A Tale of Two Duds in the Fall

Waiting...

Waiting…, the latest from the worst creative corners of Hollywood, is dumb on arrival. With an utterly vacuous 93 minute-running time, this pathetic retread of nearly every young adult comedy made in the last decade and a half opens with a scene of twentysomethings guzzling beer from a plethora of tubes, tubs, and pitchers and predictably ends the same way. The connect-the-dots story centers around Dean, a twenty-one year-old who was once at the top of his high school class and who now laments that he opted for a job waiting tables at Shenanigans instead of going to college.

Dean is joined to the hip of Monty, the coolest and hippest of the waiters. Ryan Reynolds, the thirty-year-old from Van Wilder and a host of other low-brow young adult and teen comedies, has the swagger and bravura of a self-assured leader. He smiles and winks and relies on the single note the shockingly and mind-numbingly trite script allows him to play. At one point, Monty admits to having slept with or planning to sleep with every available woman on the restaurant’s staff and in the town for that matter. As is the case with most of these films, there are several moments of truth regarding the sexual exploits of characters and Monty is no different.

Dean’s decision to decide whether or not he wants to accept his boss’s offer to be promoted to an assistant manager is as deep and involving a narrative thread as Waiting offers. Dean and his fellow waiters’ boss is a loud, slimy, dimwitted lug, who flirts with the restaurant’s underaged hostess. In between the light as a featherweight scenes of Dean deciding whether he wants to become an assistant manager, there are several scenes of gross-out gags involving genitals and sexual prowess scattered about, few of which will generate more than an occasional chuckle from anyone over the age of fourteen.

Reynolds is familiar fare in this tired yet unfortunately, lucrative genre. A staple of such films is its supporting cast with a mixture of newcomers and name players eager to join in on the fun of being crude and cruder. The film is not much of a breakout for fast-rising comedian Dane Cook, though. He portrays a cook, who tosses steaks on the dirty kitchen floor on cue. Young rapper Andy Milonakis, who now has his own television show, gets more screen time and appears to relish every opportunity to smoke marijuana and eat large quantities of whip cream with his much taller sidekick. Little Andy even raps a little as well. His song, which plays during the closing credits and is filled with expletives, will seem light to most people who make it through this exercise of gross-out humor and sexual innuendo.

Not only is the film certifiably awful, but it will likely receive its loudest laughs from a scene that’s a direct ripoff from the equally gross yet far funnier film, Roadtrip. The scene involves an angry customer, who sends her meal back to the kitchen. Need I say more?

Waiting... is written and directed by relative newcomer Rob McKittrick, and needless to say, he doesn’t distinguish himself with this effort. On at least two occasions McKittrick’s characters deliver the line, “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is this little bit of extra.” The actors who speak these words without bursting into laughter hold their two fingers close together. This leads me to my question: What did the studio executives who greenlighted this project think when they heard the infantile line not once but twice and how long into their screening did it take them to realize that Waiting... was a waste of unappetizing proportions?

Grade: D-

Domino

Busy actress Keira Knightley stars in Tony Scott’s loud, profanity-riddled, and messy action picture that loosely depicts part of the life of Domino Harvey, a bounty hunter in the LA area. The female bounty hunter died literally weeks ago, and her death more than reviews and word of mouth on this misguided effort will undoubtedly heighten people’s curiosity about the film. Much of the story is told in flashback as Domino recounts much of her life for an interrogator, played by a stern Lucy Lui.

The flashbacks take us to see Domino’s mother, a still beautiful Jacqueline Bissett, moving her then young daughter to Beverly Hills after the untimely death of her father. Domino’s mother hobnobs with the rich and famous there, but Domino doesn’t have any interest in anything traditional and eventually teams up with fellow bounty hunters Ed Mosbey (Mickey Rourke) and Chocu (Edgar Ramirez), who was her on-again, off-again lover.

The three bounty hunters become embroiled in a plot that is as convoluted as any you’ll see in a movie this year. The plot thickens and thickens and then muddies and muddies again. Domino is overstuffed with black-hearted mob kings, casino owners, slick lawyers, rich-kid druggies, overzealous television producers, out-of-work actors, grandmothers, bondmen, and bounty hunters. There’s even an Afghani member of Domino’s crew thrown in for good measure. In a sharper film, the incorporation of such wildly disparate characters and such layered plotting might be considered ingenious, but here it is all dizzying.

Domino, Chocu, and Ed spend much of the film on the trail of ten million dollars, mob money that was stolen by a health services worker who is a grandmother near the ripe old age of 40. The desperate grandmother is portrayed by Mo’Nique, who uses her comedic talents while appearing as a guest on the Jerry Springer Show. How her character becomes a guest on the Jerry Springer Show is a bit ludicrous, but the plot point does allow Mo’Nique to strut her comedic routine, a wonderfully funny bit about bi-racial ethnicity.

Although Tony Scott is an experienced director (he‘s also the younger brother of acclaimed director Ridley Scott), the scenes are shot so quickly that is hard to understand who is saying what to whom and who is doing what to whom. Scott has assembled experienced actors who have made some fine films through the years. The competent cast includes Christopher Walken, Mena Suvari, Dabney Coleman, Delroy Lindo, and Mickey Rourke. The actors shout their lines in one overwrought scene packed with explosions and flying bullets after another. The inherently film-worthy story is told without finesse and control and ultimately fails to reveal any of the qualities that made Dominic Harvey such a memorable figure. The film is boisterous at every turn, never taking the time to explore who Dominic was behind the scattershot images of violence and incoherence it presents.

Grade: D+

News and Notes

Top 10 Rentals for the week of October 10 are as follows:

The Longest Yard $20.5 million
Robots $6.9 million
Crash $24.0 million
Monster-in-Law $33.6 million
Fever Pitch $14.8 million
Sahara $31.7 million
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy $13.2 million
Mindhunters $4.7million
Lords of Dogtown $2.1 million
The Adventures of Sharkboy $3.9 million

Daniel Craig, the villain in The Road to Perdition and the star of the critically acclaimed Layer Cake, will likely become the next new James Bond.

The best reviewed films so far this fall are as follows: Capote, A History of Violence, and Good Night, and Good Luck.