Dog (and cat) days of summer

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This article was published 24/05/2016 (3449 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Funny thing. With the release of X-Men Apocalypse on Friday, the remaining summer season will be relatively free of superhero movie releases (with the exception of the stand-alone Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise and Suicide Squad, the latter of which is technically about super-villains, not superheroes).

That leaves the multiplex field open for movies of a more traditional summer variety: rude comedies, horror thrillers, big-budget fantasies, family-friendly flicks, sequels, reboots and sequels to reboots (seriously, there are three). Appearing here and there in the schedule are a few filmic oddities that, if we’re lucky, should defy the kind of pigeonholing you see in summer previews.

Speaking of which:

Rude comedies

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (June 3) delivers Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island team of filmmakers having serious fun with the dubious genre of Justin Bieber-style concert docs. Central Intelligence (June 17) cannily pairs tiny Kevin Hart and giant Dwayne Johnson as reunited high school friends enmeshed in international intrigue. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (July 8) follows a pair of disaster-prone brothers (Zac Efron and Adam DeVine) attempting to find a couple of nice girls to take to their sister’s wedding, except the gals they find (Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick) turn out to be lady reprobates.

Late July sees women getting in on the inappropriate-comedy bandwagon starting with Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (July 22) when aging hedonists Edina and Patsy (Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley) go on the lam after being accused of accidentally killing Kate Moss. Bad Moms (July 29) stars Mila Kunis as a woman who rebels against the unreal expectations placed on her as a working mother, taking a pair of other misfit moms (Kristen Bell and Kathryn Hahn) along for the wild ride.

Boasting a voice cast that includes Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig and Jonah Hill, Sausage Party (Aug. 12) is an R-rated animated feature riffing on the comedic possibilities of anthropomorphized characters. When the characters are all foodstuffs, it ain’t pretty, for example, when a potato (with an Irish accent) is skinned alive. Hill is in more recognizable human form in War Dogs (Aug. 19), playing one of a pair of brothers (alongside Miles Teller) who somehow win a $300-million contract from the Pentagon to supply arms to America’s allies. Why, yes, it is based on a true story.

 

Kid stuff

Director Steven Spielberg is invoking his classic ET: The Extra Terrestrial in the hype preceding The BFG (July 1), an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story in which a Big Friendly Giant (played in motion-capture by Mark Rylance) befriends a little girl while trying to stop other giants from their dreadful habit of eating children.

The Secret Life of Pets (July 8) is an animated comedy about what goes on among the pet population when the humans aren’t looking. Think Toy Story with dogs and cats. Kevin Spacey is a thoughtless billionaire transformed into a cat in Nine Lives (Aug. 5), a comedy wherein Spacey’s character must make things right with his neglected daughter if he ever wants to assume human form again.

A runaway orphan lives in the woods under the protection of a mythical creature in Pete’s Dragon (Aug. 12), a live-action Disney remake starring Bryce Dallas Howard as a helpful forest ranger and Robert Redford as a storyteller known as Mr. Chameleon. Perhaps the summer’s most exciting animated offering is Kubo and the Two Strings (Aug. 19), a samurai fantasy from the stop-motion masters of Laika (ParaNorman, Coraline).

 

Kid-stuff sequels

Tim Burton returns to the Lewis Carroll well with Alice Through the Looking Glass (May 27) with Mia Wasikowska and Johnny Depp reprising their roles of Alice and the Mad Hatter, respectively, and Sacha Baron Cohen as… Time. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (June 3) offers a second instalment of those rampaging reptiles who battle evil while ingratiating themselves with Megan Fox, which pretty much ticks off a couple of significant items in the teenage fantasy checklist.

Finding Dory (June 17) is a welcome sequel to the lovely Pixar underwater adventure Finding Nemo, this time with the emphasis on the long-term-memory-challenged blue tang Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) seeking her long-lost family.

Somehow, Scrat the panicky squirrel is responsible for a catastrophe in outer space that threatens the world in the aren’t-we-done-yet? franchise entry Ice Age: Collision Course (July 22).

 

 

Terror firma

The Conjuring 2 (June 10) sees married demonologists (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) investigating the case of a girl in England apparently possessed by a malevolent spirit. The Shallows (June 24) pits lone swimmer Blake Lively against a shark in what appears to be an interesting, minimalist approach to the Jaws formula.

The Purge movies, which hinge on the dystopian notion of a one-day-a-year legal kill fest, may be an acquired taste, but they generally offer up a latter-day John Carpenter vibe in the way they blend horror, action and social commentary. With its timely title, The Purge: Election Year (July 1) promises precisely those qualities in equal measure. Based on a chilling horror short of the same title (check it out on YouTube), Lights Out (July 22) disputes the parental wisdom that says there’s nothing lurking in the darkness that isn’t there in the light.

Jane Levy and Fede Alvarez, the stars and director of that Evil Dead reboot, collaborate again on Don’t Breathe (Aug. 26), a thriller in which a trio of thieves get a rude awakening when they attempt a robbery at the house of a blind man (Steven Lang), who isn’t nearly as vulnerable as they assumed.

 

Blockbuster originals

A film adaptation of the video game, Warcraft (June 10) looks to be a lavish fantasy of warring species directed by the usually more understated director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code).

Matthew McConaughey stars as a Mississippi farmer who leads a movement to abandon the confederacy during the Civil War in Free State of Jones (June 24).

Suicide Squad (Aug. 5) creates a supergroup of DC Comics villains, most notably the Joker (Jared Leto), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Deadshot (Will Smith) and Slipknot (Winnipeg’s own Adam Beach) on their own anarchic adventure.

 

 

Blockbuster sequels/reboots

Independence Day: Resurgence (June 24) “I’m ba-a-a-ack.” The line of dialogue delivered by Randy Quaid in the 1996 original applies to returning cast members (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner, but not Will Smith) as they gird their loins for another attack by icky, landmark-levelling aliens. The Legend of Tarzan (July 1) stars Alexander Skarsgard as Lord Greystoke, a British noble recalled to his vine-swinging jungle origins when Parliament makes him a trade emissary to the Congo.

The all-female rebootGhostbusters (July 15) boasts formidable comic talent in Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, under the direction of Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Spy). But tepid reaction to the trailers, coupled with feverish fanboy loyalty to the original property, might spell trouble for what otherwise looks like a sure-thing hit.

Another rebooted property, Star Trek Beyond (July 22), sees Kirk, Spock et al. stranded on a distant planet with the Enterprise as good as destroyed. This one needs to live up to its title and boldly take the franchise in a new direction, as opposed to the slavish Wrath of Khan rehash that was Star Trek Into Darkness.

He got his memory back, but Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne (July 29) finds he is still in the dark about CIA misdeeds, a situation he attempts to remedy when he goes on the run with a CIA analyst (Julia Stiles) in far-flung locations including Las Vegas and Athens. Much-filmed epic Ben-Hur (Aug. 12) gets yet another incarnation with Jack Huston assuming the role made famous by the chiselled Charlton Heston.

Sure, Mechanic Resurrection (Aug. 26) may sound like a Bible story set at a muffler shop, but it’s a sequel to the 2011 Jason Statham thriller, where Statham’s titular hitman is blackmailed into carrying out three assassinations when his lover is kidnapped.

 

Oddballs

A truly weird movie, Swiss Army Man (July 8) is about a man (Paul Dano) on a desert island who finds and befriends a flatulent corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) who holds the promise of reuniting him with his lost love.

Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc, the guy who purloined some radical fast-food concepts out from under a couple of inventive brothers named McDonald in The Founder (Aug. 5).

Call it western noir when a couple of brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) start robbing branches of the bank that is foreclosing on their property, forcing a retiring Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) to give chase in Hell or High Water (Aug. 12)

Florence Foster Jenkins (Aug. 12) tells the true story of an indulged heiress (Meryl Streep) who didn’t let a lack of talent deter her from becoming a singing star in the early 1900s.

 

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing