Film Reviews: Dealing out the dopeness

THE WACKNESS (15) ****

DIRECTED BY: JONATHAN LEVINE

STARRING: BEN KINGSLEY, JOSH PECK, FAMKE JANSSEN, OLIVIA THIRLBY

IT'S ALWAYS disconcerting to find the decade of your adolescence gradually cannibalised by Hollywood. Over the years I've been able to watch nostalgic rite-of-passage movies – be they set in the1950s, 1960s or 1970s – with a fascinated detachment, mainly because the cultural reference points have always been so unlike my own. Even the 1980s settings of films such as Donnie Darko or This is England are far enough past to be slightly exotic.

The early 1990s, though, are a different matter. In my head they happened yesterday, but it's 14 years since Kurt Cobain died and, in the years since I left high school, almost enough time has passed for an entirely new generation to grow up and teeter on the brink of adulthood themselves.

That's always the way, though. The two or three-year period during which you make that tricky transition into adulthood tends to be the one you remember most vividly, which is why making a period film depicting those days is so tricky to pull off. Do it right and you get one for the ages like American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused. Get it wrong and you risk transforming something meaningful into a synthetic amusement park ride, replete with redundant pop-culture references, ironic fashion goofs and random greatest hits soundtrack cues.

Happily Jonathan Levine's semi-autobiographical film The Wackness falls into the former category. Set in New York in 1994, it's the sort of film that can drop in references to Cobain and Pearl Jam without making you gnash your teeth, and understands the importance of throwing little fashion details into the mix without drawing attention to them. It also conjures up the aesthetic subtleties of the era through its inventive visual pallet. In short, it feels like an authentic vision of how things used to be.

Set over the long, hot summer of 1994, Rudolph Giuliani's much publicised clean-up of New York is the background event informing this coming-of-age flick about a hip-hop-loving 18-year-old who deals pot to a self-medicating psychiatrist in exchange for therapy. As "the most popular of the unpopular" kids in his graduating class, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is the kind of outsider who has convinced himself he doesn't need friendships, mainly because he's been kept on the fringes of all the cool cliques throughout high school (he'll supply a party with weed, but won't be invited to hang around and smoke it).

Instead he has focused his attention on making mix tapes of the latest hip-hop (he doesn't listen to CDs) and plying his dubious trade to both save up for college and to distract from the eviction notices that are making his home life with his parents more complicated than he'd like.

Rather than popping happy pills to help him get through these tricky latter stages of adolescence, though, he's encouraged by his shrink-cum-client, Dr Squires (played by a long-haired Ben Kingsley, on showy but amusing form), to pursue every life experience possible, especially sex. But when Josh falls for the doc's stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), their professional relationship evolves into a more complicated friendship, with Squires undergoing a full-on midlife meltdown and Luke dealing with being in love for the first time and with all its attendant pain and misery. It is the scenes with Stephanie and Luke that yield the film's slangy title. With her rich kid friends abandoning her for the summer, she starts hanging out with him after having her interest momentarily piqued by his career choice. Determined to snap him out of his seemingly permanent state of moroseness, she tells him that he seems incapable of looking at the dopeness in life, only the wackness.

That's not really something Levine can be accused of doing. Deploying lots of sun-kissed lens flares, bleached-out colour schemes and impeccable soundtrack choices (A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-1, Biggie Smalls), the 32-year-old writer/director delivers an unashamedly romantic vision of what it was like to be young in mid-1990s Manhattan, including a couple of nice little touches, such as the sidewalk momentarily lighting up like disco squares, that give us a richer sense of Luke's interior life. But it's the way the film equates the period specifics of Giuliani's clean-up with the search for quick-fix solutions to help people through every bump in life that raises this a notch or two above other hipster coming-of-age dramas. As Luke comes to realise, hard times are a vital part of life that should not be swept under the carpet. Like his home city, it's these things that will give him character and soul.

Perhaps fittingly, then, The Wackness is not a film without its own flaws and imperfections. It wastes Famke Janssen by giving her a one-note role as Squires's icy wife, while the hiring of former tween-queen Mary-Kate Olsen to play a spaced-out hippy chick who gets it on with Kingsley's character smacks a little of stunt casting. But Levine – who made his debut with the visually astute but otherwise woeful horror flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane – has made a film with so much heart it's hard to resist.

It won't be long before the 1990s are strip-mined like the 1970s and 1980s. The dope thing about The Wackness is that it's setting never feels like a commodity.

STEP BROTHERS (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: ADAM McKAY

STARRING: WILL FERRELL, JOHN C REILLY, RICHARD JENKINS, MARY STEENBURGEN

GIVEN that tales of arrested development currently dominate American comedy, it was probably inevitable that a film like Step Bothers would come along at some point. After the sublime Anchorman and the sucky Talladega Nights, this third big-screen collaboration between Will Ferrell and co-writer/director Adam McKay takes the current trend for comedies about men who have refused to let go of their inner child to an absurd extreme by casting Ferrell and his Talladega co-star John C Reilly as a pair of middle-aged wastrels still living at home and still allowed to act like a couple of petulant ten-year-olds.

Indulgent parents are one of the causes of their stunted emotional development. Having been scarred as a child by a public mocking at a high-school singing competition, 39-year-old Brennan Huff (Ferrell) has long since given up on the idea of becoming a productive member of society, using this incident as an excuse to remain in a state of adolescent bliss with his mother, played by the brilliant Mary Steenburgen, deliciously sweet here, especially when called upon to swear. Meanwhile, Dale Doback (Reilly) is the 40-year-old son of a successful doctor (The Visitor's Richard Jenkins) who has taken advantage of his father's good nature and lived off his success because he's too lazy to strike out on his own. When their respective parents meet and get married, the four of them move in together, with conflict duly ensuing. Cue scenes of piss fights, fistfights and, in the film's gross-out money shot, Ferrell rubbing his scrotum all over Reilly's character's beloved drumkit. Inevitably some of it is funny, some of it is not, with the Ferrell/Reilly man-brat double-act wearing a little thin as the running time clocks up, even though their striking similarity to each other remains constantly amusing. Decent support prevents it from getting too tedious. Steenburgen and Jenkins are often very funny as the bewildered parents, and Adam Scott's turn as Brennan's go-getting brother results in the film's best scene as he leads his too-perfect family in an a-cappella version of Guns N' Roses' Sweet Child O' Mine.

Even so, like its titular protagonists, a lot of the film is lazy, the result of talented, likeable performers and writers trying to get away with as much juvenilia as possible because they know audiences have indulged it in the past. There's a fine line between being smart-dumb and dumb-dumb, and Step Brothers wobbles as it tries to walk it. Realising they have more in common than they thought, Brennan and Dale team up to try and prevent Brennan's brother selling their home to fund Dale's dad's dream of sailing round the world, which results in the odd laugh, but because the film has none of the inspired lunacy of Anchorman to counteract it, this schematic plot progression means Brennan and Dale frequently err on the side of unlikeability.

As Anchorman proved, a comedy like this doesn't have to be particularly tethered to reality, but the characters do have to be believable within the parameters it sets for itself. Step Brothers defaults on this, as too often Ferrell and Reilly are little more than grotesques. Then again, maybe that's the point. The film does, after all, kick off with a gift of a quote from George W Bush. "Families," he says, "is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." In a country where idiocy and an unearned sense of entitlement can result in someone becoming most powerful person in the world, maybe a film such as Step Brothers isn't so far-fetched after all. Maybe the joke is on all of us.

EL BAÑO DEL PAPA (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: CÉSAR CHARLONE, ENRIQUE FERNÁNDEZ

STARRING: CÉSAR TRONCOSO, VIRGINIA MÉNDEZ, MARIO SILVA

INSPIRED by a papal visit to the Uruguayan city of Melo in 1988, the clue to the tone of this deadpan comedy comes from the title: the English translation is The Pope's Toilet, so don't go expecting a film full of reverence. Instead debut directors César Charlone and Enrique Fernández slyly deconstruct patronising media portrayals of salt-of-the-earth villagers taking hope from the Pope by showing the realities of their hardscrabble lives – even after being blessed. When the announcement is made that the Pope will visit Melo, the poverty-stricken inhabitants of a nearby village see an opportunity to get rich quick by setting up food and souvenir stalls to flog to the masses expected to come and worship. Among these schemers is Beto (César Troncoso), who makes a paltry living smuggling household goods across the border from Brazil. He figures that if everyone else is selling food, he can capitalise by building a toilet outside his house for paying customers. In his ensuing quest, the film highlights the plight of the desperate in amusing and heartbreaking ways without recourse to excessive sentiment.

BEN X (15) **

DIRECTED BY: NIC BALTHAZAR

STARRING: GREG TIMMERMANS, LAURA VERLINDEN, MARIJKE PINOY

A GIMMICKY, barely credible attempt to explore Asperger's Syndrome, this Belgian/Dutch drama uses the condition as justification for some medieval-style fantasy sequences that appear to have been cynically shoehorned in to make the film more attractive to potential backers. Beyond the obvious suggestion that retreating into a fantasy world is a coping mechanism for sufferers who can't properly connect to real life, there's little dramatic purpose to the scenes where Ben (Greg Timmerman) loses himself in an online video game called Archlord, in which he imagines himself to be a fearless warrior called Ben X coming to the rescue of a sexed-up maiden called Scarlite (Laura Verlinden). Cheaply rendered on screen, it makes the film seem a little try-hard, a bit too much like a kid's TV show. The film is little better when it comes to showing how school bullying has made his daily life hell, with only his mother (Marijke Pinoy) willing to stand up for him. The histrionic acting and loaded perspective is all very adolescent, though even this won't prepare you for the bizarre twist in which an apparent tragedy lets the film morph into a bonkers Christ allegory.

MES AMIS, MES AMOURS (15) **

DIRECTED BY: LORRAINE LEVY

STARRING: VINCENT LINDON, PASCAL ELBÉ, VIRGINIE LEDOYEN

PARIS has to suffer plenty of English-language filmmakers using it as a backdrop for insipid romantic comedies, so it's perhaps only fair that London should take a hit from the French once in a while. Mes Amis, Mes Amours, which takes place in a London community of French expats, proceeds to use the city as an extended homage to the work of Richard Curtis. Vincent Lindon plays Mathais, a divorcee fired from his job in Paris, who is persuaded by his London-based best friend Antoine (Pascal Elbé) to move to the British capital and buy a bookshop. With his ex-wife also in the city, he hopes to rekindle their relationship, but when he arrives, she uses his move as the perfect excuse to return to Paris, leaving their London-schooled daughter Emilie in his charge and setting up the film's main hook. To help each other out, Mathias and Emilie decide to move in with the similarly divorced Antoine and his son. Odd-couple shenanigans duly ensue as fastidious Antoine saddles Mathias with a list of lifestyle-cramping conditions that seriously threaten his pursuit of gorgeous TV presenter Audrey (Ledoyen). It's as soppy and sloppy as it sounds.

THE STRANGERS (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: BRYAN BERTINO

STARRING: LIV TYLER, SCOTT SPEEDMAN

THOUGH this American home-invasion thriller claims to have been be inspired by true events. it was more likely inspired by the 2006 French horror flick Them, the premise for which is so similar I assumed I was watching yet another Hollywood remake. But no, apparently this is an "original" film – and a much better one as well, with debut writer-director Bryan Bertino crafting a surprisingly taut little shocker from its creaky components and making a decent fist of building and sustaining tension until genre familiarity finally gets the better of it. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are the couple under attack, Kristen and James, victims of a trio of masked and anonymous sickos (two guys and one girl) whose motivations and faces remain hidden for the entire film. This device ratchets up the creepiness, as does Bertino's patience; he takes his time to provide us with just enough information to make us care about his protagonists, which further fuels the sense of dread. Indeed, it's so effective it even helps you to ignore some of their more idiotic behaviour, at least until the blood starts gushing, at which point the plot starts feeling a little bit too mechanical.

BABYLON A.D. (12A) *

DIRECTED BY: MATHIEU KASSOVITZ

STARRING: VIN DIESEL, MICHELLE YEOH, MÉLANIE THIERRY, LAMBERT WILSON

IN THE years between The Chronicles of Riddick and this dreary Euro stinker, Vin Diesel put in a notable character turn as a bewigged mobster in Sidney Lumet's courtroom drama Find Me Guilty. That film sunk without trace, so back the actor has gone to knuckle-dragging action. The spectacularly uninspired Babylon A.D. doesn't have a plot so much as a trailer voiceover: in a world ravaged by war, one lone mercenary (Diesel) is charged with transporting a convent girl (Thierry) from Kyrgyzstan to America, where her bland looks and child-bearing hips may yet save the planet. So it's xXx, only set 50 years in the future. To VERY LOUD thrash metal. Vin – now well behind Jason Statham on the list of Action Heroes You Want to Watch – runs, shoots and growls his way around dystopian cityscapes, encountering a slumming Charlotte Rampling, clenched and pallid as "The High Priestess", and Gerard Depardieu, hiding behind a Latex nose. Kassovitz, himself still looking to crack the US, sets off explosions and gets in lots of product-placement for a certain cola drink: mercenary is indeed the word for it.

MICHAEL BLACK