All of the previews I have seen for the new Amy Schumer movie “Snatched” had me expecting a very funny movie. Unfortunately, it turns out that the funniest moments in the entire film were only those in that are shown in the previews. My acid test for reviewing a comedy movie worked again for this film. Nobody laughed in the theater I was in and I didn’t laugh once. The opportunity lost here is that Schumer is a very good stand-up comedian and perhaps the first female standup to follow that up with a very good movie which was Train Wreck, that came out in 2015. The problem is that you cannot follow a very good movie with a bad one because you might ruin your entire film career before it even gets started. The IMDB and Rotten Tomato ratings for this movie are extremely low, 2.5 and 38% respectively. I did not think that movie should have received ratings this low, especially the 2.5 from IMDB. This is at best a below average movie mainly because it is supposed to be a comedy and it mostly fails in just about all the attempts it makes to be funny. Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn do make a good mother-daughter combination in this story, so it is even more of a shame that the movie was just not nearly funny enough.

The movie starts out pretty well, with Amy’s character losing her job and then getting rejected by her boyfriend. She then turns to her mother for support and then talks her into going with her vacation in of all places Equador. I thought that the idea of vacationing in Equador was a little funny at the start, because why would anyone want to vacation in Equador? Following this setup, just about everything about this movie fails from that point on. The problem is that it is very hard to make kidnapping, some of the depressing location shots, gunplay and murder funny. The situations these two women were in most of the time during their kidnapping and attempts to escape were never funny. The appearance of Wanda Sykes and a mute Joan Cusack were not funny. Supposedly, the writer and director thought that Joan Cusack’s character cutting out her own tongue to be a better security agent would be something that people would think was a funny idea. There is nothing funny about the idea of cutting out your own tongue and her inability to talk during this entire movie removed any opportunity for her to say something funny. There were a few somewhat funny sight gags in this movie, but for the most part, this film was very disappointing.

If you are looking for a very funny and very well done Amy Schumer movie, get the DVD for Trainwreck and miss this mostly bad movie.

A question I have written on this blog several times in the past is that is it possible to rescue a bad or average script with special effects? For many people, the answer to this question is probably yes, but for me, it has always been no. For me a great story is the most important thing, a story that makes sense and that has a good message. After a great story, very good special effects are a must, especially for a science fiction movie that takes place in space. I was surprised that this movie did not has much effective humor as the first film but it did have all the unusual aspects of the first film, which included the 60-80’s music and the use of a Sony Walkman, that I thought showed great imagination for the first film. There are references to 70’s and 80’s TV shows like Cheers and Nightrider and several references and even an appearance of the actor David Hasselhoff, that makes you wonder if this is out of respect for Hasselhoff or an attempt to make fun of him.

The problem with this film are not the special effects which are the equal of the previous film, but the convoluted story and plot, that I thought at times were even boring and is the kiss of death for a film like this one. The start of this story is the meeting between Peter Quill, played by Chris Pratt and his long lost father named of all things Ego, played by Kurt Russell. After this introduction, there is a story that goes all over the place, to different planets and involves Quill’s adoptive father and even an appearance by Sylvester Stallone. I thought that the special effects at times provided overkill rather than action that enhanced the story. At times you barely knew what was going on in some of the later action scenes. There is some humorous banter in this movie like the last one and the addition of some new characters, including a sister to Zoe Saldana’s character Gamora that will most likely be appearing in the sequels to this movie and there will probably be at least two more of those. I was rather surprised at the quality of the screenplay for this movie, considering that its been 3 years since the last one was released. Clearly, I was expecting something better for this new version of one of the big hits from 3 years ago.

Mainly for the special effects and some moments of humor I give this film a very mild recommendation.

There are thousands of ways to tell a story. In my opinion, for movies, the most straightforward way of creating a timeline and telling a story is always the best. When there is an overt attempt to be different, very often the strange and unusual storytelling becomes greater than the purpose of the film because following what is going on, becomes too much of a strange experience.

I admit that I have never seen a story told the way it is told in the new film, “The Dinner”. Two brothers and their two wives meet at a very expensive restaurant, a restaurant so expensive that each course and every item on the menu requires a long explanation from the waiter. At the top of each new course of the dinner, there is a new part of the story that is revealed through the use of flashbacks.

The main characters in this story are Stan Lowman, who is a politician running for Governor, played by Richard Gere, his mentally disturbed brother played by Steve Coogan and their wives played by Laura Linney and Rebecca Hall. The flashbacks are mostly about Lowman’s brother and the various reasons for his mental illnesses and how it relates to his job as a high school history teacher and of all things, Gettysburg and the Civil War.

The story telling at times during the many different flashbacks was I thought too scattered and seemed to be trying too hard to be different almost to the point of throwing the entire story under a bus. The main message of this movie had to do with a horrendous act of cruelty done by each couple’s teenage sons and then discussing what was the best way to handle the situation, especially considering that Lowman is running for Governor. What followed was an extremely strange and abrupt ending to this film that seemed almost as if the director ran out of film.

For these reasons, despite the good acting in this film, I cannot recommend the Dinner.