Movie Review Lego Ninjago

Lego Ninjago (2017) 

Directed by Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher, Bob Logan 

Written by Bob Logan, Paul Fisher, William Wheeler, Tom Wheeler, Jared Stern, John Whittington

Starring Dave Franco, Michael Pena, Kumail Nanjiani, Abbi Jacobson, Zach Woods, Fred Armisen, Jackie Chan

Release Date September 22nd, 2017

Published September 22nd, 2017

Lego Ninjago has not one single laugh. It has amusing moments but not a single instance of induced laughter. And I am not just speaking for myself here. The audience I watched Lego Ninjago with was really ready to laugh and you could hear some forced attempts at trying to laugh but as the movie went on even those that kept smiling and trying to find what was happening in Lego Ninjago funny weren’t laughing. It was strange; there was no outward disdain for Lego Ninjago but there weren’t any laughs.

Lloyd (Dave Franco) is a teenager who is constantly picked on because his father happens to be an evil ninja who keeps trying to take over his home town of Ninjago. What the people making fun of Lloyd don’t know is that he’s the legendary Green Ninja who, along with his fellow ninjas, have kept Garmadon (Justin Leroux) from actually destroying Ninjago. Naturally, regularly fighting his dad while flying around on a mechanized ninja dragon has led to more than a few daddy issues for Lloyd.

Thankfully, Lloyd has his uncle, Master Wu (Jackie Chan), who has taught him and his friends everything about being Ninjas and making giant mechanized animals that they use to battle Garmadon’s evil Crab army. Well, he has people dressed as crabs and dressed as sharks and dolphins and they make up his evil army; though at one point he does shoot sharks at people from a giant mechanical arm but that part isn’t very clear. I could follow the action well enough but some of the chaos got a little confusing.

All of that description sounds funny, right? Especially when you consider the recent history of the Lego franchise, The Lego Movie and Lego Batman. Those movies were laugh a minute spectacle that created an anticipation for future Lego movies. Like Lego Ninjago, those casts were overflowing with some of the funniest voices on the planet and Ninjago has a fair share of very funny people like Fred Armisen, Abbi Jacobson, Kumail Nanjiani, all of whom are remarkably funny.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review The Big Sick

The Big Sick (2017) 

Directed by Michael Showalter 

Written by Emily V. Gordon, Kumail Nanjiani 

Starring Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Ray Romano, Holly Hunter

Release Date June 23rd, 2017 

The Big Sick broke my heart into a million little pieces and slowly pieced it back together throughout its gentle, sweet and very, very funny 120 minutes. Featuring an unconventional but brilliant lead performer, a radiant love interest and two of the best possible supporting players anyone could ask for, The Big Sick is, thus far, the best movie of 2017.

Kumail Nanjiani stars in the mostly true story of his love story with real life wife Emily Gordon, who also co-wrote the screenplay for the film with Kumail. The unconventional love story finds Kumail struggling to balance the demands of his traditional Pakistani born family with his desire to live outside the strictures of religion and in a more conventional style of American, big city life.

Still discovering who he is and what he believes in, Kumail stumbles into a romance with Emily, played by Zoe Kazan, equally thoughtful and searching young person. While each playfully and sarcastically discusses their unwillingness to become attached to the other the attraction becomes something neither can deny as they discover in each other pieces of themselves that they didn’t know existed.

Click here for my review of The Big Sick at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Stuber

Stuber (2019) 

Directed by Michael Dowse

Written by Tripper Clancy 

Starring Kumail Nanjiani, Dave Bautista

Release Date July 12th, 2019 

Published July 12th, 2019 

Sometimes the appeal of a movie has nothing to do with what the movie is about but how the movie is about its subject. Stuber is a good example of this phenomenon. Judging Stuber by its cover the first thing you notice is a terrible title, a pun on the main character’s name and his part time profession as an Uber driver, and a rather generic, mismatched buddy comedy with fish out of water characters. 

That judgemental, surface perception of Stuber is pretty on the nose about what the movie is but thankfully, in execution, there is something slightly more to Stuber. In executing the same old cliches of the past, Stuber director Michael Dowse has upcycled those cliches via his two terrific stars. Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista may be enacting the familiar tropes of mismatched buddies past but they are having so much fun doing it that they make those tropes feel fresh again. 

Stuber stars Kumail Nanjiani as Stu, a part time sporting goods store employee who moonlights as an Uber driver. Stu’s routine, mundane life is about to be upended by his latest rideshare customer, Vic (Dave Bautista). Vic is a police detective on the trail of the drug dealer who murdered his partner. On this particular day, Vic gets a tip from an informant that may lead to the killer but unfortunately, Vic has just gotten lasik surgery and cannot see to drive. 

Vic’s daughter, Nicole (Natalie Morales) happens to have just hooked her dad up with the Uber app, mostly so that she won’t have to haul him anywhere herself. Thus how Vic meets Stu and eventually takes him hostage and makes him his unlikely partner in a night filled with mayhem including gun fights, car chases and near death experiences. Along the way, naturally, Stu and Vic will become friends and that is the true heart of Stuber. 

The first act of Stuber plays on the cliches of the masculine, man’s man Vic and the consummate metrosexual millennial Stu, butting heads over their view of what makes a man a man. For Vic, manhood is having been left in a forest overnight by his father as a pre-teen child with only a pen knife to get him through the night. Stu clocks that story as a form of abuse while rejecting the notion that manhood has anything to do with physical trials. 

So yeah, the story of Stuber isn’t particularly special. Thankfully, Kumail Nanjiani is special for his dynamic with the burly and brusque Bautista. These two are clearly having a great deal of fun butting heads with each other and riffing great jokes off of what are otherwise well worn cliches of the action comedy genre. I could sit here for a while and describe the plot failings of Stuber but I was too busy laughing to catalog the film’s issues. 

The jokes come fast and furious in Stuber with Nanjiani throwing everything at the wall and director Michael Dowse keeping up a breakneck comic pace that covers for the few jokes that don’t land. The jokes aren’t memorable or brilliant, more often I found myself laughing despite myself. The speed and timing of Stuber matter as much or more than the actual content of the joke. Kumail Nanjiani is one of the funniest people on the planet right now and Stuber takes full advantage of his remarkable talent, 

Stuber isn’t going to win any awards or be remembered long after it is in theaters but while you are there, it’s pretty entertaining. The makers of Stuber don’t try too hard to make the film memorable, they just want to make you laugh and for the most part, they succeed. Stuber is really funny even as the plot is so predictable that you could set your watch by the cliches on hand. Kumail Nanjiani is perhaps my favorite comic presence in movies today. Even his Men in Black International alien was entertaining and that movie was a steaming pile. 

I do hope that Kumail dedicates himself to better material in the future but for now, I am glad to see him having fun in a big, silly, action movie. Not every movie has to be a transcendent work of humanity, humor and art like Kumail’s The Big Sick. Sometimes, a movie is just a big piece of cake, a rich, not so good for you, sugary mess that tastes delicious, even as it isn’t exactly good for you. Stuber is a piece of cake.