Coffee & Kareem (2020)

WARNING:  I’m going to give away some minor spoilers.  It’s nothing that you shouldn’t see coming, but I feel it only fair to mention this now.

There are probably a lot of movies that look better as a script.  One might imagine that the finished product will be funny or action-packed, but words don’t always translate well to the screen.  I think Coffee & Kareem was looking for a Hot Fuzz kind of feel that it just couldn’t pull off.

The movie is about a police officer, James Coffee, who’s dating one Vanessa Manning.  Her son, Kareem, notices them having sex.  Kareem isn’t too fond of Coffee, mostly because he’s a police officer.  What does Kareem do?  His plan is to get Orlando Johnson, notorious criminal, to kill Coffee.

Kareem actually has Coffee drive him to where Johnson is hiding.  He then offers to pay Johnson in change, which he keeps in a sock.  Oh, and Kareem’s recording the whole thing for his YouTube channel.  Having once been 12 myself, I realize this probably makes total sense to Kareem.

Things go horribly sideways when Kareem witnesses the shooting of a corrupt police officer.  His only protection is the inept police officer who let Johnson escape in the first place.  The two end up on the run and trip over every cliché a buddy-cop movie has to offer.

You can actually see a lot of them coming.  In escaping from Johnson initially, Kareem drops his phone.  Of course he does.  Why not?  Doesn’t the main character drop the one key piece of evidence?  It’s not his house keys.  Maybe it’s his wallet, so the criminals know where he lives.  But if something gets dropped, it’s going to be the key piece of evidence.

Coffee calls his captain to report corruption and has him meet at a strip club with Kareem.  If a phone call is made requesting a meeting, one of the two people involved usually ends up dead.  If a by-the-books police officer calls a trusted officer to report corruption, you’d better bet the trusted officer is also corrupt.  So, yeah.  Captain Hill meets with Coffee and it turns out that he’s corrupt.  Then, Hill gets shot.  And Coffee is framed for Hill’s murder and for the murder of the other corrupt officer.  It’s too bad that Kareem dropped the key piece of evidence.

Most of the characters are varying degrees of inept.  In Kareem’s case, we can attribute this to the fact that he’s 12.  You’re not expected to make rational decisions at that age.  Some people can at that age, but that tends to be the exception.  Coffee is just a bumbling idiot.  If the movie took place in a small town, he’d be the police chief’s nephew or something.  This is Detroit.  How did he make it through the academy?

I would say that that the only character that has it all together is Vanessa.  Unfortunately, we don’t see enough of her.  I think it would have been better to pair Coffee with Vanessa instead of Kareem.  But, then we couldn’t have that bad pun of a movie title.  What we end up with is the Dumb and Dumber of buddy cop movies.

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Jumanji (1995)

Robin Williams always had a childlike energy that made him perfect for that overly outgoing character that just never grew up.  In Jumanji, he plays the adult version of a child trapped in a board game for 25 years.  One might be forgiven for thinking the part was written for him.  However, the movie is based on a book.  I would think that Williams would at least have been the first choice for the part.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The movie starts in 1869.  To people are seen burying the titular board game, hoping that no one ever digs it up.  Heaven help whoever does find the game.  That’s how sinister it is.  Cut to 1969 and a young Alan Parrish happens upon the box containing the board game and convinces his friend, Sarah Whittle, to play.  Each move brings about some odd and dangerous event, like bats descending on Sarah.

A few moves in, Alan becomes trapped in the game.  This leads to years of therapy for Sarah.  Alan’s father spends the family fortune trying to find Alan, since no one believes Sarah.  The house is eventually sold to Nora Shepherd, who moves in with her niece and nephew, Judy and Peter.  The two kids find Jumanji in the attic and continue the game, miraculously freeing Alan from the game.

The entire time, Alan was trapped in a jungle.  He’s now an adult (played by Williams, of course) and wants nothing more than to go back to his old life.  Unfortunately, his parents are dead and he has to finish the game, which means finding a now-adult Sarah.  As you might imagine, she’s not eager, but she relents.

Each move made brings another disastrous event, like a stampede or a flood.  The house is all but destroyed, but there’s the promise that it will all return to normal at the completion of the game.  Once the game is completed, Sarah and Alan find themselves back in 1969 as if nothing had ever happened.  They’ll have to wait 26 years for Judy and Peter to be born.  And, of course, they won’t remember anything.

The movie is all mania and no real substance.  My first thought is that it’s odd how sadistic the game is.  How would such a thing come into existence?  If someone created it, how and why?  What purpose does it serve to put people through that?

In the end, it doesn’t seem like anything was learned.  Alan and Sarah grow up to be regular adults with regular lives.  The Parrish shoe factory is still in business.  It’s kind of sad that Alan and Sarah can’t talk about the ordeal with the kids, or anyone else for that matter.  They just have to hide the game and hope no one unleashes the terror again.

It’s also a fairly scary movie.  It’s too childish for most adults, but it’s way too vivid for younger audiences.  Teenagers would be able to handle it, but that age group seems a bit too advanced for a movie like this.  As I said, it seems more like a vehicle for Williams.  (From what I’ve read in IMDb, he had to be told to hold back on the improvisation so as not to throw off the story.)

It’s an entertaining movie, but not a great movie.  Part of the problem is that it tries to do too many things without doing any of them well.  The aunt is away from the children for most of the movie.  The action is silly as many of the animals look fake.  It comes across as an action movie for children as written by someone who had never seen an action movie or an actual child. 

I would love to have been in the meeting to pitch this movie.  So, you have this board game that traps a kid in a jungle and makes another one go crazy.  It throws wild animals at them, although no one really gets hurt.  I mean, everything goes back to normal at the end of the game, so none of it really matters.  But we got Robin Williams to star in it!  That should tell you if it’s a movie you’d want to see.

IMDb page