Tammy, Deliver Us From Evil – Movie Reviews
Tammy – R
Release Date: Wed 02 Jul 2014
Melissa McCarthy co-writes and stars as Tammy, a woman in crisis who loses her job, car and husband in the opening minutes of the movie. She sets off with her alcoholic grandmother (Susan Sarandon) to go and see Niagara Falls.
The movie delivers a few laughs but really works hard to get them. There are a lot of punchlines that fall flat before one lands, with McCarthy getting most of them. The other cast seem to have a little less to work with, probably based on McCarthy doing more improvisation to expand her dialogue and supporting cast like Susan Sarandon sticking to the script. This makes Tammy feel like the closest thing the movie has to a real person and with her also in almost every scene it’s a good thing that the movie does have an emotional core to it beyond just a series of setups for more jokes.
Still, the great supporting cast feels wasted. Susan Sarandon and Kathy Bates get a little bit of screen time to shine. Gary Cole is great for the handful of appearances he makes and Toni Collette is criminally underused. Fans of McCarthy will enjoy it, and as an R-rated comedy it manages to stay pretty tame on visual humor. The R-rating is all for language, but the movie could easily have gotten a PG-13 if they had wanted it.
Hannah, Cal and I saw it in the theater had a discussion in the car:
Deliver Us From Evil – R
Release Date: Wed 02 Jul 2014
Deliver Us From Evil does not look promising in the trailers. It appears to be another in a long line of “inspired by actual events” possession movies that rely on creepy female contortionists and cheap jump scares. Instead, this movie comes across much more like a police mystery/drama with supernatural elements. These supernatural elements are met with heavy skepticism within the film itself, and they are of the reasonable kind that the audience is thinking rather than the horror trope of “people too stupid to realize there are monsters here.”
Sarchie (Eric Bana) and his partner Butler (Joel McHale) investigate a series of strange crimes in The Bronx. Things start getting strange quickly, but the crimes also have a connection that they start to uncover. Meanwhile, Sarchie is distant to his wife (Olivia Munn) and young daughter who also start to experience some of the strange phenomena from the cases.
The mystery and suspense are great here, and it’s a truly great movie that doesn’t feel as long as it is (at nearly two hours.) The supernatural stuff is questioned enough that you feel like the movie eventually earns the right to suspend your disbelief as McHale’s character flat-out makes fun of some of the elements the audience is finding hard to believe. It grounds the movie until it finally earns the right to just “go there” in terms of supernatural events. Most of the movie feels more like Se7en than The Devil Inside.
Cal and I saw it in the theater had a discussion in the car:
