At the Movies With Peter Travers: ‘Get Him to the Greek’ and ‘Splice’
The summer blockbuster season has been a bore so far — both Prince of Persia and Sex and the City 2 failed to attract the masses over Memorial Day Weekend — and the situation won’t improve much At the Movies this weekend: Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers says there’s three Scum Bucket-worthy films arriving. The worst of the bunch, a film so bad that it wasn’t even screened for critics, is Killers, starring Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher in a comedy about a woman who finds out her husband is a hit man. It’s like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but much worse. Then there’s Marmaduke, featuring Owen Wilson voicing the comic strip Great Dane. Having overloaded on Garfield movies, Hollywood has now been reduced to making Marmaduke movies.
Perhaps the week’s biggest disappointment is Get Him to the Greek, a comedy that finds Rolling Stone cover star Russell Brand reprising his role of Aldous Snow from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Jonah Hill returns too, but instead of playing the pervy waiter, Hill is in a new role as record exec Aaron Green. The film starts promisingly and hilariously, but as it wears on, Travers says Greek turns from a comedy into a sermon, with Hollywood scrubbing the sex, drugs and rock & roll out of Snow’s life.
Finally, there is one sci-fi film out there this weekend that Travers calls “scary and provocative”: Splice. Starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, Splice finds two genetic researchers breaking the law by combining animal DNA with human DNA to form a living creature.