Musts and Misses: The movies to see (and skip) this weekend
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Your Place or Mine
(On Netflix now)
Netflix Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher in 'Your Place or Mine.'
It is probably not great news for your project if you spend half the press tour defending your lack of red-carpet chemistry with your co-star. The carpet might be kinder, though, or at least mercifully briefer, than actually sitting through Your Place or Mine, an experience that often feels like watching two movie stars try to set fire to a pile of wet leaves for 100-plus minutes. What should be breezy, featherweight fun — Reese! Ashton! A screenplay by the lady who wrote The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses! — instead turns out to be oddly hollow, a meandering and synthetic approximation of classic rom-com canon with too little romance or comedy in its strained, familiar formula.
Witherspoon is Debbie, a sunny Los Angeles accountant and single mom, and Kutcher is Tom, a successful New York business consultant with a vaguely broken soul (his loft apartment is immaculate, and all his relationships die by the six-month mark). They've been best friends for nearly 20 years, after one misbegotten night together long ago; now Debbie needs an accounting certificate that she can only get in Manhattan, so Tom agrees to fly out and watch her young son, Jack (Wesley Kimmel; yes, he's Jimmy's nephew) while she does it.
Naturally, this coastal exchange program also entails recruiting at least one new sidekick-slash-antagonist for them both: Debbie gets Minka (Love Life's Zoe Chao), a daffy party girl in Tom's casual dating rotation who insists on showing her the best of New York — including a bar where a dreamboat book publisher named Theo (Jesse Williams) awaits, ready to reawaken Debbie's dusty loins. Tom gets Tig Notaro's Alicia, a brightly sardonic teacher at Jack's school, and Steve Zahn as a neighbor who mostly loiters in Debbie's yard like a stoned garden gnome.
The central pair's eventual happily-ever-after is as inevitable as the location of the last scene (gold star if you guessed "running through an airport"). But it all feels as if writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna (Cruella, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) can't quite be bothered to sketch in the details, and so she just gestures vaguely at the CliffsNotes of all the rom-coms that came before. The box-office success late last year of the weightless George Clooney-Julia Roberts caper Ticket to Paradise proved that there's a whole unserved demographic still hungry for the kind of clever, frothy movies Hollywood famously doesn't make anymore; those same viewers will probably make Your Place a hit too, or whatever counts as the equivalent on Netflix. But everyone here — the actors, the audience, the genre — deserves better. Grade: C–
Sharper
(In theaters now, streaming Feb. 17 on Apple TV+)
Apple TV +
How many cons can Sebastian Stan plan, if Sebastian can plan cons? It's easy to lose count of the double and triple crosses in Sharper, a silly and unabashedly camp thriller that is, frankly, exactly the kind of sleek, shenanigan-y frolic that bleak midwinter calls for.
Stan stars as Max, a square-jawed grifter with designs on an ornery New York billionaire (John Lithgow), his new bride (Julianne Moore), and his semi-estranged son, Tom (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's Justice Smith). Not that you'd know any of these things from the first 20 minutes of the film, which kicks off like a tender bottle-episode romance between Tom and a beautiful grad student named Sandra (Briana Middleton).
Tom and Sandra both have reasons to present themselves as something other than they are, but then so does everyone in this glossy cat's cradle of a movie, which loops and bends back on itself without too much concern for through-line logic or morality. (At least half the scams here seem like they would be easily unraveled if one of the victims spent even four minutes on Google, but then what fun would that be?) Stan broods and sneers, Moore has a great time chewing up the scenery, and justice of some kind — karma is but one of many bitches in Sharper's cheerfully ruthless world — is duly served by the final frame. Grade: B+
Magic Mike's Last Dance
(In theaters now)
Warner Bros. Pictures Salma Hayek caresses Channing Tatum's abs in 'Magic Mike's Last Dance'
To strip, perchance to dream; such were the humble hopes of Channing Tatum's "Magic" Mike Lane when this all began. And what the first film delivered back in 2012 was a kind of movie magic: a scrappy, scampish novelty about Florida men who take their pants off for a living, delivered with loose-limbed auteur style by Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh.
Mike is 40 now and no longer dancing for money, though he still has the face of a handsome Easter Island statue and abdominals etched in glass. To pay the bills his custom furniture business doesn't make enough to cover, he now does things like bartend benefits at the waterfront mansions of Miami's one percent, which is how he meets the extravagantly named Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek), recently separated from her media-mogul husband and desperate to feel like a woman again.
A little bird has told Maxandra about Mike's former occupation, and so, for a fistful of dollars — or one presumes, a large Venmo — she coaxes him out of retirement for one quick private interlude in her living room. Once he lapdances her back to life, essentially, she can't let that kind of joy walk out the door. So she impulsively invites him to join her at her main home in London — not as a lover, she makes clear after their one night together, but as a business partner: He'll take over the old West End theater that's been turning to dust under her ex's tutelage, and make it come alive with his American thighs.
For all its jetsetting and choreographed set pieces, Last Dance has the closed-in, often airless feel of a pandemic project: The cast is limited, and the let's-put-on-a-show script by Reid Carolin (Dog) proceeds in leisurely fits and starts (not that Mike has ever been a man for elaborate plotting). There's a sense that the story is coming together more or less as it goes along — including Soderbergh's tone, which swings from muted vérité to pure fantasy (an inspired scene on a city bus straight out of a French New Wave musical; a rain-drenched forbidden-dance finale).
Who is Maxandra beyond her money and her beauty? What does Mike, still a gorgeously blank bohunk, really want from middle age? Last Dance is missing a lot, but it has the moves you mostly came for — and in its final strobe-lit moments, the full release of a Hollywood ending. Grade: B–
Somebody I Used to Know
(On Prime Video now)
Scott Patrick Green/Prime Video
"You're not gonna pull some Julia Roberts My Best Friend's Wedding-type shit, are you?" Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons) asks Ally (Alison Brie) warily midway through Somebody I Used to Know. In fact that's pretty much exactly what Ally, a reality-TV producer on a career spiral, is trying to do. Having slunk back home to the Bavarian-postcard village of Leavenworth, Wash., after the abrupt cancellation of her most recent show, she's desperate to prove to herself that she's more than a type-A striver skidding into her flop era with no discernible personal life to speak of.
And so when her hometown ex from 10 years ago, Sean (Insecure's Jay Ellis), reveals that he's marrying the bohemian, much-younger Cassidy, she decides that fate demands a do-over, collateral damage be damned. And as an expert at crafting reality-based havoc, she knows what to do: insinuate herself into the wedding party; pressure-test the weak spots; unleash several emotional krakens, then stand back and watch it all come apart.
Brie and her actor-husband Dave Franco, who penned the script together (he also directs), clearly know the innumerable rom-com tropes they're suckling from: the loopy setups and punchlines, the jauntily soundtracked montages, the inevitable third-act reveals. Occasionally, the irreverent pop of their storytelling tilts into crude, silly slapstick (horny moms, incontinent cats), and Ally's redemption after all her willfully awful behavior is achieved with so little friction, it seems to have slid in on Vaseline. Still, there's a low-key charm to the movie's knowing spin on familiar beats, and far more chaotic non-sexual nudity than Julia Roberts would ever allow in her contract. Grade: B
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