Finally another entry, and there’s going to be plenty more if August holds up like it will for the next two Fridays. Of course, all good conservatives should avoid the new Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg comedy
The Other Guys. It’s directed by loyal liberal Adam McKay, and you can expect all kinds of snide attacks on conservatives throughout the movie. Probably more than usual, since Jim Treacher managed to piss off McKay via Twitter just as production was starting. For such a successful director, McKay sure is a bitter and small man.
The good news is a limited release title called
Middle Men —which, sadly, will go ignored by sites like Big Hollywood because it’s the kind of movie that has boobies in it. There’s no getting around that
Middle Men will be summed up by critics as the
Boogie Nights of the internet age. Conservatives shouldn’t be frightened away, though.
Middle Men is the kind of film where a starlet signs on to play an adult actress on the condition that her character never actually gets naked. The rest of the action is no worse than what you’d find in those erotic thrillers that the Playboy Channel showed back in the ’90s.
Luke Wilson stars as a (fictional) family man who stumbles onto a goldmine in the midst of the ’90s internet porn boom. His opening narration jumpstarts the film with all kinds of fun images. Interestingly enough, that includes a smear on conservatives in the film’s opening minutes. Wilson’s quick history of pornography has to invoke the terrible sin of hypocrisy—as illustrated by a moralistic politician who is carefully revealed to be both a Republican and a transvestite. (That image is made even weirder by the actor being manly exploitation veteran Martin Kove.)
A few seconds later, Wilson is talking about how all men masturbate, That notion is accompanied by a photograph of Richard Nixon. This is particularly weird, since Wilson’s narration is leading to 1995. It takes a special kind of baby-boomer obliviousness to throw back to Nixon when we’re getting to a year when our nation had a notably notorious Horndog-in-Chief.
Keep watching, though, and
Middle Men becomes the most stirring tale of Texas morality since
The Blind Side. The film is pretty unrelenting in showing Wilson’s hellish descent into massive rationalization and lowered personal standards. You also get a cameo by Kelsey Grammer where he seems to be paying tribute to Fred Thompson, and Kevin Pollak as an FBI agent who turns out to be the film’s most moral character—all leading to a closing scene that’s corny enough to be worthy of the Hallmark Channel.
The big caveat is that you can never trust the film’s narrative. Wilson’s errant family man never explains exactly how he started out in life working for a mobster, or how he happens to have a best friend who comes with a small army of gun-happy associates.
Middle Men might ultimately be a detached meditation on
Goodfellas and other crime sagas where the source material can’t be trusted. That overblown ending could be meant to be more sardonic than satisfying. It still seems awfully sincere, and a big part of what keeps
Middle Men going as an enjoyable and overblown romp.
