The Losers Date Night

We watched two movies this weekend.  Both entertaining but neither very satisfying.

Date Night (2010)

Netflix film abstract:

Who knew simple dinner reservations under a different name could turn one New Jersey couple's date night so terribly upside-down? Claire (Tina Fey) and Phil (Steve Carell) Foster leave their kids with the sitter and head out for a night on the town -- as the Tripplehorns.

At the risk of sounding too much like a stick in the mud, this movie was a little too screwball for me.  Oh, wait, I have to point out that we missed probably 20 minutes because the DVD flaked out.  So, there could have been some pivotal bits that tied it all together that we missed (I’ve just realized that we missed some part where Tina Fey dances with the Rockettes).

As is to be expected in a comedy, there were funny parts, but those specific instances are escaping me just now.  I don’t know…I like Steve Carell and Tina Fey but the movie just didn’t work for me.  But I didn’t entirely dislike it.  Mark Wahlberg was good as the shirtless black ops guy. I’ll end this review with a quote from a New Yorker review:

“Date Night” is depressing: the movie seems aimed at gentlefolk too scared of Manhattan to leave their tour buses, but any such actual families from New Jersey or elsewhere, “boring” or not, deserve to be entertained with something better than stale panic from old movies.

The Losers (2010)

Netflix abstract:

After learning that their handler, Max (Jason Patric), has set them up, a group of disavowed CIA operatives led by Clay -- aka the Colonel (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) -- bands together to bring down their betrayers in this slick action thriller. The film, adapted from the comic book series by Andy Diggle and Jock

This movie was filmed alternately as a commercial and a music video.  It certainly comes off as a movie developed from a comic book, which it is. The result was visually sexy yet lacking in mental stimulation.  The visual sexiness was in no small part due to Zoe Saldana.  She was Uhura in last year’s Star Trek movie and Neytiri in Avatar and definitely has a certain magnetism. 

Otherwise, Jason Patric played a pathetic evil genius, but Chris Evans was a welcome comic relief (“you like the angle of my dangle?”).  There isn’t a lot to say about the plot. I like how the Entertainment Weekly review wrapped it up:

…basically, it's The A-Team meets Rambo meets Mission: Impossible, with a mission that's one part trickiness, four parts blowing stuff up.