The Roses (2025)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Andy Samberg, Allison Janney

Have I Seen it Before: You go into this feeling like you probably have, as long as you’ve seen War of the Roses (1989)…

Did I Like It: But that’s not quite right. It’s a precarious position to criticize a film by comparing it to another film, but it’s hard not to touch on that here. The heart of DeVito’s film is pitch black, with the doomed lovers committed to hating one another straight through to their final breaths. This is a broad Hollywood comedy, coming from one of the chief purveyors of broad, Hollywood comedies. Cumberbatch and Colman are sufficiently biting at their height, but the ending—even in its bleakness—is entirely too soft. The original works so well because Douglas and Turner seem to hate each other, even when they’re in love, whereas Cumberbatch and Coleman seem to love each other, even when they’re trying to kill one another. There should be no happy ending in the tale of the Roses, merely a sense that we can try to be a bit happier in their stead.

The films problems don’t end there, either. I laugh occasionally, but the cast is so stacked I’m left wanting more from the supporting characters. Ncuti Gatwa’s all-too-brief tenure as the Doctor let us all know he has the charisma that he should be leading his own movies, not playing the fifth Ken. Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon play Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, earning their paychecks. The real missed opportunity here is Allison Janney. One would think that getting featured on the poster and generally being a national treasure would warrant more than a single scene which taxes none of the comedic minds at work here. This movie sold me the idea that she would be playing the Danny DeVito role. It was far less than that, and that’s a real shame.

A good adaptation makes one want to seek out the source material. Why does a lackluster remake also make one want to do the same thing?

Trumbo (2015)

Director: Jay Roach*

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Louis C.K.

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, never. You’d think it would be right up my alley, but I just missed it. I’d say the way I eventually saw it was an odd way to finally take it in, as the climax of the Santa Fe International Film Festival nine years after the film was released. Bryan Cranston himself seemed to be a little confused by the choice, and he was there receiving a lifetime achievement award. I mean, sure Cranston’s connections to New Mexico are unassailable, and Roach hails from the Land of Enchantment, but can a pointedly political film from shortly after the golden escalator mean much in the here and now?

Did I Like It: There’s plenty in the film that is catering directly to me. Hollywood lore. Typewriter porn. Political contrariness. Cranston swinging for the fences without an ounce of ego in tow. These are the kind of things I like to see in movies.

Glossy and inherently abbreviated in the fine tradition of award-hunting biopics, I’d actually venture to say that as the film played at the Lensic concert hall**, the film means more to 2024 than it probably did to 2015. In 2015, we had what we thought was unrelenting political polarization, but we didn’t know how good we had it. One can’t help but watch Trumbo now and dwell on the possible sacrifices we may just have to make in the years to come.

*Remember when that guy had a whole career of doing whatever Mike Myers told him to? Kids, ask your parents.

**A concert hall is always, always a weird venue in which to see a film. Although, I think most large scale venues should probably be re-committed to movie screenings. Who really wants to see live music? Not I.

Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Mike Myers, Beyoncé Knowles, Michael Caine, Seth Green

Have I Seen It Before?: More on that in a minute.

Did I like it?: Well, here we are again. The only thing that this movie has going for it is a sense of finality, trying to change the characters (sketches, really) enough that if the series were to continue things would never be the same.

But nothing in the films matters, so much so that it is impossible for jokes or gags to exist long enough to make us laugh.

The world is making an Austin Powers movie, complete with celebrity cameos, but the thought is quickly abandoned until the very end, just to fit one more celebrity cameo.

Dr. Evil hatches a plot, and it is forgotten almost as quickly.

A new villain, Goldmember (Myers) is introduced, and has shockingly little to do with the proceedings other than to be weirdly Swedish and eat his own skin.

A new love interest for Powers is introduced in the form of Foxxy Cleopatra (Knowles) and…

Well, she is the best part of the film, somehow managing to look not embarrassed by the proceedings, which should have automatically qualified her for some sort of special Academy Award.

Number Three (Fred Savage, peeking his head out of his grown-up actor retirement for just long enough to send him back to television directing) has a mole. That’s the whole joke. It is, thankfully, quickly forgotten.

Austin has something that might resemble an arc with his father, Nigel (Caine), but it never goes anywhere other than a needless revelation that Powers and Dr. Evil are actually brothers.

All of these notions are introduced and abandoned with the same level of energy that they could certainly put everything back the way they found it for a fourth film, and no one would care. If the world hadn’t moved on from yelling “Yeah, Baby!” to everyone they meet (just in time to start yelling “Why so Serious?” at everyone they meet), we might have had to sit through such a fourth film.

Which brings me to a forthright plea. So, please, Mr. Myers. Do not go back to this well. You’ve had a good run since then, and I’m not talking about the various Shreks or Gurus Love you might wander into. You’re a documentarian, with Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon (2013), and a book, Canada. You were even in Inglourious Basterds (2009). You don’t need Austin Powers. We don’t need Austin Powers.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Mike Myers, Heather Graham, Verne Troyer, Seth Green

Have I Seen It Before?: Yeah… Guys, it was the 90s. We didn’t know any better.

Did I like it?: The better question becomes, did I even like it way-back-when? The loving ribbing of early Bond films that was the entire rationale for the first film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), to exist is largely gone. Although I now realize—having re-watched all three films in a row—that there is plenty left to drain from that tub. And here, the early days of Connery (and Lazenby, judging by Austin’s outfit) are abandoned for a lunar plot so inane that it makes Moonraker (1979) and the other Roger Moore movies look like John le Carré novels.

Maybe its unfair to criticize the plot of a movie that hinges on the hero accidentally drinking the bowel movement of one of the villain’s henchmen, but I maintain that is the case in point. The one gag of the original film that I can honestly say still works involves the villains trying to come up with the plot by which they might hold the world ransom. Hitting any number of walls, they shrug and decide to capture a nuclear weapon. Never has there been a more direct hit on the lazier aspects of the Bond films from which it stems. Here, there is nothing. It’s as if, in place of actually writing, a market research report took the knowledge that these films appeal to teenage boys, and subsequently abandoned everything that might have worked about its freshman effort.

And now that I think about, I was nearly 15 when came out. I guess I need to confess that it did work for me at the time. But the boy that this film did work for is a complete stranger to me.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael York, Mimi Rogers

Have I Seen It Before?: I was 12, going on 13 when the movie came out. If there was anyone for whom it was made, it was I.

Did I like it?: We all remember for about half an hour twenty years ago, we all latched on to the notion of the Austin Powers. Not because he was terribly funny, not because his throwback to a simpler age appealed to us, but mainly because he was a Gollum of catchphrases that we all could sort of do an impression of. Time passed, probably a mixture of 9/11 and Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) happened, and we all moved on.

But as I continue my willy nilly re-watch of the Bond films (I will eventually force myself to watch Moonraker (1979) again, I swear), I thought it might be time to give Austin and company another shot. The first one had to be somewhat good, right?

Eh.

There is a slavish devotion to the work of directors Guy Hamilton, Terrence Young and Lewis Gilbert, along with the delightful production design of Ken Adam and the brassy sounds of John Barry, but there’s not a lot of wit in those references. It is merely showing us things that we might recognize from other films, in hopes that it might elicit something resembling a laugh from the audience. This feels like the intermediate infection point between the sublime joy of films like Airplane (1980) and The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad! (1988) and the witless pains of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Tragically this film seems just as interested as lovingly referencing the early Bond films as it is in adopting an affect more akin to Casino Royale (1967).

Please, don’t make me re-watch the first Casino Royale feature. I beg of you.

And the humor that is on display here isn’t much to write home about. It aims at the lowest common denominator, and while that may make this reviewer read as stuffier than he might hope, I can only offer this in my defense: I remember laughing so hard in the 1990s that I hit my head at the sequence in the bathroom with Tom Arnold when Austin (Myers*) screams at a henchman, “Who does Number Two work for?” Today? Nearly nothing. I didn’t think the Swedish-made Penis enlarger was terribly funny on first blush, so the repeated call backs and the decades have done it no favors. Even the zany sort of non-sequiturs that absolutely rely on surprise to delight have long since lost their luster.

But I’m sure the series is just warming up, right?

*Still keeping a tenuous grasp on his Peter Sellers worship, although this will be the final film before the experiment completely escapes from the lab.