Where things get painful.
I’m not even going to bother beating around the bush
on these 2. Why should I, in a mentally exhausted state of being, struggling to
keep my eyes open while sporting a persistent dull headache, put forth more effort
to tear down abominations of cinema than the film crew themselves mustered up
to gather a range of talent for an extended period of time to basically throw
millions of dollars into trash just to know that they have another shipment of
millions coming in before it even leaves their hands?
There’s nothing more excruciating than sitting
through bad comedy. Awkward pauses for nonexistent laughs, incessant and repetitive
behavior that fails to produce the appropriate reaction no matter how much it’s
jammed down your throat.
Sometimes it’s just weak material, sometimes the
content is offensive, but either way you slice it, rarely is it ever a pleasant
thing to watch.
That’s where I find myself today. Between a movie so
flat and dull that it would barely even warrant discussion were it not a
runaway financial success almost a year ago due for an upcoming sequel and a
film so heinously irritating and offensive, not only in its own playing to
lowbrow insensitive stereotyping but the sheer laziness of failing to produce a
punch line along with killing what few jokes it didn’t botch through driving
them into the ground, that I’d empty my life savings to a hypnotist that could
erase my knowledge of its existence from my memory.
No veneer of care or writing was involved with “Ride
Along.” Kevin Hart makes a movie every 20 minutes and Ice Cube was available in
an effort to look “hard” again. Act out a 30 minute sitcom plot for 90 minutes
and let’s make $100 million.
The entire movie is a giant tired cliché of a
competent man on the job with an incompetent foil meant to prove himself by the
end of the film. I use “meant to” because said foil is ultimately no more
capable by the end of the movie than he already was at the start and the lack
of chemistry between leads sells no evolution in their actual relationship.
“Ride Along” is a one note joke and all that is
really worth mentioning about it is that to grant credit where it’s due, Kevin
Hart is always trying. The guy has plenty of charisma and it’s very obvious how
much he’s trying to hold down his station despite having nothing to work with.
It’s about as lazy, half-assed, and uninspired as a
January release typically is. If nothing else though, at least it’s honest
about what it is and fails only in being a comedy that doesn’t succeed in doing
its job.
Meanwhile, Marlon Wayans seems content to not just damage
his own career but tear down the moods and mindsets of audiences everywhere,
along with the credibility of a Hollywood system that would lend any money to
the now victimized Wayans name with a production that pretty much
singlehandedly counterbalances the hard work that his family is known for doing
towards the contribution of breaking down racial barriers and stereotypes in
comedy.
“A Haunted House 2” is a wretched, nauseating and
life draining experience, the likes of which I have never experienced before and
hope to never go through again. It barely even counts as an actual movie.
It may dress itself up as a horror parody anchored in
the material of “Paranormal Activity” as its basis but there is no coherent
plot or purpose driving its events forward. Every scene exists for Marlon
Wayans to set up a race joke without a punch line, a longwinded sex joke
without a punch line, toilet humor without a punch line, or an easy slapstick
gag better executed by 60 year old “Looney Tunes” shorts and 70 year old “Three
Stooges” shows.
Any of these would be groan inducing in their own
right but to regularly repeat and combine these gags that are both predictable,
disgusting, and more than occasionally offensive, failing out of the starting
gate and getting worse for an hour and a half is excruciating.
Unlike “Ride Along,” nobody comes out on top. Wayans
brings the most energy to the film by virtue of being the tool through which
this crime against humanity has taken shape but cutting through the desire to
strangle him, everybody else brings a dead performance indicative of what I can
only imagine is an actor that didn’t quite realize how painful of an experience
they actually signed up for until they started acting things out. If anybody
stands stronger than the others, Gabriel Iglesias manages to deliver his
material with a pleasantly jovial energy, generating the only even moderately
funny joke of the film within its first 20 minutes that gets promptly beaten
into the ground by the film’s horrendous tendency to repeat every joke, dead or
otherwise, ad nauseam.
You may notice my calculated effort to avoid details.
While I own up to the fact that this may be considered a copout on my part, my
efforts are more out of protest than anything else. Even if there was even a
loose semblance of story worth replicating, I cannot stress my desire for this
film to completely disappear.
The hour and a half that Marlon has spent stealing
my time, patience and energy with his incessant creaming and mugging is an hour
and a half that I wish I never experienced. At the advice of some friends, I would
like to present an alternative to this film that utilizes a Wayans’ constant
muttering 50 times more effectively within a fraction of the time.
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