The movie “The Art of Self-Defense” starring Jessie Eisenberg is one of those films that tries extremely hard to be different than anything ever done before. Unfortunately, sometimes when a story tries too hard to be different, the result is illogical and in the case of this movie, too off the wall and weird. The strange story of this film, that involves a man who is mugged and almost killed, deciding to take Karate lessons, degrades into something that is not believable.

The story started out pretty well, showing the reasons why Casey, played by Eisenberg considers buying a gun after being mugged and almost killed by several motorcycle attackers and then changes his mind to wanting to learn Karate. From this point on, the story goes from run of the mill, to unexpected and then into a strange direction, that for me, did not make any sense. Its OK to be different and unusual but illogical and strange should not be what follows.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for The Art of Self-Defense is a high 83% but my rating is only 60% because of the strange story and ending. For those reasons, I do not recommend this movie.

The thinking in Hollywood California about the idea of pairing actor Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista was probably that they are such an unlikely pair and so different culturally that this would lead to a new buddy-cop-comedy team. Nanjiani was so funny in the movie “The Big Sick”, that he will be funny again in this movie. Unfortunately the movie The Big Sick had a great script and Nanjiani was funny, because the dialogue and situation was funny. This is not the case with Stuber. Everything starts with a great idea, then a great story and screenplay and there are never any shortcuts.

The story of Stuber starts out impressively with some very good action scenes that were very effective, but not believable given that two characters fall from heights of over two stories, which is supposed to kill any human being. The Karate expert Iko Uwais is in these scenes, and he is arguably one of the best movie Karate experts of all time. Once the movie is past the opening scenes, what follows are some boring chases and a story-line involving corrupt police officers that we have all seen thousands of times before. Some attempts at comedy with Uber driver Stu, played by Nanjiani and a police officer Vic, played by Bautista mostly all falls very flat. The actress Mira Sorvino also appears in this film in a small role and it was nice to see her in a movie again, but its too bad that her white hot career of some 15 years ago is at least for right now, a distant memory. The comedy movie test that I always use also failed, because there were almost no laughs during the almost 2 hours of this film.

I agree with the low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for Stuber that are a low 46% and I do not recommend this movie.

The new movie “Crawl” gets high marks for originality. A father and daughter are trapped in a basement during a major Hurricane surrounded by very large Alligators. I have to admit, I have never seen something like this before. The only problem with this story, is the same problem with all movies like this; people do stupid things more for Hollywood drama rather than because they are panicked. If someone panics and does something stupid because they are about to be eaten by a huge Alligator, then this makes sense and is understandable. However, some of the decisions in this movie, especially towards the end are just plain dumb and are only for increasing the drama, rather than enhancing what is a pretty good story. Crawl delivers what it promises, I just wish it could have done this with some more common sense and intelligence.

The Rotten Tomatoes are a surprisingly high 88% for Crawl, but my grade is only an average 75%, mostly for the very well done special effects than the story and some of the very bad decisions the characters make to try and survive.