"Central Intelligence" - Lie Detector Test
The advertising campaign for Central Intelligence, an uber-formulaic spy comedy starring the beefy Dwayne Johnson and the pint-sized comedy star Kevin Hart, states that saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson. When a movie has a tagline as outrageously snappy as that, its hard not to speculate that the studio started with that pun and commissioned a script around it. Unfortunately, the gag may be the cleverest thing about the entire film.
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That alone shouldnt write Central Intelligence off completely: After all, this isnt a film thats really shooting for clever. The groan-inducing nature of the tagline underscores the larger point of the films existence: Its an excuse to get Johnson and Hart, two charming superstar actors, together for two hours so that they can be delightfully silly on-screen. The plot is largely irrelevant, the action mostly perfunctory, but if youre a fan of either Hart or Johnsons usual movie shtick, Central Intelligence is just about fun enough to recommend.
The film is directed and co-written by Rawson Marshall Thurber, a Hollywood oddity who seems to thrive more in silly territory than serious. His biggest hits have been Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and Were the Millers, antic, instantly forgettable comedies; his more serious effortslike an adaptation of Michael Chabons novel The Mysteries of Pittsburghfell disappointingly flat. For Central Intelligence, Thurber is back in comedy modethis is the kind of film to enjoy in a hotel room when theres nothing else on cable.
Its highlights include Johnson, whos a bona-fide movie star who rarely seems to find projects that match his magnetic screen presence. Perhaps its his next-level beefiness, which usually slots him into a specific role as the stone-faced straight man in a comedy. Central Intelligence is wise enough to undo that stereotype, having Johnson play Robert Weirdicht (yes, its pronounced Weird d**k), a high-school dweeb who looked up to star athlete Calvin Joyner (Hart) in his youth and became a hard-bodied CIA action hero in an effort to emulate his popularity. Hart, meanwhile, peaked in his teens and has become a pencil-pushing nobody, though equipped with the manic energy Hart brings to all of his performances.
In flashbacks, CGI trickery turns Johnson into an overweight, awkward fool of a teenager, singing with abandon in the gym showers and getting publicly bullied in an early sequence that pushes both good taste and visual credibility (computer-generated teen Robert looks downright bizarre, though not as strange as Johnsons turn as The Scorpion King). But the film pulls it off by staying resolutely on Roberts side and carrying his goofy personality over to adulthood, where he gets to inhabit Johnsons chiseled form. Robert still loves unicorns, singing En Vogue, and sharing dated memes (he reconnects with Calvin on Facebook by sending him a link to the Budweiser Wassup commercial). But hes also an international superspy.
The problem with this is that it forces Hart into the straight-man role, which feels like a waste of his live-wire talents. A dull accountant who bemoans the loss of his glory days, Calvin spends most of the film reacting to Roberts martial-arts and sharpshooting expertise with delight and horror, while being dragged from one location to the next by a perfectly nonsensical plot. There are double agents, encrypted codes, and a CIA authority figure played by Amy Ryan whose trustworthiness is suspect, but its hard to buy into any of Central Intelligences perfunctory twists. The story here is Robert and Calvins reconnection, and the joke that you can never quite shake who you were in high schoolthe bullets whizzing around are almost beside the point.
Still, Johnson is a gifted enough physical comedian that he sells some of the set-pieces. Part of the joke with Robert is that hes utterly unflappable in the field, dispatching assassins with delighted ease while Calvin contributes jittery yelps alongside him. Early on, confronted with a knife-wielding enemy, Robert picks up his only available weapon to counter witha bananaand the audience is never in doubt as to who will win that showdown. Anytime Robert is in action mode, the stakes are decidedly low.
But when he reunites with his old high-school bully (played in adulthood by a sneering Jason Bateman), he freezes up, and theres just enough pathos to the moment for it to land, partly because the film never fails to celebrate Roberts goofiness. I realized high school was nothing like Sixteen Candles, he confides to Calvin, recalling his experiences with bullying. And Ill never be like Molly Ringwald. Central Intelligence does its best to make Johnson its Molly Ringwaldand its that effort that makes it just memorable enough to recommend.
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/central-intelligence/487412/
