Alison Brie and Dave Franco in Together
TOGETHER
As a screen couple, Alison Brie and Dave Franco – real-life romantic partners since 2012, married since 2017 – exude so much mutual affection that, in writer/director Michael Shanks' Together, they almost seem miscast as longtime lovers who are likely reaching their breaking-up point. Yet the actors' arguably inappropriate chemistry might also make this supremely clever, enjoyably gross body-horror comedy stronger than it would've been without them, because even when their characters are at their lowest communal ebb, you sense that these two will always fundamentally stick with one another. And stick with one another they do. They very much do.
Following an unsettling, hint-heavy prelude involving a missing pair of hikers and an unnaturally attached pair of dogs, Together introduces us to Brie's Millie and Franco's Tim as they prepare to vacate their New York City apartment and move to a rural home upstate. Millie, a grade-school teacher, and Tim, a struggling musician, have been a couple for nearly 10 years. But at their going-away party, the cracks in their relationship are clearly showing, evidenced by the private conversations between Millie and her friends (“He's too needy!”) and Tim and his friends (“She's too controlling!”), to say nothing of Tim's visible panic when Millie mock-proposes marriage. Yet off to the woods they go, their discomfort masked by practiced politeness, and their myriad issues – including the fact that Millie and Tim haven't had sex in months – momentarily swept under the rug. By this point, you might think the movie is heading in the direction of a Sundance-approved millennial dramedy, one with a lot of ennui-laden montages and soft acoustic rock … if, that is, Shanks' prelude hadn't more accurately suggested the latest iteration of John Carpenter's The Thing.
The queasy fun starts when, while on a hike, Tim falls into a hole in the woods, Millie tumbles in after him, and they find themselves in a cave, the relics of which suggest a long-abandoned underground chapel. Abiding by horror-movie laws, Tim unwisely drinks from a pool of water. (Obviously the smarter partner, Millie instead drinks from their thermos.) And when the couple wakes up the next morning, they find themselves closer than they've been in ages – by which I mean their legs have grafted together via some sticky, gelatinous substance, and it takes considerable effort to pull them apart. After Millie and Tim escape the cave, things between them only get stickier.
That pool of water, you see, wasn't the Fountain of Youth. It was more like the Fountain of Codependency, because after sipping its contents, Tim literally can't stay away from Millie. It's almost as if his body is being magnetically drawn to hers (he literally aches to be near her), and when she's out of his periphery – as in the unnerving yet riotous scene of Tim convulsing in the shower – the man's body involuntarily echoes all of Millie's movements. At first, also practicing the fine art of fright-flick stupidity, Millie attributes Tim's behavior to a virus, or maybe delayed grief over the grisly deaths of his parents. It's not until after the couple finally has sex, and suffers its deeply painful/hilarious aftermath, that Millie, to her repulsion, finds herself as drawn to Tim as he is to her.
As a feature-length metaphor that manages to invoke both Plato's Symposium and the Spice Girls, Together is both astute and powerfully funny, its supernatural situation literalising any number of romantic bromides: “We're joined at the hip”; “He's my other half”; “She completes me.” And because Brie and Franco are such skilled comedians, they're able to play Shanks' body-horror scenario for maximum satiric absurdism. It's not until forces beyond their control demand that Millie and Tim stay together that the lovers finally begin to ask themselves whether they want to, and what they're willing to do to ensure that it doesn't – or maybe does? – happen. There are a bunch of decent-or-better scares, and the leads make their characters' escalating shock and terror palpable. However, this is also the rare creep-out that scores bigger and bigger laughs as it progresses, partly because the weirdly inevitable events grow almost mind-blowingly ridiculous. Yet it's chiefly because Brie and Franco appear to be having such a blast going for broke that even their most nightmarish encounters, such as the bit with the electric mini-saw, bubble over with shared, giggly performance joy. You can easily imagine Shanks yelling “Cut!” after theoretically traumatizing scenes and everyone on set, especially Brie and Franco, cackling like mad.
Like most modern works in its genre, Shanks' overindulges in dream sequences, and the mystery behind that magical pool of cave water is “explained,” disappointingly, through conveniently stumbled-upon home-movie footage, which is just a notch above the dreaded scrapbook of newspaper clippings in terms of supernatural-thriller clichés. But the dreams at least deliver the film's single eeriest sight – the abnormally grinning visage of Tim's late mom – and the home-movie denouement at least provides more time with the excellent Damon Herriman as Millie's friendly yet cagey co-worker Jamie, so even the film's flaws have their merits. (As much as I've enjoyed Herriman over the past six years, I can never recall what I remember him from until I do post facto Google searches: “Oh yeah! He was Charles Manson in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood! And Charles Manson on Mindhunter!”) Together, though, primarily succeeds, hugely succeeds, because Alison Brie and Dave Franco are such a phenomenal screen team. I hope they stick together forever. Based on the evidence, they just might.
THE BAD GUYS 2
I was predisposed to have a fine time at Dreamworks Animation's The Bad Guys 2, given that my favorite 11-year-old, who accompanied me to the screening, was my favorite seven-year-old when we saw the original Bad Guys in 2022. If memory serves, this was first time we attended a sequel to a movie we previously viewed together – a ritual begins!
Yet although, as always, I loved witnessing my young chaperone's rapt attention and listening to the giggles inspired by fart jokes, I might've had nearly as much fun seeing director Pierre Perifel's adventure comedy on my own, because it's one of few animated releases whose big-name cast had me happily imagining the same experience sans animation. The pacing would've undoubtedly been slower and the visual gags less extensive. But with Sam Rockwell reprising his role as larcenous thief-turned-hero Mr. Wolf, and an inspired team of vocal talents assisting him, Dreamworks' latest is like Ocean's 11 meets F9 – you know, that Fast & the Furious installment that sent Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris into outer space. For understandable reason, the voyage is slightly more believable here than it was there.
Based, like the original, on the children's-book series by author Aaron Blabey, Perifel's followup does suffer from a rather unusual condition for its family-friendly genre, in that it boasts too much narrative. It would certainly have been enough for screenwriters Tori Brenner and Etan Cohen, as they do, to fashion a storyline in which Mr. Wolf and his Reservoir Dogs-esque associates – Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), and Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina) – get framed for being bad not long after they've chosen to be good. But The Bad Guys 2 also gives us so much else. Our protagonists' travails as they attempt to find honest jobs. A trio of practiced thieves (Danielle Brooks' Kitty Kat, Maria Bakalova's Pigtail Petrova, and the indispensable Natasha Lyonne's raven “Susan”) utterly uninterested in personal betterment. A political-blackmail detour involving Mr. Wolf's love interest Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz). A grudging detente with now-commissioner Misty Luggins (Alex Borstein). The return of villainous guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade).
But wait! There's more! A heist set at a “Lords of Lucha” wrestling tournament. The absconding of a rocket ship. A nefarious plan to rid the world of its gold through an interstellar magnet. A reactionary TV-news team devoted to whipping the public into a frenzy. And a mysterious metal known as “MacGuffinite.” That reference should perk the ears of film fans – particularly Hitchcock fans. But it's also a wildly inaccurate name for the metal, because MacGuffins are famously of no ultimate importance, and this one is referenced so many times that it's not only essential to the plot; it's practically a supporting character.
Due to all this excess, to say nothing of the half-hour-plus of commercials and previews that preceded our Davenport screening, Perifel's 104-minute entertainment is noticeably overlong – my young pal and I unsuccessfully stifled yawns near the end – and obviously, it doesn't have the built-in novelty of Bad Guys un. More often than not, though, it's still quite funny. Better yet, it's smart funny. Animation editors rarely receive the praise they deserve, and Jesse Averna deserves mad props for his sharp cutting, especially in the opening flashback larceny that involves intricate action choreography, wicked pacing, and a supremely satisfying shift to the present day. And the plethora of verbal gags, refreshingly, is largely character-driven, allowing Rockwell and his cohorts to be honestly amusing even when not delivering obvious punchlines. The Ocean's series might be on a (potentially eternal) break. But at its best, as a heist comedy, The Bad Guys 2 is vivid and specific enough to make you yearn for, and legitimately envision, a live-action equivalent with the exact same cast of comic talents – though it's hard to imagine a live-action comedy these days that would get quite so much mileage from fart jokes. Or it would be hard to imagine, if not for …
THE NAKED GUN
If I say that I audibly laughed at about one out of every three jokes in director/co-writer Akiva Schaffer's The Naked Gun reboot, that probably sounds like minimal praise. Would it help if I mentioned that there are roughly one million jokes in the film's compact 85 minutes, placing my laugh count somewhere in the 333,333 range?
Like 1980's Airplane! and 1984's Top Secret! and 1982's sadly short-lived TV series Police Squad! and the Leslie Neilsen Naked Gun trilogy from 1988 to 1994, this new film – credited, alongside Schaffer, to screenwriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand – doesn't really require an in-depth review, as there's really only one question to be answered: Is it funny? For at least one-third of its length, it very much is. That's more than enough to merit your time and money, and any “analysis” of the content can only result in a recitation of gags that are better experienced, as happy surprises, in the moment. Suffice it to say that Liam Neeson, playing the Jr. son to Nielsen's iconic Lt. Frank Drebin and trading on years of Taken-esque gruffness, employs both his natural gravitas and underutilized gift for silliness to sublime effect; that Pamela Anderson proves her Last Showgirl comeback was no fluke (her comic jazz scatting here is legendary); that eternal movie heavy Danny Huston, playing an Elon Musk-y psycho, looks happier than I've ever seen him; and that the typically broad Paul Walter Hauser underplays to magnificent effect. Suffice it to also say that the literal-minded verbal wordplay is copious, the visual absurdity is plentiful, and the conceit involving a magically ambulatory snowman was like that “I'm into Something Good” Herman's Hermits montage from '88 crossed with Too Many Cooks.
In short, despite its inherent hit-or-miss nature, The Naked Gun is maybe the summer's most ideal cineplex destination, if only for the chance, for the first time in forever, to sit among a group of strangers and laugh your effing ass off. Please read as little as possible about the film before attending. And if you do land on a review, please try to skim over any references to its insane bevy of raucous pop-culture mentions … such as this one regarding Frank Jr.'s response to the term “Miranda rights.” As the boneheaded lummox says, “I'm pretty sure it's Carrie who writes. Miranda is a lawyer. Charlotte's an art dealer. And Samantha's a whore.”
