EMELIE (2015) The makers of this nasty brief little horror outing must have thought they stumbled on to a unique concept....the deranged, homicidal babysitter. Not quite new, boys. Marilyn Monroe gave this familiar archetype a spin in "Don't Bother To Knock", which dates all the way back to l952.
Here we have Sarah Bolger playing a seemingly mild mannered young woman embarking on an evening of watching over three young kids, two sugar-fueled, ADD tots and one sullen older boy (about 11) who resents being babysat. Well, pretty soon all three of them resent the sitter as she quickly reveals herself as an unhinged sadist, feeding the little girl's hamster to the little boy's pet snake and settling them all down in front of the TV to binge-watch porn. Plus she plans to cap off the evening by abducting the youngest boy as a replacement for her own dead child........we bet her hourly rate is even more shocking than the rest of that stuff.
This all descends rapidly into the usual by-the-numbers horror movie tropes, which movies like this adhere to as rigidly as Kabuki theater or haiku, A few curves pop up, such as the loony sitter's mysterious accomplice, who turns out as dopey and unlucky as his cohort. The filmmakers top off their little nothing of a scarefest with a delusion-of-grandeur final shot....setting up a sequel. Nobody should hold their breath waiting for "Emelie 2: The Devil's Daycare" or whatever they planned to call it. BQ can only scare up 1 star.......with or without children, you won't want to bring this sitter home.
THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY (2016) effectively demotes its whip-smart writer-director Sasha Baron Cohen from cutting edge social satirist ("Borat", Bruno") to worn out British imitation Adam Sandler. The plentiful gross out gags are all in place but none of them, a parade of bodily fluids, genitalia and assorted anal abuse, serve to highlight Cohen's withering view of humanity's foibles. Don't look for any ironic subtext here....the gags are just there to make you go "eewwwwwww." Nothing more.
Cohen plays Nobby, a lower (or we should say lowest) class soccer-besotted lunkhead who reconnects with his long lost brother. The brothers,separated when they were young orphans, have certainly become different people.....Nobby's brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) is now an efficiently lethal MI6 superspy, a Bondian/Bourne killing machine. You can easily figure out the rest....Nobby ends up as his brother's unwanted sidekick, while they're pursued by thugs in the service of an international archvillainess (Penelope Cruz). In the course of their misadventures, they inadvertently shoot a wheelchair-bound child and infect Daniel Radcliffe with HIV (don't ask). In the film's centerpiece sequence (we get the feeling Cohen wrote the entire movie around this scene), the brothers hide from their pursuers inside an elephant's vagina....and yes, if you expect Cohen to double down and triple down on this gag, he will not disappoint you.
"Brothers Grimsby"primarily takes aim at an easy, soft target....casting its farcial eye at all the dreary conventions of today's action movies and their depressing similarity to first-person shooter video games. Cohen particularly gets a kick out of amping up the bloody collateral damage done to innocent bystanders to ridiculous levels. ("The Nice Guys" with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling makes a far funnier attempt at this same idea.) Although you have admire his ingenuity in devising brutal sight gags involving pain inflicted on his bare ass, Cohen does nothing more than lazily slum around here...... it's an Adam Sandler-type paycheck grab. While Sandler's content hitting the ceiling of lowlife comedy and staying there, we can only hope Sasha Baron Cohen has more ambitious things on his mind. We'll shoot down "The Brothers Grimsby" with only 2 stars.
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