Family Home Theater

Grade: C+/B-
Entire family: No
2019, 90 min., Color
Comedy
Rated PG-13 for some language and sexual references
STX / Universal
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Featured audio: DTS-HDMA 5.1
Bonus features: D
Includes: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital
Trailer
Amazon link

In recent years, Hollywood has made a number of movies featuring (and presumably geared toward) seniors. We’ve watched retirement-age heroes take road trips, thwart a mob hit, get off their rockers to take on super assassins, reconnect with estranged children, rob a bank, and now, with Poms, find new life in a retirement community through cheerleading.

But the message is often the same: No regrets. Worry about living, not dying. Play hard and enjoy all nine innings.

In Poms, Diane Keaton and Jacki Weaver are wonderful to watch as neighbors in an active retirement commuity, and so, for that matter, is their nemesis Celia Weston (who played Cam’s mom on Modern Family), who rules with all the force of a 12-person condo association. But the plot itself is cookie-cutter, and the basic premise is a bit of a head-scratcher.

I mean, if you’ve been an unmarried, childless teacher living in the same apartment in New York City for 40+ years and you learned that you’re dying of ovarian cancer, would you sell everything you own at a sidewalk sale and buy a home in a Georgia retirement community that bills itself as “active”? Why buy a home in a brand new area surrounded by complete strangers when you have only months to live? Wouldn’t you rent until you had to go into hospice? More

Grade: C+
Entire family: No
2019, 93 min., Color
Comedy
Rated PG-13 for crude sexual content and language
MGM / Universal
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1 widescreen
Featured audio: DTS-HDMA 7.1
Bonus features: C+/B-
Includes: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital
Trailer
Amazon link

Rebel Wilson was funny in the Pitch Perfect movies and Bridesmaids, but films like The Hustle continue to prove that she’s not well suited to play a leading role. Her schtick, let’s call it, is a comedy of character that’s not up to the fast pace of the 2010s. It’s like watching Stan Laurel wiggle and squirm and fiddle with his hat and slowly, increment by increment, try to react or explain something to a befuddled partner (or audience). At some point, you tend to lose patience because the humor, often crude or full of innuendo, is so protracted out. Instead of a bouncy spring, it’s drawn out so it becomes flat as can be.

That’s the adjective that best describes The Hustle: flat. It’s lacking energy, and features only a handful of laugh-out-loud moments where you think, gee, I wish there were more of those. And they’re all in the trailer. The plot, meanwhile, is a rehash of things we’ve seen before, which only adds to the movie’s flatness. And that’s not even getting into co-star Anne Hathaway’s “British accent,” which sounds like the kind of accent that you or I would attempt at a party to amuse folks. As a snooty Brit con artist, she just isn’t convincing enough. And Wilson, as her American counterpart, is also a bit hard to believe as a con artist who could make men part with their money.

The film is a remake or variation of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, in which Michael Caine and Steve Martin played two con artists with gigantic egos who decide once and for all to see who’s the best by having a contest to see who can be the first to bilk an American heiress out of $50,000. In this version, given inflation, the bet is $500,000, and the players are a small-time grafter (Wilson as Penny) and a sophisticated and very rich con artist (Hathaway as Josephine). They meet in Europe when Penny gets in the way of Josephine’s con and also turns up on the French Riviera after learning that’s where Josephine is going . . . and where the really rich people are. After competing they finally decide to team up, and that leads to scrambled egos with egg on Penny’s face, which leads to the ultimate contest over a goofy, nerdy, rich tourist (Alex Sharp as Thomas). More