Josh Bell
In this week’s minor VOD releases, characters in isolated houses experience time loops and grand scientific discoveries, Philly gangsters plot revenge, and Jon Heder makes an ill-advised return to the style of his signature role.
Tapawingo (VOD December 2): If Jon Heder has made any attempt to avoid typecasting from his breakout role in Napoleon Dynamite, he clearly gave up before agreeing to star in this dreadful comedy, as a character who might as well be named Schmapoleon Schmynamite. Heder’s Nate Skoog is an awkward weirdo who lives in a small town populated by people with silly names and sillier haircuts, in a vaguely 1980s-ish time period. When his boss asks Nate to pick up his teenage son from school, Nate gets drawn into a battle with a group of bullying brothers. The characters are mostly middle-aged men who act like 12-year-old boys, with annoying, self-consciously quirky behavior standing in for recognizable human speech and emotion. Director and co-writer Dylan K. Narang packs the cast with familiar faces (including Gina Gershon, Chris Gethard, and John Ratzenberger) and loads up the soundtrack with distracting classic-rock needle-drops, but it’s all just desperate posturing. The loose plot drags on for nearly two hours, but the tone never progresses beyond a condescending smirk. Grade: D
Not for Nothing (VOD December 5): The meaningless filler phrase that serves as the title for this gangster drama is an accurate reflection of its amiable emptiness, with a story about drug pushing and murder that comes off mostly as goombah cosplay. It takes a while to distinguish among the various knockaround guys who hang out at a South Philadelphia bar, busting each other’s chops and engaging in petty crime and light misogyny. Eventually the story coalesces around brothers Mikey (Mike Bash) and Frankie (Carmine Yusko), who decide to take on a fearsome local operator known as Bobby Boss (Mark Webber) after he forces Frankie’s girlfriend to overdose on fentanyl. The quest for vengeance shares space with underwhelming subplots about the brothers’ buddies, and the movie lurches clumsily from broad comedy to grim drama. The web of gangland ties becomes so convoluted by the end that it’s hard to determine whether the protagonists have triumphed (or what that would even entail). Despite the mounting tragedy, there’s no pathos, just a lot of overstated bluster. Grade: C
Universal (VOD December 5): The fate of humanity may rest in the hands of three unassuming people in a vacation-rental cabin in writer-director Stephen Portland’s low-key sci-fi comedy. Universal is so low-key that its world-changing stakes never feel particularly convincing, especially when Portland spends just as much time on lukewarm interpersonal conflict. Academics Leo (Joe Thomas) and Naomi (Rosa Robson) are on a romantic anniversary getaway when they’re surprised by the arrival of Ricky (Kelley Mack), an eccentric amateur codebreaker who’s been working with Leo on human genome data. The irritating, overly enthusiastic Ricky claims to have discovered a secret message hidden in DNA strands, and she insists on staying so that she and Leo can decipher it. The bond among the trio develops haltingly, with half-hearted cringe comedy (including a bizarre extended poop joke) alongside reams of scientific jargon. The result is a movie that can’t quite commit either to its stilted humor or its high-concept ideas, and ends up in a dissatisfying middle ground. Grade: C
A Few Feet Away (VOD and DVD December 9): This Argentinian drama is just as ambivalent about app-based gay hookup culture as its angsty protagonist, and it comes to a similarly frustrating conclusion after a wild night out. Before that, though, writer-director Tadeo Pestaña Caro’s film is a well-crafted character study about a young man figuring out what he wants in life. Twenty-year-old Santiago (Max Suen) works a boring office job and spends his free time connecting with equally boring men, always with an eye on his phone for the next prospect. Over the course of a single, chaotic night on the town, Santiago goes from bars to apartments to a full-on orgy in the backroom of a nightclub, without ever finding the fulfillment he seeks. Caro offers a vibrant and gritty picture of Buenos Aires nightlife, but he doesn’t dig deep enough with Santiago, who remains passive and aloof. As the night progresses, the movie seems to be building to a catharsis or revelation, but instead it fizzles out just as the sun comes up. Grade: B-
Manor of Darkness (VOD December 9): Time loops offer a sturdy structure for horror movies, since filmmakers can kill the same characters as many times as they like. Writer-director Blake Ridder messes up that basic opportunity by taking nearly half of Manor of Darkness’ running time just to get to the time loop, then burdening it with confusing rules and shifting character motivations. The movie plods through a huge amount of ultimately useless set-up, establishing irrelevant background details on the crew of small-time criminals who decide to rob a spooky old estate. Dubiously posing as documentarians, they show up to find the mansion’s owner conveniently absent, so they have plenty of time to poke around the expansive house and unleash an ancient evil. Then the time loop finally begins, but Ridder fails to find any clever variations on the repeating events, and the demonic presence — represented primarily by cruddy CGI black smoke — is never threatening or scary. Each time the loop starts over, Manor gets less appealing. Grade: C-
