Tag: Paramount+

Dear Santa (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A dyslexic child accidentally writes a letter to Satan instead of Satan. That’s it, that’s the movie.

The Farrelly Brothers have directed some of the most well-regarded comedies of the modern age; Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary etc. Jack Black also has a pretty damn good history in comedies; the modern Jumanji movies, School Of Rock, Kung Fu Panda. With that much comedy pedigree, and with such a simple premise, this should be fantastic.

It isn’t. It isn’t the worst film Jack Black has been in recently (Hello, Borderlands), but it is definitely in the lower half. None of the issues are with the performers, Black is on form, and even though she’s only in it a little section, I LOVE Cate Freedman as the crossing guard (disappointingly she’s not even mentioned on the Wikipedia page). The issue is the script. It’s incredibly disjointed. The main problem is a lack of cohesion in terms of audience. Much like Red One, this feels like it needs to either age up or down. At times it feels like a kids’ movie. The “here’s what I can do for you” sequence feels like it’s aimed at pre-teens. Some moments feel like they’re lifted directly from a 90s Christmas movie. But then it makes jokes about the sexual abuse of a minor and the consequences of fucking a dog, which makes you feel it’s aimed more at 15-year-olds who want to be thought of as mature and think that just means swearing and sex jokes.

There’s also a surprising lack of heart to the whole thing. It attempts to have heart with a dead brother subplot, but it feels incredibly tacked on, and the way it comes back at the end just raises more questions than answers, to the point where the “wait, but how does the world react to this?” reaction overshadows any sense of narrative closure. That would be acceptable in a kids’ movie, but not in a film with some of the jokes that Dear Santa has.

I get why a studio would diversify their jokes, to appeal to a wide audience. But the way they’ve done it here means that it ends up appealing to nobody. It’s too childish for kids, too mean-spirited for kids, and too one-dimensional for adults. I put more thought into this review than the scriptwriters did into the screenplay, and considering I did this while watching an episode of Smallville, that says a lot.

Good Burger 2 (2023) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Dexter Reed and cashier Ed reunite at fast-food restaurant Good Burger

Do people like Good Burger? I think it’s like Space Jam, where if you mention it then you will get positive response from people, but it’s not really brought up that much. It also is very limited in their fanbase, people who were kids in the 90s. There’s not really a large number of modern kids and teens being like “You should totally check out this 90s film I just found”. So the market for a sequel would be people who watched the original in the 90s, and now have both disposable income, and an impending sense of time passing which means they want to recapture their youth. So in that sense, a sequel does make sense, and would be a good way for a streaming service like Paramount+ to gain a foothold.

It doesn’t mean the film is good though. The director was asked about a potential sequel to this, and gave the world the following sentence:

“The character of Ed has not changed […] he now has a family, he’s got a bunch of kids and a wife, but he is still the same old Ed. As that doesn’t change, we can just do it again and again and put them in crazier and crazier situations.”

And that’s a problem. It worked when these characters were teenagers, but it’s 25 years later and Ed hasn’t changed, and seeing that level of naivity, stupidity and immaturity, is no longer charming or funny, it’s actually kind of annoying and makes you concerned. It doesn’t feel like a movie, it feels like a television show. A character like that is needed in a TV show because you need an excuse for them to not learn over the course of 25 episodes, but for a 90 minute movie? You’re allowed to have your characters seem human.

There’s also an issue with the way the film handles Kenan Thompson. He’s a TREMENDOUS comedic talent, but he’s forced into a straight man role that doesn’t really suit him. Most of his screen time is him watching crazy shit, and then explaining what he’s just seen in case the audience didn’t understand it.

The best showcase of Kenan Thompson has been his SNL stint, and people who have watched that will know he’s capable of much more than he’s been allowed to show here. Those who haven’t watched SNL? Best of luck with this, as that’s where a lot of the cameos come from.

With only 2 or 3 exceptions, most of them are relatively low-level outside of the US. I watched Wonka recently, and this feels like it’s aiming for similar, but not really doing it. It has a similar method of casting television comedy actors in small parts so that people who watch it can do the DiCaprio point. I felt it worked better in Wonka though, and not just because I actually knew who they were (although that helped). The cameos in Wonka felt like full characters, even if they were only on screen for one scene (thinking specifically of the couple played by Charlotte Richie and Phil Wang), so that they didn’t feel like cameos, they felt like characters who just happened to be played by comedy performers. Good Burger has the cameos be so obvious that it’s distracting. It puts them front and centre, over the lead actors. You can almost sense the “look, it’s [person]! Applause”. It’s like when I watched the Uncharted movie and the cameo of the original voice actor stood out like a sore thumb covered in fairy lights, begging for people to notice it. “I don’t know who that is, but I assume that’s somebody” is the general feeling.
It’s not all negative though, there is some tremendously funny dialogue with some genuine laugh out loud moments. The scene where Ed is introducing his family has some really randomly funny lines. “he’s allergic to hippos” was my personal favourite because it’s just so stupid and wonderful. Whilst I did say Thompson was miscast, he is still pretty good at what he has to do in this. Kamaia Fairburn is talented as hell and has great potential, as do the Hinkler sisters, who in their all-too-brief moments show enough that I feel casting directors need to focus on developing a vehicle for them.
There’s one area where this is a definite improvement over the first one: no creepy sex pest Dan Schneider, which as anybody who has read I’m Glad My Mom Died (or has heard anything said about him in the last few years), is a definite good thing. The ending reprise of “We’re All Dudes” is also pretty damn entertaining.