Three new films open in wide release this weekend, and it’s more of the same awful-looking comedies and middling genre fare that we tend to see in January.
The first of these, and probably the one that will be most successful, is the comedy Dirty Grandpa. Starring Robert De Niro and Zac Efron, the film apparently tells the story of a grandfather who tricks his grandson into driving him to Florida right before the latter’s wedding day. And then… low-brow hilarity ensues? I’ll see this (because that’s how dedicated I am to my little Flickophiles), but it looks atrocious. Director Dan Mazer has only made one previous film (the little-seen I Give It a Year), though he was nominated for an Oscar as one of the writers on Borat. Seeing one of the greatest actors of all-time really committing to this bad-comedy chapter of his late career is really confounding. Can you believe that the De Niro who makes Dirty Grandpa and Meet the Fockers is the same guy who once starred in The Godfather and Taxi Driver and Raging Bull?
Also opening this weekend is The 5thWave, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller set on an Earth struggling to survive after four waves of brutal alien attacks. As the world prepares for the fifth wave, a young woman must go on the run to save her little brother. OK, this is a premise that I find very compelling. Far less compelling, however, is the fact the Chloë Grace Moretz plays the lead, and she irritates me more than just about any other actor I’ve ever watched on screen. The film comes from director J Blakeson, who made the well-received British indie The Disappearance of Alice Creed, so let’s stay cautiously optimistic. Early reviews aren’t too promising, though.
The final new wide release of the week is The Boy, a horror film about an American woman (The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan) who takes a job as a nanny in the English countryside — only to discover that the child she was hired to care for is a life-size porcelain doll that her employers treat like a real boy. I quite liked The Devil Inside, a previous film from director William Brent Bell, and this premise is creepy as hell, though with enormous potential to be completely ridiculous if they’re not careful. Count me in.
Opening in limited release this week are Bleak Street, a bonkers-sounding black-and-white Mexican film about two aging prostitutes who accidentally murder a couple of little-person wrestlers and decide to go on the run; Caged No More, in which the wonderful Loretta Devine plays a women searching for her granddaughters after they were kidnapped and sold into slavery for drug money by their father; and Monkey Up, a film where two children befriend a talking monkey who is struggling to be taken seriously as an actor. Honestly, it doesn’t seem like these last three are real movies, right? But they all sound more interesting than Dirty Grandpa.
Finally, two Oscar hopefuls are finally expanding into wide release this weekend — Best Picture nominee Room and The Danish Girl, for which Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander were nominated.
What are you planning to see this weekend?
