Your Night In: Every movie on TV tonight rated
Hollywood legends hit the small screen with Robert De Niro as a retirement-age intern, Bruce Willis as a veteran cop and Mark Wahlberg stars as a bodybuilder in a get-rich-quick scheme. Leigh Paatsch rates — and slates — all the performances on TV tonight.
Leigh Paatsch
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THE INTERN
**1/2
8:30 PM 7MATE
Hey, world! Old folks have employment prospects too! Especially if they land a post-retirement gig as silver-haired sensei to the CEO of a booming internet start-up. That is it for insightful takeaways from The Intern, a sugar-sweet, wafer-thin comedy hoping to inspire many hugs across the generation gap. It is only the comfortable chemistry of leads Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro that averts a feelgood folly here. Hathaway plays the hip young boss of a popular fashion website who takes on a 70-year-old senior citizen (De Niro) as her unpaid junior assistant. This is one of those middle-of-the-road affairs that is neither good nor bad. Can get quite funny once in a while. Can also take you to the brink of completely nodding off twice in a while.
COP OUT
***
11:00 PM CH. 7
Remember those white-cop-black-cop-good-cop-bad-cop-sane-cop-mad-cop flicks like 48 Hrs and Lethal Weapon? Well, Cop Out proudly pays homage to the zillion straight-to-VHS imitations that followed in their wake. As dictated by genre formula, proceedings must begin with a veteran police detective team botching a job, followed by their desk-jockey boss chewing them out, and then suspending them without pay. The timing could not be worse for Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis), who needs to come up with some major dough for his daughter’s wedding in less than a month. After reluctantly deciding to sell a rare baseball card to make up the shortfall, Monroe and his reality-challenged partner Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) become unwitting magnets for every dopey drug-dealing perp and double-dealing snitch in New York City. A dynamically dumb, guilty-pleasure comedy.
PAIN AND GAIN
**
11:00 PM 7MATE
A tonally erratic and consistently irksome true-crime farce that plays out like a GoodFellas for Dummies. Mark Wahlberg stars as a Miami bodybuilder with a stupendously dumb get-rich-quick scheme doomed to get all involved either jailed or killed. The fact these events (sort of ) actually occurred buys the movie some time on a curiosity level. However, some chronically misjudged attempts at black humour - there are no laughs to be had with all the disfiguring, dismembering and disposal of victims - loses all goodwill rather swiftly. A handful of stunning standalone scenes hint a better film might have been in the offing, but director Michael Bay (Transformers) has other, lesser ideas. Co-stars Dwayne Johnson, Ed Harris, Rebel Wilson.
WHITNEY
*1/2
9:20 PM GO!
This hastily chucked-together biopic of the late, great singer Whitney Houston should not be confused in any way with the superb recent doco of the same name. Track that down in preference to this trite, trashy affair. The fella who plays poor Whitney’s rotter of a husband Bobby Brown is particularly sub-par. Stars YaYa DaCosta.
THE FAMILY FANG
***1/2
7:30 PM WORLD MOVIES
Though best known for his work as a comic actor, Jason Bateman (Horrible Bosses) has been steadily nudging along a directing career in recent times. (His work behind the camera on the new Netflix series crime series Ozark is sublime. Be sure to check it out) This dark, deceptively engrossing comedy-drama sees Bateman partnered with Nicole Kidman to portray Baxter and Annie, the damaged adult children of two notoriously strange performance artists (Christopher Walken plays the father, say no more). Bateman and Kidman are a surprisingly effective team casting-wise, in spite of the fact they look nothing remotely like biological siblings. Kidman’s measured performance (as strong as her acclaimed showing in the recent mini-series Big Little Lies) really comes into its own in the film’s steadily unsettling second half. It is here that Annie must reluctantly confront her greatest fears about her prankster parents and their unhealthy love of the spotlight. Plenty of rewards here for viewers willing to roll the dice.
NIGHTCRAWLER
****
9:30 PM WORLD MOVIES
When it comes to Nightcrawler, it is best to be both alert and alarmed. Each state of mind is necessary when processing the motives of its chilling lead character, an unhealthily driven young man named Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal). Having just started out as a freelance TV news cameraman, Lou prowls Los Angeles after dark in search of what sells : car crashes and murders soon become a house specialty. Though Nightcrawler is squarely taking aim at the worst inclinations of US tabloid television - the holy grail of footage is described as “a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut” - it is the eerily centred performance of Gyllenhaal that draws all focus. With a smile always on his dial and a work ethic that never lets up, Lou seems like the kind of guy that would do anything for anybody. Gyllenhaal reads him differently, and gradually gets us thinking the same way : Lou is really the kind of guy who would do anything to anybody.
SEPTEMBER
***
9:30 PM NITV
In 1968 on a farm in Western Australia, a close friendship between two teenage boys is slowly coming apart. Patience is very much its own reward for this quiet Australian rites-of-passage drama, which gradually transcends its glacial pacing and sparse scripting to build to a delicately poised pay-off. Stars Xavier Samuel, Clarence John Ryan.
THREE MOVIES FOR STREAMING OR RENTAL
JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL (PG)
***
FOXTEL, AMAZON
The core premise of this quality sequel has been refreshed just enough to keep Jumanji fans leaning forward and ready for anything. Naturally, there are a new set of player-to-avatar switcheroos to be executed, the standouts of which are Dwayne Johnson subbing for Danny DeVito (very amusing work from The Rock) and Kevin Hart channelling his inner Danny Glover circa Lethal Weapon (uncannily on the money). Co-stars Jack Black and Karen Gillan do not have as much to do as they did before - and the same goes for the younger cast of regulars - but it doesn’t really matter that much. The action-adventure sequences are given more emphasis to build some consistent momentum this time around, and it lends The Next Level a slight edge over its well-regarded predecessor.
JERRY SEINFELD: 23 HOURS TO KILL (M)
***
NETFLIX
At this late stage of his career, no-one would be advancing the theory that Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up comedy is continuing to evolve in new and surprising ways. He’s in strong enough form for his latest live special for Netflix to justify the look-see, even if there are periods where the big laughs are a little more spaced apart than we have come to expect. Though Seinfeld can get a bit too whiny about the perils of being rich, famous, married, white and in your sixties, his powers of observation regarding the absurdities of everyday living are undiminished. Running time wisely keeps everything tidily inside an hour.
HER SMELL
***
SBS ON DEMAND
A quality American indie drama dominated by a sterling performance from the ever-reliable Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man and TV’s The Handmaid’s Tale). She very authentically plays a self-destructive punk rocker struggling with sobriety while trying to recapture the creative inspiration that led her band to success. There is only one sticking point here, and it could be a deal breaker for some : the running time is a way too excessive 130 minutes-plus.
Originally published as Your Night In: Every movie on TV tonight rated