Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...

Rating: 6/10 (4 March 2017)

Sequels are tough. Even though we live in a strange new age where sequels are already planned and penned seven chapters ahead of time, in movie form as to squash out all of the detail and description a television series could properly do, sequels are still tough. THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS goes something like this: The first movie was slightly stale popcorn. The second was trying too hard to be funny. The third was about the same as the first, just in a different location. The fourth turned out to be a bit more interesting when they started playing with the timeline. The sixth was too serious, the seventh was too gritty. Overall, popcorn. Most of it stale, or at least past its prime.
I skipped FAST FIVE on purpose, because of all of the FAST movies, it's easily the best. It takes the best of the slapstick that makes the movies bearable, mixes it with the best of jokes, and just overall has a blast with itself, never daring to take itself too seriously or try to bog us down in soap opera-style deaths while making yet another point about the importance of family (which is yet another reason why I think 8 will collapse, but more on that some other time).
Making franchises, to me, is like having half a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread. Your task is to somehow spread what little peanut butter you've got over the length of the entire loaf. You can't use too much in any particular spot, so what you end up with is a thin layer of flavor over a stack of wheat slices, which by the time you're finished, leaves you wishing for anything other than peanut butter on bread, and may traumatize you from ever eating it again.
That being said, there are, of course, flawed gemstones in the midst of the bread. A moment where you became frustrated, and said, "screw this, I'm going to indulge myself!" and slapped a little too much on that middle slice, just so you could get some joy out of it. Thereby jeopardizing the rest of the loaf, unfortunately.
Sorry for the long intro.
FINDING DORY is not a good sequel. Shticks that are put into movies that test our ability to suspend belief are best used sparingly, and this is not something anyone that made this movie really stopped to care about. In FINDING NEMO, most of the action was underwater, and when the fish needed to jump locations, it was done carefully, tip-toeing the edge of where believability would be lost.
FINDING DORY simply doesn't care. The logic is to just throw caution to the wind and hope for the best. "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming" ends up becoming less of a mantra for the kindhearted Dory and more of a directive for the entire film, a kind of sweeping message designed to keep you in the game, so to speak, so you won't think too hard about the complete lack of logic presented here.
Tearjerker moments involving Dory's youth take a lot away from the comedy of NEMO, where what could have been a very dark tale of desperation and despair was turned into a fun adventure, and sometimes we're left with that empty-hole feeling, that all-too painful reality of just how hard it would be for someone who truly lived with short term memory loss to live a happy life. I'm reminded of MEMENTO, and that's not something I should be thinking about when watching a film of this caliber. Pixar has always been good at touching the darker side of reality, but only with a light touch, and never one that doesn't have some resolution down the line. While we do have resolution here, it's not a complete payoff as is the case with other films of this kind, because Dory is still Dory, in the end. Will she even remember the journey she's taken, and the point of it all? Pixar's golden age has come to an end, and it's sad to see, from a guy who's found an awful lot to love about their films. I'm supposed to get excited about CARS 3, when I didn't really think CARS was on the same level as so many other Pixar gems, and then CARS 2 which turned out to be nothing more than a giant commercial for churning out Disney merchandise. Needless to say, I don't have any high expectations for Lightning McQueen's 3rd expo into Maynard jokes and inexplicable competition woes.
TOY STORY 4 is coming. I haven't seen TOY STORY 3, but it's one of those films that you end up hearing about because of its overall impact, and there is a certain sense of finality about it that is something I truly appreciate in films. I've always thought, regarding movies, that three is the lucky number, the perfect pattern for a fictional reflection of life: It begins. It lives. It ends. It's how it should be.
So I guess we're looking at FAST AND THE FURIOUS logic infecting everything. As long as we're making moolah, churn out those overpriced theater tickets. How many Toy Stories are waiting for us, just around the corner? How many slices of bread are we headed for, with just enough peanut butter gracing the ridges of the wheat as to tell our mouths what we are eating, without really being able to derive any pleasure from it, because of how much is lacking? Are we facing a time when, as in SOYLENT GREEN, Charlton Heston sucks what's left of the remains of jam off of a dirty spoon, just to tearfully remember a time when food was delicious
Instead of just filling?