In Review: 'A Real Pain,' 'Red One'

If you want real pain this week, see 'Red One.' 'A Real Pain,' on the other hand, is a pleasure.

A Real Pain
Dir. Jesse Eisenberg
90 min.

As Roman Roy, the youngest of the siblings vying for control of their father’s media empire on Succession, Kieran Culkin played arguably the most venal power broker of the bunch, so eager to win favor that he winds up embracing a full-on fascist presidential candidate. Yet for all the miseries visited upon his older brother Kendall, an ambitious number-one-son type who salves his persistent failure with a raging drug habit, Roman is maybe the saddest sibling, too, truly broken by a patriarch who constantly humiliates him, which only makes him that much more desperate to please. Culkin has a knack for directing savage, weaponized bon mots at everyone in a room, but the sadness behind his eyes is so heart-wrenching that Roman is sympathetic anyway. He’ll never stop being the wayward child. 

With his compact, touching, and often blisteringly funny new comedy-drama A Real Pain, writer/director/star Jesse Eisenberg has tailored a role for Culkin so perfectly that it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the part. Benji Kaplan is not Roman Roy—he barely has the financial resources to get out of his mother’s basement—but Culkin plays him with the same mix of extreme toxicity and on-the-surface vulnerability. His complete lack of a filter gives A Real Pain a combustible energy as both comedy and tear-jerker, because he can break up a room with an outrageous breach of social protocol one minute while cutting straight to the bone the next. He’s exhausting to be around, which accounts for his loneliness to a large extent, but he possesses a radiant soul. 

Echoing Before Sunrise in its talkiness, concision and lovely evocation of a European backdrop, A Real Pain opens with David (Eisenberg) meeting his cousin Benji at the airport before a week-long trip to Poland. Their recently deceased Jewish grandmother fled her native Poland during the war and she set aside money in her will for the two to embark on a heritage tour of the country. David and Benji are a difficult match to say the least: David’s intense neuroses and social anxiety are set off by Benji’s freewheeling volatility. When they finally meet up with their tour group, a diverse set of mostly older people seeking to connect to their Jewish history, David takes a naturally defensive posture, bracing for the inevitability of his cousin saying something embarrassing. 

And boy does Benji live up to that expectation. When one of the tourists, a Rwandan (Kurt Egyiwan), explains how he converted to Judaism in response to his country’s genocide, Benji says, “Oh snap!” Later, as the group takes advantage of first-class train tickets to their first destination, Benji pitches a fit over the privilege of taking a posh ride through Poland that their ancestors in World War II were very much denied. He has a point—and he makes points along similar lines later—but his confrontational attitude, punctuated by foul language and ugly public scenes, strikes the wrong tone on a tour that’s somber by nature. His insistence on grief, always on his terms, can come off as bullying and narcissistic. 

If A Real Pain has one nagging flaw, it’s the idea that Benji’s realness so often draws the affection of the people around him, like he’s the truth-teller they didn’t know they needed. Eisenberg weirdly doesn’t consider the likelihood that touring graveyards, upended Jewish neighborhoods, and Holocaust sites with someone like Benji would be a worst case scenario for people who want to process their grief most quietly. But the double-meaning title lands well in both directions, with Benji as a hilariously shambolic companion and a man who’s often deep in his feelings, wanting others to acknowledge them and perhaps get in touch with their own. He seems to believe it’s a gift that he’s giving them—and perhaps, in a way, it’s more selfless than it appears. — Scott Tobias

A Real Pain is in limited release and expanding.

Red One
Dir. Jake Kasdan
123 min.

Have you ever found yourself asking the question: What if Santa Claus was a ripped man of action with a high-tech Arctic headquarters and a security apparatus worthy of a head of state? What if in addition to elves he had ELF, an acronym for “Enforcement Logistics and Fortification”? What if he had a badass right-hand man? How awesome does that sound? Not very? If so, then it’s safe to say that Red One, a new action comedy written by Fast and Furious veteran Chris Morgan and directed by Jake Kasdan, is not for you. 

But just who is it for? As an action and effects spectacular it’s a monumental “Eh?” In a different era, it might have worked  as a kids’ introduction to big-screen blockbusters, but in an age when most big-budget movies have an eye on the junior-high-and-younger crowd, it’s hard to grasp the appeal. How do you keep the kids content with flying sleds once they’ve seen Deadpool carve a bloody path through a battalion of foes? As a comedy, it hopes viewers find combative snowmen and Krampus presiding over a slapping contest hilarious. As for any remaining space, well, did you know one sign of a bad dad is when he’s too busy and distracted to make time for his kid’s recital?

Chris Evans plays the dad in question, Jack O’Malley, a mysterious, highly respected hacker/tracker who lives a deadbeat existence built around gambling and booze, neglecting his son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel). But his shady profession and bad dad habits start to catch up with him after he helps an anonymous client locate an elusive subject somewhere in the North Pole. That’s right, it’s Santa (J.K. Simmons), who’s preparing to make his midnight rounds and to say goodbye to his aide de camp Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), a glowering tough guy whose Christmas spirit has gotten depleted after centuries of service. But when Santa disappears, Callum Drift swings into action, pressing Jack into service in the hopes of averting a disaster.

A globetrotting adventure ensues that contains a few clever touches, like a transportation system that magically joins the backrooms of every toy store in the world, and a lot of limp quips, half-committed performances, and just good-enough special effects. It’s the scenes between setpieces that capture Red One’s half-assedness. Many films put their actors against green screen backdrops for the majority of scenes but most take steps to keep viewers from noticing. Fighting snowmen, however: you won’t find those anywhere else. Ho ho ho. —Keith Phipps

Red One arrives in theaters to entertain both the naughty and nice tonight.