A Simple Plan (Retro)

A SIMPLE PLAN (1998) R 121 Minutes Director: Sam Raimi Writer: Scott B. Smith, based on his novel Bill Paxton, Bridget Fonda, Billy Bob Thornton

CAST Bill Paxton...Hank Mitchell Bridget Fonda...Sarah Mitchell Billy Bob Thornton...Jacob Mitchell Brent Briscoe...Lou Chambers Chelcie Ross...Sheriff Carl Jenkins Becky Ann Baker...Nancy Chambers Gary Cole...Neil Baxter / Vernon Bokovsky

Well, talk about false advertising. I thought this was going to be a movie about my favorite band, SIMPLE PLAN. Sure, the band didn't technically form until after the movie was released, but I figured we'd at least get the early years, when they were still going by Reset. Nope. A SIMPLE PLAN is about two brothers and a guy named Lou who find several million dollars in the woods and proceed to make increasingly terrible decisions about it. Before long, they're on the edge of breaking down, and no one's there to save them.

Three people can't keep a secret — one of the oldest rules in crime fiction — and A SIMPLE PLAN spends its opening minutes establishing that these three were particularly ill-equipped to share one. The film opens on the Mitchell brothers' annual New Year's Eve visit to their parents' grave, and even that ritual isn't as settled as Hank assumes. He finds a flower already planted in the snow and has no idea who left it. Jacob did, on a visit of his own that Hank never knew about, and when Hank asks when he came, Jacob turns defensive fast: "This is the only day we can come here? What the hell's wrong with you?" Lou wasn't even invited to any of this — Jacob only picked him up because he needed a ride home — and the film introduces him mid-urination a few yards from the headstones: "Hey, Jacob! Look! I'm writing my name!" Jacob joins him a moment later. Hank's patience with both of them is visibly running out before they've even left the cemetery. Nobody has found the plane yet. Hank already knows less about his brother than he assumes. The money doesn't put those cracks there. It only finds them.

The debate over what to do with the money doesn't last long. Hank's first instinct is procedural — "Whatever it is, it's a police matter now" — and it survives almost no time against Lou's argument that the dead man in the plane won't mind being robbed and nobody but the three of them will ever know: "Nobody knows about this... but us." It's the exact premise the cemetery scene already spent disproving, and the film knows it even if nobody in the truck does yet. What tips Hank has less to do with greed than the deal he negotiates around it. He'll hold the money through the winter; if the plane turns up in spring with no mention of missing cash, they split it three ways and leave town; if anyone comes looking before then, he burns it. It's a plan built entirely around a hypothetical they've all already decided won't happen. Then they count it. $4,400,000, called out in stacks of ten thousand while Lou pictures a Trans Am and Jacob's ambitions stop at a truck, and by the last stack the money has stopped being a moral problem and started being a number they can each divide by three. They haven't spent a dollar yet, but they've already begun spending it in their heads. Giving the money back was never going to be as hard as giving up what they've already decided it's for.

Sarah's first answer, when Hank poses it as a hypothetical over dinner, is immediate and principled: "Of course not... I wouldn't take it. That's just me." Then he tells her it's real, and principle has to compete with $4.4 million sitting within reach. By the next scene she's already directing what gets returned, what gets hidden, and what Jacob doesn't get to know. The clearest measure of how completely this becomes her default mode comes weeks later, in the hospital, holding their newborn. Handed the baby and told "she's hungry," Sarah starts nursing and, in the same breath, lays out a plan to get Lou drunk enough to talk about Stephanson's death on tape, dressed up as a game — Hank and Jacob taking turns joking about how they'd have done it, Lou going last, the recorder running the whole time. It's the coldest scene in the movie, and it's staged as an act of maternal tenderness. But it's worth granting her something before writing this off as pure calculation: when Hank later threatens to give the money back, her answer is a full accounting of what "normal" would cost them — his dead-end job at the feed mill, her own at the library, Amanda in hand-me-down clothes and someone else's old toys, Jacob alone with his dog in a filthy apartment: "How long do you give him, Hank?" She isn't wrong about any of it. She's only the one willing to turn the arithmetic into a plan instead of a complaint.

Jacob's dog, Mary Beth, is some kind of shepherd mix, scruffy and unglamorous — which suits Jacob fine. For all the ways Hank treats him as someone who needs looking after, Jacob keeps being the one who looks after Hank when it matters. At Lou's house, when Sarah's tape-recording scheme collapses and Lou pulls a gun, Jacob retrieves his rifle from the truck and shoots him before he can kill Hank. It's a terrible act, but the impulse behind it isn't hard to read. It matters more once you know what Jacob wants out of life. Earlier, drunk and happy for one of the only stretches in the whole movie, he lays it out unprompted: buy back the family farm, meet a nice woman, have kids, Sunday dinners with Hank and Sarah and Amanda, drinking on the porch the way their dad used to. It's a plain, specific, entirely reachable version of contentment, and Jacob is the only one of the three men who says out loud that he wants it. By the end, he's also the one who understands that they've made that future impossible. He talks Hank into killing him: "If you love me, Hank, you'll do it." The last thing on his mind isn't the money or the murders. It's making sure Amanda gets the stuffed bear he gave her, the one that used to be his: "You just tell the little girl that... that bear is from me." And he explicitly gives up the whole future he described earlier — "I don't wanna sit around the rest of my life thinking about this shit. I can't do it... Sit on the porch and drink. I can't do it." It's Steinbeck's Lennie and George, except Lennie never got to choose and never understood what was coming. Jacob understands completely and chooses it himself. Hank never even has to ask.

Sarah works out from the bill denominations that this was never an armored-car robbery before Hank does, then connects the ransom story to "Baxter" and places him as Vernon Bokovsky, brother of the man they found in the plane. She calls the sheriff's office to pull Hank out before he ever reaches the woods. Hank doesn't doubt her. He's already weighing different numbers: Jacob's excused with a fake hangover, he's standing next to Carl when the call comes in, and backing out now, as he'd argued to Sarah the night before, would "look suspicious as hell." Even after she tells him flatly that Baxter is going to shoot him, Hank goes anyway — "they're waiting for me, baby, I gotta go" — because leaving looks worse to him than the real risk of staying. It's the same instinct that's driven every decision since the plane: assess whatever's directly in front of him, solve that one problem, and let the next crisis be a future problem. In the woods, Baxter shoots Carl, and it's Hank himself, not Jacob, who ends up killing Baxter. He walks in trying to solve a suspicion problem and walks out with two more bodies to explain — proof that his read on danger was never the issue. He can see a threat coming from a mile off. He's never once been able to see past it to what handling it will cost.

The recorded bill numbers are what finally get the money burned, and it's worth noticing what a relief that must be. An FBI agent lays it out for Hank: they never risked marking the ransom cash outright, not with a kidnapped girl still in play, but a task force recorded roughly one bill in ten before the drop. Spend enough of those hundreds for long enough and eventually one gets noticed. The reasoning is practical, not moral. It's the first practical argument Hank's had in months for doing the thing he probably already needs to do. Sarah begs him not to — they could run, leave the country, go anywhere — and he burns it anyway. By then the sunk cost was never really about the money. What he'd spent to keep it was Jacob, killed by Hank's own hand; Carl, shot by Baxter in the woods Hank walked into against his wife's warning; Lou, shot by Jacob at his own house; and whatever version of the three of them might have existed if Hank had done what he wanted to do at the start and called it in. Burning $4.4 million doesn't buy any of that back. It only proves he can still keep the one promise he made at the start: "If somebody comes searching for the money, I'll burn it." What's left afterward isn't relief. Hank opens the film telling us he was a happy man: a wife, a decent job, neighbors who liked and respected him. He closes it admitting he can go a few days at a time without thinking about the money, the murders, or Jacob — pretending, as he puts it, that "we're just like everyone else." A few days is the best he gets. How could this happen to him?

Final Verdict: 91 out of 100

3 Ninjas (Retro)

3 NINJAS (1992) PG 84 minutes Director: Jon Turteltaub Writers: Kenny Kim, Edward Emanuel Victor Wong, Michael Treanor, Max Elliott Slade CAST Victor Wong...Grandpa Mori Tanaka Michael Treanor...Rocky Max Elliott Slade...Colt Chad Power...Tum-Tum Rand Kingsley...Hugo Snyder Alan McRae...FBI Agent Brown Professor Toru Tanaka...Mr. Sakata Joel Swetow...Eddie Patrick Labyorteaux...Fester Kate Sargeant...Emily

There are two versions of 3 NINJAS. Most Americans don't know this. The version that played in U.S. theaters in the summer of 1992 is not the same film that screened across Europe. The European cut runs several minutes longer, closes a subplot the American version leaves dangling, and is modestly — though meaningfully — the superior film. This distinction would have meant nothing to me in the fall of 1992, when I was eight years old and sitting in the Alderwood Village Cinema 12, a $3 second-run house in Lynnwood, Washington, watching the lesser version without knowing another one existed. I wouldn't find out for thirty years.

3 NINJAS exists at the intersection of HOME ALONE and TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, two properties that had recently demonstrated that children consuming large amounts of sugar would pay to watch other children cause chaos and mayhem. The film follows three brothers — Rocky, Colt, and Tum-Tum — who spend their summers training in ninjutsu under their Japanese grandfather, Mori Tanaka. Their father is an FBI agent pursuing an arms dealer named Hugo Snyder, who happens to be Grandpa's former partner. Snyder, believing that leverage is the sincerest form of negotiation, hires a trio of burnout criminals to kidnap the boys.

Victor Wong, best known as Egg Shen in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, anchors the film in a way it doesn't entirely deserve. If the production was aiming for a Mr. Miyagi figure, they largely achieved it, though Wong is working considerably harder than the material requires. His presence gives the movie a credibility it has no other claim to.

The children do not look remotely Asian. Their mother mentions her Asian side at one point, but she presents as entirely white. This is not a KUNG FU-David Carradine situation where the casting could even pass as half-convincing. The grandfather is Japanese. The grandchildren very clearly are not.

The villain, Hugo Snyder, is played with full cartoonish commitment by Rand Kingsley — think Terry Silver from KARATE KID III, a man who has confused menace with theatrics. His henchman Mr. Sakata, played by Professor Toru Tanaka, is a stocky, intimidating presence who finally gives the boys a credible physical challenge in the third act. Sakata is, briefly, the most interesting antagonist in the film.

The score deserves mention as a cautionary example. It sounds like some guy fucking around on a Casio keyboard, a vague approximation of what Danny Elfman does. There is a great deal of whimsy. None of it lands.

Most of the genuine comic inspiration involves Fester and his two associates, a trio of burnout criminals hired to kidnap the boys. When they're ordered to grab the children, one of them asks, with genuine professional concern, "Could these be like any kids, or did you have some specific ones in mind?" They are menacing one moment and catastrophically stupid the next, and the film is wise enough to lean into this contradiction. "This kidnapping is so much better than armed robbery," one of them observes over stolen pizza, and he is not wrong. Their van has a Die Yuppie Scum sticker on it, which tells you nearly everything you need to know about these men and their life choices. Their plans are hilariously half-baked, just like their brains. When the boys deploy homemade weapons against them — throwing CDs like ninja stars, lobbing pepper bombs, administering what is described as "instant diarrhea" via laxative — the chaos is energetic and occasionally funny. When one of them takes a CD to the face, his anguished "Ooh! Watch my nose, dude! It's bad news already." is delivered with the commitment of a man who has genuinely earned his suffering. Ex-Lax does not cause instant diarrhea. Nobody cares.

The movie also gestures toward kidnapping Emily, the girl next door and Rocky's unofficial love interest, before abandoning the idea entirely. The setup is there. The payoff is not. This is a pattern throughout: ideas are introduced for tension or laughs, then abandoned when the script loses interest. Similarly, I don't believe for a moment that any of the boys would genuinely lose faith in their grandfather. The film requires them to, briefly, and they do, because the script says so.

Most American action films ask the audience to accept certain physical impossibilities — a hundred-pound woman defeating a man twice her size, for example. In this film, three boys systematically dismantle a houseful of grown men. It is the same logic applied to smaller protagonists. In a kids' movie this is arguably forgivable. It is still funny to notice.

I can confirm from personal experience that the film works on its intended audience. In the fall of 1992, my friend Jason, who lived nearby and was, if such a thing is possible, even nerdier than me, had an eighth birthday party. His parents drove two carloads of children to the Alderwood Village Cinema 12, and we watched 3 NINJAS with smuggled popcorn from sack lunch bags. Afterward, we walked across the parking lot to Chuck E. Cheese, play-fighting the whole way there. The movie had done its job. And yet, even then, something didn't sit right with me. I couldn't have articulated it at eight years old, but the feeling was there. The film was fine. It wasn't quite enough.

It would take thirty years to understand why.

The version I saw that day was the American cut. In the European version, the basketball scene plays differently. The boys do not win. The stakes are not Emily's bike — the bullies simply threaten to rearrange their faces, and when the game ends they ride off with the bikes anyway. This is more convincing. The American version has Rocky executing a six-foot slam dunk to win back the bike, which is the kind of moment that feels thrilling at eight and faintly exhausting at forty. More significantly, the European version adds an entirely new sequence after the Snyder plot resolves — the boys walking home, bickering over borrowed bikes, Rocky returning to confront the bullies and recover what was taken. It closes a loop the American version leaves open. The film feels finished.

None of this makes 3 NINJAS a good movie. The European cut is a modest improvement on a film that was adequate to begin with. The American version is good enough for an eight-year-old. I can personally attest to that, though "good enough" is doing real work in that sentence. That's the version getting scored here.

Clearly, what I should have done is decline that birthday invitation. No, Jason, I will not attend a fun birthday party full of neat friends to watch a vastly inferior version of 3 NINJAS. Instead I will convince my parents to drive to a seedy electronics shop in downtown Seattle and purchase a multi-system VCR. And I shall import the uncut VHS tape from Germany. Anything less is pure blasphemy.

Final Verdict: 50 out of 100 (55 if you can find the right bootleg)

Sidenote: Both versions are currently freely available on YouTube...for now.

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

Bingo (Retro)

BINGO (1991) PG 89 Minutes Director: Matthew Robbins Writer: Jim Strain Cindy Williams, David Rasche, Robert J. Steinmiller Jr. CAST Cindy Williams...Natalie Devlin David Rasche...Hal Butler Robert J. Steinmiller Jr....Chuckie Devlin Donnie Jeffcoat...Lonnie Billy Jayne...Leo

The name’s Poochie D and I rock the telly
I’m half Joe Camel and a third Fonzarelli
I’m the kung-fu hippie from gangsta city
I’m a rappin’ surfer you the fool I pity
—Poochie D, THE SIMPSONS, 4F12

I didn’t grow up on BINGO, so I’m coming at this without rose-colored glasses. Most people who like this movie probably wore out their VHS copy in 1993, but I was raised in a house where my father had zero tolerance for “dog movies.” I finally see why. So many of them are lazy, relying on a cute face to carry the entire movie while the actual filmmaking stays stuck in a strange, low-effort place.

My path to BINGO came through David Rasche. I was watching SLEDGE HAMMER! and wanted to see if his straight-faced, deadpan delivery translated to a ninety-minute family comedy. Throw in Cindy Williams—whose LAVERNE & SHIRLEY status usually earns a movie at least twenty minutes of my patience. But even with that pedigree, you start to suspect the actors were in it just for a paycheck—possibly earmarked for alimony or tax debts.

BINGO is very much a product of the video-store era. Regardless of quality, a movie with a dog wearing sunglasses on the cover was going to get rented—especially by kids, and especially by parents desperate to kill ninety minutes. It’s a hard PG, too, from a time before the lines between kids’ movies and adult movies were so aggressively enforced. There’s something oddly refreshing about seeing children exchange middle fingers or a parent occasionally swear without the movie feeling like it was sanitized by a corporate focus group.

Movies with talking dogs are an abomination. Maybe “abomination” is too strong—let’s just say they’re strictly for kids in nursery school, the kind where a Chihuahua is given George Lopez’s voice and says things like, “We’re Mexi-can, not Mexi-can’t!” BINGO at least avoids that particular sin. There are no digitally altered mouths and no inner monologue voiceovers explaining his feelings. The gold standard for the genre remains EIGHT BELOW (or its source material, ANTARCTICA), and BINGO never threatens that title. But it does understand that dogs are most effective when they’re actually allowed to be dogs—even if “being a dog” in this movie involves MACGYVER-level tactical genius.

I’m not going to pretend this was a good movie, but there are a lot of fun scenes. Bingo licking dishes clean at a diner as a “job.” A hot dog stand run by a guy who keeps dogs in cages, implying they’re not just mascots but inventory. Bingo even manages to call 911 to report the villains after they kidnap a family and steal their RV. A courtroom scene where Bingo places his paw on a Bible before testifying, gets cross-examined, and somehow winds up in jail. There’s an unaccompanied bus trip to Green Bay, Wisconsin. An extended crotch-attack gag that refuses to let go. And yes, Bingo grabbing the villains’ suitcase bomb and dumping it into the water, limiting the damage but not walking away unscathed.

The villains have a budget HOME ALONE energy—all bluster and incompetence—which makes the movie’s later escalation into genuine peril feel especially strange. They kidnap Chuckie and stash him in a nondescript warehouse while the plot slides into actual hostage territory. It leads to a bizarre ultimatum where Chuckie’s father is forced to tank his kicking career or his son gets blown up. This is the point where BINGO stops being a goofy dog-on-the-loose movie and briefly convinces itself it’s a thriller, even though it never fully commits to that shift.

Bingo’s fear of fire, which the movie went out of its way to seed earlier, finally comes into play here. It’s rooted in his backstory as a circus dog, where a missed jump through a flaming hoop led to a catastrophic blaze. Overcoming that trauma is the movie’s way of giving Bingo an emotional arc, even if it arrives packaged in the clunkiest way possible, with consequences that immediately turn physical. Judging by the size of the explosion that follows, the villains wildly overestimated how much explosive force was required to kill a child.

Bingo survives, of course, after being injured by the blast, and the movie milks the hospital scene for all the fear it can before it gets sentimental. Friends—human and canine—wait anxiously for him to pull through. Once he does, BINGO can’t resist one final joke, ending not on relief or reflection but on a neutering gag—a final reminder that this was always meant to be a family comedy first and a coherent emotional experience second.

Final Verdict: 55 out of 100

Playdate

PLAYDATE PG-13 93 Minutes Director: Luke Greenfield Writer: Neil Goldman Kevin James, Alan Ritchson, Sarah Chalke CAST Kevin James...Brian Jennings Alan Ritchson...Jeff Eamon Sarah Chalke...Emily Alan Tudyk...Simon Maddox Stephen Root...Gordon Isla Fisher...Leslie Benjamin Pajak...Lucas Banks Pierce...CJ Hiro Kanagawa...Colonel Kurtz Paul Walter Hauser...“Zach Galifianak-ish”

For those of you who think I can’t review two Kevin James movies in a row—like I’m going to run out of jokes, or it’ll start sounding redundant—challenge accepted.

“Do I look like a child predator?” Kevin James asks early in PLAYDATE, standing in a park in a windbreaker that’s practically begging for a restraining order. Honestly? I bought it. I can believe him as the awkward stepfather everyone assumes is a creep. What I don’t buy—not for a single second—is Kevin James as a forensic accountant.

The suit looks like it’s on him for the first time in his life. He doesn’t even bother to wear glasses. Oh, don’t get confused—he keeps them perched on top of his head, because in Hollywood, glasses are shorthand for “this is a smart guy doing smart things.” But actually crunching numbers? Please. I could see him as a zookeeper, an IPS driver, or maybe a high school biology teacher who does mixed martial arts to save the music program.

Anyway, Brian gets fired and slips into stay-at-home dad mode, which means he ends up in that weird daytime purgatory of parks, small talk, and pretending you’re not desperate for adult conversation. That’s where Alan Ritchson shows up as Jeff, and he’s the funnier of the two. Jeff has this infectious, manic energy—like he just chugged three energy drinks and decided friendship is a contact sport. I can see why Brian ends up in his orbit, even if Jeff gives off a “this guy has seen some shit” vibe.

Is Ritchson playing the same character as Reacher? It’s hinted. I think he missed the fine print on his Amazon contract: “If you want to get renewed for another season, you have to do a movie with Kevin James.”

Sarah Chalke plays the wife, Emily—you may know her as the other Becky Conner—and yes, she seems a little too attractive for him. The movie knows it too and says it out loud. That kind of self-awareness goes a long way here, and it’s part of why PLAYDATE ends up better than you’d expect.

Then the movie remembers it needs a plot. Jeff kidnaps CJ, and the story never quite gives you an airtight reason. We find out the kid is his—or so it seems—until the villain shows up and snatches him back, because we need movement, not clarity. The pacing stays brisk. It never turns into a slog, which is more than I can say for a lot of these algorithm-built streaming movies. It all builds to a bizarre final standoff involving Maddox, Colonel Kurtz, and an entire army of CJs.

We also get an appearance by the doofus from COBRA KAI (Paul Walter Hauser), and he’s cast perfectly in this. Jeff refers to him as “Zach Galifianak-ish,” and that’s about right. He leans into the weirdness enough to be memorable. The movie could’ve used more of that energy.

PLAYDATE is a solid C. Not an “I didn’t deserve it” C like I got in high school—a real C. Some of the jokes are dumb, but not all of them. Yes, this is a movie you can watch with your family. If I were grading on a curve, I might bump it up—because contemporary family movies are god-awful. But I’m not grading on a curve. If you need something harmless in the background, this’ll do.

Final Verdict: 72 out of 100

Guns Up

GUNS UP
R
91 Minutes
Director: Edward Drake
Writer: Edward Drake
Kevin James, Christina Ricci, Luis Guzmán

CAST
Kevin James...Ray Hayes
Christina Ricci...Alice Hayes
Maximilian Osinski...Antonio Castigan
Luis Guzmán...Ignatius Locke
Melissa Leo...Michael Temple
Leo Easton Kelly...Henry Hayes
Keana Marie...Siobhán Hayes
Timothy V. Murphy...Lonny Castigan
Joey Diaz...Charlie Brooks
Francis Cronin...Danny Clogan
Solomon Hughes...Ford Holden
Miroslav Barnyashev...Harry the Hammer

Here Comes The Boom

In case you missed it the first time—and you probably did—GUNS UP is on Paramount Plus.

GUNS UP is the kind of movie that starts with a bad sign and never really recovers: our hero is named Ray Hayes. Even his name is kind of lazy. Ray Hayes. No parent gives their kid a first name that rhymes with their last. That’s like naming your child “Ben Denn,” then being shocked when he grows up to make questionable decisions.

Ray begins the film making a life-changing decision. He can either keep his police job—where he’s probably making six figures and gets great benefits—or work as an enforcer for some shady criminal enterprise where he can maybe make a few more dollars. Naturally, Ray goes the Doug Heffernan route—dumb, stubborn, and convinced it’ll all work out. He takes the enforcer job, and he’s still there five years later, like this was always part of the plan.

We find Ray embedded in a strange, multi-ethnic gang, the kind you only see in bad ’80s movies. He and his wife, Alice, are saving up for a diner. As soon as he has enough, he’s out. Now that he finally has the money to quit, things get complicated—because that’s how these movies work. You know something will pull him back.

That “something” is Lonny Castigan, and the minute he takes over, Ray’s exit plan is dead.

We’re also supposed to believe Ray’s kids don’t know what he does for a living. I could see the young boy not figuring it out, but he has an 18-year-old daughter. Even Meadow Soprano was hip to what her father was up to.

To get out, Ray agrees to kill Antonio—but he can’t bring himself to do it. He just wants to scare him and run him out of town. Then a third guy barges in, there’s a scramble for the gun, it goes off, and Antonio takes it in the head by accident. Messy, loud, and it sets the rest of the film in motion.

I like many of the character actors here. Luis Guzmán. Christina Ricci. Joey Diaz. Unfortunately, they’re underutilized. You spend the whole time waiting for them to do something interesting, and the script doesn’t let them. They show up, they deliver their lines, and the movie hustles past them to the next burst of violence.

Instead, everything becomes completely preposterous. We find out the wife has her own criminal past. She apparently took Lonny’s eye after his gang killed her parents. Sure. The dialogue doesn’t help much either, relying on generic tough-guy lines like: “We finish what we start.” “No more running, we finish this.”

By the end, it’s less a crime thriller than a conveyor belt of gunfire.

Who is this for? Families looking for a wholesome night in… plus an orgy of violence?

I’ve enjoyed Kevin James’s work and defended him plenty of times, but there’s absolutely no excuse for this movie.

Final Verdict: 48 out of 100