So many choices at the cineplex this weekend: A college quarterback learns why you should never meet your heroes in a sports-horror flick produced by Jordan Peele; a rental car agency promotes romance in a (theoretically) non-horrific rom-com; an eco-friendly Marlon Brando hugs palm trees; and a queer drama offers a cautionary tale about what was (and might be again).
Him
In theaters Friday
This trailer includes instances of vulgar language.
With all the real-life horror stories about the damage football does to players, there was bound to be a horror movie tackling the topic. Justin Tipping's visually baroque, sporadically violent, would-be thriller is as flamboyant a take as anyone could wish on the physical and mental abuse players suffer. But after a promising start, it devolves into a series of ever-sillier training interludes that culminate in what amounts to a blood-soaked, pom-poms-and-marching-band-bedecked halftime show of a finale.
The story centers on star college quarterback Cameron Cade (a formidably buff Tyriq Withers), who is prepping for an NFL scouting event when he suffers a traumatic brain injury at the hands of a mysteriously costumed figure. Advised by doctors to stay off the playing field, he instead leaps at the chance to train with his idol, aging quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans in a less comic mode than usual). White's training regimen includes humiliation games, the brutalizing of fellow players, frequent blood transfusions and hallucinogenic ice baths. The director's filming regimen includes x-ray-enhanced tackles, a lot of red lighting and some football-helmeted religious imagery. It all gets pretty tiresome after a while.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
In theaters Friday
Renting a car is worrisome enough without the magical GPS pushed by the car rental agency in this relentlessly drippy fantasy. David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) are two single, sad-sack wedding guests who make use of the agency's services. They arrive separately, flirt mildly, and on their drive home are offered — by the GPS — the titular journey, which turns out to be a trek through a series of miserable-to-the-point-of-traumatic days from their respective childhoods.
David returns to the night he played the lead in his high school production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and was rejected by the girl he'd been pining for. Sarah relives the night her mom died alone while she was screwing her college professor. We're meant to understand that experiencing a second helping of these moments will make them wiser and less commitment-phobic. Not sure why. The stars struggle to make their dialogue sound credible, and director Kogonada is stymied by generic, cloying, situational twaddle that cannot possibly have looked any smarter on paper than it does on screen.
Waltzing with Brando
In theaters Friday
Billy Zane's uncanny resemblance to a 40-something Marlon Brando is put to intermittently amusing use in this breezy, if scattered, comedy. Based on architect Bernard Judge's 2011 memoir, it chronicles his budding friendship with Brando and their collaborative misadventures as Judge attempted to design an environmentally self-sustaining retreat on an uninhabited Tahitian atoll that Brando owned. Married, buttoned-down Judge (Jon Heder) first arrives in Tahiti to scout locations for a hotel, but upon meeting a louche, garrulous, and easily distracted Brando, relaxes into the freewheeling rhythms of the actor's island paradise. He learns to field Brando's proposals that the planned retreat be powered by electric eels, or that potable water be recycled from urine, and he survives on an ever-more-compromised project longer than one might expect. There's charm to the story, and a lot of dead space in the digressions. But the film relies mostly on the strength of Zane's embodiment of Brando, and director Bill Fishman's recreations of scenes from the late-career films (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris) with which Brando financed his Tahitian sanctuary.
Plainclothes
In limited theaters Friday
Lucas (Tom Blyth, looking like a young Channing Tatum) is a cop assigned to a mid-1990s sting operation, arresting gay men cruising for sex in a Syracuse shopping mall. He's bait, making eye contact, nodding unobtrusively, then heading for a restroom. But there are rules: He can't talk, or make physical contact. When his quarry makes an overt move, Lucas walks out and a colleague makes the arrest. Though this is clearly entrapment, a police tactic frowned upon by the courts, shame generally keeps the men from contesting the charges.
That Lucas is himself closeted (though he's never acted on his feelings) complicates things when one assignation with a guy named Andrew (Russell Tovey) sparks something in him. They meet again, with repercussions for both men and their families. In real life, celebrities from John Gielgud to George Michael have come back from being caught in such stings. Lucas is less protected and considerably more vulnerable in writer/director Carmen Emmi's gritty feature debut. Lucas' self-loathing and panic are persuasively of their time, and the story, which could as easily have been set in the 1950s, can't help but seem a cautionary tale for the world we find ourselves in today.
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