CHIPS (2017)
IMDB Rating 5.5/10 (as on 26.03.2017)
A rookie officer is teamed with a hardened pro at the
California Highway Patrol, though the newbie soon learns his partner is really
an undercover Fed investigating a heist that may involved some crooked cops.
Director: Dax Shepard
Writer: Dax Shepard
Stars: Michael Peña, Dax Shepard, Jessica McNamee
R | 1h 40min | Action, Comedy, Crime
In ‘CHIPS,’ Blown-Up Cars Overshadow Buddy Cops
A fascination with posteriors —
both human and feline — isn’t the worst thing about “CHIPS,” but it’s up there.
Borderline incoherent and unrepentantly lewd, this buddy-cop comedy (based on
the 1977-83 television series of the same name) substitutes cars, ’copters and
motorcycles for actual characters. The language might be mature, but don’t be
misled: There’s nothing here that rises above the level of the playground.
And that’s too bad, because had
there been, the talented Michael Peña wouldn’t have had to work so hard to hold
this minimally amusing mess together. As Ponch, an undercover federal agent
investigating corruption in the California Highway Patrol, Mr. Peña struggles
to make his character more than a walking erection. That’s tough when your new
partner, Jon (Dax Shepard, who also wrote and directed), seems so fixated on
his own equipment that he keeps forcing you to look at it. The mixed messages
are clamorous.
“I don’t think we went more than three days on
this movie without blowing something up,” Mr. Shepard says in the publicity
notes, betraying the picture’s true intent. Yet beyond checking genre boxes,
the action sequences, while undeniably flashy, often have debatable narrative
utility. The accomplished cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen brings what context
he can to the pyrotechnics, but not even he can perk up the movie’s drearily
staged indoor setups. Focusing his camera intently on a cat’s backside, he must
surely have been questioning his life choices.
Read full review at New York times
Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆
Timid, off-colour cops-on-bikes remake
Here comes yet another addition
to the “ironic film remake of a beloved 70s/80s TV series” genre, which is
starting to look as dated as the shows it purports to send up. Updating of the
cops-on-bikes action drama of the same name, ChiPs stars Michael Peña in the
old Erik Estrada role of Ponch, a sex-addicted FBI agent who is tasked with
rooting out police corruption by going undercover in the California highway
patrol unit.
When placed next to the gleeful
postmodernism of the 21 Jump Street films, this feels remarkably timid, its
humour built around off-colour gags (including one desperately poorly judged
Oscar Pistorius joke) and the mildly homophobia-tinged bromance between Ponch
and Baker. Shepard and Pena do at least throw themselves into proceedings with
elan, but they can’t prevent CHiPs from seeming a distinctly second-gear
affair.
Read full review at The Guardian
Movie Rating ★☆☆☆
Big-screen 'CHIPS' a tawdry, sexist disappointment
CHiPs" was a wholesome TV
show in the 1970s and '80s about two California Highway Patrol officers. They
were a couple of good-natured guys who embodied California cool with their
motorcycles and mirrored sunglasses, solving problems, catching criminals and
brightening days everywhere.
The two main characters discuss
the looks of almost every woman on screen. Calling someone "a 2"
might be a forgivable comic misstep, but making such remarks a major part of a
movie's humor is reductive and gross, not to mention outdated and uninspired.
Maybe you need to look like Kristen Bell (Shepard's wife, in real life and this
film) or have a Y chromosome to find it funny.
The best thing about
"CHIPS" is some classic Southern California scenery and superb
motorcycle riding, complete with stairwell tricks, airborne stunts and long
shots of that beloved mecca for local bikers, Angeles Crest Highway.
But overall, the film is an
uncomfortable eye-roll. Shepard and co-star Michael Pena have plenty of charm,
but not enough to support the feeble story and tasteless jokes.
The film opens with the words
"The California Highway Patrol does not endorse this film - at all,"
and it's easy to see why.
The objectification of women
here is brutal. There are several close-ups of women's butts in yoga pants, and
Ponch openly lusts after them - so much that it's a problem and he has to
quickly steal away to masturbate. I'm not kidding. Even the CHP chief, played
by Jane Kaczmarek, is reduced to an object: Ponch and Jon discuss her body
("It was tight") after Ponch discovers she's secretly sex-crazed. (Of
course she is.)
Only Maya Rudolph, who makes a
brief cameo to reunite with her "Idiocracy" co-star, escapes
objectification. She is just a police officer who happens to be female. Josh
Duhamel and the original Ponch, Erik Estrada, also make cameos, though
unfortunately Estrada gets in on the lady lust.
Made before the U.S. elected a president
whose crude, caught-on-tape remarks regarding women inspired a nationwide
conversation about "locker-room talk," there's no shortage of a
"locker-room" tone toward women in "CHIPS." That's not just
tired and unfunny, it's potentially alienating to half the population.
The TV series was from a
different era, to be sure, but affording basic respect regardless of someone's
looks or gender is timeless.
Read fill review at Daily Mail
Who is this
feeble NSFW cop show reboot aimed at?
The comedian Dax Shepard isn’t
a tested box-office draw – not in the UK, at least. But two and a half years
ago, someone at Warner Bros entrusted him with making a light-hearted send-up
of the California-set police series CHiPs, which was broadcast at weekend
teatimes on ITV in the late 1970s and 1980s, never quite catching on in the
same way as Knight Rider or The A-Team.
Whether you recall the show
fondly or have never heard of it, this new movie version is, by any measure,
staggeringly feeble. Shepard serves as its writer, director and star: his work
in all three capacities recalls Martin Freeman’s nervous body double in Love
Actually, obligingly wobbling through the motions while the crew wait for the
real talent to show up. Tragically in this instance, they never did.
Unlike the original
family-friendly show, the tone here is blaringly NSFW: Shepard and his co-star
Michael Peña rambling endlessly, and almost entirely punchline-lessly, about
their characters’ sex lives and genitals, pausing only for an occasional
motorcycle chase, to watch something explode, or to ogle nude or otherwise
compromising photographs of their female colleagues on their mobile phones.
Quite who the studio imagined
their target audience was for this is a mystery on a par with the Zodiac
killings: the material seems aimed at a hyperactive eight-year-old boy with the
jaded sexual palate of a vengeful divorcé.
That Shepard and Peña lack
chemistry is the least of their problems. The writing is so muddy, even the
basic trajectories of their jokes are unintelligible. It’s never clear, for
instance, if Ponch’s homophobic rants are supposed to be funny because they’re
non-PC or amusingly pathetic, or because they ironically mark him out as a
closet case. (Peña, who’s been funny and charming in everything from End of Watch
to Ant-Man, just seems defeated.)
Often the film resorts to that
unforgivable cheat move of having the supporting cast laugh at its leads’
antics on screen, in the hope of prompting us to do likewise. Instead I found
myself curling over in such a paralysing cringe, my body had to be rolled out
of the cinema afterwards like a dented bicycle wheel.
Read full review at Telegraph
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