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Author
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Topic: The Upside (2019)
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 01-23-2019 02:33 AM
This one totally got under my radar. My wife had seen a trailer for it somewhere and suggested we go see it on the premise that it is a comedy (apparently the trailers make it look like a comedy).
We saw it at the Cinepolis Luxury Cinema in Jupiter, Florida. This was my first experience with a "luxury" theatre. Our auditorium had a total of 52 seats, arranged in pairs (what do families do?) and our assigned seats were in the 2nd row. Once reclined, the viewing was OK but there was a horrendous hot spot in the lower left center of the screen. I think it was a silver screen but not sure....but that silly hot spot drove me crazy throughout the movie.
This being a "dine in" theater, but me not being particularly hungry, I ordered the chicken tenders. (I can't remember what my wife had.) The waiter was a millennial who was friendly, but talked too fast and mumbled, so I had to ask him to repeat everything. I'm sure he thought I was completely deaf.
The chicken tenders were very good. The fries were weird -- they looked like a steak fry and a potato chip had a baby. They're wide and long like steak fries, but only about 1/8" thick, and kind of crispy, and fairly tasteless. They were like eating salty cardboard. Ketchup helped. What didn't help was the reclining seats.... if you sat up to eat your food, you were craning your neck at the movie, and if you reclined to see the movie, you risked dropping food onto your stomach or chest. Drinking a 32 oz soda was no picnic either in this regard. So at 21 bucks a seat, plus another 30 or so for the food, color me a little impressed. Mostly with the seats. I'd go again if we could get seats a few rows further back and thus be able to eat without lying down. Or - here's an idea -- eat before the movie! Yeah, we'll do that.
Also, my feet hung off the end of the recliner footrest. Hey seat manufacturers, SOME OF US out here are 6 feet tall or more....how about making these things long enough for taller humans to be comfortable in?
The sound was outstanding. The picture was a very generous size, considering there were only 50 seats. It had to be at least 40 feet wide. The image would have been fine if not for the damn hot spot. The screen was provided with movable masking, but the picture came a few inches short filling the image area on all four sides.
Oh, the movie? It's about a wealthy quadraplegic named Philip who, against everyone's better judgement, hires an ex-con loser named Dell (Kevin Hart) to be his "carer," meaning the person who does pretty much everything for the guy -- feeding, dressing, bathing, and yes, helping with bathroom duties. We're not shown too much of the details of any of this, but Dell takes to the job pretty handily -- almost unbelievably so, considering he starts off as a stereotypical "street thug" who is just going around collecting job-search signatures so he can keep collecting unemployment. He's similar to Eddie Murphy's character in "Trading Places," except less funny, not as snappy a dresser, and he knows nothing about the stock market.
Naturally, Philip and Dell form a grudging friendship, but things fall apart eventually when Dell oversteps his 'helper' boundaries, and then they get resolved at the end, but maybe not in quite the way you'd expect. Plus there's a side story about Dell having an estranged girlfriend and a son who he loves, but is completely incompetent in raising him, and of course that gets resolved too, but in a totally expected way.
The cast does an OK job with so-so material. Kevin Hart, I assume, probably made up a lot of his lines as they went along since he provides 95% of what laughs there are. Nicole Kidman is completely forgettable as the "executive assistant" to Philip, who may be a little more than an executive assistant, nod nod wink wink, but she's oh-so-professional. Bryan Cranston, as Philip, handles his role pretty well considering he doesn't move under his own power at all (outside of speaking and turning his head, plus one pre-injory flashback) during the whole movie. So he gets points for being convincing as a quadriplegic.
It has some funny moments but is most definitely not a comedy. I haven't seen the trailers yet, but if they're selling this as a comedy, they're some lyin' mo-fos.
Overall, I thought the movie was OK, but it's definitely not a repeat-watch or a must-buy. 2 out of 5 stars.
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