Can Mr. Smith Still Get to Washington? (unrated) Reviewed in this issue. TV
John Tucker Must Die. (PG-13) If only. No one buys the farm in this Heathers-wannabe teen "satire," a term used so loosely it'll fly off in a stiff breeze. But the title's difficult to argue with, unless it's to maintain that we'd all be better off if the film's entire roster of characters had been shot in the head at the dump, greyhound-style. But enough about me: John Tucker (the plasticine Jesse Metcalf) is a rich-boy high school demigod boffing three princesses (Arielle Kebbel, Ashanti, Sophia Bush), to the revulsion of shy unpopular kid Kate (Brittany Snow). The trio discover his supa-player scheme, and plot revenge — which quickly devolves from dreams of violence (my dream, too), to spiking his sports drink with estrogen and, eventually, setting Kate up as his new honey with the intent to crush his inviolable heart. The script-performance synergy is pure Disney Channel sitcom with moderate relief provided by Bush, the only hireling here who seems to have actually watched a comedy once in her short little life. Whatever the target demographic was in the pre-production phase, now it's limited to sexually active 14-year-olds still retaking the sixth grade. (Michael Atkinson) ARN, CGX, DP, EG, J14, MR, OF, RON, SP, STCH, STCL
Miami Vice. (R) Reviewed in this issue. ARN, CPP, CGX, DP, EG, J14, KEN, MR, OF, RON, SP, STCH, STCL
Scoop. (PG-13) Woody Allen might have done well to end his expatriate adventure in London with last year's intriguing morality tale Match Point. This alleged return to comedy — starring Point's nubile Scarlett Johansson as a naive American journalism student, Allen himself as the phobia-rattled magician who poses as her father, and Hugh Jackman as a dashing English nobleman who may be a serial killer — is so flat, dull, and off-form that its seems to have been conceived in a fog. When Allen's famously neurotic one-liners start to bomb, there's real trouble, and Woody's performance here comes off as stammering self-parody: He's a pent-up bundle of tics and quirks so irritating that, halfway through, you may feel like ending the misery — his and yours. With Deadwood's Ian McShane as a recently deceased London newspaper legend who, from beyond the grave, puts the young heroine onto the story of a lifetime. (Bill Gallo) CPP, PF, RON
Who Killed the Electric Car?. (PG) Admit it: For years you've been burning to know what ol' Phyllis Diller really thinks about electric cars, which first (dis)appeared in her youth. "They were very quiet," she recalls. The real question is why this purportedly impassioned documentary investigation of a great subject — American culture's conspiratorial dismissal of eco-friendly alternatives to the gas-guzzler — would assume such massive viewer disinterest that it coats the pill with C-list celebrity NutraSweet, including Martin Sheen voiceovers that would sound unforgivably hackneyed even on basic cable. An opening vignette in a California cemetery has GM's produced-and-abandoned EV-1 being "buried" by tearful mourners; subsequent title cards finger so many of the usual suspects (carmakers, lawmakers, big oil, us) that the titular question might as well be Who Didn't Kill . . . ? Director Chris Paine's choice of talking heads leads you to think that famous people were the only ones lucky enough to have leased GM's now-flattened roadster. Another few of these squandered opportunities for art-house muckraking and we'll need someone to ask who killed the left-wing documentary. (Rob Nelson) HP
