Ride Along 2, The Benefactor, Theeb, The Treasure

Ride Along 2

The Benefactor

Theeb

The Treasure

Yup, it’s January.

Ride Along

Two stars is overly generous for the Kevin Hart-Ice Cube cop comedy “Ride Along,” but it’s so much more enjoyable than “G.B.F.” or “The Rocket,” I can’t squeeze them into the same star rating.

21 Jump Street

I was all set to have a blast watching the movie "21 Jump Street" - a friend had told me it was beyond funny - and it kept feeling like it was about to happen, but it never did. It's a movie where nobody behaves the way a human being would in similar circumstances, so it's essentially absurdist humor, which is very hard to pull off. And it never quite finds its groove for more than a moment at a time; it's an uneasy mix of desperation, the actors flailing about and ever more profanity where the funny lines are supposed to go, and unwarranted nonchalance, as though the set-up were funny enough without worrying about the execution.

Rampart

Woody Harrelson gives a look-at-me performance as a rogue LAPD cop in Oren Moverman's style-over-substance misfire "Rampart." Moverman aims to create, in Harrelson's Dave Brown, an iconic embodiment of paranoid, self-righteous vigiliantism, but peppering Brown's vocabulary with a few two-dollar words doesn't make him iconic any more than clogging the soundtrack with right-wing talk radio and the noise of the vacuum cleaner in the adjacent apartment conveys paranoia. The movie is plot-heavy, which is a problem because the plot is a muddled mess, so that when the lights abruptly came on, we looked at each other befuddled and asked, "Okay, what just happened?" Interesting performances by Sigourney Weaver, Robin Wright, Ned Beatty and Ice Cube get lost in a morass of coincidences and bizarre camera angles in a picture that's less than the sum of its parts.