If this feels a bit contrived  —  and I certainly wouldn’t blame you if it did  —  that’s essentially the spirit of this achingly convivial sci-fi caper, directed by the team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Clone High, The Lego Movie, and the Spiderverse films), from a screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on a novel by Andy Weir (The Martian). As with the previous adaptation of Weir’s work, it’s a film that gleefully presents basic scientific principles and logic clumsily sewn together with a story and outlook that feels very much like something an enterprisingly affable 15-year-old might come up with while daydreaming in Physics class. 

Buddy cop movies work best when there’s just as much humor or more as there is investigation into some crime. If you think back through the entries in some of the best franchises in this genre like Beverly Hills Cop, Rush Hour, Lethal Weapon and even The Heat, you also realize that one of the […]

I first encountered LEGO bricks in the late ‘70s. I was torn between sinking all of my meager savings from chores, birthdays and holidays into LEGO sets or my new Atari 2600, and the video games prevailed. Were it not for a greater addiction to video games, I could have gone down that path of […]

Partners in the the narcotics department head back to high school to catch drug dealers in a big screen farce of 21 Jump Street. One way I can tell that a film isn’t all that interesting is when I take the time to see it, take notes about it and then entirely forget to post a […]