At least Jonah Hill is back to what he does best: screwed up vs. screwball comedy. Screwball comedy is the magic kind best seen in the Thirties and Fifties where intelligent characters duel with wit and intrigue. Screwed up comedy is what you get from Hollywood these days when Judd Apatow isn’t involved: badly challenged characters behaving badly.

Jonah Hill is such a loser in high school he apparently bleached his hair to match his braces. Several years later he’s befriended his high school’s former cool guy, Channing Tatum, at the police academy. Channing is so dumb he can’t remember the Miranda warning when arresting a perp. So, he becomes the perp, and gets assigned to undercover work in his former high school. Jonah goes with him because he’s never found the nerve to actually try to manhandle or shoot at a criminal.

Again, this is a screwed up comedy, so rookie cops worldwide should be offended at being shown to be so inept in one form or another. What is also screwed up here is that this is a remake of 21 Jump Street, a TV series no one actually missed or probably wanted to see remade.  It had a social conscience, however, and brought us Johnny Depp. And at the end of this remake, however, you’ll see how there was plenty of fun to be had in this remake – if anyone had respected the material.

But that’s part of the concept, after all: a skewering of remakes. They are not generally great films (just try to remember the remake of Dukes of Hazard or Get Smart), but we do pay good money for these rites of nostalgia, and it’s not all that funny to reminded that we’ve been made fools of. It all oddly seems like Hollywood eating its young.

Once our heroes return to high school, they are tested by an idiot drug king and his inept drug pushers. The chief one wants to go to Berkley. I guess the joke here is that the kid didn’t want to go to Harvard. There’s a perky blonde, Brie Larson, who might have a career on her hands if she learns to choose material that doesn’t always ask her to play a dumb blonde. And Dave Franco as the drug pusher and cool guy almost steals the show.

The trick to great stupid comedies is not having characters know they are stupid. The Apatow classics like Forty Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up knew that. In an earlier age, Mel Brookes knew that as well in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Steve Martin always knew that as well. Jonah Hill will hopefully learn that lesson soon before he wears out his welcome like Seth Rogen has.

No one goes to the movies to be made fun of: that’s what we pay screwed up actors for. And these guys are great at screwball – when they have the humanity and wit found working with Judd Apatow.

Maybe the clear cutting of a paradise like forest isn’t the best plot for a child-like fantasy. But Despicable Me by the same producer, Chris Milandari, was all about stealing the moon, and that near classic managed to be a miracle in the making that Dr. Seuss would have enjoyed.

That having been said, let’s not quibble too much. The Lorax is full of riotous color and colorful characters that rambles along like a day at the circus, but not a movie. There are really tart and, alternatively, sweet set musical numbers that soar into the stratosphere for a few moments, and then the movie plops down to the ground like one the freshly felled cotton candy trees. The kids won’t notice; the adults won’t care because the kids are giggling, but we’ve learn to expect more from these big budget animated films.

The Lorax himself, voiced by Danny DeVito, is the main part of the problem. He’s not really in much of the movie and really doesn’t play much a part of the resolution. His job is to protect the trees; he doesn’t do that. His job is to restore the forest; he doesn’t do that either. He flits around ineffectually making generally unappealing jabs at usually women. If he’d embodied in the Lorax the character Louie of TV’s Taxi or Frank Reynolds of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, this would have given the film some much needed edge and something for adults to follow. As it is, Danny DeVito was probably never meant to play sweet and cuddly, and it hurts this film.

Our teenage boy hero, Ted, never seems to get with the program either. He lives in Theedville named after some kind of sweater mop the production of which caused the magical forest to be cut down. The town is totally synthetic with bright colors and not a piece of real vegetation in sight. Ted’s girlfriend, Audrey, wants to see a real tree and Ted sets out to find one. He escapes the Truman Show like town, but not without being sighted by Mr. O’Hare, the local trust fund baby industrialist with a strange haircut that seems vaguely Chines. He’s plotting to sell air in plastic bottles. You get the picture.

Ted ventures into the desolate wilderness outside of town and the Lorax informs him that the trees were all destroyed by the Once-ler. He made a fortune on the sweater mops at the behest of his horrible mom and grandma. He felled the forest and then locked himself in a tower. He refuses to be seen, but after his flashbacks take us totally out of the Ted story, the Once-ler gives Ted a seed for the revival of the trees. Comic book movie forced madness eventually leads to a renewed land of trees.

With all these distractions and not a noble motivation is sight, The Lorax never gets off the ground. The best musical number is a tap dance to greed. Except for Taylor Swift, all the voices are somehow off key. Even Betty White doesn’t deliver. 

Now the thorax is the part of the body that holds the heart and possibly the soul. Given that, the film seems to avoid both of those on purpose, figuring cotton candy will satisfy a young audience. Too bad. Even kids know that the destruction of nature is an ax to bear.

The spirit of teenage anarchy rules this film about a couple of dumb parents who let their seventeen your old son and his anti-social friends have a birthday party — when the parents go out of town. Now how numb is that? Groucho would have made this wittier: here we have to settle for mindless fun.

We live in an age of tolerant parents who often raise children who feel they can do no wrong, and a culture with a gangster ethos where the privileged get away with murder. And we also live in a culture where teenage girls feel just as empowered to walk on the wild side as teenage boys always have. You can call this the perfect mix for a cocktail known as a Pasadena Wall Banger — in this make believe, supposedly real life movie with the ultimate high school party, riot police included.

Thomas, our hero, is a sweet guy whose dad considers a loser. Too nice, too smiley, I guess. And while his mom thinks his new friend, Costa, a transfer student from Queens, just spells trouble, Dad sees Costa as a rite of passage for his son, especially given the fact that the third of his son’s Three Musketeers is an overweight nebbish who apparently can pass as officially socially challenged. An even weirder character videocams all this. He also possibly carries the moral of the story.

Costa walks around the party holding a chalice — apparently considering himself the Antichrist. He’s short, angry and brags about his connections. He lies to Thomas about putting the party on the Internet and Craigslist. With friends like this, you don’t need enemies. And the fact that Thomas learns that lesson and learns responsibility as well at great cost – saves the film.

Thomas of course is not the kind of guy to have the party of the century. He just wants friends. He spends the first part of the film worrying about everything as Costa manipulates him. And in fact, the first part of film is rather unlikeable and tedious because of this. Costa disrespects women at every step of the way, and Thomas as well. But as Thomas loosens up despite himself, you’ve got to cheer him on.

This is a Todd Phillips film – the man who gave us the Hangover movies. It’s a twisted bromance with Costa in the Zack Galifinakis role. You get the picture: the man who respects nothing but gets away with everything because he’s got money. And Thomas, of course, is the nice guy who gets to hold the bag.

This being a Hollywood movie, there are too many drugs and too much underage drinking thrown in. If this had been a college party at a farmhouse, this would all be much easier to take – but then the cavalry wouldn’t have to come to the rescue and funnier characters would have had to be developed.

Nevertheless, just like Thomas, you’ll probably get lost in the infectious atmosphere of the party – just pretend the kids are in their twenties. Then an adult with a flame thrower shows up. This is a smart film, you’ll then realize, when it blames the parents and the culture for this riot of a good time.  

The stars, Jennifer Anniston and Paul Rudd, seem well cast for once: with both working comfortably together as uptight Manhattan yuppies who don’t really have it all. Both actors have limited ranges, and it’s a relief that neither one is trying too hard here. And when they run away from the disappointments of the big city, you’ll find yourself actually caring about them.

By the time they initially end up with their lives overturned in a throwback hippie commune outside Atlanta, you know getting lost in the woods for a while is what they really need. They flee from that of course and move in with Paul Rudd’s brother – a loutish porta-potty entrepreneur. And from that moment on we veer into one cliché after another on either side of the cultural divide.

The movie pits obnoxious capitalist society and clueless commune society against each other — with Rudd and Anniston caught in the middle. Of course, having just left the cruelty of Manhattan, they flee the brother’s vulgarity for the commune’s niceness – only to find that the hippies have an authoritarian streak behind the smiles of the young guru, Justin Theroux, and the old guru, Alan Alda. When they both turn out to be mild mannered hypocrites and fools, the movie just barely avoids turning them into blatant clichés. A more human exploration of both characters might very well have allowed them to be funnier, and not just an extension of MSNBC vs. Fox News.

This being a Hollywood film, the plot, such as it is, revolves around a pernicious casino developer and free love. Except the casino developer is not very bright and the love isn’t very free – and neither plot line brings forth much laughter. There’s an absurd scene where Paul Rudd looks into a mirror and tries to turn himself into a macho man for the benefit of a beautiful blonde — that Anniston has begged him to sleep with. She has of course bitten from the apple first. And it’s safe to say that if humankind had had to rely on Paul Rudd’s machismo as the archetypal Adam, none of us would be here now.

But by then of course the movie’s early charm has long been flushed down the porta-potty, so you probably might have drifted off to sleep for a while and won’t notice.

Still in all, “Wanderlust” isn’t just another bromance in that recent line of head banging films, and it really is pleasurable, though not funny enough, to watch Rudd and Anniston play a couple trying and succeeding to stay together.

They move back to Manhattan in the end with the realization that they were really meant to be entrepreneurs, not slaves to corporations. They then somewhat ludicrously help the hippies become very rich. That should be funnier as well, but at least the movie will leave you with a somewhat bored smile on your face – because this is a movie that doesn’t take you to hell and back.

“This Means War” is one of those movies that is watchable because the concept and the stars hold so much potential – that not even a disastrous directing job can’t totally screw it up.

Love triangles of course have always worked. And with Reese Witherspoon in the middle of the mix, this battle between two likeable, up and coming male stars, Chris Pine and Tom Hardy, has plenty of character charm that almost overcomes the unfathomable directorial execution. I mean, if Captain Kirk and Batman, our heroes current franchises, can’t have fun tussling over a perky blonde, what’s a director, or a Hollywood movie, worth?

Pine and Hardy are a battling duo of CIA agents who go too far on an undercover assignment as the movie opens. They are exiled to Los Angeles for no apparent reason and have nothing better to do than try to find a woman marry. Enter Reese Witherspoon, a bitter marketing expert who’s just been unceremoniously dumped by the boyfriend she moved to LA to marry, but can’t seem unable not to run into on the street.

Her best friend is Chelsea Handler — who prattles away with a misguided, but oh so wise commentary on married life. Every one of these actors is adept at comedy, and the film does have enough love leery, funny moments, but just barely.

Apparently afraid that absurdity and wit couldn’t carry the day, “This Means War” actually has the two guys go to war over Reese. They know they’re chasing the same woman; she doesn’t. A lot of cat and mouse stuff would have sufficed for action. Instead, they go all creepy with total surveillance of one another’s dating adventures — at CIA’s expense.

With the whole Los Angeles CIA operation dedicated to seeing who Reese would sleep with first, one might think some CIA higher up would catch on and shut all this foolishness down. No, it just goes on and on – until a German terrorist saves the plot from total incredulity. Until his return, the movie actually seems realistic if for no other reason than there was not a manical killer in every other scene.  When he appears again, it all just falls apart. But thankfully the movie’s almost over and you get to cheer when Reese picks her guy. There is no real surprise in this, but you’ll be happy as long as you don’t think about it too much.

Jealousy of course is the most common of movie emotions. We can all relate — because the stakes in play are true love, and everyone’s done dumb things in the name of love. McG, the director, just directs everything like a music video and misses all the nuances of emotion that would make this movie satisfying, and far more funny. When he cuts a scene like an action movie, you repeatedly feel you’d  rather see a love is absurd reaction shot. This happens time and time again.

But then Reese smiles something perky, Chris Pine plays Don Juan, and Tom Hardy pouts like a lovelorn romantic.  Hollywood usually provides some sort of romantic comedy around Valentine’s Day, and this will suffice. With a better director, it just would have been so much more fun.

Denzel Washington’s character here, “Tobin Frost,” is a rouge CIA agent on a mission to expose malfeasance that corrupts apparently every spy agency across the globe. He’s been underground for ten years, but he’s forced to enter a U.S. Embassy in South Africa in order to save himself from bad guys who want to keep the evildoers within the agencies safe.

Ryan Reynolds plays a new CIA agent in charge of the safe house to which Denzel is sent for interrogation. Reynolds is bored with his lonely assignment and has fallen in love with a beautiful French woman studying in South Africa. When Denzel shows up and CIA agents begin to interrogate him about his activities during his lost years, the bad guys who forced Denzel into the embassy show up and mow down the interrogation team. Reynolds escapes with Denzel, determined to keep him in CIA control.

Denzel of course just wants to escape from Reynolds and go underground again. Back at the CIA’s Langely headquarters, everyone knows there must be a betrayer in their midst, or the bad guys wouldn’t have shown up at the safe house.  Thereby begins the usual CIA cat and mouse paranoia game well played by Sam Shephard, Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson. The fact that the ultimate villain is within the CIA itself is standard espionage movie plot these days, but at least we have three well acted characters to choose from before the ultimate acts of betrayal give the true villain away.

With Denzel and Reynolds entertainingly on the run as they try to reach another safe house, we enter standard “Training Day” territory as well – except with a twist. Denzel isn’t trying to show Reynolds how to be bad here, he’s trying to show him how to maintain his integrity and not lose his soul. This character arc actually plays out rather effectively – as Reynolds goes from untested careerist to good hearted action hero killing machine. This transformation might be a little slow by comic book action standards, but some warm and interesting moments play out between the two stars along the way.

Newcomer director Daniel Espinosa shoots this like a European film which makes it more interesting than it ordinarily might be. Ryan Reynolds struggles to hold his own acting wise against Denzel but he does a credible job as a good hearted guy who expected the CIA to be an up and up operation. A sad part of the casting is Vera Farmiga as a CIA executive. It’s a relatively minor role for a very talented actress who many hope might someday rise to the status of Meryl Streep.

You’ll never be bored during this film unless you’re an unrelenting action junkie: the acting more than papers over the slow spots. And besides, Denzel’s always worth the price of admission.

“Contraband” is a caper movie for action fans who don’t require much believability and will settle for a good action packed ride in the dark.

 A crucial moment in the movie involves Mark Walhberg, the movie’s good guy/bad guy star, walking right out of the back door of a counterfeit kingpin’s heavily defended lair – right into a drugstore to find a bottle of iodine. Returning through that undefended back door, Walhberg finds the counterfeit bills he’s come to Panama to smuggle not to be of sufficient quality — when he tests the bills with the iodine. And thereby begins a parade of one plot twist after another — until a preposterous fairy tale ending.

Walhberg and the movie make us care about his character– by hitting us over the head about how this is all about family. He used to be a top smuggler in the Port of New Orleans. Now he’s a hard working burglar alarm installer with a beautiful wife, Kate Beckinsale, and two cute kids under five.

Unfortunately, Kate has a younger brother who’s just had to throw a drug kingpin’s cocaine overboard, so as not to be caught by Custom’s agents. The apparent owner of the cocaine, Giovanni Ribisi, wants the street value of the cocaine to be covered, or he will kill Kate’s brother. Wahlberg makes himself responsible for this – even though he and his family might get killed. Most of us would have probably thrown the brother-in-law overboard ourselves. But, as it turns out, Wahlberg’s bored with the good life and seems to want to emulate his father who’s serving hard time.

For Wahlberg, importing counterfeit bills to pay off his brother-in-law’s debt is one thing; importing cocaine is another – or so it seems for a while. Of course, this being a dark crime movie, Walberg’s best friend played by Ben Foster is somehow behind all this. Apparently, he’s gotten over his head with metrosexual remodeling costs of his French Quarter digs — while he’s also been running a Mafia backed freight hauling business. We’ve of course seen all these circles within circles before.

Movies like this live on grimy atmosphere, car chases and gun fights, and New Orleans has never looked quite so bleak. Most of the film occurs on a grim container hauling ship as it plies the waves between Louisiana and Panama, and back again. A good shootout in Panama City shows us what slums are really like as local police with armored vehicles can’t keep Walhberg from completing his mission of mercy. And Wahlberg repeatedly gets to show us how clever his character is – though you’ll probably wonder how such a clever guy has such a dumb brother-in-law and such sleazy friends.

In the end, most of the tension is provided by a comatose Beckinsale – which is probably not the best recommendation for an action movie. By the time a rabbit is pulled out of a hat in the end to provide a happy ending, you’ll have gotten use to the clunky magic tricks that keep this moving along. Now remember the iodine and wonder why no one had used some to disinfect the clichés in the script, and thereby have a script worthy of a real police blotter.

“Haywire” is another “set up” movie in a recent run of similar films: that is, thrillers where the crime is being committed against the hero — who is being conveniently framed for a crime they didn’t commit, but a crime everyone will believe they could have committed. Don’t expect big explosions here, however, just tough gritty fun. This is what life is probably like to be a modern mercenary, and the picture isn’t very pretty, but it certainly worth a look.

Here, the hero, or more appropriately, the heroine, is “Mallory Kane” played well be a beautiful and physically assured newcomer, Gina Carano. She does her own stunts – which mostly involve karate like fights that you could believably find yourself in if you were a well trained spy.

With the last name of “Kane,” as in “Cain and Abel,” no doubt, Mallory is a natural suspect for betraying her family or friends. Emotionally cold and world weary, she is clearly comfortable with duplicity. She is someone you should be paranoid about. Her duplicity is doubled up as she works for a shadowy mercenary operation working for the government.  And she slept with boss, Ewan McGregor, a while ago, and regrets it now, but not much. She also apparently slept with her most recent partner in crime, Channing Tatum.

She tells this all to her father, Bill Paxton, without blushing. He is an ex-Marine now war correspondent who knows better than to ask too many questions. Michael Douglas might or might not be a respectable government agent; the same goes for Antonio Banderas. When Mallory is offered a chance to go straight  and clear her record, she opts out for revenge against whoever set her up.

We are meant to believe she’s never killed anyone but bad guys, so when she is framed for the murder of a good guy, you’ve got to wonder if anyone really thought this through. But the stellar cast and sure footed direction by Stephen Soderberg never really give you a chance to think about this…much. When you do, it might occur to you that this is another clue regarding the incompetence of the government, or the screenwriters. Whichever’s the case, it’s the kind of flaw that occurs in a not great movie.

“Haywire” gives you too much time to wonder about the issues of trust, or the lack thereof. When she kidnaps a young guy from a café to save her own life, she trusts him – and almost gets him killed. He of course shouldn’t trust her and that hurts the film. You have to wonder why this guy isn’t paranoid.

One suspects this is more about Stephen Soderberg’s life in Hollywood, than real life. Extremely well made in the technical sense, “Haywire” doesn’t try for profundity: it goes for what a cold cruel world this is, and that’s it. It’s January after all, so the film is well placed. And you’ll leave the theater being glad you have an ordinary life, and don’t have to be paranoid all the time.

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And while you’ll jump out of your seat two or three times in the just released film, you might very well wish this one were in black and white as well. Many of the best Hitchcock films are black and white: there’s something about how a film without color enters the brain like a nightmare in the making. You put more of your heart and mind into it because it looks strange, and these films get to be spare and still deeply moving. “The Woman in Black” is in dark lush color, however, but it’s just hard to really lose yourself in it as very little happens besides a creaking house and a creaking rocking chair amid the often gruesome images of dead children.

Part of the problem is Daniel Radcliff – otherwise known as Harry Potter. He’s really a good actor, but looking now in his mid-twenties as he moves around the movie’s spooky mansion, he looks like he’s in a sequel to his epic franchise — instead of in a stand-alone movie meant to reintroduce him to audiences. And, truth be told, he probably needs to age about five more years to be taken seriously as a man.

Here he’s brooding over the loss of his young wife in childbirth and has a five year old son. That’s a long time to brood as a young lawyer with a son, and you never really get the sense that the character’s neurotic enough to suffer that much. This creates a big problem, especially with the ending.

With his solicitor job on the line due to his unending grief, he’s sent to the north of England to settle a troubled estate. The town doesn’t want him there, but he insists on going to the creepy mansion on an bogged in island set just off the coast. We soon learn that the town’s children often die because the former mistress of the mansion was betrayed by her sister, and her son was lost due to her neglectful husband. As “a woman scorned” movie, however, this also doesn’t quite stand up either. She never speaks just lurks in shadows. You don’t care for her plight and the children’s deaths seem gratuitous.

Radcliff is befriended by a lugubrious rich guy with an estate. His wife takes dinner knives and carves in the table when her dead son comes up. You can’t help but wonder why they just don’t burn the woman in black’s mansion down. 

This is technically a well done film, and that applies to Radcliff’s performance as well, but maybe this film is just too slick a transition from Harry Potter. For cheap thrill seekers, however, there are several spine tingling moments worth the price of admission, but for a movie about ghosts, there is just no spirit.

“We Bought a Zoo” is a fine family drama that oddly suffers from the same basic flaw as “War Horse.” Both of these this big holiday movies about animals don’t seem to really care about the animals; rather, the furry creatures are used like props for important human tales. This being said, “We Bought a Zoo” is a better family film because it knows how real families work, and doesn’t try to be a profound human statement with a horse who can’t talk. Put another way:  There was genius in “Mr. Ed.”

Matt Damon is the star and dad of “We Bought a Zoo.” He’s packed on a few pounds for this role and actually seems like a real life family hero, not a superhero slumming in softer material.  He’s always good at the romantic roles and here makes a believable husband who’s just lost the love of his life. He has a cute smart talking daughter who looks like she’s seven and talks likes she’s Oprah — and a bitter teenage son thrust into early adulthood who interprets that as an excuse to be an artistic juvenile delinquent.

If all three of those characters seemed clichéd to you, you’ve hit on the problem with this film: you can see every emotional moment coming at you from a mile away, like a lion on the savannah. You’ll have to have a hard heart if you don’t cry, but you’ll no doubt feel more than a little manipulated – just like in “Warhorse.”

To escape his family’s suffering over the death of his wife, Matt Damon reverts to his character as a hard charging journalist – except this time he takes his two kids along. When he decides to buy a new house to chase the memories away, nothing satisfies him until he finds a dilapidated farm house that’s accompanied by a small zoo. If Matt doesn’t buy it, the animals and caretakers will be out of jobs. Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.: he’s glad to set himself up for more pain.

The fact that Scarlett Johansson is the head caretaker poses a problem for the filmmakers however. How could those two not fall in love at first sight? This is a movie after all. So, Damon doesn’t even meet the staff until after he moves in. Sure, yeah, that’s how life works. But at least he doesn’t look like a lonely guy on the make until late in the film. This gives Damon a chance to play a romantic who will never get over the loss of the love of his life – which is another improbability for a guy that handsome.

While his daughter just says cute things laced with wisdom, Damon wars unrelentingly with his teenage son. This is quite effective and becomes the emotional center of the film to good effect. Fathers and sons often act this way and that makes their resolution heartfelt – though overly contrived.

And what about the animals? They are afterthoughts here – except that the father and son bond over a dying tiger who represents their grief hobbled emotional lives. The tigers are just props — like the horse in “Warhorse” is just a prop in an emotional journey that reunites a father and a son.