A reboot for a beloved comedy franchise, an animated heist sequel designed to be grander than its predecessor, a gripping odyssey for an endangered 11-year-old and a stunning meditation on an endangered planet. Hollywood's got it all this weekend.
The Naked Gun
In theaters Friday
For many years, on Police Squad! on TV and then in The Naked Gun movies, Leslie Nielsen played Frank Drebin, the deadly serious detective who was the butt, sometimes literally, of most of the jokes that surrounded him. Now, more than 30 years after the last Naked Gun movie, Liam Neeson takes over as Frank Drebin, Jr., who, obviously, takes after his dad. Here, he and his partner (Paul Walter Hauser) are up against an evil tech mogul named Cane (Danny Huston). Cane has developed something called the P.L.O.T. device, and it's obviously very dangerous, so Drebin has to stop him. Along the way, he meets the sultry Beth Davenport, played by Pamela Anderson. That's just about all you need to know about the story, such as it is, because like the original franchise, this Naked Gun is all about a joke pileup. — Linda Holmes
She Rides Shotgun
In limited theaters Friday
We meet 11-year-old Polly (a remarkable Ana Sophia Heger) outside her elementary school as all the other kids and staff head home. Her mom is late picking her up, and when a car squeals to the curb and Nate (Taron Egerton) heavily-tattooed and recently incarcerated, urges her to get in, it's hard not to scream "no!" Things are scarcely more encouraging when he turns out to be her dad, clearly on the run. Turns out, he may be her best shot at survival in Nick Rowland's gritty film adaptation of Jordan Harper's 2017 novel.
Polly and Nate are soon skittering all over the American southwest, just ahead of some very bad men, and because Nate's not saying much, Polly never knows whom to trust. Nor do we, which keeps their violent odyssey tense and the action unnerving as Rowland alternates big-sky country with claustrophobic hideouts. Rob Yang and John Carroll Lynch are briskly effective as lawmen who may or may not have Polly's welfare front-of-mind; Egerton is ripped and terrifying as a father whose very existence seems to put his daughter in danger; and Heger is flat-out terrific as a child who proves as resourceful and canny as she is vulnerable. — Bob Mondello
The Bad Guys 2
In theaters Friday
It's hard to get a job at a bank you've robbed, as light-fingered Mr. Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell) discovers when he slows down from the car chase that starts this rambunctious sequel. So, although he and he and the rest of his animated gang tried to go straight in the first movie, they are quickly pulled back into committing another heist. Safecracker Mr. Snake (Mark Maron), quick-tempered Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos), disguise-master Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and computer hacker Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina) all join forces this time with ruthless schemer Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), science wiz Pigtail (Maria Bakalova) and a seductive raven named Doom (Natasha Lyonne) to hijack a rocket from a tech billionaire (Colin Jost), and also to steal the world's entire supply of gold.
As you might guess from that synopsis, what's being parodied this time is less Oceans Eleven, the object of fun in the first Bad Guys film, and more James Bond (specifically Moonraker) — the sort of bigger-must-be-better escalation that's long afflicted live-action sequels. Thankfully, the overkill is offset somewhat by excellent character work by the vocal cast, and the same cleverness and visual flair that charmed kids and their parents in the first film. — Bob Mondello
Architecton
In limited theaters Friday
A nearly wordless meditation on the building blocks of civilization — stone and concrete — Viktor Kossakovsky's sensory overload of a documentary offers a dazzling, epically cinematic argument that what the earth has endured as man has used and abused it is unsustainable. The filmmaker makes his points not with words, but with majestic, breath-catchingly beautiful images: Slow motion shots of stone cascading downhill — larger chunks fracturing and shattering, smaller ones crumbling into dust in a torrent that behaves almost like a frothing waterfall. Deep, even cuts in a terraced quarry catch daylight and shadow in patterns that have a majesty of their own, even as they mock the age-old geologic striations of surrounding granite mountains. A nearby pine tree sheathed in freshly fallen snow, viewed from directly above, glitters in the sunlight like a giant, symmetrical snowflake, then crashes to the earth, felled by a chainsaw.
And everywhere, as if to remind us that man's alterations to the planet have a shelf-life measured in years, not eons, the filmmaker provides soaring drone shots of ancient Roman ruins with Corinthian columns standing proud amidst rubble and shattered modern structures destroyed by bombs in Ukraine, or by earthquakes in Turkey. Architect Michele De Lucchi confesses to feeling some shame for an unremarkable concrete structure he has helped to insert into Milan's already-crowded downtown. In a sort of penance, he employs two stoneworkers to create a simple stone circle in the yard of his house, designed as a negative space — a human-free area that will be allowed to return to nature. The work is painstaking and precise, and seems, by the end of this staggeringly effective film, in some elemental way, essential. — Bob Mondello
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