It’s going to be an ugly weekend at the movie theater…

It’s hard to decide which wide release this weekend is worse, Bad Company or Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood.  Okay.  Not true.  Bad Company is much worse than Ya Ya. 

Bad Company doesn’t work on any level.  Not only isn’t it a good Jerry Bruckheimer movie, this is the worst-made Jerry Bruckheimer movie ever… ever!  This thing makes Days of Thunder look like commercial poetry.  It’s probably Joel Schumacher’s worst work ever.  Batman & Robin was a disaster, but in context.  The movie, as ridiculous as it was, made sense.   Characters were consistent. 

Bad Company is a pre-fab buddy thriller that neither paints by the numbers effectively nor reaches for a single ounce of originality.  Even the color of Chris Rock’s skin seems to be an element that the filmmakers just didn’t bother to address. 

It’s just sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.  The Hopkins character starts the film with the classic “establishment guy hates the outsider” position.  But it is never really defined.  What is Hopkins problem?  Is he just cranky because he’s older than 40?  Does he have a problem with black people?  Or is he just reading lines?

When the second act roles along and it is time for Hopkins to start showing sympathy to Rock’s plight, they add another character, Hopkins’ boss, to do the same exact callous schtick that Hopkins does in the first act.  But in the third act, when you think the duo would become a real team that we could root for, they don’t really connect either. 

Likewise, there is the artistic conceit of a team of five CIA agents who are handling Rock throughout the movie.   Okay.  But we never develop a relationship with any of them.  There are hints of one character trait or another, but nothing that makes us care for a second if these people live or die. 

At first, I blamed a lot on Chris Rock’s lack of range as an actor.  The only real variation between Rock’s portrayal of the two separated-at-birth brothers is that one doesn’t engage in street patter.  When the world’s most obvious gag is set up – an obvious movie needs some obvious gags, particularly when there is nothing else paying off – they shirk from paying it off and limit it to an unexplained, Spider-Man-like taste test…. I think.  Like I said, it was unexplained.   

Then there is Schumacher, who manages to turn every action sequence into a blurry, unfollowable mess.  The most aggravating of them takes place in a single large room…. You should be able to figure out where everyone is and, so, where the bullet s are flying.  But no!  It’s like the old Police Squad joke where they are having a gun battle in close-ups and, when you pull back, the two gunmen are four feet away from one another.  The worst such sequence is a hotel chase in which you have no idea where any character is in relation to any other until they actually meet. 

It would be nice if it managed to be funny… they did hire Chris Rock.  But I could count the laughs on one hand… a painfully experienced butcher’s hand.  Even the signature gag, Anthony Hopkins calling Chris Rock, who is African-American, “bitch.”   HA!  I laughed until I… well, I didn’t really laugh at all. 

Bad Company doesn’t even qualify as a failure that’s making an effort.  It is a by the book, “we got financing,” developed to death piece of junk that will not even rate a second viewing on cable. 

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, on the other hand, features one of the best cast s of women ever.  The women of Steel Magnolias were good, but this is, for me, the A Team.  (No, Mr. T doesn’t do a cameo.)  You really couldn’t find a better quartet of aging actresses than Dame Maggie Smith, Fionnula Flanagan, Shirley Knight and Ellen Burstyn.  And watching each one work is enjoyable in and of itself.  Each brings a unique spin and Maggie Smith has a line reading early in the picture that ranks up there with the greatest single line readings in the history of cinema comedy... just amazing.  But that’s just one joke. 

Ashley Judd is very good, though she is given a lot of suffering to do.  Her skin looks better here than ever and she is absolutely radiant when working with little or no makeup.  Callie Khouri proves to be a writer/director who needs to get back behind the typewriter.  But she has a couple of moments.  And one is a scene with a near-makeup-less Judd, her head filling the frame.

Judd plays one of the four Ya-Ya members as teen-twenty-thirty-year-olds.  Her sidekicks are given little screen time, but they do the job.  The great Jacqueline MacKenzie plays the young Flanagan and does the most with the least.  Katy Selverstone, formerly of The Drew Carey Show, plays the young Maggie Smith with a voice that is so different from Smith’s that it makes it hard to be sure who she is playing.  And Kiesten Warren is the young Knight… you’ll know her face, if not her name.  But it’s Judd show in that generation.

Sandra Bullock is also quite good, though she is a reactor here and doesn’t really get a lot to do.   She spends most of the film looking exasperated. 

James Garner is still James Garner, playing gentle and smart, though the weight he carries as an actor tends to make the story of his younger days seem all but unbelievable. 

The problems with the book, I am told by my sister, who read the book, are all in the adaptation.  It does seem that the book had just too much in it for a two-hour movie.  But the major leaps in logic are all from new story construction.  The most major comes in the form of the “big secret” which was pretty powerful in the book and turns out to be lame and under standard in the movie. 

I loved watching all the actresses work in this film.  Give Smith, Flanagan, Knight and Burstyn a phone book to read and you have something worth watching.  Of course, that didn’t keep me from laughing as every time the film introduced a new female character, a new country was represented.  Smith, Flanagan, MacKenzie and Gina McKee are just four examples.  Don’t we have enough actresses in America?

David Rasche and Cherry Jones team up for an intensely dramatic sequence.  It was great to see Rasche breaking out of his comedy mold, but unfortunately, the Cherry Jones stuff is so poorly developed that it comes off as shrill short-hand. 

In the end, Ya-Ya is not a very good movie.  The staff around Callie Khouri was very game, but she really didn’t know how to frame the most basic shots.  Had the director been George Roy Hill or maybe Alan Parker, it would have been a movie a step above Steel Magnolias.  But it wasn’t.  It wasn’t like having my teeth pulled either.  (No matter… they were all pulled by Bad Company the night before.)  It just wasn’t special.  And that was frustrating, because this cast was more than extraordinary. 

READER OF THE DAY:  2MK/V writes:  “Your Wednesday Readers of the Day all gave good reasons why AOTC is not going to make as much as TPM. I would like to add one more factor into the mix, and his name is Peter Jackson. This stubby Kiwi filmmaker, in my opinion, is a Lucas-killer.

Three years ago, TPM was the only game in town. Then last winter, LOTR:TFOTR was unleashed upon the world and, frankly, knocked people on their ass. This was the dark, immersive film experience that intelligent, thoughtful people who fell in love with Star Wars two decads ago craved, not the Jar Jar Binks show. In the last ten years, LOTR:TFOTR is the only film I saw during its theatrical release three times. Not that it's the best film of the last decade (although I would place it in my top five), but it's certainly one of the most complete visual, creative and soul-touching experiences I've ever had in stadium seating.

Compare that to AOTC ... and the comparison cannot be made. Lucas' film is adequate, while what Jackson created was transcendent.

Poll any set of 100 filmgoers and ask them: what are you looking forward to most, The Two Towers and Return of the King, or Episode 3? I'd be willing to slap a Balrog if the majority said Ep3 ... in other words, it ain't gonna happen.”

E ME:  If you are going to avoid the Attack of the Bad Movies this weekend, what will you see instead?