Uncle Drew is a movie that maybe shouldn’t exist. It mostly stars professional athletes and is based on a series of soda commercials. It makes it more than a little surprising that it is as entertaining as it is. Uncle Drew isn’t the best comedy to come out this year, but it is solid and largely entertaining.

Uncle Drew stars Lil Rey Howery as Dax, the manager of a streetball team gearing up for the Rucker Classic basketball tournament. Just before it is set to start, Dax’s rival Mookie (Nick Kroll) steals his team and his girlfriend (Tiffany Haddish). The dejected Dax then encounters elderly streetball legend Uncle Drew (Kyrie Irving) and manages to convince him to play for him. One of Drew’s requirements for playing is that he gets to pick the rest of the team, which sets the two of them off on a roadtrip to put his old team back together.

That team includes power forward Preacher (Chris Webber), who is now a minister married to Betty Lou (Lisa Leslie) who does not want Preacher to play. They also pick up Lights (Reggie Miller), a legally blind outside shooting expert and Boots (Nate Robinson), the hyperactive point guard who is now confined to a wheelchair. Along with Boots comes his granddaughter Maya, who becomes Dax’s love interest. Lastly, they pick up Big Fella (Shaquille O’Neal), their center and now martial arts instructor.

It all mostly exists for former, and current, professional athletes to put on old age makeup and make a bunch of old people jokes. The other part mostly involves simplistic life lessons, like echoing Tag’s moral that “you don’t stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing,” and noting that you miss all of the shots you don’t take. It is fine, not profound but doesn’t need to be and is not supposed to be. The last ingredient to formula is seeing these old players school a bunch of youngsters. Other than an early scene of Uncle Drew clowning a young guy near the start, the movie does its best to withhold this part until the end, but it is mostly worth the pay off.

There is just enough the make the characters in this movie actually characters to string things along between the basketball and jokes. There is Dax’s arrested development, with him being trapped in a moment when he got his shot blocked, by Mookie, as a kid and with his feeling alone since he grew up an orphan. There is also the conflict between Big Fella and Uncle Drew that broke up the team all those years ago. It isn’t anything surprising and its resolution is pat, but it is enough of a conflict to be a conflict.

As far as basketball goes, Uncle Drew largely delivers. That is the advantage of casting professional basketball players. The tournament plays out almost exactly how you’d expect it to, but there is enough here to be enjoyable. I don’t know why this movie exists, but I am not upset I used my moviepass to go see it.

***

Hearts Beat Loud is a low key, charming little movie about a father and daughter. It doesn’t really do anything new or unexpected, but it is good hearted and enjoyable that it is easy to like anyway.

Hearts Beat Loud is a movie about the inevitability of change. Change isn’t innately good or bad, it merely is. Sam (Kiersey Clemmons) is graduating from high school and heading to college across the country. Her father Frank (Nick Offerman) is having a hard time dealing with it. Added on to this is that Frank’s record store is going out of business. The two of them are a musical family and after an evening of playing together, Frank becomes determined that the two of them will start a band. This is an enticing prospect for Frank, who used to be in a band with Sam’s mother before their daughter was born.

There is sadness is Frank’s obviously futile quest. The viewer knows that the worst possible outcome here is that Sam puts off her medical school dreams to start a band with her Dad, but as the movie seems determined to strip everything he has away from him you can’t help but sympathize with Frank a little bit. A big part of their relationship is obviously their musical connection and him wanting to keep them together with it is understandable, but also kind of selfish. Even Frank appears to know that it is a bad idea, although it is one that lets him keep his daughter around.

Sam appears to know this and for the most part shows little interest in giving up school to be in a band. But she also writes songs, because she is a musician. She also has to deal with moving across the country and giving up a burgeoning romance. There are tons of reasons for her to stay, but it is obvious that staying would be a limiting move for her.

In a parallel to losing his relationship with his daughter, Frank’s record shop is also going out of business. Like with the band business, Frank is given an opportunity to keep the record shop going, only it will mean changing it from what he knew. He has to decide if it is worth keeping what he had at the risk of changing it utterly, or just letting it go and grow to be something else.

A movie can’t put the emphasis that Hearts Beat Loud does on music and not make the music worth listening to. Fortunately, Hearts Beat Loud has some really great tunes and the significant time it spends letting its characters just play music is not wasted space.

Hearts Beat Loud is undeniably slight. It is a simple and low key affair buoyed largely by its charming cast, which in addition to Clemmons and Offerman includes Toni Collette, Blythe Danner, Ted Danson and Sasha Lane, and its engaging sincerity. A fun, touching trifle.

****

The first Sicario was a look at the drug war that put the viewer in the shoes of Emily Blunt’s FBI agent Macer as she was exposed to the moral rot that it involved. It invited the viewer to join in her alienation as the tactics of the good guys became essentially indistinguishable from the bad guys. Sicario: Day of the Soldado, still wants to have that moral complexity, but other than a few echoes of the original it manages none of it. The fact that it works as well as it does rests entirely on the shoulders of Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin, who is having quite a year.

Sicario Day of the Soldado starts with some histrionics about imagined border security fears, with Muslim suicide bombers sneaking through the Mexican border to attack American grocery stores. It is a disgusting bum note that the movie never quite manages to recover from. It does give an unneeded in to introduce Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a CIA operative who is busy torturing someone suspected of facilitating the suicide bombers. The US government has decided to treat the Mexican Cartels like terrorist organizations and wants Graver to bring his expertise to disrupting the cartels. He starts a plan to kidnap the daughter of the head of a cartel and frame another cartel for it. He brings along with him Alejandro Gillick (Del Toro), a mexican hitman he worked with in the past. Things go awry, as these things do, and Alejandro and Matt end up on opposite sides of the border and the conflict. Weaved inelegantly through the thriller is a plot line about a kid who gets caught up with the gangs starting by helping people cross the border for some cash.

Without Blunt’s character, the movie has no heart. The first half shows only the moral emptiness, with nothing to compare it against and making no real comment about it; it merely shows the blackness. About midway through, it turns into something of a straight up Western, and the two amoral operative suddenly develop at least the inklings of a conscious. It works for Del Toro’s Gillick, because it fits with his motivation. For Graver, it comes out of nowhere and makes little sense. The plot with the kid is as bleak as it could possibly be, but the movie doesn’t let the viewer inside of his thoughts to any degree at all, making it hard to tell if this is a drifting or just how he always was.

The end is where the movie really falls apart. It has no themes to tie together and no interest in delivering some kind of exciting final act, so it just sort of peters out with unsatisfying conclusions to its various plots. Some of them barely explained. Were I feeling generous, I might say the movie is leaving the viewer unfulfilled so they can chew on the movie’s meaning, but the movie doesn’t manage to have much of meaning, leaving the viewer simply underwhelmed.

Ignoring the movie’s either disgusting or muddled politics, as an action thriller it is fairly well staged. Its few actions scenes are tense and exciting. Brolin and Del Toro both deliver very good performances that make it easy to forget how unnecessary this sequel is.

**

I have long felt that The Incredibles is Pixar’s best movie. It was also the Pixar movie most calling for a sequel. It didn’t need a sequel, no Pixar movie has needed a sequel, but The Incredibles seemed like the one that was tailor made for there to be continuing adventures. Now, more than a dozen years after the original’s release, a sequel is here. While Incredibles 2 doesn’t quite match the original, it is a more than worthy follow up.

Although more than a decade has passed since it was released, Incredibles 2 picks up right after the The Incredibles ends, with the Underminer attacking the city and only the Parrs there to stop him. After a somewhat botched fight with the Underminer, the movie moves on to its main point. Winston Deaver wants to bring supers back, and his plan involves getting some of the most popular ones, like Mr. Incredible, Frozone and Elastigirl, to go on something of a charm offensive. Primarily, he wants Elastigirl, since she tends to be the least destructive in her crime fighting. That leaves Mr. Incredible to take care of the kids on his own.

The movie proceeds along those two paths, Helen/Elastigirl’s adventures at her new job trying to make supers look good and Bob/Mr. Incredible having to be a stay at home dad. Helen’s adventures have her dealing with the mysterious new villain the Screenslaver and mostly put other superhero movie action scene to shame. Her on her motorcycle chasing down a runaway train is one of the best action scenes I’ve ever seen. Bob’s scenes are likewise a lot of fun, with Bob having to help Dash with his homework, to try to fix a breach he caused between Violet and her beau and to deal with the fact that Jack-Jack has started exhibiting superpowers.

Mostly, Incredibles 2 is a fun expansion of the world of the first movie. It introduces a half dozen new heroes with inventive powers. It works on solving the problem that drove all the heroes underground in the first movie. Where it falters, slightly, is how it doesn’t really move the characters along that much. It flips the relative roles of Bob and Helen from the first movie, but doesn’t do anything all that new with them. The kids, other than Jack-Jack, don’t really have much to do. They are the same characters they were the first time around and we don’t really learn anything more about them or see them grow. The movie does have a lot of fun with the baby and those scenes delightful.

There isn’t much about the movie that doesn’t work, but it lacks a little of the original spark of the first movie. Maybe it is just that the landscape for superhero movies is quite different now than it was in 2004. The Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it had not even started yet; its contemporaries were X2, Daredevil and Spider-Man 2. Now, instead of one or two superhero movies a year and maybe one of them is good, we see five or six, plus all the TV shows. It makes it harder for Incredibles 2 to stand out. Nothing, however, hides its excellent construction and marvelous adventure.

*****

Tag is a movie with a lot of people I want to see in good movies in a movie just competent enough to get by. Tag isn’t bad and actually tries to do some things that are at least partially interesting or original, but it can’t quite manage to break higher than forgettable summer comedy.

Tag, as the title implies, is about the game of tag, or at least a game of Tag. A group of friends, played by Jon Hamm, Hannibal Buress, Jake Johnson, Jeremy Renner and Ed Helms, have been playing the same game of tag since they were children. Every year during the month of May they go to great lengths to sneak up on and tag each other. The movie starts with Ed Helms getting a job at Jon Hamm’s company just to ambush him with a tag. This leads to a journalist, played by Annabelle Wallis, deciding to write a story about this group.

Mostly the cast plays into their expected comic personas. Jake Johnson plays a stoner, Hannibal Buress is wry and kind of above it all, Jon Hamm is all arrogant self-assurance. Ed Helms is the kind of dweeby everyman. Jeremy Renner’s character, though, is some sort of tag savant, having never in the course of their game been tagged. When the other four find out that he has not invited them to his wedding, they team up to tag him before he gets married and quits the game forever.

While the movie expressly doesn’t let the women play the game, it also doesn’t do that thing where they are all nags. Ilsa Fisher plays Helms’ wife and gets so into things that keeping her out of the game seems to have been done for everyone’s safety, including her own. And Wallis’s reporter is mostly kind of an amused outsider, observing with interest even as lines are broken, though luckily they don’t quite get to torture. Finally, Leslie Bibb at first appears to be the wet blanket, but she merely wants to keep the game out of the wedding and is actually a master at helping her husband to be avoid a tag.

As these things go, initially only outrageous attempts to tag their friends, from the secret job to hiding in the closet of a therapist, soon spiral out of control, with breaking and entering and kidnapping and absurd lies about medical problems eventually being the methods employed to get a tag. That being said, the outrageous antics never really add up to comedy gold. Its attempts at a heartfelt look at friendship hit closer to the mark, though its central message of “you don’t quit playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing,” is not quite as profound as they seem to want it to be.

All told, Tag is a moderately entertaining movie, especially if you happen to be a fan of one or more of the actors involved.

***

Hotel Artemis had all the makings of being a cult hit like John Wick, but in the end it just doesn’t quite come together. The movie is filled with so many interesting characters and ideas that it really hurts when the whole turns out to be less than the sum of the parts. Still, the movie is entertaining throughout and while it leaves you wondering about what might have been, there isn’t a whole lot about what it is to dislike.

The Hotel Artemis is a near future hospital for criminals. It has strict rules about admittance and membership. When a bank robbery goes wrong, a pair of brothers show up at the hospital, taking on the names of their rooms, Waikiki and Honolulu. The Hotel is run by Nurse and her assistant Everest, who rigorously enforce the rules, as show by Everest kicking out one of the brothers’ accomplices who is not a member. Also at the Artemis is a nasty little man called Acapulco and and Waikiki’s former lover Nice, an assassin. As they enter, riots break out in the streets, which leads to Nurse breaking her own rules to take in a cop that was a friend of her son, only to find that the Artemis’s benefactor, The Wolf King, is coming to have some injuries tended.

The plot keeps building and the view is stuck waiting for a explosion that never really comes. It helps that the cast is amazing. Jodie Foster plays Nurse and instills in her a marvelous combination of vulnerability and competence. Dave Bautista is Everest and doesn’t really press his range in being large and intimidating, but does it so well. The same is true for Charlie Day as Acapulco, who is at his snide, insufferable best. Sterling Brown as Waikiki is the solid center for all the rest of this to build around and Sofia Boutella is great as the mysterious Nice. Lastly, Jeff Goldblum shows up near the end to play the amiable, but dangerous Wolf King.

For most of its runtime, Hotel Artemis keeps adding wrinkles to its plot. There are the riots; there are stolen diamonds; there is a planned assassination; there is Nurse’s past; there Honolulu’s drug problems; and there is the Wolf King’s angry son. You can feel the tension ratcheting higher and higher as everyone starts to break the rules and become compromised. Then it ends. It feels like there should be another act, or at least another scene, but instead it builds to something of an anticlimax.

Until the end, I would say that I loved Hotel Artemis. It is creative and wild and interesting. But it feels like it didn’t know what to once it had introduced everything. So it just sort of let each of its little plots come to their own little resolution without any of it coming together in a meaningful way. It leaves you not so much wanting more, but wishing it had been more.

****