The Good and the Bad in Central Intelligence

Central Intelligence - Movie Review

Dwayne Johnson commands the whole screen in Central Intelligence with his blend of power and navet, purpose and bewilderment. He and Kevin Hart have a bluff comic chemistry. Amy Ryan is quickly resonant in a deadpan role, and the script offers a surprisingly unforced amiability, emotional clarity, and deft espionage entanglements. Yet it isnt enough.

The problem with Central Intelligence is that its an action comedythe story of a C.I.A. agent, named Bob Stone (Johnson), who recruits a former high-school classmate, Calvin Joyner (Hart), a mild-mannered accountant, to help him crack a case that quickly turns violent. And the problem with the action is that its filled with what, in a grim oxymoron, would be called gunplay.

It isnt just the massacre in Orlando last weekend that puts the violence of Central Intelligence in the spotlight. The script is constructed so as to put shoot-outs into the foreground and push the director, Rawson Marshall Thurber (who co-wrote the script with Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen), into strategic terrain that isnt his strength. As a result, the movies authentic comedic energy and emotional connections are dissipated nearly from the start, leaving most of the film to be viewed as if on two parallel tracksone featuring its essential virtues and the other its dully conventional development.

Central Intelligence starts at a commencement assembly in a high-school gym, in 1996. Bobthen known as Robby Wierdich (pronounced weird d**k)was fat, awkward, sentimental, and bullied; Calvin, then nicknamed the Golden Jet, was the exuberant and multitalented class president, named most likely to succeed. At the ceremony, Robby is horrifically humiliated, and Calvin alone comes to his aid.

Twenty years later, Calvin is an unhappy, only modestly successful accountant, married to his high-school sweetheart, Maggie (Danielle Nicolet), a law-firm partner. Its the day before their twenty-year high-school reunion; Maggie plans to go, but Calvin cant face his classmates as the failure he takes himself to be. Out of the blue, hes contacted by Bob, who invites him for a drink. Calvins shocked to see the formerly unathletic and flabby Robby now heavily muscled and a master of martial artsa skill that quickly comes in handy, in a bar fight.

In the course of the evening, Bob discloses that hes a secret agent attempting to thwart a nefarious plot, by the so-called Black Badger, to steal and sell the complete list of U.S. undercover agents, and he needs Calvins forensic-accounting skills to help make sense of a spreadsheet filled with data. But, while Bob is visiting Calvin at the accounting office, a trio of agents, headed by Pamela Harris (Ryan), arrives and, declaring that Bob is actually a rogue agent who himself has stolen the list, tries to arrest both him and Calvin. After some ridiculous gunplay, Bob, with Calvin in tow, makes a dramatic escape, and the rest of the film is devoted to a double chaseBob and Calvin have to elude the C.I.A. while heading off in pursuit of the Black Badger.

The very essence of the story is the comedy of violence, and Central Intelligence offers plenty of it. Theres nothing funny about car crashes, plane crashes, Tasers, torture, or even a punch in the nose, but when theyre done as comedy theyre physical comedy in the literal sense of making a connection between bodies or between objects, to render what would be mirthless events as parodistic through choreography. With guns, its different. Guns present danger at a distance, with little action at hand beside ducking, diving, sliding, pointing, running, and reloading, which are, for the most part, cinematic clichs piled atop one another in a rapid montage. Of course, with some unusual directorial invention, something comedic can be done, but thats rarely achieved. The effect of a bullet is generally so devastating that it allows little for a director to play with (although one of the cleverest scenes in the movie, involving a superficial bullet wound, sends the story careening off into strange directions and the emotional stakes shifting). Even Brian De Palma doesnt do much more with a shoot-out than Thurber does. (It would be worth looking back at the history of cinema to see who does; the first filmmaker who comes to mind is Howard Hawks, in Scarface.)

The films triple backstoryinvolving the high-school reunion, Calvin and Bobs enduring traumas over their high-school identities, and resulting trouble between Maggie and Calvinyields occasional comedic delight, the highlight of which is a marriage-therapy session, in which Bob makes an unexpected appearance. Harts verbal rapidity and sense of timing set even dull lines ricocheting sharply, but Calvin isnt the center of the action. The emotional kick delivered by the elaborate, rickety setup comes mainly from Johnsons remarkable performance. The bold and mighty Bob is still as much of an awkward sentimentalist as he was in high school, and Johnson does deft work balancing both sides of the character with quizzical facial expressions and diction. Despite Bobs achievements (or his audacities), the C.I.A. agent still carries around the impacted pain of his adolescence. The plot point may be a commonplace, but Johnson manages to lend it a spontaneous, nave resonance.

Johnson and Ryan are movie stars, and they give lessons here in what that means: even in a minor movie such as this one, in which the dramatic and comedic foundations give way under the weight of conventions and banalities, their presence radiates far beyond the identity of their characters and their actorly intentions. Its good to see Ryan work in comedy (as she did with Jared Hess, in the extraordinary yet tainted Don Verdean). As for Johnson, theres a dramatic actor waiting to break out of his sometimes comic, sometimes fiercely violent persona. With his ambiguities and hesitations, his irrepressible gift for self-deprecation, hed be a natural for the cinematic worlds of Sofia Coppola or Paul Thomas Anderson.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-good-and-the-bad-in-central-intelligence