The Other Guys (1.5 out of 5)

There’s a moment in The Other Guys that is just about the funniest thing Will Ferrell has every done. It proves that Ferrell has all the ability to be a brilliant subtle character comic but none of the good sense to follow through with it. The Other Guys is instead a constant parade of stock Will Ferrellisms: breaking out into pimp talk, yelling nonsense like a madman, making forced pop culture references and, as is his speciality, conducting himself like a full grown moron with the subtlety of a jackhammer.

And yet there’s that one scene, denying us all the promise Will Ferrell has been denying us for years. It involves the star standing in the doorway of a ballet school. He’s just finished yelling something nonsensical. The dance instructor tells him to go away. He pauses, stares, turns and walks away with a strange and perfect mix of force and idiocy and for one moment so brief that you blink and you miss it, Will Ferrell has become an actual character.

Character is exactly what has been lacking form every Ferrell comedy since Talladega Nights. It’s not so much that we expect much from Ferrell and his director/collaborator Adam McKay anymore, as much as it is that they drag good people down with them. In this case it’s Mark Wahlberg who can be a very funny actor but here is given nothing to do but play off of Ferrell's doofus naif, which basically comes down to a lot of frustration, yelling, and telling his partner that he just doesn’t like him very much.

Gamble (Ferrell) and Hoitz (Wahlberg) are mismatched police partners to say the least. Gamble is tall, straight-laced, always dawns his oversized spectacles and would rather work a calculator than a drug bust. So clueless is this guy that when his co-workers convince him that it’s a regular office practice to fire your gun off into the ceiling he ends up being issued a wooden gun as a result.

Hoitz on the other hand is fiery and ready for action. He used to be a hotshot but got transferred and stuck with Gamble because of an incident that gets a chuckle the first time and then get’s beaten into the growd as it becomes one of the plots many frequent punch lines. After the two top cops (Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson) get taken off the job in one of the films few big laughs, Hoitz sees an opportunity and must convince a reluctant Gamble to get out from behind the desk and onto the streets.

There’s no point talking much about what kind of case Gamble and Hoitz stumble onto because the entire film is essentially a collection of set ups for Wahlberg to scream at Ferrell and Ferrell to say something stupid in response. Sometimes the exchanges manage to find something halfway amusing to run with, but more often than not they are just superfluous flashes of nothing in particular. Ferrell talks about his days as a pimp, his sexual escapades with his wife, how a school of tuna would defeat a lion who tried to capture them and you know how it goes.

None of this does anything to build into comedic characters or a some sort of clever plot. Instead it just sits on the screen, does noting, proves nothing, contributes nothing and then disappears only to be followed up by the same bit of business. The chief is played by Michael Keaton who, once, amusingly quotes a TLC song and then denies and then does it again and again and again. He also works a second job at Bed, Bath and Beyond where he gives a pep talk about the new shipment of rugs. Characters rarely ever run deeper than that.

None of this would matter if the punch lines were funny. However they aren’t. They aren’t even halfway towards clever. Part of the thing that made Talladega Nights work so well is that it had the clear idea that it wanted to be a parody and shot for that. The Other Guys has no such conviction. Instead of approaching this material with the keen eye of a spoofster, McKay and his crew trample forward with the laden hand of someone who can’t be bothered to think up a decent punch line, thinking that maybe half-hearted jokes will maybe get funnier with every time that they are repeated. It’s a shame, Will Ferrell is a talented guy and can be a compelling character actor. I just desperately pray that he will soon muster the sense enough to stop making Will Ferrell movies already!

Toy Story 3 (4 out of 5)

Pixar Animation Studios spends so much time creating timeless family films it’s no surprise that every couple of years they need to phone one in. That’s not to say that films like A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Cars and now Toy Story 3 are bad, they just don’t possess the sweep and the pull of Pixar’s greatest work. They exist, more often than not, to be light and amusing as opposed to vast, exciting, adventurous, and to pull the imagination to the end of the world and back. They’re still magic little films but they’re not the first ones you grab off the shelf when you need a fix.

Toy Story 3 picks up mere days before Andy, now 17, is moving off to college. The toys, stored in a chest, desperate to be played with one last time devise a failed attempt to lure Andy back into his toy chest for one more go. Mom orders Andy to box up all his stuff to separate what will go with him, what will go to the curb and what will collect dust in the attic. Andy, seeing the cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) and the gang one last time as he roots through his stuff has one brief moment of Proudstian revelation in which he is transported back through all of the great times he shared with his favourite cowboy. It’s funny after coming of age, to look back over life and see what objects seem to have created deep physiological connections that can trigger emotional responses at a mere glance.

So Andy throws Woody in the college box and bags up Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and co. to go to the attic, but the bag is mistaken as trash and heads for the curb instead. Knowing that Andy would be devastated to lose his old friends, Woody runs to the rescue but the toys all think they have been junked and, out of equal parts spite and heartbreak head for the back of the van where a box of toys is to be donated to the Sunnyside Daycare.

This is great opening stuff. Not only has director Lee Unkrich put us right back into engagement with these beloved characters but he, along with writer Michael Arndt of Little Miss Sunshine fame, seems to really understand the psychology of toys. The movie not only understands the important, unbreakable emotional connections that children form with their favourite toys, who, in a sense, are always there through the most important moments of childhood, but it also understands what the owner means to the toys; how they are dedicated to Andy and will forever be there for him whenever he needs them. All they ask in return is to never be forgotten about. Andy may grow up, but does one ever really grow out of their childhood toys? This is what is so special about Pixar films: no matter their subject they always understand there characters, first and foremost, in relation to their dramatic surroundings.

But then the toys get shipped to Sunnyside, which seems great at first. All the other toys welcome them with open arms and assure them that here there will always be kids that will want to play with them and when those kids leave it’s no matter because more just as eager will soon arrive. The daycare is run by the old bear Lotso (Ned Beatty) who ships the new toys to the Caterpillar Room where the young children, all riled up from recess, lay waste to them.

In the meantime, knowing his true intentions, Woody escapes the daycare in an attempt to get back to Andy. Back at Sunnyside it turns out that Lotso was once the favourite toy of his owner until he and his accomplice Big Baby and Chuckles were forgotten about one day on a picnic and quickly replaced. Feeling betrayed by his owner, Lotso became bitter and now rules over the daycare with an iron fist along with Baby, Ken (Michael Keaton) and others.

The long middle section at the daycare is essentially one complete action sequence. The toys are trapped, Buzz is reprogrammed, and Woody returns to rescue them in a sequence that plays more like Escape From Alcatraz than the cute adventures of past films, until it finally ends in a junk yard before the fires of hell in which the heroes become less like toys and more like your standard action hero.

The film ends strong with a final scene so touching and moving that it’s a shame the midsection couldn’t live up to the bookends. The action is entertaining enough but these films have always gotten most of their mileage from showing the toys acting like, well, toys. Even what happens to Lotso is a missed opportunity. What could have been one of the films biggest emotional moments becomes no more than standard movie villain commuperance.

And yet, when the toys are being toys, the film has a magic all its own. It’s neat to see how the toys use their specific capabilities in order to evade Lotso and his goons and Unkrich, a veteran Pixar man, knows how to get big laughs out of small places. When Ken first appears on the balcony of his dream house he takes the elevator down and it moves, not like a real elevator but like a cheap toy one. It’s stuff like that that keep Pixar at the top of the heap.

Of course there is always the sentimentality, like is the case with old toys, of picking up with these characters so many years since we last saw them. Tom Hanks, still the most endearing man in Hollywood, is perfect as Woody, the good hearted do gooder, Allen is still doing Buzz as what he is: the best movie part the man has ever had; Joan Cusack is lovely once again as cowgirl Jessie, Michael Keaton is the best choice one could imagine for Ken and no actor other than Beatty as Lotso could play a lovable bear with dark tones lurking just below the surface.

And then the film ends with a classic Pixar moment in which Andy and the toys both find solace in each other one last time before the inevitable must happen. The film opens musically with Randy Newman’s You Got a Friend in Me. It could very well have ended with Tom Waits’ I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.

Note- Toy Story 3 was my first 3D movie experience and confirmed to me that 3D is both a gimmick and a distraction that is not worth the extra money. I’m curious if, when the DVD of this film arrives, I will connect with it on a deeper level in two dimensions than I did in three.