This weekend we get Paul Walker’s last completed movie in the parkour-heavy Brick Mansions. He takes on three blondes who are the victims of infidelity in The Other Woman. I’ll let you know if you’ll be spending money at the movies this weekend.
The Other Woman
This will come as no surprise, but I wasn’t exactly looking forward to The Other Woman. While watching early trailers, I thought it looked like Cameron Diaz’s attempt to recreate the success she had over 10 years ago with another girl trio in The Sweetest Thing.
The Other Woman follows Carly (Diaz) as she meets Mark (Nicholaj Coster-Waldau). Their relationship is going great for over two months, until one day, when she decides to surprise him at his house and there, runs into his wife, Kate (Leslie Mann). These two women quickly get over their heartbreak and differences and decide to team up against the cheater. They soon find another mistress (Kate Upton) and recruit her to their vengeance squad. Not only is Jamie Lannister… errr, Mark, a cheater but he is also embezzling funds and hiding them in secret accounts overseas. These three women eventually become best friends as they seek to take down this philandering criminal.
The Other Woman could only work if the audience cares for the unknowing mistress Carly and also for the unassuming wife Kate. The main issue is that it’s impossible to care for Diaz in her role. Diaz does her best to sound so clever in every situation, that you can almost see her reading the lines on cue cards. She somehow maintains a smug, yet lifeless energy throughout the movie. The real star here is Leslie Mann. She gives 110% in her role. However, her character feels like she belongs in another movie. At no point do you ever feel like she’s a woman scorned, but her boozy, cartoonish behavior almost makes this movie worth the watch. Almost. She provides a screwball lightheartedness to an otherwise dry “comedy.”
Also, this movie is doing its best to promote the inclusion of supermodel Kate Upton. By my watch, it was over an hour until they introduced her character. And when we see her for the first time, it’s nothing short of a salacious Carls Jr commercial. They shamelessly show her running on the beach in slow motion, missing only a 6 dollar Turkey Burger in her hand. Her only purpose in the movie is to smile, act dumb and show cleavage. I had to wonder who The Other Woman was targeted for at that point. Only a small selection of women could tolerate this man-hating tripe. And even then, they won’t laugh.
If this movie hasn’t won you over by now, you should know that Nicki Minaj appears as Carly’s sarcastic assistant. I’m not sure why she was in the movie. Subtitles would have been helpful in her scenes, as her voice sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher speaking on the phone.
For some reason this movie has more music montages than the entire Rocky series combined. None of them make sense either. There is seriously music played over Diaz and Mann laughing….for minutes. After the 5th montage, you start to feel like they ran out of script and just realized they’d extend the movie in post production.
The Other Woman = 9 To 5 – good actors x John Tucker Must Die + Laxative and Dog Poo Humor
So yeah, I hated it. Don’t see this non-comedy.
Brick Mansions
When an actor dies, do studios automatically release typically low quality flicks to the big screen? That seems the case with the latest and one of the last Paul Walker movies, Brick Mansions. Fast and the Furious 7 will be his last movie, though he never had the chance to complete his role.
Brick Mansions is the French-Canadian remake of the popular French action movie, District B13. Walker is joined by RZA, who plays Tremaine, the major crime lord in the ghetto. Also joining the cast is an actor from the original District B13, and the creator of Parkour, named David Belle. He plays the same role he did in the original. Basically, he’s there to make a very unoriginal movie look a little bit cooler.
The story goes….a large section of Detroit, known as Brick Mansions, has fallen into disrepair and corruption. The rest of the city has built a wall around the ghetto and the police no longer patrol its streets. Basically, the criminals and poverty-stricken are left to do whatever they want. Lino (Belle) apparently stole drugs from Tremaine and now his minions are hunting him down. Their guns are no match for Lino’s foot chases and flying kicks. Meanwhile, Paul Walker plays another undercover cop trying to take out every thug who was involved in his father’s death. He finds his way into Brick Mansions to take on Tremaine. Lino and Paul Walker have to team up like Tango and Cash. That is, if Tango was Jackie Chan and Cash drove cars really fast.
The climax of the movie revolves around a neutron bomb that may be either be meant for the ghetto or possibly the over-privileged part of the city.
This is the kind of movie that necessitates audience interaction. Several teenagers at my screening could be heard saying, “That b*%#& got tazed!” and “That b*%#& got wasted!” It was a very intellectual experience, I assure you.
I’m not sure where RZA’s character was supposed to be from. He went in and out of a supposed Jamaican accent so many times that, at one point, I think he was trying to do his best Borat.
Brick Mansions is a movie meant for one audience. Action movie fans with no regard for anything other than kicking and explosions. This could have easily starred Jason Statham and been Transporter 4.
No, I don’t mean that as a compliment.
This movie feels foreign. In quality. In casting. In story. If the original French movie needed to be remade, why couldn’t they have improved it?
As the movie ends, there is a forcible gut-punch “In honor of Paul Walker” image. Basically, the movie ends by saying, “Sure, that was a laughably bad movie, but you can’t hate it because Paul Walker is dead now.” Yet somehow I still did. However, it’s a far better watch than The Other Woman.
Save your money and skip both movies.
