items tagged with Justin Timberlake

G.I. JOE: RETALIATION

If you handed a box of crayons to a group of eight-year-olds with action figures, they’d probably come up with a more entertaining storyline for G.I. Joe: Retaliation than the one we’re stuck with, which is your standard blockbuster nonsense about a megalomaniac’s plan for world dominion and the crack team of well-armed, quip-ready hotshots attempting to thwart him. In a welcome surprise, though, director Jon M. Chu’s follow-up to 2009’s G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra is, unlike its forebear, quite a bit of zippy, throwaway fun, a fast-moving and happily unpretentious diversion with jokes, and good ones, obviously written specifically for viewers well over the age of eight.

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

The latest movie to star Clint Eastwood, marking the icon’s first on-screen appearance since 2008’s Gran Torino, is director Robert Lorenz’s baseball drama Trouble with the Curve. That curve, by the way, is the least of this film’s troubles.

IN TIME

Set in either the distant future or some Bizarro World version of the present, Andrew Niccol’s sci-fi thriller In Time imagines an Earth in which time is literally our universal currency; an eight-hour work shift can add a few days to your life span, but a trip to the grocery store will cost you two weeks. (A slowly ticking, neon-green clock embedded in your forearm tells you just how much time you have left to spend.) It’s also an Earth in which humans have been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, and are then allowed one year more before their bodies shut down completely ... unless, of course, they have the proper means, or the proper lack of morals, to buy or steal as much extra time as they want.

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

Modern romantic comedies are in such generally dismal shape that I feel ungrateful for wishing that Friends with Benefits were better than it actually is. But while it’s impossible to fully dislike any movie that finds a nitwit shrieking “John Mayer is our generation’s Sheryl Crow!” or features a couple making a solemn vow on the Bible app of the woman’s iPad, I left director Will Gluck’s latest thinking that the film had just missed its mark. And that, after two frequently hysterical features in a row (2009’s Fired Up!, Gluck’s directorial debut, and last year’s Easy A), its helmer had just missed his trifecta. Damn it.

CARS 2

Judging by his voice, vocabulary, and the intensity with which he occasionally kicked the back of my theater seat, I’m guessing that the kid sitting behind me at Cars 2 was about three or four. He would also, for the folks at Pixar and Disney, be perhaps the ideal critic to supply a pull-quote for the animated comedy’s TV and print ads, because during the screening’s first 20 minutes, absolutely everything about the experience, for this child, was awesome. Or rather, “Awesome!”