It’s hard to believe that during the July 4th weekend 20 years ago in 1996 the movie Independence Day was released. The special effects which we all saw on TV before the movie came out were spectacular, especially for the time. Even more surprising is the fact that the sequel to this movie is coming out this weekend, a full 20 years later. I am sure there is some financial reason why they didn’t wait until the July 4th weekend this time around because I think it would have been better of they waited one more week until the release of the new one. Independence Day had everything, great special effects, some humor and a great action movie acting performance from Will Smith, who is not in the new movie.

The one thing for me that stands out in this film more than anything else is that it probably has the stupidest ending idea in this history of all movies. The ending almost ruined the whole film even though before the ending it was very solid throughout. At the low point in the war against the Aliens, Jeff Goldblum who is the lead in this movie had no idea what humanity was going to do to stop this Alien invasion. His idea at first was very good. Invade the mother ship with one of the captured alien spacecraft from Area 51. Amazingly this ship still flew and the plan was to plant a bomb in the spacecraft, fly into the mother ship and set it off. Brilliant idea. If you disable the mother ship then all the other spacecraft that were destroying many cities on planet earth would be disabled! This is a great idea and would win the war. However, because of Hollywood, because of money, because of some kind of an audience reaction test, because of stupidity or other reasons, Jeff Goldblum came up with an idea to “install a virus” into the mother ship. How can someone do this? How can a person install software invented from planet earth into Alien Software and expect it to work? So this Alien world also uses the same code we use? It uses the same binary language we use? Also, how can you interface with the alien computer? Do they use a USB port? How do you connect to their computer and how did Jeff Goldblum do this with his laptop? Why didn’t the producers realize how stupid this is and that there is no logical way this idea to save the world could be pulled off? They already had a good ending with the bomb idea, why add this stupidity at the end? For me, it almost ruined the whole movie.

I am hoping that the new movie has a better ending than the last one 20 years ago. As far as Independence Day, its a very good movie despite the stupid ending.

Kevin Hart has probably made the most movies of any well-known movie actor in the last 5 years and I heard the other day that his movies have grossed close to 1 billion dollars. I have noticed that all of his movies follow the same pattern. An average story, some physical humor and many attempts at verbal humor, some that fails and some that are only moderately funny. As a standup comedian Kevin Hart is one of the best to come out in many years, but as a comedic actor, he has to find better scripts than the mostly average ones he has found so far. The other problem if this keeps up is overexposure which can be the death of anyone’s acting career in Hollywood.

The other hard working actor in the movie “Central Intelligence” is Dwayne Johnson, “The Rock” and over the last 5 years, he has probably chosen his movie roles a little better than Kevin Hart. The good part of this movie includes some important statements about bullying, which is a huge problem in this country and has been getting worse over the years. From an outrageous bullying incident in 1996 involving Johnson’s character who was obese at the time, he later became not only a great physical specimen “because of his 6 hours of training for 20 years”, but also a CIA agent. The re-connection of Hart’s character and the Rock is through Facebook and very quickly they find themselves being chased around by CIA agents within a story that became rather convoluted and run of the mill. Some of the physical comedy was somewhat funny but not enough as were some of the lines and interaction between Hart and Johnson’s characters.

This movie is a very typical Kevin Hart movie and if you are not a big fan, you can miss this film.

I thought while watching this movie that the correct title should have been “Finding Dory’s Parents” because that is what this entire movie is about – A baby fish with short term memory who loses her parents as a child and then spends the rest of the movie trying to find them. “Finding Dory” is the sequel after 13 years to “Finding Nemo”. While this movie has a good solid story and excellent computer graphics, after 13 years I was expecting more than this just above average cartoon about a cute fish with big eyes who has short term memory. Ellen Degeneres reprises her role as Dory and like she did 13 years ago, did a very good job with her part. As I always do, I had to respect the outstanding computer graphics work in this movie as every moviegoer has to. Somewhere they should publish the number of man hours it takes to put a 2 hour animated cartoon together, then add the script and the planning that goes into a project that takes years to produce.

I thought this movie was very good but not great and I do recommend it.