Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson, Seth MacFarlane, Taron Egerton, Tori Kelly, Nick Kroll, John C. Reilly

Garth Jennings

Illumination Entertainment prints money. Their three most recent films (“Despicable Me 2,” “Minions” and “The Secret Life of Pets”) have raked in just under $3 billion combined, with an average budget per film of $75 million (which is roughly half what Disney and Pixar spend on their films). As business models go, it’s hard to come up with a better one. On the other hand, those Illumination films range in quality from aggressively mediocre to downright bad, and in 10 years, they’ll all be forgotten. If Pixar films are a blue chip stock, Illumination films are day trader profits; it’s all about the now, hence the emphasis on merchandising over story.

“Sing” appeared to be aiming (slightly) higher than its most recent predecessors in terms of quality, but it falls victim to the same trappings as the others, namely a script that feels as though it wasn’t touched by human hands until the third act. The first hour is a laundry list of overused tropes, including a few that are so outdated that their presence here beggars belief.

Koala bear Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) is a theater owner in desperate need of a hit. He decides that his newest show will be a singing competition, and when the grand prize amount is moved two decimal points to the right thanks to a series of events both gross and absurd, Buster is surprised to see that he has a bevy of talent to choose from at auditions (but doesn’t yet know why). The ones to make the final cut are classically trained mouse Mike (Seth MacFarlane), hausfrau pig Rosita (Reese Witherspoon), German pig Gunter (Nick Kroll), sensitive gorilla Johnny (Taron Egerton) and teen punk porcupine Ash (Scarlett Johansson. Yes, Scarlett Johannson plays a teenager). Meena (Tori Kelly), an elephant with pipes for days, went to audition but is terrified of performing in front of an audience and is bullied off stage by Mike. She goes to audition a second time, and Buster asks her to be his stage hand without ever hearing her sing. This turns out to be a very good thing for all concerned, for obvious reasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Vergara, Robert Kazinsky, John Carroll Lynch

Anne Fletcher

“Hot Pursuit” is bad. Like, really bad; the kind of movie where the blooper reel attached to the end credits is funnier than the film itself. Not that outshining Anne Fletcher’s action-comedy was particularly difficult to do, but at least it looks like Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara had fun making the movie. Unfortunately, sitting through it isn’t quite as pleasurable, akin to listening to fingernails on a chalkboard for 90 minutes while the two actresses yell at each other like a couple of high-strung Chihuahuas. Women in Hollywood may be desperate to prove that they can be funny too, but “Hot Pursuit” is so painfully dull, mind-numbingly stupid and just plain lazy that it doesn’t exactly help their cause.

Witherspoon stars as Officer Rose Cooper, the daughter of a well-respected cop who followed in her dad’s footsteps. But unlike him, Cooper is totally inept, recently demoted to the evidence locker after a now-infamous incident where she accidentally lit the mayor’s son on fire. When her precinct teams up with the U.S. Marshals Service to transport an important witness to Dallas ahead of his testimony against notorious cartel boss Vincent Cortez (Joaquín Cosio), Cooper is brought along as the police-mandated female escort for his wife, Danielle Riva (Vergara). But after her husband is killed by intruders, Cooper must protect Mrs. Riva from crooked cops and cartel hitmen looking to finish the job so that she can testify against Cortez the next day, even if Cooper has to drag the spoiled and unwilling witness there all by herself.

Read the rest of this entry »