An American Pickle– When Herschel Greenbaum immigrates to the United States and starts a family, he gets a job at a pickle business (plant?) and accidentally falls into a brine vat. He’s perfectly preserved in the juice and wakes up 100 years later in modern Brooklyn, NY.

In this new world Herschel discovers that his wife died several decades ago but his son went on to have a family. He meets Ben, his great-great-grandson and they begin to live together while Herschel starts his life over (he’s basically the same age as Ben).

Seth Rogen plays both Herschel and Ben, doing a fantastic job as both. It’s a cute story that, I think, works better as a drama than a comedy. It got a few chuckles out of me and there is some really absurd things going on (besides the whole premise). The best is the relationship between the distant relatives. First Ben teaching him about modern life, them finding things they have in common and then Ben becoming jealous of Herschel’s surprising successes. The fish out of water story is an ages old one, but I found Pickle to use it well for family and social commentary. It’s a creative and fun story (based on a short story by the great Simon Rich) that’s worth watching.

Project Power– I wanted to like this way more than I did. The problem is it doesn’t do much that’s new or that interesting.

On the streets of New Orleans, a pill that gives the user superpowers for 5 minutes suddenly appears. The superpower given is different for everyone–and it could be deadly. It might make you explode right away or give you an ability that is so strong (and dangerous to anyone around you) the body can’t handle it and you more or less fall apart.

There are three main characters navigating this situation and their paths all cross, leading them to uncover where the Power pills are coming from and why they’ve hit the streets on New Orleans (the most interesting part of the story, in my opinion).

Frank the cop (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Art the ex-soldier(Jamie Foxx), and Robin the teenage Power dealer (Dominique Fishback). The cast is great, no complaints there. They do their best with what they are given. The problem is that each character is the textbook cliche of each description. They aren’t interesting, at all. If you’ve seen a movie in this genre that’s been made in the past 40 years or so, you’ll be able to guess each character’s background stories just by the first sentence of this paragraph. So it becomes a waiting game for them to come together as a 3 piece and see what the fallout and twist of the story are if any. I did like the ending so that’s a plus.

The standout parts of the movie are the special effects. There are some wild transformations on display that are done really well. That makes the action fun to watch and punches up the interest. Basically what kept me from turning the movie off and moving on to something else. It felt like this script was just a set up for a larger universe. A message of “I know, you just have to sit through this so I can set this up for a better sequel. Please stick with me.” That’s not a good message.

Guns Akimbo– If you’re in the mood for anarchist hyper-violence, take a long trip to crazy town with Miles when he gets forced into playing the real-life death match game, Skizm.

If you understood that sentence than you are probably in a certain age bracket that this movie caters to. When it comes to making an action movie, you need a hook. As you read above, Project Power didn’t work well for me. Guns Akimbo approach is to throw everything into the wind a try to film all of it at once as the debris falls all over the place. I wanted to see this because Daniel Radcliffe stars in it. He always does his best when doing an American accent and it always sounds weird. I find that charming–what can I say I’m a fan.

So Dan’s my entry point in this video game scenario put to film. Miles talks trash online and one time he does so to the organizer of a viral online gladiator show called Skizm where two people literally fight to the death. The guy bolts handguns to Miles’ hands and forces him to fight the current reining Skizm champion, Nix. He has 100 bullets and 24 hours to do it, or he’ll be killed. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

So Miles is well un-equipped for this. He’s far from a fighter and having guns bolted to your hands is insane and makes for many everyday problems. The whole movie is Miles running around the city trying to survive and find a way out of this mess.

Everything about this movie is absurd. The set up, the characters, the action, the violence. It’s a video game made with people instead of pixels (there’s some really great stylized animation integrated too, think Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). When the guns start firing the camera takes off with it. Kinetic direction is what I would call it.

While I appreciate what the movie does and the attempt at social commentary (GTFO the internet, it desensitizes you) it gets exhausting to watch. Blood and bodies and cursing all over the place. It’s sensory overload after sensory overload (which the John Wick series runs up to but pulls off with stunning style and reservation) that in the end doesn’t mean much. The desensitization of violence warning of the script is on full display with the final product of the movie. Not a bad movie per say but a one and done experience for me.