'Inside Out 2' Is What A Real Hit Looks Like...Not 'Bad Boys: Ride Or Die'
#276: "Inside Out 2," "Bad Boys: Ride Or Die," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Godzilla Minus One"
Edition 276:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Pixar is back in the driver’s seat with a kid’s movie for adults. I’d argue that the new Bad Boys is an adult’s movie for kids (if that). Then a shoutout for one of my all-time favorite movies and a tribute to the late great Donald Sutherland. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a follow-up to the smash hit horror movie Smile.
Inside Out 2
It’s incredible to me that Pixar would’ve ever needed someone to defend them, considering their now nearly 30-year history of excellence, but in this “what have you done for me lately” town the doubt had started to creep in that maybe they’d lost their magic touch.
Nah.
Inside Out 2 is excellence personified, from the writing to the animation to the voice acting and every other facet of production. And ladies and gentlemen, this is what a REAL box office hit looks like. Not all those other wanna-be’s like Godzilla and Apes and Bad Boys where we can hold our nose and squint our eyes at a couple hundred million dollars and convince ourselves of success. No no. By this weekend, Inside Out 2 will knock out Dune 2 as the biggest movie of the year in the United States ($282 million being the number to beat), and within a couple of weeks it’s quite likely to unseat it as the No. 1 movie worldwide ($711 million).
Once again, Pixar takes us inside the mind of a young girl whose emotions like Joy, Anger and Sadness are personified as employees jostling to control her brain. Except this time around, our protagonist Riley is 13 years old, and as puberty strikes a whole new set of emotions like Anxiety, Envy and Embarrassment crash the party and start causing chaos.
The sheer creativity to pull off the world of this movie, which renders everything from sarcasm to brainstorming as literal events inside the world of the mind, is incredibly impressive and clever. As a kid watching the movie and perhaps learning what these things mean for the first time, it could be educational.
Still, the feeling I couldn’t shake while watching the movie was that it was dense. It’s throwing concepts and ideas and characters and jokes at viewers in rapid succession, trusting them to follow a really complex web of character motivations and emotional stakes. It was a lot to follow even for me.
I think this is what people mean when they lodge the most common complaint about the recent era of Pixar movies, that they’re “actually for adults.” It’s not that the content is adult in nature, and in fact, the movie takes great pains to target kids with almost a beginner’s manual in therapized self-actualization. It’s just that the content is complex and perhaps heavier than you’d expect for young audiences.
Well, actually for any audiences. I’ve watched a ton of movies this year supposedly geared toward adults that are far simpler and more hand-holdy than this was.
It’s also a key point of distinction between Pixar and Illumination, the studio behind Despicable Me and Super Mario that has taken the championship belt as the undisputed king of animation away from Disney for the first time since…ever? The whole concept of Despicable Me’s minions is almost defiantly stupid, playing on Gen Z’s desire to be trolly and ironic in contrast to Pixar’s incredibly sincere virtuosity. And the minions are winning. I fully expect Despicable Me 4 to eventually unseat Inside Out 2 in year-end box office total.
For one thing, I promise you that Illumination entry won’t be primarily about anxiety, as this movie is. It’s my hope that we’re nearing the end of this flood of content focused solely on the topic. I don’t know about you, but one thing that doesn’t help my anxiousness (and I have to assume the rest of the country’s very real anxiety crisis) is to continually talk about anxiety. And even if it did, I wouldn’t call that the most fun use of two hours.
Still, Pixar handles the topic well, while still managing to land a handful of memorable hilarious moments and that signature emotional gut punch. As always, they lay the emotional manipulation on thick and beg you for tears. Whether they get them or not, one can’t doubt the movie’s quality from top to bottom.
In this slog of a year, it’s a breath of fresh air!
Something New
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (Theaters): Serious question — does this movie pass the Turing Test? It feels like the script was written by AI, the cinematography by a drone (the way it whips around is dizzying), and the editing is jumbled. Whenever I see multiple scenes chopped down to just 20-30 seconds, delivering one or two lines of crucial dialogue then hitting the rip cord, it’s an immediate red flag that the movie went through extensive work in postproduction to re-edit and rework to “find” a story.
The only thing saving this from being a Madame Web level disaster is the presence of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, though even their Hall of Fame-level chemistry feels stilted and strained here. Even worse, the entire plot is about how both guys are old and basically incapable of performing the action sequences required of them. That’s actually the source of most of the humor, which only underscores the point. There’s nothing “bad” about these boys anymore.
The market disagrees, and this is now one of the biggest hits of the year in the U.S. (thanks mostly to underserved black audiences who made up 44% of first weekend moviegoers). It’s a career revival for Smith, who has been stuck on the skids since The Slap. The takeaway? No franchise ever really dies, regardless of the amount of dignity that must be sacrificed to keep it going.
I’m not trying to act like the original two Bad Boys movies are some holy institution, or that anyone came into them expecting Shakespeare, but I would like to think every movie could strive for at least a single shred of humanity from the dozen or more one-dimensional side characters.
The saddest reality from a business perspective is that this movie will be held up as an example of commercial success — $100 million budget making $230 million and counting at the box office. One has to imagine Smith and Lawrence commanded one-third or more of that reported budget, because there’s nothing cinematic about the movie, which shares an aesthetic with social media videos shot on an iPhone or GoPro.
Sony is making a habit this year of making movies at reduced budgets that look every bit like they’re fished out of the bargain bin (the aforementioned Madame Web, The Garfield Movie, Ghostbusters 5, and I hate to say it but Anyone But You also). If moviegoers continue to accept that lack of quality, and these movies place among the rare few to reach profitability, prepare for a tidal wave of crappy production values from every studio in the coming years.
Something Old
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003, Disney+): People are often surprised to hear that one of my very (very!) few five-star movies logged on Letterboxd is this stone cold classic from my childhood. Does nostalgia play a role in that? Maybe a little, but after revisiting the swashbuckling pirate adventure during the pandemic and again this week, I have zero misgivings about my take.
This is, in my opinion, the greatest example of world-building of any movie I’ve ever seen. The way we are introduced to the world of pirates and ports and governor’s daughters, curses and codes and treasure over the course of the first half of the movie draws a viewer into the tale in an incredibly deep way — action-packed, funny and dramatic at the same time. It created an absolute cinematic icon in Jack Sparrow, but I was amazed by just how memorable a half-dozen other characters are.
It’s the kind of undeniable and timeless masterpiece that would’ve been a hit and launched a franchise in any era. And it is without a doubt the greatest movie ever to be inspired by a theme park ride.
Something to Stream
The Italian Job (PlutoTV, Paramount+): Rest in peace to Donald Sutherland, who died this week at the age of 88. He’s a crucial part of a number of iconic movies, including Space Cowboys, A Time To Kill, JFK, Ordinary People, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and more recently the criminally underrated The Best Offer (which would’ve been my pick here except that it’s not currently on streaming).
Of course, the most iconic role from Sutherland’s white-haired godfather era of his career (and no, I’m not forgetting The Hunger Games !!) is this bank heist thriller that might be the most complete and crowd-pleasing genre entry of the 21st Century. Mark Wahlberg, Ed Norton, Charlize Theron and Jason Statham topline this dynamite cast remaking (and in my opinion upgrading) the 1969 version, which maintains the same zany comedy but brings to it a level of kick-ass cool that movies today can’t touch. Capital “C” Cinema this is not, but if there’s any way you haven’t seen this one, you’re in for the best possible version of an action adventure.
Trailer Watch: Smile 2
Smile was sneakily one of the most successful movies of 2022 — $217 million at the box office against a $17 million budget, thanks mostly to a viral marketing campaign that made the movie a cultural touchstone before it was even released (it was almost a let down when the actual movie came out and it kinda stunk). I see this as one of the trickiest sequels to navigate in recent years, because the entire movie was built on a premise that is no longer a mystery…can it still be scary the second time around? The story seems to center around a Lady Gaga-esque recording artist, which is a far departure from the everywoman vibe of the first movie but may create some interesting drama in its own right. Just please, please, please, don’t make this another movie entirely about ~trauma~.