Celtic Pride (Retro)

CELTIC PRIDE (1996) PG-13 91 minutes Director: Tom DeCerchio Writer: Judd Apatow, Colin Quinn Damon Wayans, Daniel Stern, Dan Aykroyd CAST Damon Wayans...Lewis Scott Daniel Stern...Mike O'Hara Dan Aykroyd...Jimmy Flaherty Marcia Strassman...Carol O'Hara Christopher McDonald...Coach Kimball Vladimir Cuk...Lurch Bill Walton...Himself Larry Bird...Himself

I saw CELTIC PRIDE in a theater in 1996. I was a kid, and I still liked most movies at that point. Even then, something felt off. I couldn't have told you what it was. I just knew that I was supposed to be rooting for these two guys and I wasn't.

It took me thirty years and two viewings to figure out why.

By 1996, the Celtics were no longer a team anyone celebrated. The Bird era was over. The Boston Garden had already closed and was waiting to be torn down. The team was bad — genuinely, embarrassingly bad — stuck in the kind of rebuilding purgatory that has no romantic name. This was after Larry Bird, and well before Paul Pierce. If you were a Celtics fan in 1996, you were a person in mourning who hadn't fully accepted it yet.

I came to the Celtics later, and sideways. Seattle still technically had a team when Ray Allen got traded to Boston, but nobody was paying attention anymore. You don't abandon a franchise. Sometimes a franchise abandons you first.

The setup is simple enough. Two Boston superfans kidnap Utah Jazz star Lewis Scott the night before game seven of the NBA Finals, hoping to keep him out of the game long enough for the Celtics to win a championship. They didn't exactly plan it — they blacked out, and Scott was just there when they came to. But they make the conscious decision to keep him, which is where the moral accounting should begin. It never really does.

CELTIC PRIDE wants you to find this charming. Two lovable obsessives doing a desperate thing for the team they love. The problem is that Lewis Scott didn't do anything to them. He's just very good at basketball. Mike and Jimmy are committing a felony against a man whose only offense was being employed by the wrong franchise.

A movie built on this premise has two options. It can commit to the comedy and make everything weightless enough that the audience never stops to think about it. Or it can acknowledge the darkness and do something honest with it. CELTIC PRIDE tries to split the difference and ends up with neither.

This is a movie that has opted out of consequence entirely. A police officer shows up while Scott is being held at gunpoint and just walks away. Later, Mike's wife learns about the kidnapping and doesn't call the police. By the end, Scott himself covers for them. And in case that wasn't enough, they receive a hundred thousand dollars for their trouble. It isn't just saying the kidnapping was fine. It's saying everyone benefited from it.

The closest comparison I can think of is BIG FAN, a 2009 film that takes a similar premise — obsessive fan, athlete, a line that gets crossed — and never blinks. That film understands that this kind of story only works if you're willing to look directly at what fanaticism actually costs. CELTIC PRIDE keeps looking away.

Daniel Stern is the most capable actor in the cast and the most wasted. Anyone who has seen him in DINER or BREAKING AWAY knows what he can do with a character who is quietly falling apart. There are traces of that here — the divorce, the failed athletic dreams that Carol's therapist has already diagnosed — but it never follows through on any of it. Instead it asks him to ride the goodwill of his HOME ALONE persona until the wheels fall off. Mike O'Hara had the potential to be genuinely tragic. He ends up being Marv with a Celtics jersey.

Dan Aykroyd is a different problem. His best work has always leaned into his strangeness — BLUES BROTHERS, GHOSTBUSTERS, even CONEHEADS finds the right vehicle for his particular energy. Jimmy Flaherty needed someone whose obsession reads as unhinged and human simultaneously. Aykroyd comes across as unhinged and alien. The Boston accent doesn't help. It hits the broad markers but never finds the rhythm, and by the third scene the accent begins to overwhelm the character.

Christopher McDonald is playing a familiar variation of himself. In this case, that's exactly what the movie requires — a coach radiating Tom Thibodeau levels of sideline stress.

Damon Wayans, to his credit, is competent. That sounds like faint praise and it is, but competent is the ceiling in a film this untethered. He's playing the only character with any grounding in actual consequence, and he doesn't oversell it. The press conference apology is a good example — his character explains his back problems come from carrying a sorry excuse for a team all season. It lands somewhere between groan and laugh, which is probably the best CELTIC PRIDE ever manages.

There is something performative about the fandom here that never goes away. Mike and Jimmy feel less like obsessives and more like two men doing an impression of what fanaticism looks like. The jerseys, the memorabilia, the superstitions — it all reads as a costume rather than a life. A real fanatic has a specificity to their devotion that is almost impossible to fake. These two could take the jerseys off and go home.

CELTIC PRIDE is rated PG-13, which means the real texture of Boston sports fandom in that era is completely off the table. Anyone who has spent time around that particular strain of New England loyalty knows it has edges it was never going to touch. What you're left with is a sanitized version — fandom as the studio imagined it.

The best thing in CELTIC PRIDE is a peripheral character named Ilyalurtz Bronfermakher, listed in the credits simply as Lurch. He is a seven foot Eastern European player on the Jazz roster who gets approximately four minutes of screen time and is more fully realized than anyone the script is focused on. Vladimir Cuk, who plays him, was a real basketball player before he was an actor, and the cadence he brings to the role is not something you could coach. When Lurch tells his coach he has got the bad crap, and then misses a sure slam dunk, it is the funniest moment in the movie. When he is finally called off the bench late in the game and informs the coach he will be giving them some of that death row shit, you almost wish the movie was about him instead.

The most unexamined relationship in the movie is Mike's wife Carol. Carol is established early as the voice of reason — she has been holding divorce papers for years, her therapist has diagnosed the obsession, she has clearly had enough. Then the kidnapping happens and she just stops being a person. She doesn't report it. She roots for the Jazz to protect her husband from consequences. And presumably stays married to him at the end. CELTIC PRIDE spends the first act building her as someone who finally sees clearly, then quietly asks her to forget all of it. She never gets an explanation and neither does the audience.

CELTIC PRIDE closes with two scenes that tell you everything. After the Celtics win, a police officer asks Lewis Scott if these two men have perpetrated a crime against him. Scott looks at Mike and Jimmy and says "I know these two jerks, they're my friends." No consequences, no accountability, no acknowledgment that anything wrong occurred. The victim absolves his kidnappers because the movie needs a tidy ending and couldn't think of a better way to get there.

And then, seven months later, Mike and Jimmy are outside Deion Sanders' house. In a better movie this might have worked as a jokey button that sends the audience out laughing. Here it just confirms what you already suspected. CELTIC PRIDE doesn't just let them off the hook. It endorses them, suggests that kidnapping athletes is simply what devoted fans do, and that getting away with it once is a reasonable argument for doing it again. CELTIC PRIDE mistakes the absence of consequence for charm. They are not the same thing.

I knew something was wrong with this movie when I was a kid. Thirty years later I can finally explain it. CELTIC PRIDE is a movie about getting away with it. Unfortunately that applies to the filmmakers too.

Final Verdict: 33 out of 100

Air Bud (Retro)

AIR BUD (1997) PG 98 Minutes Director: Charles Martin Smith Writers: Paul Tamasy, Aaron Mendelsohn Kevin Zegers, Michael Jeter, Bill Cobbs CAST Kevin Zegers...Josh Framm Michael Jeter...Norm Snively Bill Cobbs...Arthur Chaney Wendy Makkena...Jackie Framm Eric Christmas...Judge Cranfield Brendan Fletcher...Larry Willingham Norman Browning...Coach Barker Nicola Cavendish...Announcer Stephen E. Miller...Principal Pepper Shayn Solberg...Fog Frank C. Turner...Referee

There are two kinds of people in this world — those who like golden retrievers, and...just kidding, there's only one kind of people.

I should also tell you upfront that before writing this review, I read a 348-page book about the real dog, Buddy. To be fair, at least a third of it is about the author.

I'll admit I tried watching AIR BUD once before and checked out after twenty minutes. The IMDb rating of 5.4 didn't exactly inspire confidence, and I went in looking for immediate absurdity rather than what the movie actually is — a family sports film that isn't in any hurry to earn its premise. That was my mistake, not the movie's.

GO, BUDDY! — the book written by Kevin DiCicco, the man who found and trained Buddy — changed my approach entirely. The real story isn't what you'd expect. He was a scraggly, pinecone-obsessed stray that DiCicco stumbled across in the Sierra Nevada, nursed back to health, and then discovered almost by accident had a peculiar gift for basketball.

The talent snowballed organically — AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS, then David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks, then Disney. Hollywood didn't manufacture Buddy. It just scaled up something that already existed.

Knowing that going in makes the movie feel less like cynical product and more like a document of something that actually happened to a real animal. That's a better starting point for a review.

AIR BUD opens with a kid who has lost his father and a dog who has lost his dignity. Josh Framm is twelve, quiet, and new to Fernfield, Washington — though you'd pick up on the Pacific Northwest setting less from anything the movie tells you and more from the casual Shawn Kemp references. The grief isn't milked. The movie establishes it, respects it, and then lets the dog do the therapeutic heavy lifting.

What's refreshing about AIR BUD is how unapologetically sincere it is about all of this. It knows exactly what it is — a movie about a golden retriever who plays basketball — and it never once tries to be anything else. There's no winking at the camera, no meta-commentary, no attempt to justify its own premise. It simply commits, which turns out to be harder to pull off than it looks.

The villain of the piece is Norm Snively, an alcoholic clown who loses Buddy during a disastrous birthday party performance in the opening scene. Michael Jeter plays him with a particular brand of desperation that edges closer to the seedy birthday clown from UNCLE BUCK than broad slapstick. He's not scary exactly, but he's genuinely unsettling in the way that only a failing clown can be. The movie wisely never tries to rehabilitate him. He crashes his truck into a lake while drunk, shows up uninvited to a championship basketball game, and eventually gets his case dismissed by a judge who can barely conceal his contempt. It's a fitting end for a man who opened the film by nearly choking on a plate-spinning stick.

The abusive coach who throws basketballs at children gets fired early enough that the movie doesn't have to spend much time justifying it. In his place comes Arthur Chaney, played by Bill Cobbs, a retired pro who has quietly ended up as the school handyman. The movie doesn't explain how he got there, and it doesn't need to. Cobbs brings enough quiet authority to the role that you fill in the blanks yourself. There's a dignity to the character that the film earns without spelling anything out — a private man with a complicated past who decides to invest in a lonely kid and a dog. He brings genuine warmth to what could have easily been a throwaway mentor role, and he elevates every scene he's in, including a courtroom moment late in the film that works almost entirely because of him.

One of the film's more underrated choices is what it doesn't do. There are maybe three songs in the entire movie, including a track you'd hear at any basketball game, and even the film score barely makes its presence known. For a mid-90s family film, that's almost radical restraint. AIR BUD trusts the story and the performances to do the work. Deliberate or not, it was the right call.

AIR BUD also gets the ratio right. There is enough dog without it ever overwhelming the human story, and enough human story without the dog feeling like an afterthought. That balance is harder to achieve than it sounds — either the animal becomes a gimmick or the humans overwhelm it. Here the two storylines breathe together. Josh's grief arc has room to develop alongside Buddy's presence rather than being swallowed by it. The chemistry between Kevin Zegers and Buddy feels genuine, and a lot of it is. Much of the film is simply the two of them playing together, loosely edited but emotionally real.

If the film has a structural weakness it's that the basketball stakes never quite build the way they should. The championship game arrives almost without warning — announced in a single throwaway line from a commentator — and the movie hasn't done enough work to make you feel the journey to get there. Ironically, the original concept had Buddy helping a struggling team reach the finals through a proper playoff arc. That version of the film would have given the basketball more weight. What we get instead is competent but a little thin. Though there's a case to be made that this was partly intentional — the abusive coach who opened the film was obsessed with winning, and replacing him with Chaney meant shifting the value system away from trophies and toward something less measurable. A full championship run might have sent the message right back in the wrong direction.

Here's where the review takes a turn.

The dog who played Buddy was actually named Buddy. Kevin DiCicco found him as a scraggly stray in the Sierra Nevada in 1989, nursed him back to health, and gradually discovered that this particular dog had an inexplicable affinity for basketball. The trick was less graceful than it looks — a slightly deflated ball covered in olive oil, propelled off Buddy's nose and into the basket — but it was completely real. No CGI, no camera tricks. Roger Ebert apparently assumed it was digital effects, which says less about the movie and more about how low his expectations were going in.

Buddy made his name on AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS and David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks before Disney came calling. He also made a one-episode cameo as Comet on FULL HOUSE — specifically for a basketball scene with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which makes perfect sense.

Buddy was already older than he looked during filming. DiCicco had found him as a stray and never knew his exact age. The production touched up the white on his muzzle for certain shots. By the time the movie came out in the summer of 1997, Buddy had been diagnosed with bone cancer. He had his right hind leg amputated that fall and began chemotherapy. Disney quietly distanced themselves, concerned that a three-legged dog undergoing cancer treatment might upset the children they were marketing the film to. You can't entirely blame them for the logic even if the coldness of it stings.

Buddy died in February 1998, in his sleep. He was ten minutes away from meeting his own puppies.

Kevin DiCicco did genuine good with Buddy's fame. Hospital visits, charity appearances, bringing joy to kids who needed it. That counts for something. But the real story around Buddy is messier than the movie it inspired. There were legal disputes, questions of ownership, a franchise that grew well beyond anyone's original intentions — one DiCicco never really benefited from. As recently as 2024 he was facing homelessness. The man who found a stray dog in the woods and turned him into a cultural phenomenon doesn't own the rights to that phenomenon.

None of this tarnishes Buddy. That's the thing about dogs — they stay pure even when the humans around them get complicated. The contracts, the disputes, the sequels don't touch him. What survives is the image of a golden retriever bumping a basketball into a hoop like it's the most natural thing in the world, and the collective memory of every kid who saw it and believed.

At some point Buddy stopped belonging to one person and started belonging to culture. That's how myth works. The human discovers, the dog performs, the audience believes, and the story detaches from its origin. What defines him is simpler than any of that.

GO, BUDDY! ends with a chapter written from the perspective of Buddy II, one of five golden retriever puppies gathered around a basketball, each one carrying something forward. The game continues. That's not a bad note to end on — for the book, for the dog, or for this review.

Final Verdict: 74 out of 100

First Kid (Retro)

FIRST KID (1996) PG 101 Minutes Director: David Mickey Evans Writer: Tim Kelleher Sinbad, Brock Pierce, Blake Boyd CAST Sinbad...Sam Simms Brock Pierce...Luke Davenport Blake Boyd...Dash Timothy Busfield...Woods Art LaFleur...Morton Robert Guillaume...Wilkes Lisa Eichhorn...Linda Davenport James Naughton...President Paul Davenport Fawn Reed...Susan Lawrence Zachery Ty Bryan...Rob McArthur Bill Cobbs...Speet

In seventh grade, our teacher rewarded us with a movie day. The choices: FIRST KID or JACK. Some troublemaker in the back blurted out, "I don't want to watch JACK...off," which got the whole class laughing and settled the vote immediately. We watched FIRST KID instead. Having now seen both movies, I think we made the right choice—but just barely.

FIRST KID is a Disney comedy about Luke Davenport, the president's 13-year-old son who's lonely, friendless, and determined to make life miserable for his Secret Service detail. After one agent gets fired for being too rough with Luke, Sam Simms, played by Sinbad, gets assigned to protect the kid. In the role, Sinbad is charming and doing his best with thin material. It should work. Except there's one problem: Luke himself is nearly impossible to root for.

The president's son is a dorky twerp. Not in a Milhouse way—just unlikable. He whines, he sulks, he treats everyone around him like garbage. The movie knows this is a problem, so it tries to compensate. Luke has a Bearded Collie that gets squeezed into more scenes than necessary—something for the audience to care about. There's also a pet snake for comedy and chaos. Disrupting social functions. Messing with keyboards. Keeping things moving when Luke isn't interesting enough. Multiple pets aren't character details—they're damage control.

Sinbad's like an enthusiastic puppy in a household of depressed people—big eyes, endless optimism, just trying to make everyone smile. He's charming and fully committed, even when the movie boxes him in with Secret Service protocol and bland buddy-comedy material. The Dunkin Donuts bit at the mall is solid. His dance moves during the "Fantastic Voyage" scene are genuinely funny. As an executive producer, you can tell he's calling some of the shots—he picked his jam and made sure it had some bounce.

The soundtrack follows Disney's mid-'90s budget strategy—75% generic filler, 25% real standouts: Devo's "Girl U Want," Chill Rob G.'s "The Power," and "I Want to Take You Higher." The rest is elevator R&B and knockoff covers. The school dance scene plays "I Can Love You Like That," but it's not the All-4-One hit version everyone knows—it's the Diamond Mike/Joey Richey cover Disney licensed on the cheap. Same song, same words, zero of the harmonies that made the original work. They couldn't afford the real thing, but somehow they got Bill Clinton and Sonny Bono for cameos. Classic Disney priorities: skip the music licensing, book the sitting president. As if he needed the paycheck.

Zachery Ty Bryan plays Rob, the school bully, and he's surprisingly good at it. Maybe too good. He's not just generic mean—when he calls Luke's dad a draft dodger right before their fight, it's got actual bite. You almost root for him, which says something about how weak Luke is as a protagonist. The irony, of course, is that Bryan himself now has assault charges. So the bully actor became—well, you get it.

The plot hinges on Luke chatting with a stranger online—Mongoose12, who turns out to be Woods, the fired Secret Service agent. He's bitter about losing his job after failing his fitness-for-duty evaluation, and by the time he's pointing a gun at Luke in the mall, he's convinced the kid ruined his life. It's insane villain logic, but at least it's motivation. The movie spells it out from the start: Luke's username is Viper Boy, his internet pal is Mongoose12—snake and mongoose, natural enemies. Not exactly subtle. What's more dated is how casually everyone treats internet stranger danger. Simms asks someone to look into Mongoose12, but there's no urgency, no real concern about Luke chatting with a stranger at all. This was just plot in 1996. Today I'd expect Chris Hansen to meet Woods at the mall.

The movie's grasp on technology is hilariously shaky. Luke wears a tracking necklace that apparently has infinite batteries—no charging, no replacement, just perpetual surveillance. At one point, Luke gets a wrist tracker—like he's on house arrest for his second DUI—and slaps it on the dog to fool everyone. Then there's a scene at the mall where a bunch of kids gather around to watch Luke play with clunky 1996 virtual reality tech, like they're courtside at a Celtics game. The whole movie feels like it was written by someone who heard about the internet and technology secondhand and just hoped it would all work out.

For a light Sinbad comedy about a lonely kid learning to make friends, FIRST KID gets surprisingly violent at the mall. The movie sets it up early—Wilkes gets on Simms for not wearing his bulletproof vest because it "causes chafing," then later tells him about getting shot protecting Reagan. So the film is building to Simms getting shot all along. In the modern world, a family-movie climax with bullets flying and people screaming hits very differently than it did in 1996. Even then, the sequence was jarring. It ends with Sinbad taking a bullet—and then everyone goes to the park to play hockey.

And then there's Brock Pierce himself. The kid from FIRST KID retired from acting at 16, became a cryptocurrency mogul, ran for president in 2020, and is now generously described as a creepy billionaire. So the movie about the president's son stars an actual future presidential candidate—just not the kind Disney was hoping for. It's another layer of darkness on a movie that was supposed to be harmless fun.

Luke is a black hole of charisma. Everything else in the movie—Sinbad's charm, the Bearded Collie, the pet snake, and 25% of the soundtrack—exists to compensate for the void at the center. The movie knows it. That's why it keeps throwing animals and energy at the screen, hoping something sticks. It's formulaic Disney moviemaking held together by Sinbad's effort and sheer wishful thinking. When the protagonist is this unlikable, no amount of "Fantastic Voyage" or Dunkin Donuts scenes can save it.

It's Black History Month, so naturally I had to review a movie with Sinbad. I'm probably only going to say this one time in my life: Sinbad is not the problem with this movie. Everything else is. FIRST KID works in scattered moments, but it can't overcome its fundamental problem—you're spending 101 minutes with a kid you don't like. Surrounded by darkness the movie never intended. That seventh-grade vote between this and JACK? Still the right call. But just barely.

Final Verdict: 52 out of 100

The Last Boy Scout (Retro)

THE LAST BOY SCOUT (1991) R 105 Minutes Director: Tony Scott Writer: Shane Black Bruce Willis, Damon Wayans, Chelsea Field CAST Bruce Willis...Joe Hallenbeck Damon Wayans...Jimmy Dix Chelsea Field...Sarah Hallenbeck Noble Willingham...Sheldon Marcone Taylor Negron...Milo Danielle Harris...Darian Hallenbeck Billy Blanks...Billy Cole

Friday night's a great night for football
You can feel it in the air like lightning on the edge of the night
You can feel it everywhere, but it's party time in Cleveland tonight
Friday night's a great night for football
Catching as tight ends, ready to do it
—THE LAST BOY SCOUT

The Last Boy Scout opens with Billy Blanks—yes, the Tae Bo guy—playing an NFL running back who's about to have the worst game of his life. He's Billy Cole, strung out on pills and pressure. Blackmailed mid-game, he's told to rush for 150 yards or lose everything—his spot, his fix, his life. He pops a handful, eyes go blank in the locker room, then hits the rainy field running on pure instinct.

Ball's snapped. Pitch-out. He tucks and runs. Defensive back barrels in—Cole pulls a gun from under his jersey, pumps three shots through the guy's helmet. Blood and fiberglass everywhere. Keeps going. Another DB dives—Cole blows out his knee. Pandemonium. Players running, cops sprinting, the goalpost collapsing. Cole crosses the line, drops the ball, turns, smiles, and says, "I'm going to Disneyland..." Puts the gun to his helmet. Bang.

It's brutal and absurd—and we're barely past the kickoff. Football's just another racket—players get chewed up, the dream dies on camera, and nobody stops the broadcast. The NFL wanted nothing to do with this movie, so the teams are the Stallions and the Cats instead of actual franchises. The only time you should see the word "stallion" is on the back of a license plate frame about Italians.

Cut to Joe Hallenbeck, the last boy scout—disgraced ex-Secret Service turned PI, sleeping off a bender in his car under the freeway. Dead squirrel lands on his chest courtesy of neighborhood kids. He wakes, stuffs a .38 in a kid's face ("Hey, motherfucker"), then realizes and lets go. Vomit on the lawn, Camel lit, Seagrams rescued. Jimmy Dix gets his own version: ex-QB, coke spoon in the mirror, flashing back to glory days on the field—seventy thousand screaming, perfect spiral, feeling alive—now this.

From there, it's the same pattern: rigged games, senators taking bribes, painkillers handed out like Tic Tacs so players can grind through the damage. Villains like Milo exude slick, dramatic, prissy menace. The bad guys monologue with campy flair while the heroes trade insults through gunfire. It gets so excessive, the darkness starts feeling ridiculous instead of scary.

Hallenbeck's a mess—marriage wrecked, daughter hates him—but he still operates by some code: protect family, team up with Dix (even if they just insult each other). Dix talks about his wife getting killed during his best game, their kid lived 17 minutes. That lands harder than Dix getting thrown from an overpass. The banter's sharp ("Smile, you fuck"—Hallenbeck to his own reflection). But the two of them keep showing up anyway—protecting family, refusing to quit. In a world this rotten, being the last boy scout isn't naive—it's just what's left.

The Last Boy Scout works. It's unapologetically '90s, made for people who want their action movies bitter and loud. The original script had Joe donate the money to charity—they kept it. That's the whole movie: when everything's broken, the only honest move is to stop pretending otherwise.

Final Verdict: 85 out of 100

The Wrecking Crew

THE WRECKING CREW R 122 Minutes Director: Ángel Manuel Soto Writer: Jonathan Tropper Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Morena Baccarin CAST Jason Momoa…Jonny Hale Dave Bautista…James Hale Temuera Morrison…Governor Peter Mahoe Claes Bang…Marcus Robichaux Jacob Batalon…Pika Frankie Adams…Haunani “Nani” Palakiko Miyavi…Nakamura Morena Baccarin…Valentina Roimata Fox…Leila Hale Stephen Root…Detective Rennert / Sergeant Karl Rennert Maia Kealoha…Lani Lydia Peckham…Monica Robichaux David Hekili Kenui Bell…Alekai Mark R. Black…Monty Josua Tuivaralagi…Kai Stephen Oyoung…Akihiko

THE WRECKING CREW needed to do exactly one thing: let Momoa and Bautista be themselves in a buddy action comedy. That’s it. That’s the whole ask.

For about twenty minutes, it almost works. The opening has a loose, easygoing rhythm—clichés included—like the movie briefly knows what it is. Then something shifts. Simple setups get tangled. Key information gets withheld until the third act, not for suspense but because the script can't figure out when to say it. The early momentum disappears. What replaces it: scenes where characters tell each other things they already know purely so the audience can catch up. It’s storytelling that arrives breathless and scrambling, like trying to finish an assignment ten minutes before class starts.

That scramble becomes unavoidable near the end, when the movie stops pretending and just dumps the entire plot in one rushed conversation. Marcus Robichaux wants to build a casino resort in Hawaii—on Hawaiian Home Lands, no less. Gambling needs legalizing first. The governor's been bought for twelve million. Yakuza muscle gets imported for enforcement. The father dug up financial records through Robichaux's wife. A kid downloaded the dirty transactions. Torture happened. Murder followed. It's delivered at auction speed, frantic and graceless, as if someone suddenly remembered this information was supposed to matter.

The characters operate on the same convenience. James is positioned as hyper-competent—former SEAL, always three steps ahead, the kind of guy who reads a room before he enters it. Except he walks into a house where someone's missing and his kids are hiding, and doesn't register that anything's wrong until a phone call explains it to him. He also keeps an unlocked weapons stash in a house with children, not because it reflects who he is, but because the next scene needs firepower. His competence flickers on and off depending on what the plot requires in that exact moment.

The tone never settles on what kind of movie it wants to be. There's a scene where they infiltrate a party in Hawaiian shirts, played for pure cartoon logic—total farce. But everything around it insists on being taken seriously. People are dying, lives are unraveling, and yet we're supposed to accept both the goofy disguise routine and the weight of their murdered father. It wants HOBBS & SHAW’s irreverence one minute and genuine stakes the next, but keeps hedging between them instead of choosing.

What makes this more frustrating is how much raw material is sitting right there, unused. Jason Momoa has the kind of natural charisma where you’ll watch him do anything—here, he's playing Jonny like the fun brother who never quite grew up—but the movie barely lets him breathe. Dave Bautista is locked into restrained, responsible dad mode as James, and that could be a smart contrast, but their dynamic never gets enough space to build.

Meanwhile, their father—whose death is supposed to motivate everything—was apparently a terrible dad. Jonny even says something like “he wasn’t a father to anyone.” The movie still expects us to care about avenging him anyway, as if that detail doesn’t complicate things.

The ending plays out with that oddly detached FAST & FURIOUS casualness, where the movie just sort of stops. Big stakes dissolve in seconds, consequences vanish offscreen, and everyone wanders away like they’ve got other plans. After all the plot scrambling and the tonal mess, the finish feels indifferent—like even the movie ran out of patience for itself.

I watched THE WRECKING CREW twice, which is once more than necessary. The second viewing doesn't add clarity—it just makes the shortcuts sharper and more irritating. It's not a disaster. It's something more deflating: a movie that takes two actors who should have made this easy and turns it into a chore.

Final Verdict: 43 out of 100

The Sandlot (Retro)

THE SANDLOT (1993) PG 101 Minutes Director: David Mickey Evans Writer: David Mickey Evans CAST Tom Guiry...Scotty Smalls Mike Vitar...Benny Rodriguez Patrick Renna...Hamilton "Ham" Porter Denis Leary...Bill James Earl Jones...Mr. Mertle Art LaFleur...Babe Ruth

“I am Hercules.” — Kevin Sorbo

The Sandlot is one of those movies that feels smaller when you’re a kid and larger when you’re an adult. What once felt like nothing more than a string of jokes and bits slowly reveals itself as something gentler — a memory of a summer that mattered, even if no one knew it at the time.

The narration sets the tone. It’s Christmas Story–adjacent, but with a key distinction: Ralphie grows up still wrestling with his childhood. Scotty Smalls grows up simply grateful for his. There’s no bitterness in the voiceover—only fondness.

That tone brings the movie closer to a family-friendly Stand by Me. Same idea—kids on the brink of change, one last shared adventure—but filtered through humor, exaggeration, and baseball. And even then, it’s not really about baseball. Baseball is the setting, not the point. This is a movie about kids hanging out one last summer before their lives quietly shift out of reach.

You see that shift everywhere. The legend of the Beast is cartoonish and funny, a child’s myth inflated into something operatic. The s’mores bit still works. The chewing-tobacco-on-the-carnival-ride scene remains perfectly disgusting and impeccably timed. Everything is heightened, but it’s emotionally honest—how summers felt, not how they literally happened.

The adults mostly exist as pressure. Bill, Smalls’ stepdad, radiates pure Denis Leary energy. You know he’s going to give that kid a black eye; the only surprise is how.

Even the stuff that could have aged poorly mostly doesn’t. The pool make-out scene lives in a gray area, sure, but it never feels creepy. If this movie had been made five years earlier, it’s easy to imagine that scene being played differently. Instead, the joke stays on Squints, keeping it silly over leering. That restraint matters.

Hercules—the Beast—becomes a central emotional anchor for the movie. He’s terrifying, misunderstood, and ultimately just a lonely old dog with a bad reputation. For anyone who grew up with an outdoor dog—the kind that growls at strangers but licks your face when you get home—it rings true. And mercifully, this is a movie with the right amount of dog in it: memorable, meaningful, never emotionally exploitative.

Art LaFleur’s brief turn as Babe Ruth is one of those performances that stays with you. He shows up for maybe three minutes, delivers a handful of lines with the perfect mix of gruff kindness and faint impatience, and then vanishes. But those minutes quietly reframe everything that follows. He’s not trying to steal the spotlight—he’s just there to hand it back to the kids. That understatement is what makes him so good, and it’s why, even now, I catch myself smiling every time the Bambino walks out of the fog.

I was surprised by how teary the ending made me. Nothing especially tragic happens—none of the boys meet some grim fate, no one gets killed breaking up a fight at a McDonald’s—and yet the emotion sneaks up all the same. Maybe it’s the exact balance the movie strikes between sweetness and sincerity, with just a trace of melancholy underneath. Even Hercules—or the Beast, as he’s more often called—is revealed, just before the epilogue, to be a mere mortal when the fence collapses on him. Later, we’re told he lives to be 199 in dog years, which sounds legendary until you realize he’s still the only character who actually dies. Or maybe the sadness comes from something simpler: the knowledge that once the movie ends, you don’t really get to see these kids—these newfound celluloid friends—again. Like childhood summers themselves, they don’t end in tragedy. They just end.

The epilogue seals it. “Heroes get remembered, legends never die” works because the movie earns it. The futures aren’t tragic, but they aren’t fantasy either. Benny Rodriguez makes it all the way, the way you always hoped he would. The rest don’t—and that’s the point. Bertram gets really into the ’60s. Life happens. It’s the exact right balance of bitter and sweet—proof that a family movie doesn’t need to be a bummer to be honest, and doesn’t need to be a fantasy to be comforting.

If anything, The Sandlot improves with age. As a kid, it’s funny and exciting. As an adult, it’s generous. It’s the kind of memory that sneaks up on you years later—when you’re old enough to see just how much that one summer really meant.

Final Verdict: 92 out of 100

Sidenote: Postscript

The Rip

THE RIP 113 Minutes Director: Joe Carnahan Writers: Joe Carnahan, Michael McGrale Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Steven Yeun CAST Matt Damon...Lieutenant Dane Dumars Ben Affleck...Detective Sergeant JD Byrne Steven Yeun...Detective Mike Ro Teyana Taylor...Detective Numa Baptiste Sasha Calle...Desiree “Desi” Molina Catalina Sandino Moreno...Detective Lolo Salazar Scott Adkins...FBI Agent Del Byrne Kyle Chandler...DEA Agent Mateo “Matty” Nix Néstor Carbonell...Major Thom Vallejo Lina Esco...Captain Jackie Velez

So the cops knew Internal Affairs was setting them up, but they played along so they could catch the real killer.
—Homer Simpson, THE SIMPSONS, 6F23

The title is deliberately vague, which turns out to be fitting—it could be about Rip Torn, Rip Van Winkle, Rip Hamilton, or a documentary about a guy engraving tombstones. URBAN DICTIONARY will tell you a rip is a monster hit from a bong. But in this movie, it’s simpler: a rip is robbing a stash house — money no one can claim. That looseness isn’t just in the title. It bleeds into everything else.

The movie opens with Jackie’s murder. From there, it settles into a mode where no one trusts anyone. Everyone is a potential liability, everyone’s a suspect, and no one’s motives are entirely clean. Even Mike Ro, who the movie quietly positions as someone to watch, is hard to read. Is he doing a dirty job, or just stuck inside a system where everyone’s already compromised?

THE RIP is built to entertain, and on that level — while the bullets are flying — it does work, even if that forward motion ignores basic logic. It’s the kind of movie where you stop caring exactly why someone is being shot, as long as the choreography looks good.

Part of the issue is that the plot is over-engineered, stacking OCEAN’S ELEVEN–style reveals — tactics and timelines held back just to be “cleverly” unveiled. In a straight heist flick, that’s part of the fun. Here, with real stakes like bodies dropping and careers imploding, it feels evasive by design. THE RIP wants that gotcha satisfaction without dealing with the mess it’s making.

The story feels cobbled from real cop stories and heist-movie tricks, but that real-life edge gives THE RIP a seriousness it wouldn’t have otherwise — even when the script takes a few shortcuts to keep the plot moving.

Still, there are moments that pull you out of it. There’s a scene where Ben Affleck’s JD, alone in a bathroom, takes off his shirt to dry his face — a move so exaggerated it borders on parody. Paper towels exist. Hand dryers exist. The shirt comes off, the face is dried, and back on it goes. It’s not symbolic enough to mean something, and not natural enough to feel real. It plays less like psychological distress than a brief pause where you can almost hear Ben Affleck saying, “hey, check me out, I hit the gym at 53.”

JD doesn’t help matters. Is there anyone named JD in fiction who isn’t a total douche? Jermaine Dupri remains the lone exception. The movie wants him to carry real moral weight—but it feels more like a performance than real pressure.

Oddly, the most likable character is Wilbur, the cash-sniffing beagle. He’s cute, efficient, and refreshingly uncomplicated, unlike the humans around him. The movie could have used more of him. He’s also got one of those names that feels like it wandered in from another era — you mostly hear “Wilbur” now in MR. ED reruns — which gives him an unintended charm. He’s certainly easier to root for than most of the people in THE RIP.

Kyle Chandler pops up as Matty, and if you’re looking for FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS–era nobility, adjust your expectations. The only lights he seems headed for are red and blue — no football fields in sight, Coach Taylor. Chandler brings a steady, professional presence, but even he can’t ground a story that keeps flipping between that Ice-T procedural grit and convenient plot shortcuts.

It’s not dumb or lazy—it’s entertaining, competently made, and engaging in the moment. It’s the kind of movie that’s fun while it’s running, but doesn’t hold up when you hit pause—like a stash-house rip that falls apart if anyone looks too close.

Final Verdict: 60 out of 100

Blank Check (Retro)

BLANK CHECK (1994) PG 93 Minutes Director: Rupert Wainwright Writers: Blake Snyder, Colby Carr Brian Bonsall, Karen Duffy, Miguel Ferrer CAST Brian Bonsall...Preston Waters Karen Duffy...Shay Stanley Miguel Ferrer...Carl Quigley James Rebhorn...Fred Waters Michael Lerner...Bank Manager Tone Lōc...Juice Jayne Atkinson...Mrs. Waters Rick Ducommun...Henry

“You got the juice now, man.”
—Bishop, JUICE

BLANK CHECK opens by taking its villain way more seriously than the rest of the movie ever will. Miguel Ferrer, in full ’90s character-actor mode, is shown in a dark, industrial basement counting out a million dollars in illicit cash. It’s played completely straight, like we’re meant to take Carl Quigley as a genuine criminal threat, which makes it stranger to watch him get outsmarted by a kid with a handful of Kevin McCallister tricks.

It’s nice, occasionally, to review a movie where the title handles most of the work for you. Preston Waters is a dorky, friendless kid — a YOUNG SHELDON type — ignored at home, picked on at school, and framed as poor in that specific ’90s-movie way where poverty means only having a couple of dollars at a theme park. When Carl Quigley backs into his bike and hands him a signed check to make the problem disappear, Preston fills it out for a million dollars, and the movie immediately enters a reality where a child is treated like a serious adult, no questions asked. In 1994, a check was money; now it’s evidence.

Miguel Ferrer should have been appreciated more while he was around—here, he brings a level of conviction that feels wildly out of scale with the movie he’s in. If you want to see what Brian Bonsall was doing just before this, watch MIKEY and then watch BLANK CHECK right after. The whiplash alone is worth the double feature.

Once the money clears, the movie settles into its fantasy: Preston living like a kid pretending to be a rich adult, though he’s not any more likable with a mansion than he was without one. What kid doesn’t fantasize about living like Nicolas Cage—buying a castle one week and going completely broke the next? There’s generic ’90s music underscoring expensive toys and a long line of adults who never once question the existence of “Mr. Macintosh.” Even the poster tries to help, sticking sunglasses on Preston and turning the hat backward, like he’s Snoop Doggy Dogg. Preston builds himself a kid-friendly version of Neverland Ranch.

The movie runs on fantasy speed, where a racetrack and a waterslide appear overnight and nobody thinks to ask how. The name itself—grabbed from the nearest computer—is adopted without a second thought. One thing the movie gets right is that in the ’90s, parents didn’t really care where you were — just be home in time for dinner.

The one relationship that actually works is with Henry, Preston’s chauffeur. He isn’t law enforcement, a plant, or a secret guardian — he’s just hired help, and that’s why the character works. He doesn’t ask questions because the movie needs at least one adult who won’t immediately shut the fantasy down. When Preston realizes his party guests are only there for the free food and prestige, Henry stands out as one of the few people who seems to genuinely care. It’s the closest the movie comes to anything resembling emotional grounding.

By this point, Preston has managed to burn through a million dollars in less than a week, which helps explain why the big party feels less like a celebration and more like a problem.

Naturally, the villains catch up. There’s a bike chase through the park, a limo escape, and Carl Quigley repeatedly shouting “your butt is mine,” a line it seems oddly proud of. The money disappears faster than the movie seems willing to acknowledge — even in 1994 — and the fantasy starts to fall apart.

Beyond a Super Soaker, a pair of Jordans, and a big-screen TV, I honestly wouldn’t have known what to do with a million dollars as a kid in this time period. Five grand would’ve felt like plenty.

BLANK CHECK is a simple premise stretched just a bit too far, stitched together by overqualified character actors and a brand of wish-fulfillment that only works if you squint real hard. It’s harmless, occasionally weird, and stranger than you remember — a kids’ movie from an era when Disney was still comfortable letting a little sleaze creep in around the edges.

Final Verdict: 45 out of 100

Sidenote: Streaming on Disney+. If you don’t have Disney+, it’s usually only a dollar more to buy than rent.