If you only watch comic-book movies, sequels and sequels of comic book movies, I’d like to inform you that Jesus movies make money. Once megachurches successfully baptized themselves in the Hollywood pond, bigger and bigger players lined up to make uplifting movies with themes promoting faith, i.e., Christianity. NBA star Stephen Curry helped bankroll “Breakthrough” (2019), the based-on-a-true-story about a kid who drowns and then comes back to life, presumably through the power of prayer. It attracted actors like Mike Colter, Topher Grace, Dennis Haysbert, Josh Lucas and Chrissy Metz and grossed $50 million off a $14 million budget. Ka-ching.
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The crash of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s brought an era of lowered expectations that I don’t think we’ve ever fully gotten over. That small-ball sensibility seems to be what drives “In Good Company.” It’s got the architecture of a romantic comedy: middle-aged family man (Dennis Quaid) gets a new, young boss (Topher Grace) who falls for his daughter (Scarlett Johansson). But instead of hijinks, everyone takes turns receiving gut punches followed by small victories. The presumptive happy ending seems more relief than triumph. But that’s where we were in 2004, and now. Just relieved that we’re surviving.
The core audience for “American Ultra” (2015) is 20-year-old gamer types, not 50-year-old stay-at-home-on-a-Friday-night types. I get that. It was a wise move, since the gamers paid $10 to watch it in a theater, while I paid 60 cents to rent it from Redbox (and stay at home on a Friday night). So the fact I thought the violence was waaay too cartoonishly bloody means little. The fact I thought said violence put a damper on the ingeniously compelling story of a sleeper-cell stoner means little. I’m sure the gamers ate it up. My reward? Friday night with Connie Britton.
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