With a much-hyped but middling Spielberg offering, a better-than-expected rom-com and a stinker horror-comedy, it’s a truly mixed bag of movies this week.
Disclosure Day: A Familiar Tale
With the arrival of Disclosure Day, once more we get to see one of the greatest filmmakers of all time indulge in his greatest fascination. Since his formative years as a teenager in the 1960s, making movies with friends in his backyard, Steven Spielberg has always had a thing for alien life forms paying us a visit. Two of his finest works, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, were diverting, deeply thought-out dives in the unknown. Just as a welcome mat was put out for visitors from far, far away, Spielberg also issued a stern warning that the powers-that-be would always be doing their best to keep us all in the dark.
Now well into the sunset phase of his storied career, Steven Spielberg is paying his favourite themes one last visit with Disclosure Day. While there are hefty, healthy strains of Close Encounters and E.T. to be found in Disclosure Day’s storytelling DNA, there is also little that is noticeably refreshed, updated or differs from all that Spielberg has done before. The end result could hardly be deemed dire in any way, but it is faintly disappointing nonetheless.
Plot and Characters
The chief flaw in play is a disjointed and uneven screenplay, which fails to bring any truly relatable characters to the fore (with one notable exception). The main cog in Disclosure Day’s plotting machine rotates around Daniel (Josh O’Connor from Challengers), a cybersecurity expert being chased here, there and everywhere by a swarm of federal agents. Daniel is carrying around a cache of secret files which detail a vast government cover-up hiding evidence of the presence of aliens on Earth since the 1940s. You would think in this day and age that all Dan needs to do is upload everything to the internet, and let the immediate widespread global uproar do the rest. Instead, Daniel and his ex-nun girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) scamper between a series of hideouts and safe houses, awaiting the go-ahead for a live TV broadcast that will blow the lid off the conspiracy once and for all.
While this part of the story triggers a stack of high-speed, low-stakes car chases – you’ve never seen so many black SUVs driven in aggressive formation in the one movie – a smaller, better subplot is nurtured for more satisfactory returns. It is here we meet Disclosure Day’s sole character of worth, Margaret (a brilliant Emily Blunt). She is a TV weather reporter who suddenly discovers she cannot only speak every language on the planet: Margaret has also mastered a dialect that is known only to select alien life forms. The movie comes alive in the Margaret sequences, to the extent where you are left wishing the focus could have been narrowed down to her own quirky, yet purposeful journey through the tumultuous events depicted here.
Scary Movie: A Tired Reboot
In case you lost count – or more likely, elected to totally forget – there were five instalments in the original 12-year run of the Scary Movie franchise before it was put out of its mirthless misery in 2013. (Scary Movie 5 was so bad its director openly confessed it was terrible while promoting it.) This belated reboot takes the same approach as before, furiously referencing and spoofing every recent-ish horror flick it thinks its target audience might recognise. Having arrived a touch too soon to capitalise on the current record-breaking chillers Backrooms and Obsession, the sixth Scary Movie makes do with short, sharp and stupid shoutouts to the likes of Sinners, Weapons, Longlegs, The Substance, Get Out and, of course, every Scream movie you may or may not have seen. About one in six jokes hit their intended mark and warrant real laughs. The rest come and go to an in-cinema soundtrack of faint groans or complete silence. Franchise stalwarts Anna Faris and Regina King fare best from the limited pickings on offer.
Office Romance: A Pleasant Surprise
As far as straight-to-streaming rom-coms go, this is one of the better ones. So what if that ain’t saying much? The stunt casting of putting one of the screen’s most durable glamourzons (Jennifer Lopez) up against Roy Kent from Ted Lasso (Brett Goldstein) is endearingly effective, and that is all that should be really mattering here. J-Lo plays Jackie, the gung-ho CEO of an airline experiencing severe legal turbulence from a bitter rival. Goldstein is Daniel, our hard-nosed heroine’s lawyer of choice for the case about to hit the courts. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He says all the wrong things in all the right ways. Sparks fly. A certain sizzle ensues. And the outcome of the courtroom wrangle rests upon the pair keeping their unlikely relationship a secret. This might well be standard-format stuff, but its entertainment value is enhanced by some lively and rather rude banter (Goldstein also penned the screenplay), plus the relaxed and inviting chemistry of the two leads. True fans of the rom-com genre will add bonus points for Lopez’s wardrobe choices, and the occasional sudden change of up-market location. Nice stuff.
