Family Film Reviews

-- 10 AND OLDER:

"DIARY OF A WIMPY KID" PG (NEW) -- Few people have happy memories of middle school and "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" does a fine, funny job of showing why and in a way that should tickle kids 10 and older. It's based on Jeff Kinney's delightful, if ungrammatical, 2007 novel (there are four "Wimpy Kid" books now), and, as direct ties to the book, includes a bit of narrative spoken into the camera by the young protagonist and a few line drawings. These are the adventures of first-year middle-schooler Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon), a small, pre-pubescent kid with a bullying older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick), a mischievous toddler brother Manny (Connor and Owen Fielding, double-cast) and nice but semi-oblivious parents (Rachael Harris and Steve Zahn). Greg is obsessed with becoming a "class favorite." His best friend Rowley (Robert Capron), who's unhip, generous and sweet-natured, is clueless about all this and doesn't see how badly Greg treats him in his race to the top. Greg is self-absorbed, conniving and shallow, yet still likable. He redeems himself a little and you forgive him. He's got the makings of a good writer -- an outsider forever looking to get in.

THE BOTTOM LINE: There is a lot of emphasis on gross-out gags (nose-picking; the rotten-cheese subplot) and toilet humor (boys in the school's doorless cubicles; baby brother on his training potty). Greg's and Rowley's classmate Chirag Gupta (Karan Brar) is made to seem silly and stereotyped. There is sexual innuendo regarding the cheesecake photo on the cover of Rodrick's "motorcycle" magazine. Some of the schoolyard taunts are vaguely homophobic, and Rodrick makes fun of Rowley's weight.

"ALICE IN WONDERLAND" PG -- It would help kids 10 and older if they had some prior knowledge of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass," since Tim Burton's fresh and often miraculous film moves beyond the books, but uses most of the characters. His Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a young Victorian woman of 19 with an independent streak. The story recounts her liberation, prompted by a visit to her childhood fantasy land. When an awful twit (Leo Bill) proposes to her at a garden party, Alice dashes off to follow the White Rabbit (voice of Michael Sheen). She falls down the rabbit hole and lands in Underland. (In her barely remembered earlier visits, it was apparently Wonderland.) Alice learns she's destined to slay the fearsome Jabberwocky, a dragonlike monster owned by the vicious, bulbous-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp, gap-toothed and orange-haired) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) gently nudge Alice toward finding the courage to fulfill her destiny. The movie is occasionally incomprehensible due to accents or overdone effects. Shown in 3-D, it has extra visual depth, but doesn't throw things at the audience.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The violence, while fantastical, can get fearsome, hence the 10-and-older recommendation. The "frumious Bandersnatch" (from the poem "Jabberwocky") is toothy and vicious and gashes Alice's arm. Its eye gets plucked out with a pin. The Red Queen's "off with his head!" orders lead to a near-execution, but the only head that rolls is that of the Jabberwocky. The fall down the rabbit hole is a bit scary, though Alice's "Drink Me" and "Eat Me" transformations are understated. There is very mild sexual innuendo and a subtle infidelity theme early on.

-- PG-13s:

"THE BOUNTY HUNTER" (NEW) -- Apart from a few gross-out gags, high-schoolers won't be cracking up at "The Bounty Hunter." This by-the-numbers romantic comedy is about as funny as an attack of hives. It's also too profane and full of bawdy sexual innuendo to be appropriate for middle-schoolers. Co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler (both ridiculously tan, considering they're supposed to live in New York) play, respectively, hotshot reporter Nicole and boorish bounty hunter Milo. They were briefly married, drove each other nuts, and divorced. Now Nicole's a wanted woman for skipping bail on a charge of assaulting a police officer during a minor traffic incident. Milo decides he'd like nothing better than to chase down his ex and put her in jail. But Nicole is on the trail of a police corruption story which, of course, soon embroils the two of them, reminds them of their original attraction and also why they never got along. Charmless. Unfunny. Awful.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Near the end of the film, there are pole dancers in G-strings and pasties -- not exactly a PG-13 visual, one would think. The dialogue is peppered with low and midlevel barnyard profanity and sexual slang. There is gun and fist violence, most of it not very bloody, threatened torture with a drill, considerable unsubtle sexual innuendo, hints of "kinky" sex with handcuffs, and mild drinking.

"REMEMBER ME" -- Some filmgoers will find "Remember Me" and its climactic finale in poor taste, too predictable, or both. High-schoolers, however, may not immediately see tragedy coming -- the story takes place during the summer of 2001 in New York, leading up to Sept. 11 -- and just appreciate the drama, which is well-acted and largely well-written. Robert Pattinson, of the PG-13 rated "Twilight" films, will pull high-schoolers in, too, playing yet another tall-thin-and-tortured anti-hero (who chain-smokes) named Tyler. Estranged from his gruff dad (Pierce Brosnan) since the suicide of his older brother (not shown), Tyler is a lost soul. Then he meets Ally (Emilie de Ravin), a fellow college kid and the daughter of a cop (Chris Cooper) who roughed Tyler up and arrested him outside a bar. Tyler's roommate (Tate Ellington) urges him to break Ally's heart as revenge, but Tyler nixes that plan.

THE BOTTOM LINE: This film is one of those PG-13s that is not for middle-schoolers. It opens with a prologue showing the young Ally witnessing her mother's gun murder in a subway mugging. The sexual situations are quite steamy, if not explicit. The murder is very intense, and there are other fistfights, profanity, drug references and sexual slang and much drinking and smoking. The 9/11 depiction is not graphic at all.

-- R's:

"SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE" -- The Family Filmgoer expected "She's Out of My League" to be lewd, crude, rude and awful and was happily surprised to see that beneath all the R-rated bawdiness was a gentle, good-hearted story -- though told in a way not appropriate for under-17s, with highly profane language and explicit sexual slang, as well as semi-explicit comic sexual situations. A skinny, nerdy Pittsburgh guy named Kirk (Jay Baruchel) works for airport security and figures, since he didn't go to college, that his life is mapped out for him and it's pretty dreary. Then he meets a gorgeous young woman (Alice Eve), who falls for him not because of his washboard abs (he hasn't got any) or money, but because he's nice and funny and smart. His burping, beer-drinking buds can't believe it, nor can his mean ex-girlfriend (Lindsay Sloane). Their constant buzzkill chatter nearly destroys Kirk's self-confidence.

THE BOTTOM LINE: "She's Out of My League" uses extreme frat-house/locker-room humor, sexual situations and language. There is also drinking and backview nudity.

"GREEN ZONE" -- This politically charged thriller should quickly draw in news-savvy high-schoolers. "Green Zone" is fictionalized, but based on the nonfiction book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone" by former Washington Post Iraq bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran. As directed by Paul Greengrass (the PG-13 "Bourne" thrillers), the movie puts you at the dizzying center of the action. Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Miller. It is early in the Iraq War in 2003, and he is searching for those weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein supposedly stockpiled. But Miller and his team are finding nothing. When he beefs about bad intelligence, the White House's man in Iraq (Greg Kinnear) and the military brass tell him to shut up, so he teams with a grizzled CIA guy (Brendan Gleeson) to find the truth. The film's plotting spins a little out of control, but it is always fascinating.

THE BOTTOM LINE: "The Green Zone" depicts deafening, scary house-to-house battles, street skirmishes and firefights, showing civilians, women and children in danger. There are bloody point-blank shootings as well. The film has midrange profanity and drinking.

"BROOKLYN'S FINEST" -- This very adult film about cops working Brooklyn's toughest neighborhoods ought to grab filmgoers 17 and older into crime flicks. "Brooklyn's Finest" has terrific ensemble acting, intense emotions, and stomach-churning urban violence. It borrows heavily from other classic cop films and overuses street slang to the point of silliness, but that won't bother the 17-and-up crowd so much, even if critics see cliches. Richard Gere plays a burned-out street cop nearing retirement and trying to avoid conflict. Don Cheadle plays an undercover cop trying to bring down a drug gang, but torn about betraying its leader (Wesley Snipes), an old friend. Ethan Hawke plays a money-strapped family man trying to skim off confiscated drug money. His partner (Brian F. O'Byrne) tries to stop him.

THE BOTTOM LINE: "Brooklyn's Finest" has blood-spattering point-blank gun iolence, beatings, highly explicit sexual situations with nudity, a prostitution theme, very strong profanity, drug use, drinking and smoking. It deals with corruption and betrayal.

"COP OUT" -- There are cheap laughs in this buddy/action comedy that may amuse high-schoolers 17 and up, but that doesn't mean "Cop Out" is anything other than atrocious -- sloppily filmed and trafficking in every kind of ethnic/racial stereotype and cop-flick cliche. Savvy high-school seniors will see that, as directed by Hollywood iconoclast Kevin Smith, the film is intended as a spoof. But Smith can't seem to decide whether it's wholly tongue-in-cheek or partly serious, so the result is merely slapdash. Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan play eccentric police detective partners. Suspended for the crazy way they go after a drug dealer, they turn quasi-vigilante.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The script is highly profane -- and even that's a cliche in this derivative flick. There is point-blank gun violence, tasering, beatings, crude sexual slang, a strongly implied sexual situation, gross toilet humor, drug references, and a prolonged scene in which a little boy of 10 cusses out the cops in R-rated language.

"SHUTTER ISLAND" -- A lugubrious mess of a movie, "Shutter Island" (based on the novel by Dennis Lehane) may still grab some filmgoers 17 and older with its hypnotic aura of dread, but it might be too much for others. And even older teens who like gothic creep-out movies could be frustrated by its disjointedness, its fizzled ending and its overheated grab-bag of themes ranging from mental illness to Nazi atrocities to Cold War commie-baiting. Director Martin Scorsese lays on the atmospherics so thick, they may prompt giggles. It is the early 1950s. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy, a troubled U.S. Marshal and World War II vet. He and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) come to Shutter Island, a federal facility for the criminally insane, where a patient has disappeared. After meeting with the chief psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley), other patients and guards, Teddy suspects a conspiracy.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Not for under-17s, the movie has repeated graphic flashbacks of corpses and starving survivors at the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp -- an exploitative use of such images in what's really just a potboiler. There are images (unrelated to the war) of drowned children, murdered by a parent, and of a fatal fire. There are graphic gun wounds and intense fights. The "treatment" patients get looks more like torture. There are hallucinatory scenes and swarming rats, strong profanity, crude sexual language, smoking and drinking.