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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Stuber (2019)

I remember someone once saying about the character, Frasier Crane, that no psychiatrist would ever act that way.  Any professional therapist would lose their license if they did a tenth of what Dr. Crane did during the run of the series.  This isn’t to say that the show wasn’t funny.  Much of the humor came from someone so intelligent being largely clueless.  The humor came from that disparity.

I don’t think that Stuber was going for that dynamic, though.  Vic Manning would seem to be your typical renegade police officer.  He shoots from the hip and maybe grunts out a few questions later.  The movie starts with Vic and his partner, Sara Morris, trying to take down Oka Tedjo, who sells drugs to kids.   Tedjo gets away, leaving Sara to die.

Cut to some time later.  Tedjo is still on the run.  Vic is still on the job, but his vision isn’t what it used to be.  This leads him to get laser eye surgery, which does require some down time.  Wouldn’t you know it?   Someone gets a lead on Tedjo, prompting Vic to spring into action.  Since he can’t drive, he has to rely on the Uber app, which his daughter thoughtfully installed for him.

Enter Stu, a driver with a 4.1 rating.  His main job is at a sports store; he does Uber for some extra cash.  Vic has Stu drive all over town looking for the next clue that will lead them to their target.  I doubt very much that any police department would allow an officer to put a civilian in the line of fire like this, to say nothing of paying for it.  But, here Stu is, desperately hoping for a five-star rating.

The main problem with the story is that there isn’t much of one.  Movies like Beverly Hills Cop had a pretty solid storyline.  This looked like someone wanted to see how closely they could stick to a template and still get greenlit.  I’d worry about giving away the plot, but anyone watching the movie could probably guess what’s coming next.

For instance, there are two running gags: Stu’s rating and Vic’s eyesight.  The entire reason Vic can string Stu along is the threat of a low rating.  (Stu states that dropping below a 4.0 average gets him kicked off the app.  I don’t know if this is true.)  The entire reason Vic even needs someone is that he literally can‘t see well past his nose.  There’s also Stu’s friend, Becca, who constantly calls him to hook up.  Stu promises that he’ll be right there, thinking that Vic couldn’t possibly need him that much longer.

The funny thing is that the movie doesn’t really feel like a rip off of a particular movie.  It’s more like the most basic entry possible into the genre.  This puts me in the awkward position of sort of liking it because I can’t find any particular fault with it.  It hit many of the marks, but was also kind of basic.

Vic and Stu get into a fight at the sporting-goods store, which sort of deals with toxic masculinity, but doesn’t do a great job of it.  Vic is also not a great father to his daughter, Nicole.  She’s thoughtful enough to put the app on her father’s phone.  Vic isn’t thoughtful enough to try to make it to his daughter’s art opening.  (He winds up there by chance.)

When I left the movie, I felt entertained.  However, it didn’t really have anything new or clever about it.  This isn’t going to make my list of top-ten police movies.  I don’t think it will make any of my top-ten lists.  It’s the kind of movie I’d tell you to rent if your Netflix queue is running low or Redbox is out of your first choice.  It’s probably going to be better than watching nothing, but I don’t expect you’d rent it a second time.

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Future Man (Season 1)

If you watch enough time-travel movies, there are certain things that would be good, like stopping Hitler before he becomes the leader of Germany.  If any of us invented a time machine, that’s probably the first thing we’d look in to.  The problem is that there’s no promise that this would be effective.  There were a lot of other factors at play, so there’s no guarantee that someone much worse wouldn’t have come along and done the same thing.

Such is the problem that Wolf and Tiger have.  They live in a world where genetically modified people known as biotics rule.  Regular humans have no hope except with time travel.  They’ve traced the Biotics’ origin to Doctor Elias Kronish,  All they need is a savior.

What does it take to become a savior?  That’s what Josh “Future Man” Futturman finds out when he beats Biotic Wars, a game that no one else has beaten.  Wolf and Tiger show up in his room to recruit Josh into their war.  You see, in their time, warriors play video games for training.  What they don’t realize is that Josh thought it was just a game.  Yes, in a giant nod to The Last Starfighter, they used a video game as a recruitment tool.

The first episode should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect.  There are plenty of references to major time-travel movies, like Terminator and Back to the Future.  There are all manner of sexual situations, like Tiger and Wolf having sex to relieve tension.  This is not a TV series you want to watch with your children.  Or your parents, for that matter.

The series has 13 half-hour episodes, meaning that it’s very easy to binge watch.  I was worried that the series might drag, as several other series have.  This isn’t a problem.  In fact, the series was originally developed as a movie.  It was eventually realized that they needed more time to tell the whole story.

Part of this is that they have several setbacks.  Josh is insistent on not killing Kronish whereas Tiger and Wolf would simply kill him as a baby.  Many of Josh’s attempts result in either failure or making the situation worse. I kind of wonder why Tiger and Wolf needed Josh in the first place, since it should be relatively easy to get that information.  It’s pure chance that Josh works at Kronish’s research facility.

It seems like much of the plot revolves around paying homage to various tropes of the genre.  In terms of time travel, very little is original.  Josh points out that killing Kronish at an early age is the central plot of the first Terminator movie.  There is also an episode that loosely resembles Back to the Future.  This isn’t to say that it’s not entertaining.  Wolf has an instant attraction to pickles and eventually takes up cooking, which leads to an interesting episode.

The series is at least maybe a little more realistic if that can be a thing with science fiction.  The amount of culture shock experienced by Tiger and Wolf is believable.  I also think most people in Josh’s situation would also teeter between wanting to go on an adventure and not waning to screw things up royally.

It did end up being a fun series.  (Yes, I know I’m a few months late in reviewing it.)  I don’t want to ruin the ending, but it looks like there will be a second 13-episode season.  I’ll be looking forward to it.


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