THIS MEANS WAR

Review: This Means War
3 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

It's impossible to ignore the relevance of Reese Witherspoon's profession in This Means War. Her character, an especially Witherspoonian blonde named Lauren Scott, is a consumer-products tester whose workplace looks like a scrumdiddlyumptious torture chamber. Neon-handled Teflon pans are blasted with flamethrowers in a tangerine lab, while a focus group of concerned housewives discusses charcoal grills in a polka-dot boardroom. Before long, it hits you like a skillet to the face: How many times did this love-triangle action comedy go through similar rounds of quality control? How many focus groups gave it the once-over before it got the green light? Considering its multiple endings, spastic construction, odd romantic outcomes, and bizarrely dated snippets, it's safe to assume the punchy product arriving in theaters is a few generations removed from Simon Kinberg and Timothy Dowling's original script, which was once called Spy vs. Spy and had Sam Worthington and Bradley Cooper attached to star.

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THE VOW

Review: The Vow
2.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

It's too bad every complacent couple can't have one spouse lose all memory of the other. As evidenced by The Vow, being forced into a clean-slate courtship is a great way to cure mid-marriage malaise. The zealous effort to woo is restored. What was tired is fresh again. Indeed, it makes the simple renewal of vows look like the work of lazy slugs. Leo (Channing Tatum) and Paige (Rachel McAdams) aren't old enough to have fully nestled into married life, but Leo is nevertheless compelled to dust off his game when Paige suffers head trauma from a car crash and can't recall that the tall drink of whey protein at her bedside is the same one who's been between her sheets. Based on the tale of a real-life couple who stalwartly gave amnesia the wedding-banded finger, this Valentine's Day date magnet is a proud cheerleader of love conquering all. It might have been better if the script, the sets, or just about anything else in its visual palette had the bottled-lighting ease of Tatum and McAdams's quiet chemistry. This is a movie whose true romance has virtually nothing to do with the movie itself.

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BIG MIRACLE

Review: Big Miracle
1 star (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

In Big Miracle, a big ol' mess of a fact-based weeper that welcomes the whale puns (pass the harpoons!), the only things that ring somewhat true are the ulterior motives scattered among the characters, each of whom has something to gain from helping a trio of gray whales trapped beneath the ice in Middle of Nowhere, Alaska. An aspiring Anchorage journalist (John Krasinski) hopes spreading word of the story will get big networks to notice him, a Colorado oilman (Ted Danson) thinks lending his Alaskan resources will make for killer PR, a fish-out-of-water reporter (Kristen Bell) hopes covering the rescue will make her career as big as her hair, Inupiat natives want to save face lest the public think they're heartless hunters, and a Reagan staffer (Vinessa Shaw) wants to preserve the boss's legacy while securing the future of "humanitarian" George H.W. Bush.

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ONE FOR THE MONEY

Review: One for the Money
1.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

You could go nuts with the double entendres associated with One for the Money, beginning, of course, with the film's title. The gluttony of Katherine Heigl's inexplicably street-smart character Stephanie Plum—for money, bad guys, and most of all food—can be easily applied to the formerGrey's Anatomy star's career path. Heigl, it seems, hasn't met a headlining opportunity she wouldn't plow through like junk food in order to hit pay dirt ("I'm not going to say no to a cupcake," Stephanie eventually says). A mix of Rosalind Russell, Erin Brockovich, and Sandra Bullock's Gracie Hart (who gobbled up steak and spaghetti with the same elbows-out voracity Stephanie shows while downing oodles of product placement), Heigl's latest cipher is a dyed-in-the-nylon Jersey girl who loses her Macy's job in underwear sales and has to spend a lot more time at her parents' house in Trenton, where home cookin' and bad wallpaper reign supreme.

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HAYWIRE

Review: Haywire
2.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Perhaps you've heard of Gina Carano. A former American Gladiator and current YouTube sensation, the raven-haired 29-year-old is one of the most Googled people on the planet, and has been dubbed "the face of women's mixed martial arts." She's also the comely ass-kicker at the center of Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, a hell-hath-no-fury spy jaunt conceived by its director as Carano's breakout vehicle (think Ong Bak with boobs). Ever the experimental genre jumper, Soderbergh finally gets his Luc Besson fanboy on, making his first-time leading lady a Nikita thirsty for vengeance in a man's world. He certainly breaks some sort of new ground in the way his fights are presented. Though Carano's freelance operative Mallory Kane tends to walk away the victor, it's hard to recall the last time a female character was so fiercely and frequently beaten up by men, punched and kicked and thrown and smashed without a speck of sugarcoating.

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JOYFUL NOISE

Review: Joyful Noise
3.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Joyful Noise certainly has its demographics covered. For the traditionalistic Bible Belt crowd, there's a bounty of God-fearing folk, and at least three women who are rendered defective when the men who complete them leave the picture. For the urban enthusiast, there's ample soulful swagger and belting of R&B, with tracks by Michael Jackson and Chris Brown given the shake-the-rafters treatment. For the Gleeks, there's an exultant third-act medley that puts every single mash-up in Ryan Murphy's repertoire to shame. For the gays, there's nearly enough over-primped fabulosity to rival Burlesque, whose divas-play-themselves lead the movie surely follows. And for the cynical liberals, there's a tacky reflection of the church's overall hypocrisy that seems marginally self-aware (among other things, the inevitable tournament victory of the film's devout, cookie-cutter choir can't be had until the crooners ditch the God stuff and whip out the secular guns).

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THE DEVIL INSIDE

Review: The Devil Inside
1.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

"Connect the cuts," Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) hisses to her doe-eyed daughter, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade), who's come to visit Maria in a Roman mental hospital after 20 years of estrangement. "Connect the cuts, connect the cuts, connect the cuts." The chant is fair warning for the inevitable revelation of Maria's self-mutilation, a tic-tac-toe patchwork of upside-down crosses that she's apparently been carving into her forearms since she murdered three clergy members back in 1989. It's also an unintentional nod to the first fundamental faux pas of this klutzy bamboozler, directed and co-written with senseless audacity by William Brent Bell (Stay Alive). Bell's cuts are connected with the formal intuition of a filmmaker possessed by Ed Wood, as every abrupt jump that aims for dramatic intensity begets comedy instead—or merely points to a puerile grasp of continuity. The common scenario involves film-within-film footage of over-the-top possession victims curtly juxtaposed with reaction shots from onlooking characters, whose soap-opera-serious expressions couldn't be further from those of The Devil Inside's actual audience (what's unwittingly created is the kind of awkward, how-about-that humor often seen in one-camera sitcoms). Bell doesn't mean to be in the business of jokes, but his movie is a big one, and it's most certainly at the viewer's expense.

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