Davis Freeberg's DVD AllStars

It's hard for me to look at movies seperately when they are sequels.  I always want to see the all picture and tend to judge the whoe franchise by it's overall quality.  Normally, I won't see a film, if I'm not prepared to see it's sequel too, but for this pair of dark comedies, my advice is check out The Whole Nine Yards, but skip the tenth yard.

The first movie is dark, witty, very funny.  A lot of sophisticated humor mixed in with it's moments of slapstick.  The second movie is just as dark and at times witty, but the plot makes no sense and it fails at ever being funny.  This is a case of sequels gone bad.  The first one made so much money, that they had to jump in and try to make too much out of it.  In the end the sequel has the same cast of characters, but it feels much more forced and the humor too dependent upon what happened in the first movie.

I walked into this film knowing absolutely nothing about it, except that Gwenth Paltrow was in it.  I left very disappointed.  The story follows a set of characters around the midwest as they all eventually head towards a Karaoke competition in Nevada.  The movie relies heavily on character interaction in the film and during the film you explore a midlife crisis, an absent dad reunited with his daughter and an ex-con on a karaoke crime spree.

The movie tried to take itself too serious and at the end you feel like you invested a lot of emotional energy into the movie, but with very little payoff.  The setting for the film could have inspired a sitcom, but it doesn't go off well as a drama.  While the whole time I wanted to like the characters, at the end of the day their neverending quest for the next karaoke bar seemed like the wrong motivators.  I'd stay away from this one unless it's just you, a bunch of your girlfriends and a half gallon of Hagan Daaz.