comedy

Every now and then there is a movie or two that’s so bad that you actually find yourself walking away from it halfway through, or having to pep talk yourself into finishing watching – that’s the category that Is That A Gun In Your Pocket? falls into. The film is an attempt at comedy written and directed by Matt Cooper, starring Andrea Anders, Matt Passmore, John Heard and Cloris Leachman.

Skiptrace (originally titled Jue Di Tao Wang) is a 2016 action-comedy film directed by Renny Harlin and starring Jackie Chan, Johnny Knoxville and Chinese actress Fan Bingbing. It is about a Hong Kong cop and an avid gambler that must team together, each for their own reasons, and take down the Chinese crime syndicate and its mysterious leader ‘The Matador’. It is a film that I, in all honesty, did not want to sit down and watch at first but did, due to unmentionable circumstances, and in my forced viewing of this easy-going and lighthearted film, I began to remember why Jackie Chan is one of the most beloved names in Hollywood.

A midlife crisis is roughly defined as a period of anxiety and disappointment reflecting on your past as you approach middle age. Those going through a midlife crisis are noted to act irrationally compared to their previous behaviour in a need to get out of a self-perceived rut. It has often been noted that no two people react to the dawning of maturity in the same manner, even if the cause of the anxiety is always the same.

It now appears to be a given that every few years, Woody Allen produces a film hailed by critics as a “return to form”. In keeping with relatively recent late period offerings such as Blue Jasmine, Midnight in Paris and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Café Society has also been afforded that accolade. Is this lazy journalism or a concise way of communicating that he has again crafted a film that bears the hallmarks of this aging auteur’s better judgement?