Absurdity rules in Teen Titans Go! movie

Beast Boy, Cyborg, Robin, Starfire, and Raven in Teen Titans Go! To the Movies. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Everything about Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a lark. Almost nothing is designed to be taken seriously, especially the titular collection of lackluster, premature superheroes whose fascination with waffles greatly outweighs their ability to fight crime. They are ridiculous, and their hero’s journey ends with them embracing their ridiculousness. Yet a serious movie about their adventures would be a little too in line with the current D.C. Universe ethos; to be interesting and unique in a franchise overrun by dour heroes, it takes a little madness and a whole lot of disinterest in following the established playbook. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies may be a lark, but it's a necessary and surprisingly fun lark.

 

It's wholly appropriate for this movie to kick off with Daffy Duck going bonkers ahead of the title screen. The film, like the show that inspired it, thrives on absurd lunacy. It's an odd movie, littered with fart jokes, butt jokes, deep cut comic references, and asides that lead to asides that ultimately go nowhere. The eponymous Teen Titans, Robin (Scott Menville), Raven (Tara Strong), Cyborg (Khary Payton), Starfire (Hynden Walch) and Beast Boy (Greg Cipes), are heroic infrequently, yet take great pride in their ability to thwart crime in spite of themselves. They spend the lion share of the movie trying to get director Jade Wilson (Kristen Bell) to make a movie about them, because a movie would solidify their status as heroes, and because the medium is the message. Their sole motivation for acquiring a nemesis, the hypnotic Slade (Will Arnett), is to land a film contract. The entire plot of this movie hinges on making a movie, which is supremely meta. 

 

Then again, given the source material, the decision makes a fair amount of sense. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies has a lot of fun with its premise, lacing joke after joke making fun of D.C., Marvel, Stan Lee, and every other superhero related topic under the sun. The fart jokes, random references to waffles, and extended dance scenes round out the humor for the target young audience, but the soul of this movie belongs to parody and chaos and nerdiness. No superhero topic is out of bounds to go after, no Deadpool vs. Deathstroke argument too obscure to elaborate and ultimately argue about. The movie veers for the sake of veering, dipping through topic after topic, and musical number after musical number, as it runs through the tiny amount of plot it has designed for itself.

 

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies both benefits from and is diminished a wandering plot. Having little story to work from results in some occasionally inspired lunacy, including peculiar but well done homages to Disney franchises and other popular animated programs, as well as a whole time travel subplot that ultimately makes zero difference to the story. In most movies, time travel is a central focus of the plot. In this movie it's a method for some joke delivery and parody, and then immediately undone once the logical conclusion of the activity comes to fruition. It does not matter at all to the story; it happens, and then it unhappens to the point where it doesn't matter, and that's essentially the overarching joke and the sole purpose for doing it.

 

And yet, there are times when some consistent narrative thread would be of use. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies has a shaggy vibe, influenced heavily by the 11-minute episodes that came before. The need to pad out the run time (which hovers around the 90-minute mark) results in some serious drag. The movie never veers into boring, but it loses energy as it enters the third act and the wackiness is invaded by unfortunate clichés. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies could be more effective with 60 minutes of material instead of pushing to 90.

 

Less would be better than more for Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, but what is offered on screen is still pretty fun. It has a sly smile hiding under the shenanigans and periodic songs revealing how silly the whole superhero thing is. What is missing in substance is made up for in silliness and a disregard for the rules. It’s a ludicrous film made by people who know exactly how ludicrous their parody is and embrace the chaos they create.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 93 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: The humor, Will Arnett, Kristen Bell, absurdism

What Sucked: The very thin plot

Watch As Well: Teen Titans, Teen Titans Go!, The Lego Movie

Johnson's charisma can't save faulty Skyscraper

Dwayne Johnson in Skyscraper. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Being a Dwayne Johnson fan can be a painful experience. For every Moana and his regular appearances in the Fast and the Furious franchise, there’s something dreadful waiting. Walking Tall, San Andreas, Be Cool. Nary a one of those films is good, but they are at least mildly entertaining because of the well-documented charm of Dwayne Johnson, the only actor who regularly turns awful into mildly entertaining. It's as if he's on a quest to take roles in as many half-baked or completely asinine films as he can and see just how far audiences will follow him. His journey through the cinematic minefield has taken him to Skyscraper, yet another movie best described by the phrase “the Rock makes it watchable.” 

 

Skyscraper isn't the worst material Johnson has ever taken on. He stars as former FBI agent Will Sawyer, who gets wrapped up in a terrorist plot involving the billionaire owner Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han) of the largest, most technologically marvelous building in the world. Ji is the target of a terrorist attack coordinated by Kores Botha (Roland Møller), and Will's wife (Neve Campbell) and children (McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) are stuck in the middle of everything. Naturally, it becomes Will's job to stop the terrorists and save his family from the danger he accidentally got them into. Nothing in the aforementioned premise is overly exciting or new; this is a Die Hard rehash, transplanted from Los Angeles to Hong Kong and exchanging German terrorists for more diverse terrorists to soak in some of that sweet, sweet, foreign box office cash. Despite the tired concept, the premise has enough room for writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber to navigate a fun, nifty little action flick. 

 

The opening scene hints that Thurber has something more in mind for Skyscraper. It's a clever set up, starting with the peaceful snowfall and showing a small house in the middle of the woods before panning back to reveal a dangerous situation. Thurber does an excellent job showing the danger of the situation, emphasizing that things are not quite as they seem. It's an ambitious opening scene that results in a captivating opening sequence that, in a good movie, would link directly to the events of the rest of the film. Instead, it appears Thurber used up his best ideas for Skyscraper in the first five minutes. The nuanced storytelling shown in the opening is tossed in the very next scene, thanks to a torrent of exposition. Even the themes that could be carried from the opening are largely abandoned, revisited visually during the inevitable showdown between Will and Kores but not thematically or emotionally. An opening as good as this movie has should infect the rest of the film to provide some connection to the experience for the character, who undergoes a massive amount of emotional trauma that isn't revisited. 

 

Like the eponymous building, Skyscraper becomes big for the sake of being big, sacrificing storytelling and aesthetics so it can resemble a summer blockbuster. A boring, often incompetent blockbuster to boot. A lot of it is tied to some poor filmmaking choices from Thurber, for example his decision to explore the area outside the building instead of staying inside. What's lost is the paradoxical claustrophobia the setting should invoke, as a place as large as the eponymous building should both welcome and trap its occupants. Once Thurber ventures outside the mystique is lost, and the building is never utilized as an inescapable setting.

Skyscraper is influenced heavily by Die Hard and old school disaster movies, although the combination of the two in this movie is shockingly dull. The action scenes, often stolen from better films like Enter the Dragon are clichéd and unimaginative. An overarching sense of fun is lost because the movie plays it very straight, limiting the hints of tackiness that make the disaster movies sort of fun to watch. Even Johnson is restrained, limited in the number of little winks he gives to the audience to remind them he’s here to ensure they have a good time. The filmmaking isn't strong enough to maintain a serious tone, and a less rambunctious Dwayne Johnson is simply a waste of a movie star and his magnificent talent.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 102 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Dwayne Johnson, the opening scene

What Sucked: The rest of the story, the dialog, the special effects

Watch Instead: Die Hard, The Poseidon Adventure, Southland Tales