullies, Max falls through several rotten floors of an abandoned building, lands on the basement floor, and dies. He accidentally turns on a magic boombox, which is secretly inhabited by a 5,000-year-old genie named Kazaam. The genie uses his phenomenal cosmic powers to chase away the bullies and tells Max that he must make three wishes.

Kazaam seems eager to get the wishes over with so he can go back to haunting the magic boom box, so he hurriedly lays out the ground rules: he must grant Max's wishes; he can't show his magic to anyone but Max (a rule he has already violated); and he can only grant "material" wishes, as opposed to "ethereal" wishes. I don't know what that means. Anyway, for no explained reason, he is unable to grant Max's first wish (for a car), so Max blows him off and goes home.

Back in the unrelated dad plot, Max somehow figures out exactly where his dad is working, and he goes looking for him. Dad is a music producer or concert promoter or talent agent or something, and he has it in with famous rapper Da Brat. (Remember Da Brat? She was the musical guest on almost every episode of All That.) When Max finds his dad, the dad is delighted to see his long-lost son and gives him all-access passes to an upcoming concert.

Then, when Max actually attends the concert and tries to talk to his dad, the dad suddenly can't stand the sight of him and orders him away. Apparently, the dad's sudden animosity toward Max is instigated by his boss, Malik, who is really a mob boss, and who wants to steal Kazaam's magic boom box for himself. But then, Max has to steal a concert tape from the recording studio to give it to the school bullies for whatever reason. And Kazaam becomes a rapper and—

Forget it. I can't explain it. I have no idea what was happening. At the end of the movie, Malik murders Max. (I'm serious.) Kazaam wishes for Max to return to life, grants his own wish—even though he explicitly told Max earlier that he cannot raise the dead—and then transforms from a genie into an even more magical being called a jinn. And he also turns Malik into a basketball and... kills him? Does Malik die? Has anyone else seen this movie? Can you explain it to me?

All right, never mind the plot. Kazaam is not as bad as you've heard. Shaquille O'Neal really isn't bad in the part, and I liked the main kid and the mom. The special effects aren't very good, but they didn't bother me. I even kind of liked the in-your-face editing style that whipsaws the viewer from scene to scene without ever letting you catch your breath. But to pull off a style like that, you have to exercise great caution to make sure the basic plot elements don't get lost in the shuffle. Otherwise, people can't follow the story and they get distracted.

...Hey, remember Shaq Fu?

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