In Review: 'Men,' 'Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers'

Alex Garland's latest puts its heroine through hell (but delivers its harshest blows to those who torment her) and a pair of DIsney characters get a meta revival in this week's new releases

Men
Dir. Alex Garland
100 min.

Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) desperately needs to get away. As Men opens, the Londoner is still trying to make sense of her husband James’s (Paapa Essiedu) death. Not put it behind her, because there’s no doing that, not when you watch someone close to you plunge from a tall building after an argument in which they’ve threatened suicide. But it might be possible to get some distance by, say, staying in a gorgeous 500-year-old country home far away from where it happened, far away from where anything happens. A place to be alone. Maybe.

Only she’s not alone. Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), the property’s off-puttingly chipper landlord, has a way of lingering too long and asking a few too many personal questions. Then there’s the matter of the naked man in the woods, or the profane boy, or the vicar whose sympathy curdles into judgment, and the nearby town’s other male residents — each of whom seems to share variations on Geoffrey’s face and makes Harper the center of their attention, whether for microaggressions or less disguised form of attacks. She’s put distance between herself and her old troubles only to find new ones. Only maybe they’re not that new at all.

The latest film from writer/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation) suggests that some things can’t be escaped, they’re hardwired into our personal and cultural history, if not our DNA. At the very least, the heated, tragic drama that transpired between Harper and James in their flat, the details of which Men reveals a little bit at a time, is a variation on a struggle between women and men even more ancient than the carvings of the Green Man and a sheela na gig in the local church, gendered pagan figures whose original significance been lost to time but remain powerful symbols still.

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The movie’s a bit like that, too. Like Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! it's a film whose setting and players blur the concrete with the allegorical. (Garland’s not overly concerned with subtlety on this front. There’s an apple tree outside and Geoffrey makes a “joke” of his guest stealing its forbidden fruit.) Harper’s realization that she’s somehow entered a kind of symbolic landscape and is now playing a part that stands for something more than the life of a single person provides a kind of turning point. Kinnear’s deft and alternately darkly funny and terrifying — sometimes switching from one to another in a dime — in his multiple (?) roles. But Buckley’s performance also keeps it all rooted in the flesh and blood concerns of a woman trying to survive a world that’s threatening to her simply because it’s filled with, well, look at the title. Though Men defies categorization, Garland shoots it like a horror film; think The Shining by way of Buñuel. Harper’s in a beautiful, terrible corner of the world where the simplest interaction or most banal environment can turn toxic, even dangerous, with little warning. It’s grotesque and absurd in the service of observations that feel at once ugly and true. —Keith Phipps

Men is now playing in theaters.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers
Dir. Akiva Schaffer
97 min. 

The second most popular animated series involving chipmunks with speeded-up voices, Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers squeezed three seasons into about a year and a half, from March 1989 to November 1990, before its 65 episodes slipped into syndication blocks. In the early ‘90s, the reruns were part of a Disney Afternoon lineup anchored by DuckTales, when many of the key people involved in the Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie were still sipping juice boxes. No doubt they have a lot of affection for this crime-solving duo and their quirky pals, like the cheese-whiffing Aussie mouse Monterey Jack. But here, the show’s treated mostly as grist for the content mill, a sort of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-style concoction for Millennials whose childhoods straddled evolutionary changes in animated style. The funniest running meta-joke of this goof on reboot culture is that Hollywood must be really desperate to revive characters so minor and vaguely remembered. 

Director Akiva Schaffer and the voice of Dale, Andy Samberg, are two-thirds of the brilliant musical-comedy duo The Lonely Island, which specializes in pop culture parody, like hard-edged rap songs about seeing The Chronicles of Narnia or an entire weird Netflix suite about the glory days of Oakland A’s ‘roid-ragers Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. For their purposes, Chip ’n Dale is the ideal property to riff around—not so beloved that fans make demands about what a Chip ’n Dale movie can or cannot be, but recognizable enough to be solidly within the flow of animated favorites from the period. 

Chip ’n Dale cleverly grafts an approximation of one of its half-hour mystery plots onto a freewheeling commentary about animation past and present, and the current yen for referential features like The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse. Like Bojack Horseman without the existential dread, it’s about what happens on the other end of fame, when Hollywood stars lose their agents and become answers to trivia questions. For Chip (John Mulaney), the more sensible and grounded of the two, it has meant a second career as an insurance agent, catering to the humans and toons that coexist in this Roger Rabbit-ized Los Angeles. The dimmer Dale (Samberg), meanwhile, continues a pathetic bid for relevance, regularly making solo appearances at fan conventions in his surgically updated “CGI” body. When their old buddy Monterey Jack (Eric Bana) disappears, Chip and Dale reunite to search for him, unraveling a convoluted scheme involving a long-in-the-tooth Peter Pan named “Sweet Pete” (Will Arnett) and cheap bootlegs of animated titles for overseas consumption. 

The plotting, though, is often so busy that it steps on the jokes, and the made-for-Disney kid-friendliness of the project suppresses the bawdier, weirder, more unhinged pleasures of The Lonely Island’s best work, like Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Though Mulaney and Samberg are ideally cast as, respectively, uptight straight-man and irreverent goofball, most of the laughs here are on the fringes, like fake movie titles or tossed-off nods to other animated characters or phenomena. 

The film delights in referential mash-ups, like a party where Paula Abdul and her 1989 animated collaborator MC Skat Kat are tucked in one corner of the frame while Roger Rabbit himself discoes in another. It also has affection for fellow animated misfits like “Ugly Sonic,” the version of Sonic the Hedgehog who appeared in the first trailer for his first movie and then was retooled after viewers were horrified by his teeth, and the array of cruddy bootlegs of beloved characters, like a Lady and the Tramp knockoff called Spaghetti Dogs. The creators of the Chip ’n Dale movie are avid collectors of the flotsam and jetsam that gets washed up on Hollywood’s shores. They turn trash to treasure. — Scott Tobias

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers premieres on Disney+ tomorrow, May 19.