Playing with Fire: one movie that should have been burnt.

over 3 years ago

Greetings, Hivers
I love movies and I try to be very open-minded about genres, performances, and plots, but some movies are so bad they freak me out.

Some movies should never be made.

Unless of course you got the right budget, the right actors, and the right script; and even then you may have the wrong director who would screw everything up. Andy Fickman (remember that name) seems to be one of those directors who can ruin a movie (Jewopia), an actor’s career (Kevin James even tried gore drama after Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2), and a movie fan’s night.

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Starring John Cena (Jake "Supe" Carson), who manages to make Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a virtuoso in comparison; Keegan-Michael Key (Mark Rogers), with a performance that would make even the worst non-actors of the world say: “I could have done it better”; John Leguizamo (Rodrigo Torres), who should be wishing for a sixth Ice Age movie so that people will forget about this one; and Judy Greer (Dr. Amy Hicks), who did not embarrassed herself so much because she did not get more lines or scenes, this movie is terrible combination of bad acting, writing, directing, and life philosophy. Greer’s character provides a piece of parental advice that proofs problematic in real life, but which somehow made it into the psyche of a generation, despite the damaging results: “Kids are like fires, you can’t control them. You just have to contain them until they burn themselves out.” I don’t think the comparison is logical or the results applicable. Timely intervention (control?) may prevent many wild fires.

The movie is about a group of tough smokejumpers, who are supposed to be cooler than regular firefighters, commanded by Cena’s character, and whose life is put upside-down by three children they rescued from a fire and are forced to babysit for a couple of days while their parents come pick them up. In the mean time, Carson is in the process of getting promoted, which represents a big personal aspiration and a challenge since the standards for the position demand the upmost macho behavior. As you can image, the kids will put into question Carson’s authority and jeopardize his chances of getting the promotion. The rather contrived and unrealistic ending may be satisfying for those accustomed to feel-good movies, but for me it stresses some troubling tendencies to emasculate male characters as if that were the only way they could develop empathy, love, and responsibility.

It serves me right, though. I should have trusted the critics. I should have trusted my guts. One reason we will continue seeing crappy comedies like Playing with Fire being made is because there is an audience that still approves this kind of mess, more than 70% according to some sources. That should not surprise me considering the emergence of reality shows and influencers in the last decade.

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This year has been a really bad one for everyone; bad movies were probably a logical addition to our disastrous pandemonium, aka 2020, and even though this movie was released in November, 2019, I will count it as one of 2020’s worst movies. I am seriously considering not watching any more family/comedy movies for a long time. It seems that the tendency is now towards scatological humor (of the stinky kind), parental questioning, gender roles distortion, emasculation, melodrama, and an utter disregard for realism.

Dan Ewen and Matt Lieberman (mark these names too) were behind the atrocious script, which was bad enough to make all human actors look really bad. The only possible exception was the dog that provided some oxygen to a suffocating movie experience.

The movie fails in all ways a movie can fail, even a slap-stick comedy. There are also a couple of rather awkward scenes involving “Supe” Carson and little Zoey (played by child actress Finley Rose Slater) that, far from being funny, were embarrassing and of poor taste.