Masterminds

Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig, Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Ross Kimball, Devin Ratray, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Ken Marino
Directed by: Jared Hess
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Action, Comedy
2016

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: A guard (Zach Galifianakis) is tricked into helping bank robbers steal from his armored car service.

Review:

Tim: Masterminds may be "based" on a true story, but it's a loose borrowing of the concept for another lackluster comedy. Zach Galifianakis has made far too many of these watered down, forgettable comedies. The approach is always the same- fire up as many jokes as you can, let funny people improvise, and expect to get a solid movie out of it. That rarely ever works. This is et another forgettable, only mildly funny comedy.

It felt like so much of the movie was centered around Galifianakis- "Look how funny his hair is! Look what an out of touch loser he is!" We've seen this so many times before, it's grown pretty stale. This movie relies far too heavily on the visual gag of Galifianakis. It's not especially funny, especially after the first five seconds. He's certainly game for this kind of film, but he's not nearly as funny as he thinks he is. Kristen Wiig was likewise only average. She certainly has some funny moments and some of them were undoubtedly due to improvisation. Far too many others just fell flat. Owen Wilson was better because he played more to his strengths and it felt like he stuck closer to the script. Jason Sudeikis was pretty good, although he'd have these weird lapses where he just wasn't funny and didn't connect with the audience at all. I appreciate the acting he did, but it just didn't always work. Kate McKinnon continues to baffle me- why do people think she's funny? She's way too over-the-top and isn't a very good actor at all. Leslie Jones was fine, but again, why the overacting? She needs to show some restraint. The film grabbed a lot of comedy names, but when you don't give them enough to do and provide them with too long a leash, you're going to get a mess like this.

This movie took an interesting approach, of basing their story on a real-life robbery. However, that's all you get. Everything else is complete fiction, everything dialed up as high as it can go on the perceived comedy scale. Some of the jokes undoubtedly connect, but far, far too many simply are not funny. The saving grace of this film is that it's a short 1 hour, 35 minutes. Even with that scaled down run time, there's not enough meat here to sustain the film for that length of time. Part of the issue with this is that the characters are all so ridiculous, they bear no resemblance to actual human beings. Why should we care about these absurd cardboard cutouts of human beings? In the attempt to chase a laugh, we get a film full of characters that aren't even close to being believable. That immediately detracts from any investment we might have in them. Sure, the occasional joke might hit us, but the lack of any emotional connection undercuts anything positive in the film.

I've said it a thousand times, comedies are hard to do well. This might not be quite as bad as some of the stinkers coming out of Hollywood recently, but this is a forgettable, stupid movie that was mostly a waste of my time. Maybe some day I'll stop watching these films- I never seem to miss much.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating- 5.5



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: Dinner for Schmucks, Keeping Up With the Joneses, The Hangover