In “Playing with Fire,” he’s like Jon Hamm’s lunk brother - you want to see him wind down and unclench. And Cena’s antic volubility is very 21st century.
But Cena may be the first bodybuilder-turned-actor who has what Arnold Schwarzenegger had: the ability to project a mocking light soul trapped in a musclehead’s body. He’s so pumped up his palms have muscles the veins in his chest look like implanted electric wires. Playing this paramilitary firefighter jock, a character built directly around his bodybuilder physique, Cena is certainly convincing. (Leguizamo is less funny as a goofball man-child who reflexively misquotes the famous.)īut it’s John Cena’s movie. Keegan-Michael Key does something sharp in this movie: He takes a nothing role and plays each riff with a concentration so wide-eyed and manic it becomes surreal. That generational friction, between her and Jake, is the source of the film’s comedy - or, at least, it is in the first “episode,” which is basically “If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get The Kids Out of the Kitchen.” There’s a bit of head-bonking, as well as an incident where Jake and Mark have to clean up a bathroom accident by little Zoey, and the actors’ largely improvised gross-out panic (we see more of it in the outtakes) is pretty damn funny. In describing the kids’ antics, I almost used the term “high jinks,” but I avoided it because Brynn, in her more-plugged-in-than-thou Gen-Z hauteur, would sneer at a phrase like “high jinks.” It’s so old. (They’re pretending their parents were away in fact, they are orphans.) Do you think there’s a chance they could stay at the firehouse and cause a lot of precocious trouble and, through all the slapstick disaster, form a sitcom family with the smokejumpers? There’s another brief action sequence (they rush to extinguish a burning cabin), but that’s only there to set up the sitcom premise: In the cabin they rescue three children - the sassy teenage Brynn (Brianna Hildebrand) and her sibling tots, Will (Christian Convery) and Zoey (Finley Rose Slater) - who now need a place to go. But then Jake, known as “Supe” (short for superintendent), and his right-hand men, the deeply loyal chatterbox Rodrigo (John Leguizamo) and the sarcastic wiseacre Mark (Keegan-Michael Key), head back to the firehouse, which is basically the film’s elaborate version of a three-camera sitcom set. The fire sure looks real (it’s an impressive sequence), so you may figure you’re in for a wholesomely heroic action comedy. The film opens with Cena, as Jake Carson, leading the battle against a wildfire blaze in a California forest.
0 kommentar(er)
