Congested Rio 2 is a poor sequel

Liberty Theatre

Rio 2

**

Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Jemaine Clement.

Director: Carlos Saldanha

Rated: G

Showing: Fri 1pm, 4:30pm, 7:30 pm; Sat-Sun 1:30pm, 4:30pm, 7:30pm; Mon-Thurs 1:30pm, 4:45pm, 7:15pm.

Runtime: 101 minutes

Animation, adventure,
comedy.

With Rio 2, the creators of Rio give us more of everything that their first film had in just the right doses. But if this sequel proves anything, it’s that more is not always better.

There are more stars in this birds-of-the-Amazon musical, with Broadway’s Kristin Chenoweth, Oscar winner Rita Moreno, Andy Garcia and pop star Bruno Mars joining in. And all of them sing. Because there are more tunes. 

There are more animals for those stars to play, with Chenoweth voicing an exquisitely animated spotted tree frog, plus anteaters and tapirs, scarlet macaws and pink Amazon River dolphins. And there’s more story, as Jewel (Anne Hathaway) and Blu (Jesse Eisenberg) take their brood (they now have three kids) into the Amazon to help Linda (Leslie Mann) and her scientist husband Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro) track down a rumoured lost, last flock of bright blue macaws.

But one thing the cluttered, overlong Rio 2 lacks in extra supply is jokes. A script designed to give cute moments to everybody from the first film as well as all those brought in for the second is a cumbersome, humour-starved affair. 

Neptune Theatre

Noah

***

Stars: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Hopkins, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson.

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Rated: PG-13

Showing: Fri-Sat 7:30pm; Sun 5:30pm; Mon-Thurs 7pm.

Runtime: 138 minutes

Adventure, drama.

Big, beatific and (more or less) Biblical, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is a mad vision of a movie, an action/adventure take on The Flood that cleansed the Earth.

Aronofsky (Black Swan) envisions this epic through the lens of Hollywood, interpreting the Bible as myth and telling one of its most fantastical tales as a grand and dark cinematic fantasy. And with Russell Crowe as his Master and Commander and shipbuilder, Aronofsky has concocted an accessible, modern and mythic version of this oral history that may make purists blanch even as it entertains the rest of us. 

Speciality Theatre

Oculus

***

Stars: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff Director: Mike Flanagan

Rated: R

Showing: Fri-Sat 2:45pm, 6:30pm, 9:15pm; Sun 2:30pm, 5pm; 7:30pm; Mon- Thurs 2:45pm, 6:30pm, 9:15.

Runtime: 105 minutes

Horror.

The women do the heavy lifting in Oculus, this April’s Insidious, a complex and chilling big-screen ghost story with serious movie-date potential.

Doctor Who alumna Karen Gillan sheds her Scots accent and most outward signs of emotion as Kaylie, a young woman who went through something terrible and, she is convinced, something supernatural 11 years before. Now, she’s out to prove that and “kill it”, the thing that killed her parents and put her brother into a mental institution for more than a decade.

The “thing” that did this: an ornate, Baroque mirror, which seemed to possess her parents and, when she and her brother were little, tricked them out of destroying it.

Kaylie stares at the mirror with the look of a stone-cold killer. Or glass-breaker. She’s taken a job at an auction house to get that mirror within her reach. She’s set up cameras, computer sensors and timers to monitor its evil and document what she does to it.

The problem — she’s dragged baby brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites), fresh from the mental hospital, along as a witness and helper. They’re back in the house where their parents died. And Tim, filled to the gills with psychobabble, sees himself as the one who “faced it”, dealt with the trauma of that night with mental health professionals. 

The effects are modest and effecting, the pacing not quite as brisk as you’d like and the finale entirely too predictable in this age of franchises. But Oculus earns its frights the old fashioned way — with convincingly traumatized characters, with smoke and with mirrors. 

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

***

Stars: Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson.

Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo.

Rated: PG-13

Showing: Fri-Sat 2:30 (3D), 6:15pm (3D), 9:30pm (2D);  

Sun 1:30pm (3D), 4:45pm (3D), 8pm (2D); Mon-Thurs 2:30pm (2D), 6:15pm (3D),  9:30pm (3D)

Runtime: 136 minutes

Action, adventure, sci-fi.

The superhuman efforts director Joe Johnston made to persuade Chris Evans to re-enlist in the comic book movie universe as Captain America pay more dividends in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Evans, that perfect specimen of American manhood, really sells the earnestness, the dry wit, the sense of duty and righteousness of the icon of American values that he represents in this sequel, even if Johnston isn’t around to direct it.

And it’s great that The Winter Soldier is actually about something, a comic book spin on privacy and civil liberties issues straight out of today’s data mining headlines. It’s a freedom vs. fear movie, liberty vs. “order”. But The Winter Soldier lacks that lump-in-the-throat heart that Evans, Johnston and company brought to the first Captain America. It’s okay, but not up to the higher standards of a Marvel blockbuster.  

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