Classic Movie Review: Loaded Weapon 1

Loaded Weapon 1 (1993) 

Directed by Gene Quintano

Written by Gene Quintano, Don Holley 

Starring Emilio Estevez, Samuel L. Jackson, Kathy Ireland, Whoopi Goldberg 

Release Date February 5th, 1993

Published February 6th, 2023 

On the new Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast Spinoff, Everyone's a Critic 1993, myself and my co-hosts, Amy K, and M.J, watch movies that were released 30 years ago that week. One movie per week and the month of January 1993 was truly awful. It was a miserable time for movies. Leprechaun was mildly entertaining but certainly not great. Body of Evidence was downright traumatizing in how sleazy it was, and Hexed, starring Arye Gross, is among the worst movies Hollywood has produced in the last 30 years. 

Thus far, the best movie we've watched is another of the worst of all time. Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice is one of the great hidden gems of the So-Bad-Its-Good pantheon. It's one of the best unintentionally funny movies I've ever had the pleasure of watching. But, the pleasure is tinged with it being a solely ironic appreciation. In the first month of the new podcast, we have not seen a single good movie. February changed things immediately. 

On the first weekend of February, 1993, Hollywood managed to finally release a good movie. National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 stars Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson in a Naked Gun style spoof of the Lethal Weapon movies. This might sound like a tired idea but the reality is that Loaded Weapon 1 is a hidden gem, an oasis of genuinely funny comedy in a sea of terrible movies of the early 1990s. Before the Scary Movie franchise ruined parody movies seemingly for the rest of time, Loaded Weapon 1 stuck to the basics of the spoof genre and created a forgotten classic. 

The plot of Lethal Weapon 1 is brilliantly silly. William Shatner plays General Mortars, a former Army General turned drug kingpin. For reasons that are ingeniously silly, he needs a piece of micro-film to help him turn Cocaine into Girl Scout Cookies that he can distribute via a subsidiary of the Girl Scouts, headed up by Kathy Ireland as Miss Destiny Demeanor. Tim Curry co-stars as the General's right hand man and right away, from the introduction of Curry as Mr. Jigsaw, you get a sense of the wonderful silliness at play. 

A girl scout gets out of a van and begins skipping towards the door of a suburban home. Just before knocking, she stubs out a cigarette. The home is a safe house where an ex-cop, played by Whoopi Goldberg is hiding out. When she finally opens here series of comical front doors and locks, we see Curry dressed as a Girl Scout and speaking with a thick, Middle-European accent. Deadpan, Goldberg invites him in so she can buy cookies and ends up dead. The back and forth in this scene is wonderfully silly and sets a terrific tone for the rest of Loaded Weapon 1. 

From there we will unite our Riggs and Murtagh characters, Emilio Estevez as the haunted and suicidal detective with nothing to lose, Sgt. Jack Colt, and family man detective, on the day before his retirement, Sgt. Wes Luger. Luger also has a tragic backstory where he nearly killed his partner and has since been unable to shoot a gun without shaking uncontrollably, a bit that pays off multiple times in Loaded Weapon 1. Each gag is better than the last. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls

Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls

Directed by Tyler Perry

Written by Tyler Perry

Starring Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, Thandie Newton, Kerry Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson

Release Date November 5th, 2010

Published November 5th, 2010

For all of his faults as a filmmaker, Tyler Perry has guts. Perry is a principled artist who delivers stories his way on his terms and has made a mint doing it. Critics be damned, Tyler Perry is one of the most successful filmmakers of the decade and he’s never had to compromise his vision to get there, whether you enjoy his vision or not.

Perry’s latest daring bit of storytelling is easily his biggest gamble, even bigger than dressing in drag to play Madea. “For Colored Girls'' is an attempt to corral a 20 piece stage poem into a single dramatic narrative. Nearly a dozen different actresses, often breaking out in poetic verse, going through some of the ugliest trials ever brought to screen for dramatic entertainment. It’s bold, it’s daring and it's a massive failure but it’s Tyler Perry’s unquestioned vision onscreen.

There are seven lead performances in “For Colored Girls.” They include Janet Jackson as a tyrant magazine editor dealing with a distant, possibly gay husband. Jackson’s assistant played by Kimberly Elise is an under-employed woman carrying a jobless, abusive husband and two kids. Her neighbor played by Thandie Newton is bartender who deals with childhood trauma with an endless line of sex partners.

Newton’s sister is played by Tessa Thompson and is an aspiring dancer with an accidental pregnancy. Their mother played by Whoopi Goldberg is a damaged woman whose own childhood drama sent her spiraling toward lunacy in some cultish religion. Thompson’s dance teacher, Anika Noni Rose, is a loving trusting soul who finds herself on the wrong side of the wrong man. Finally, Phylicia Rashad stars as an apartment manager slash den mother.

There are other roles as well for Kerry Washington as a social worker struggling to conceive and singer Macy Gray as a back alley abortionist as frightening as such a figure likely should be. Wrestling all of these characters into one narrative is a Herculean task. Add to that some spontaneous poetry and crushing dramatic turns involving murder, rape, abortion, Aids and spousal abuse and you have movie incapable of withstanding its own weight.

“For Colored Girls” is what you might call emotion porn. Tyler Perry crams every possible trauma into “For Colored Girls” and pummels the audience with poetic glimpses of women in the darkest depths of despair until even the most remote audience member can’t help but shed a tear. It’s the false emotion of manipulation but even if each tear is surgically extracted, they are there.

The cast of “For Colored Girls” is phenomenal with veteran Rashad as the stand out. Rashad’s character is Perry’s own invention, a narrative convenience used to tie otherwise disparate characters together. Her apartment is located right between those of Elise and Newton’s characters and she hears everything. Still, Rashad gives this character a rich emotional life. She is the beating, broken heart of “For Colored Girls.”

The rest of the cast is too busy being decimated by the Jovian burdens each is asked to carry. The despair visited upon these characters is an anchor that cannot be raised. Each actress at the very least is given a moment to shine but because that moment comes in poetic verse it resonates more as a stand alone monologue than as part of a narrative.

This is the bridge that Tyler Perry cannot cross in “For Colored Girls;” trying to make actresses breaking out into spontaneous poetic monologue feel like a natural dialogue in a typical narrative drama. He would have been better off breaking convention; take the poetic moments to a stage and break the fourth wall. Instead, Perry chooses to try to make it just like any other film drama and the effect is disjointed and unsatisfying.

Undoubtedly moving, “For Colored Girls” finds moments of great emotional force. All is undone however by a conventional approach to highly unconventional drama. “For Colored Girls” is bold and daring but fails because it was not bold and daring enough. Attempting to force all of this emotion into a singular narrative, especially one as conventionally staged as this, is a fool’s errand and it sinks an otherwise powerful idea.

Tyler Perry wildly misses his target in “For Colored Girls” but you have to respect the attempt. Few filmmakers would have the guts to even attempt to bring a complex, Female led, stage poem to the big screen. It’s fair to wonder if other filmmakers recognized how un-filmable this material is but it took a lot of guts to try and Perry’s effort has to be praised. Perry fails in “For Colored Girls” but he failed fearlessly and spectacularly.

Movie Review Nobody's Fool

Nobody's Fool (2018) 

Directed by Tyler Perry

Written by Tyler Perry 

Starring Tika Sumpter, Tiffany Haddish, Whoopi Goldberg

Release Date November 2nd, 2018

Published November 3rd, 2018

Nobody’s Fool is marketed as a platform for the brilliant Tiffany Haddish, one of the breakout stars of the last two years. The trailer for Nobody's Fool would have you believe that Haddish is being set loose in the kind of the leading role that plays to her strengths as a force of nature style performer who dominates the scene by being more alive than everyone around her. Finally, after the promise of Girls Trip and all of the buzz about how much Haddish is the next big thing we were supposed to see Tiffany Haddish step forward into the spotlight.

Nope! Tiffany Haddish is not actually the lead actress in Nobody’s Fool. Tika Sumpter, a nice actress in her own right, is actually in the traditional romantic lead of Nobody’s Fool. Haddish is, instead, a proxy for writer-director-executive producer Tyler Perry who employs Haddish as an avatar for his Madea character. Little of what Haddish does in Nobody’s Fool is anything Perry hasn’t done with Madea in other movies and as you can imagine, that’s a pretty big waste of Tiffany Haddish.

Nobody’s Fool is the story of Danica (Sumpter), a successful, sexy, young woman who we meet when she rolls out of bed and dances to Janet Jackson’s Miss You Much, a song appropriate for the fact that she misses her boyfriend Charlie (Mehcad Brooks), who she’s never actually met in person but is in love with. Danica may not see her boyfriend but thankfully she’s not short on male attention as Frank (Omari Hardwick) from the coffee shop next to her office romances her everyday with free coffee and a rose.

Danica’s happy, well-ordered life of privilege is thrown for a loop when her sister Tanya (Haddish) is released from prison and their mother, Lola, played by Whoopi Goldberg, forces Danica to take Tanya in. Tanya then immediately gets a job at Frank's coffee shop and sets about screwing up every aspect of her little sister’s life. First she figures out that Danica is getting Catfished by Charlie by literally getting the guys from MTV’s Catfish to investigate Charlie.

Then she manipulates Frank and Danica into bed together where they begin falling in love only to have a major monkey wrench thrown into the story that I won’t spoil if you still want to see this despite my not recommending that you skip it. It’s an unpredictable twist to be sure but it is also incomprehensibly stupid. I can’t fully go into how dimwitted this twist is without spoilers, all I can say is that an utterly embarrassing cameo by Chris Rock is the rotten cherry on top of all the bad decisions that culminate in this twist.

Where to begin with the misguided mistakes of Nobody’s Fool. The most egregious from my perspective comes in how Tyler Perry uses his supposed star, Tiffany Haddish. Haddish’s foul-mouthed, supernova charisma made her a star in Girls Trip but here, that same nasty charm is used to make Tanya an avatar for the awfulness of Tyler Perry’s usual Madea schtick. Every line out of Tanya’s mouth could be lifted from past Perry movies where his drag character Madea is little more than a series of unfunny, dirty, non-sequiturs that go on for seemingly hour after pointless hour.

Haddish still manages to shine through the box that Perry is shoving her into because she’s far more talented than the hacky character she’s being forced into. The charisma monster of her Girls Trip persona cannot be contained and occasionally in Nobody’s Fool we get a little of that character such as a scene where she is offered a job at the coffee shop and can’t resist offering the owner some sex as a thank you. It’s horribly inappropriate but it’s delivered with a devilish energy that is irresistible.

Sadly, that type of scene is limited in Nobody’s Fool. Surprisingly, Haddish is kept offscreen for a great deal of more time than you expect also. I mentioned before that we were suckered into thinking she was the lead character in Nobody’s Perfect, and we were. She’s unquestionably in a supporting role here despite being multiple times more interesting than the sweet but otherwise bland Tika Sumpter.

That’s not Sumpter’s fault really, Tiffany Haddish is simply not a performer who melts into the background of an ensemble. It would be like having Bugs Bunny in a scene and having him just stand there and listen while someone earnestly explains the plot of the story. That simply doesn’t work, not for Haddish whose character lacks the patience to be in the background and not for the movie which casts her and asks us to accept when she’s not out front. All we can think is, when is Tiffany going to do something wild?

That’s a perception problem created by us and by the movie. It’s our fault for expecting Tiffany Haddish to be a particular way as an actress but it is also the fault of the marketing team that put her front and center and made promises that the film does not keep. We were promised a Tiffany Haddish movie and we got a Madea movie minus Madea. Tiffany Haddish is way better than Madea boo. A Madea movie is still no prize, even without the sight of Tyler Perry in drag.

If you do decide to see Nobody’s Fool despite my warning just remember that I told you so. Tiffany Haddish is not the star of this movie. She tries, and occasionally, she overcomes Tyler Perry to find a joke that works, but mostly she’s stuck playing out tired Madea gags with an energy and life that are commendable on her part as a professional but misguided because this movie doesn’t deserve Tiffany Haddish.