Code 3 (2024)

Director: Christopher Leone

Cast: Rainn Wilson, Lil Rel Howery, Aimee Carrero, Rob Riggle

Have I Seen it Before: That’s an interesting question. In all truth, I got to watch a screener of the film over a year ago as part of my duties on the screening committee of a film festival*. I don’t write reviews of those screeners. I’ve got any number of reasons for that. Some are so amateurish that one doesn’t want to kick someone when they haven’t yet realized they’re down. Others are perfectly fine, but for any number of reasons, will never see the light of day. Others are painfully average and yet destined to show up on your Netflix feed either way.

Code 3 was different. I’ll get to the details in a minute, but it is the only screener I have named as one of my five best films of the year. I loved it then.

Did I love it now?

Did I Like It: Yes, yes, I did. While Howery may at times be playing a slight riff on his TSA character from Get Out (2017), there is not one ounce of Dwight Schrute in Wilson’s performance. The fact that Wilson is not likely to get any awards attention—it’s a comedy, after all, and an independent one, at that—for this is something I object to in the strongest terms.

But nobody’s listening to me.

The film is funny throughout. More than enough recent comedies are content to be joke machines built around set pieces, but every ounce of humor in this film is character-based. There is a terrific pathos here, where these people with a thoroughly thankless and abusive job. I said just a moment ago that Howery is playing a variation on material he has done before, but there are oceans of more depth here. Watch this man try to calm down someone with a mental illness while the police are champing at the bit to escalate the situation. It’s beautiful, and heart-rending, and better than anything of which studio comedies could conceive.

But there’s something so much more here. Roger Ebert once complained that films were steadily becoming less and less about people at work. Fantasy—it has its place—displaces seeing authentic depictions of people trying to live and make a living. He made the observation in the 90s, and it only got worse, and got even worse still after Ebert’s passing. This film, however, is a perfect picture of what it is to have a job in the 2020s. Failure. Success. The deep-seated belief that some other job will be the solution to all your problems, but also the knowledge that will never be the case. I’ve never been a paramedic, but in this film, I felt seen and saw myself in those people.

When I first saw the film, I expected nothing, and it was a revelation. It hit the same way the second time.

Is there nothing better to find in a movie?

*I won’t mention what film festival here, as it might invite someone somewhere to try and curry favor over my admittedly negligible influence, but if you go looking, you might be able to figure it out. You might need a couple of guesses, though.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)

Director: Eric Appel

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood, Rainn Wilson, Toby Huss

Have I Seen it Before: Brand new.

Did I Like It: First of all, a note of update about experiencing streaming-only films these days. which does seem to be an ongoing odyssey for me. The film comes free to watch, but riddled with commercial breaks, and considering I had to route the playing of the film from Roku’s website on my iPad through screening mirroring onto my Apple TV, the film just stopped at several moments and then came back in. No commercials were presented at any time. Sometimes I had to refresh everything in order to get back into the film. As this free-to-watch could only be seen as an advertisement for Roku’s service, it would have gone a long way to have all the ads loaded at the front. As it stands, while I enjoyed the film, I’m way less likely to become a Roku person at the end of the process.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…

It’s been so long since we’ve been given a pure parody film that was worth a damn. The last one I can readily reach for is Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), and I’m cautiously willing to give this one a lead on even that film, especially considering Walk Hard is only slightly a parody—of music biopics, no less—and more of a mid-2000s Apatow comedy.

This might yet herald (or at least promise, and never fulfill) a return to form for the genre. The secret strength? Not the writing so much, as the jokes might repeat a bit too much for my taste. The specificity of it’s subject matter, ensuring that the formula wouldn’t seem so simple that we are doomed to be subject to an army of immitators? Possibly.

The real strength I think is Radcliffe, who has shown once again his willingness to not take his image seriously, and subject it to enthusiastic clowning. The last performer I can think of who harnessed that energy so effectively was Leslie Nielsen. If you had Daniel Radcliffe becomes the new Leslie Nielsen on your 21st century bingo card, you are a lucky one, indeed.

Reign of the Supermen (2019)

Director: Sam Liu

Cast: Jerry O’Connell, Rebecca Romijn, Rainn Wilson, Cameron Monaghan

Have I Seen it Before: In all the very loose adaptations of The Death of Superman, WB and DC have never really leaned into the other half of the story. So, no I guess I’ve never seen it.

Did I Like It: It’s exactly what it promises to be, if a little slight.

Gotta admire a movie that takes the piss out of its long-running title in the first opening minutes, especially as it tries to move beyond the similarity between the original, more Nietzsche-esque elements of the character’s prototype. I’m a little less sure if I admire the choice to make Superboy (Monaghan) as 90s radical as he was in the source material, although they do manage to include a whiff of Bieber-esque celebrity for the character that is a little more now.

Is this the first review—or even first piece of writing at all—that features both the terms “Nietzsche-esque” and “Bieber-esque” in a single paragraph? God, I hope so.

The animation is a little cheap in places. Not sure if we can expect much more from a Warner Bros. direct-to-disc production, but a boy can dream. Also, the story wraps itself up far too quickly. Trying to jam in nearly a year of comics into a movie just slightly over 80 minutes long seems like a flaw inherent in the form. I’m not sure I can fully recommend it, but then again it’s not the worst adaptation of the resurrection of Superman that’s ever floated across our screens.

A couple of weird nitpicky things that I can’t quiet get completely over:

Having a world where there is both Cyborg (Shemar Moore), a member of the Justice League and a Cyborg Superman (Jerry O’Connell and Patrick Fabian) feels like some muddled story-telling, even if they hang a lantern (ha) on it. I guess, that’s just what the League brand is now.

Having Batman—even halfheartedly—suggest Green Lantern take a shot with a bazooka at Superboy feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of the character, but then again, this isn’t Batman’s movie, so I guess I can allow it.

While having a Hillary-esque woman be POTUS is certainly a world I would prefer to live in. And yet, it feels sort of an easy shot, but then again our wolrd is one full of easy shots.

Death of Superman (2018)

Director: Sam Liu, James Tucker

Cast: Jerry O’Connell, Rebecca Romijn, Rainn Wilson, Nathan Fillion

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve seen this story, before yes. And read it, in both comic and novel forms. How I ever got married is beyond me.

Did I Like It: Yeah. Why not?

By my count, this is—excluding the Super Nintendo game from the early 1990s where the whole point of the first level was to die—the fourth adaptation of the Death of Superman. Like the others, it reflects a Justice League of its time (i.e. Batman has a son, which was unthinkable in the pre-Nolan era, and everyone has a smartphone) but it hews closer to the original source material than any of the others. Excluding possibly the abandoned Tim-Burton-directed-Nicolas-Cage-starring movie from the late 90s that lives on in our hearts for how weird it could have been.

Interesting gambit, casting a married couple as Superman and Lois Lane. I’m not sure if Jerry O’Connell has the essence of Superman down as much as some other actors, nor do I think that Rebecca Romijn quite has the energy of an ideal Lois Lane, but they are both flying circles around Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth, so as with most Superman adaptations, all is improved when we grade on a curve. While Rainn Wilson wouldn’t look the art in a live action production, his voice works. Then again, Eisenberg didn’t even have a voice that worked. So, there you go.

Does manage to grab the Superman-as-Kennedy motif that the comic reached for more effectively than any of the other adaptations. While I’m more excited about the followup Reign of the Superman (2019), Bibbo is there, and he’s the character I’ve been waiting for the movies to get to. Everything good about Superman can be found in Bibbo. If you don’t know who Bibbo is, it’s entirely possible that this move may not be for you.

Ultimately, the structure the movie has more of a feeling akin to part one of a multi-part TV episode, which is not the greatest sin in the world. Additionally, we’re so far from the days of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993) to expect that much out DC animated movies.

It’s damn sure better than Justice League (2017) or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), and that’s saying something.