Double Dip: Christopher Robin and Mile 22

Christopher Robin (2018)

Christopher Robin was almost painfully adorable. It was never close to making me cry, but I was smiling for almost the entire movie. It had one of the strongest openings of a movie this year, introducing the characters and their connection to the innocence of childhood and then using the opening credit sequence to shatter that childhood with loss and war. It was similar to the opening of Up, developing a character with little dialogue and doing it in a meaningful way to forge a connection to the protagonist (by no means am I saying it was as good as Up’s opening, because that was perfect, but it was very good). From the opening onwards, we are treated to a tale of rediscovering happiness and youth. It was a fairly simple retelling of a person reconnecting with their inner child, but it was well done and very sweet. While the advertising sold it as a children’s movie, it was geared more towards adults, reminding them that family and fun are just as important as work and money. Some of the kids in the theater were bored with the movie because they still have the innocence and the message was lost on them. Also, many of them are unfamiliar with Winnie the Pooh, especially a version more faithful to the A.A. Milne source material than to the Disney cartoons. They also didn’t appreciate how the setting was a character and how beautiful the cinematography was. But I enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone looking for a smile and a reminder that it is okay to have fun. I only had one major problem with the movie, and that is how flippantly everyone dealt with Christopher Robin’s sadness and seriousness when he returned from the war (one of the World Wars, but I’m not sure which one). At points, I pitied Christopher Robin in the movie because every solution posed to him came from someone who hadn’t spent three years watching people die. I understand the choice, because that is how people dealt with PTSD at the time, but it still made me sad. On a lighter note, Pooh was the cutest movie character so far this year, and his stupidity was very sage. Overall, Christopher Robin was a light, fun family film with a simple story that often gets overlooked. I give Christopher Robin 86 acres of the Hundred Acre Wood.

Mile 22 (2018)

While Christopher Robin was almost a master-class in using opening credits to introduce characters and provide context as time passed, Mille 22 had a terrible opening. The first half hour was just bad. The first scene was a by the numbers action movie scene that felt like it was written by a robot that had only watched Chuck Norris movies and NRATV. The opening credits hastily introduced Mark Wahlberg’s character, a shallow narcissist who snaps an elastic on his wrist when he thinks hard or is stressed. They try to make him relatable by giving him a tragic backstory, but when you meet his character, just comes off as a jerk, making him hard to root for. Then time flashes forward and we have CIA twenty minutes of CIA fan-fiction that thinks it is clever, but isn’t clever. It tries to be edgy by making everybody swear every other word and it comes across as lazy. Then the action finally starts and director Peter Berg shines, with well-shot combat sequences in many ranges and settings. There is even an obligatory hallway battle. The action was good enough to cover up for lack of character development and empty story. It was non-stop and sufficiently brutal to engage the audience, until the end that was pretty obvious from the middle of the movie. Mile 22 wasn’t a bad movie, but it wasn’t good either. It will be relegated to the $4 DVD bin in two years. I give the movie 12 out of 22 miles. Just over half of it was good, but that makes for a forgettable whole movie.

My favorite part contains a mild spoiler, so stop reading if you care. Near the end, a character tells Mark Wahlberg, “Say hi to your mother for me,” which I found delightful because of the SNL sketch of “Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals”. Here is a link to the clip:

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/mark-wahlberg-talks-to-animals/n12321