In Revue: Assassins, Medieval Stoners, Psychedelic Cookies

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

Sometimes Cate Blanchett’s in bad movies too. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

Blah. What a blah week. Most everything we saw this week was either “meh,” manically perplexing, or just plain bad. This why you should be glad you have rep cinemas to chase those blahs away. Also, a wonderful indie drama, Little Rock, is opening at the Royal this Friday. So maybe you should check out that. You can take our word that it’s really good, even if we didn’t type up a proper review.

With its rapidly paced montage of kiddie violence, throbbing electro soundtrack, and Cate Blanchett’s chilly delivery of the line “sometimes children are bad people too,” the theatrical trailer hyping up Hanna showed a good deal of promise. In all fairness, Hanna does live up to its trailer. Its titular adolescent superhuman killing machine (Saoirse Ronan) runs around dishing out PG-13 carnage to a driving original score courtesy of the Chemical Brothers. And Cate Blanchett says the line you want her to say, like the salivating dogs that you are. It’s all the stuff before and after that sags.
Living in a cabin in the snow-swept wilds, Hanna spends her days learning multiple languages, tracking wild animals, reading the encyclopedia, and fending off surprise attacks mounted by her father (Eric Bana). The sporadically violent father-daughter relationship (recalling the Clouseau/Cato regimen in the Pink Panther films) is part of a training program intended to prep Hanna for a world that apparently wants her dead. Sure enough, one day Bana absconds, and a team of CIA agents swoops in to capture and detain Hanna in an underground bunker. Using a combination of cutesy wiles and formidable agility, she escapes and eludes agents (led Blanchett’s scowling supremo) as she treks across Europe, en route to rendezvous with her father in Berlin.
Even if Hanna’s bloodshed may seem hopelessly tame in a post–Hit Girl climate of middle-school killers, Wright competently handles the action set pieces. A stealthy cat-and-mouse sprint around a yard stacked with shipping containers and the handful of close-quarters combat numbers work especially well. But otherwise, it’s just a lot of running around, with the techno soundtrack (excellent though it is) and European exteriors making much of Hanna feel like warmed-over Lola rennt rehash.
Add to this some flat interpersonal interludes as Hanna stows away with a family of vacationing Brits (only to learn about friendship/endanger their well-being), grating fairy-tale plotting and imagery, and some confusion of jack-booted skinheads with campy homosexual killers, and Hanna comes out awfully messy, buckling under its own sense of genre-bending self-importance.
Hanna opens Friday, April 8, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

It’s easy enough to recognize the latest from Gregg Araki as a bit of a disaster. What’s harder to gauge is whether or not Araki is carefully masterminding this psychedelic-sexual train-wreck. Thomas Dekker (of last year’s Nightmare on Elm Street do-over) plays Smith, a sexually “undeclared” college student. Like any stiff-dicked freshman, Smith’s sexual appetites take precedence over his studies, and he spends most of his time chasing tail, plotting advances towards his surfer dude roommate (Andy Fischer-Price), and commiserating with his best (and only) friend, Stella (Haley Bennett).
Despite appearing to lean closer to the gay end of the bisexual binary, Smith begins dreaming of two beautiful women. Then they pop up in his life, as if on cue. Getting all frigged up on an especially trippy batch of psychoactive cookies (flashes here of Araki’s underrated stoner flick Smiley Face) doesn’t do much for Smith’s ability to distinguish between dream states and reality. And eventually, Kaboom chucks the distinction entirely, as Smith gets swept into a global conspiracy involving, apparently, everyone he’s ever known.
If it’s meant to be a quirky, pansexual college sex comedy, Kaboom doesn’t really work, skimping on the jokes (if not the sex). It’s not as confrontational with its sexuality as Araki’s better films (Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation), nor is it as weirdly funny as something like Smiley Face. Indeed, clipping unevenly through so many tones (queer flick, comedy, sex romp, cerebral conspiracy picture, and half a dozen more), it’s hard to say what Kaboom is “meant” to be. Maybe like those lousy, halfway-terrifying acid trips, you’re just supposed to sit back, bug-eyed, and wait it out.
Kaboom opens Friday, April 8 for a limited engagement at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). for showtimes.

As Hollywood cinema marches towards singularity—the moment when James Franco and Natalie Portman will be in all movies, and every film comedy will be directed by a three-headed hybrid of Judd Apatow, Greg Mottola, and David Gordon Green—we’re presented with Your Highness. Green, who used to make pretty-okay indie pictures before he fell in with all the skeezy stoners populating American cinema’s proverbial smoke pit, attempts to apply the same pothead panache that made the unlikely action-comedy Pineapple Express work onto a crude high fantasy starring (and co-written by) Danny McBride.
Except Your Highness isn’t really a stoner movie at all. Despite the title, a few scattered pot-smoking scenes, some references to “ganja” and “sticky-icky,” and a pretty funny scene involving a pedophilic pot-smoking wizard, Your Highness is just a cheeky medieval fantasy picture. With swearing. You know, for kids!
McBride plays Thadeous, a hard-partying prince who undertakes a quest to rescue his brother’s fiancée (Zooey Deschanel) from the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux). With his hunky brother Fabious (Franco) and faithful squire (Rasmus Hardiker) in tow, he sets out on an adventure with all the narrative beats of a beginners’ Dungeons and Dragons scenario. With swearing.
The film’s bad-mannered attitude is just embarrassing. Ditto the thick English accents. McBride and Green expect us to laugh at the simple juxtaposition of someone saying “motherfucker” or “cock” or “beaver” while wearing a suit of chain-mail. Theroux does steal a few scenes as a leering, pent-up sorcerer, and the film does boast probably the best Minotaur (and one of the best Minotaur penises) ever rendered for the screen. But it’s hardly enough to save something as sluggish and unfunny as Your Highness.
Your Highness opens Friday, April 8 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.