Four Ways of Looking at an Action Movie: ‘The Accountant 2,’ ‘Havoc,’ ‘A Working Man,’ and ‘The Amateur’

Sean and Amanda are joined by Chris Ryan to recap their trip to the mobile Criterion Closet before celebrating the big box-office weekend performances of ‘Sinners’ and ‘Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith’ and explain why movies are so back (1:09). Then, they cover some recently released mediocre action films: ‘The Accountant 2’ (14:30), ‘Havoc’ (25:39), ‘A Working Man’ (36:33), and ‘The Amateur’ (44:41), and have a big-picture conversation on what these four films mean for the state of action movies (53:32). Finally, they discuss a handful of movie news headlines and share their excitement and concern for some upcoming releases (1:00:35). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the brand new Zach Lowe Show. That's right, I'm back to have the same in-depth NBA conversations you're used to. We're going to talk about the games, the X's and O's, the drama. The playoffs are coming up and now you get to see every episode in full on video on Spotify and on my own YouTube channel. Episodes drop every Monday and Thursday with a collection of guests you're gonna love. So make sure you follow and subscribe to the brand new Zach Lowe Show on Spotify or wherever you watch or listen to your podcasts. Let's go!

• 0:35Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. There's nothing better than having friends who support whatever you're into, like re-watching a director's entire catalog in the lead-up to their latest release. And like those friends, State Farm is there to help you feel supported by helping you choose the coverage you need. With so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help finding what fits for you. So you can check coverage off the list and spend more time debating movie rankings. Go online at statefarm.com or use the easily accessible app to get help from one of their local agents. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO.

• 1:20Sean Fennessey?

  LinkedIn has a word for that: bull spend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title and more. So cut the bull spend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/thepickpicture. That's linkedin.com/thepickpicture. Terms and conditions apply.

• 2:03Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessy.

• 2:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 2:04Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the big picture, a conversation show about action. CR, Chris Ryan is here.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Pew pew.

• 2:10Sean Fennessey?

  Whoa, a midnight boy?

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. So we're gonna talk about action movies today.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Action, yeah.

• 2:17Sean Fennessey?

  Guns? You're pro-gun? Let's just start fresh.

• 2:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, good.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  You know, it's been a minute since we've all seen each other. Do we have to start with the Second Amendment?

• 2:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's a dodge for CR. CR and I actually spent yesterday together.

• 2:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I know, I saw.

• 2:28Sean Fennessey?

  Did you hear?

• 2:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I saw it on the internet. It was very cute. So I wanted you to take me through the wardrobe process for you.

• 2:35Sean Fennessey?

  The wardrobe process?

• 2:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Well, because the Paddington sweater is new.

• 2:39Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And I was wondering when you acquired it? Is it Paddington for Gap?

• 2:45Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, no.

• 2:45Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not.

• 2:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's Rowing Blazers.

• 2:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, right. Okay, yeah.

• 2:48Sean Fennessey?

  And...

• 2:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I gotta be honest, I was a huge supporter of Paddington, but they were getting around with the collabs before Paddington and Peru.

• 2:55Sean Fennessey?

  Well, Paddington, obviously very important to me. And here's, I'll tell you, I told Chris...

• 2:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Not as important as it is in my household.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 3:01Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I don't really know why I would be competing on who cares about Paddington more.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  That seems antithetical to Paddington's ideology, is this competing over Paddington.

• 3:09Sean Fennessey?

  My intention was I wanted to talk to people on the street waiting in line for the Criterion Mobile Closet. CR joined me yesterday at Vidiot's where the Criterion Mobile Closet was. I was wearing a Paddington sweater because I thought I would seem more warm and approachable.

• 3:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 3:23Sean Fennessey?

  If I had Paddington on my chest.

• 3:25Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's not because Criterion is announcing a Paddington addition.

• 3:28Sean Fennessey?

  Not to my knowledge. I can either confirm or deny.

• 3:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Paddington too.

• 3:33Sean Fennessey?

  That would be an interesting step, you know. We did talk about the red balloon a little bit, which has a Criterion addition. There is some Paddington energy in the red balloon, so it wouldn't be so out of practice. Did you have fun yesterday?

• 3:44Speaker 03

  I had a great time.

• 3:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we had a good time.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  I was so impressed by people's taste. Young people who just like incredible.

• 3:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Were you just like standing outside the closet? Just being like, show me your, were you doing exit polling?

• 3:55Speaker 03

  He was doing it. I was executive producing.

• 3:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  I was like that, that person.

• 3:59Sean Fennessey?

  That literally is what you were doing. You were IDing potential folks to talk to. We talked to a lot of really nice, really cool people. All just waiting for physical media, waiting on Saturday. They were waiting in the rain. We weren't there on Saturday.

• 4:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Can I, was the exit polling like sanctioned? Or were you just?

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had Criterion's blessing.

• 4:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, great. I just wanted to make sure.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  We asked, yeah.

• 4:18Sean Fennessey?

  It was actually pre-polling.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:19Sean Fennessey?

  Which I think is illegal.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  It wasn't like Jesse Waters like running up to someone and being like, why don't you like movies enough? You know, like.

• 4:25Sean Fennessey?

  You didn't give them any water though, Larry David style. You didn't want to be sent to prison for several weeks. We had a lot of fun. We made a couple of videos. They'll be on The Ringer Movies YouTube channel later this week. Jack Sanders got to go in the Criterion mobile closet. He was, he seemed very, very happy. Um, it was fun. Also fun. Movies, we're, we're, we're doing so well. We're doing so well.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Didn't say we're so back.

• 4:48Sean Fennessey?

  We, we haven't left.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:50Amanda Dobbins?

  But no, well, no.

• 4:51Sean Fennessey?

  It's been weeks.

• 4:52Amanda Dobbins?

  There, there are two approaches that we could take here.

• 4:55Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 4:55Amanda Dobbins?

  And one is just the like, this is so great. And also two is to be like you, Sean Fantasy were crying in that chair like two weeks ago.

• 5:04Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean?

• 5:04Amanda Dobbins?

  And movies are, they're nowhere and TV is so important and I love Severance and whatever. And.

• 5:10Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, movies sucked until Minecraft came along and changed everything. And now TV all the way in the back row.

• 5:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I just can't live like this.

• 5:19Sean Fennessey?

  Well, you have to. Frankly, we're doing great. Sinners down five percent week over week.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Unfucking believable.

• 5:26Amanda Dobbins?

  It's amazing.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:27Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, so the film is now made well over a hundred million dollars. We were talking six, six days ago about the trades, talking about how this film may or may not be profitable, which even at the time seemed absurd. But now we've seen this movie is now in this sort of phenomenological era. It is like, it's like Get Out. It's like Inception. It's like Gravity.

• 5:47Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a sensation.

• 5:47Sean Fennessey?

  It's a huge sensation. It's a movie that people have built a huge relationship to. Obviously a lot of reasons for that. The premium large format movies where tickets cost more money. So if you go to see it in IMAX or Dolby, a 70 millimeter, it costs more money to see those movies. So you're going to generate more box office, obviously. But word of mouth is just insane.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Word of mouth.

• 6:05Sean Fennessey?

  It's just insane.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  It's, I've had like multiple conversations with people who don't necessarily work within. The film industry or media or like not like terminally online about movie culture. And they're just like, so Sinners, like, really? I should go see it? I was like, please go see it, not just for like the benefit of the industry, but like you'll love it.

• 6:23Sean Fennessey?

  It's just the best way to see it.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  And it's undefeated. I have not had a single person come back and be like, eh, that was a waste of 10 bucks.

• 6:29Amanda Dobbins?

  It just, it, there's also, it's, it's a scene. It's a thing, you know, in a real way that we've, we've had from time to time. And I, you know, I was thinking about this as, as you were freaking out a few months ago. And, but also this morning of like, it's not that movies are back and it's not that like all movies are great, but like, movies are kind of cool. Again, like there, there's, there's something happening and even like your criterion aspect of it. I don't know whether it's just like fan culture has moved from, you know, specific genres or like franchises to just formats, you know? And it's just like, I guess now we're into movies. And this doesn't obviously apply to everything, but there is an energy around the big name

• 7:14Amanda Dobbins?

  directors, like the big name events, like people are waiting in line, people are like buying the merch, people are.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Listening to the soundtrack.

• 7:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. When I came in the studio last Thursday, Jack was bumping the soundtrack.

• 7:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Sean Fennessey?

  I'm here. Um, I, I think that's all true. I think one of the reasons why this has happened, which we thought would be a negative, but is in an odd way, turning into a positive is during COVID theaters were closed, people got out of the habit of going to see movies. People got really interested in streaming, but they also watched a lot of movies during COVID and they got more interested in movies and movie history. We've heard from hundreds of listeners over the years that they're so more into movies now than they were pre 2020. And then there's also this desire to be back with people having an experience. And so it's not always going to happen. We're going to see a ton of movies this summer that bomb or underperform. It's not foolproof, but when you get something that is familiar, but new like this, you

• 8:09Sean Fennessey?

  can get an energy going and it feels like, you know, the snowball is really rolling down the hill now. So it's, it's really exciting and the cooler thing is great. It's like, he is now in the Nolan, Tarantino, you know, Jordan Peele, Greta, like there's a handful of people who you could sell the movie on their name.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Based on their directed by.

• 8:25Sean Fennessey?

  Which is so cool. I mean, that's obviously for me personally, like probably my favorite thing in movies, when you have somebody with a really strong vision and then you're kind of like eventizing around that, but it's exciting for him and. It's good for the theaters and it's, it's in theory, good for the kinds of movies that get made.

• 8:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm sure we'll learn all the wrong lessons from this. And by we, I mean studios and the same people who were bitching anonymously to the trades about how, you know, not understanding the point of sinners was gonna then also ruin studios forever. And I'm sure that people will look at this and try to corporatize it. But, and, and there, there is something about this that, the, the magic of it is a little bit like, oh, wow, like another one-off, like an original thing that this doesn't happen that often, so I want to be a part of it. That is hard to manufacture, but it's kind of keeps happening.

• 9:19Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:19Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's, that's exciting.

• 9:21Sean Fennessey?

  There's an aspect of Barbenheimer that was very similar to this.

• 9:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it's not, it, we can go back to a time when there were more people who were able to do this. Like, this might seem strange now because of where they stand in the firmament of Hollywood, but like, Adam McKay and Judd Apatow had this kind of power, where like, if you put their name on a movie.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  From the guys who made Superbad.

• 9:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it was like, oh, I want to know what that is. And I think we just need to keep leaning into that stuff, leaning into empowering people to make those kinds of movies. I don't know. What are, any takeaways from you beyond that?

• 9:48Speaker 03

  I just want everybody to keep the same energy for Jurassic World Rebirth.

• 9:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  You know, another cultural event.

• 9:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Another movie about characters we don't often see.

• 9:58Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm. Representation matters for dinosaurs. Absolutely.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Uh, what do you think, is there anything else coming this year that you guys think could have a similar kind of energy? Or is this gonna be a rare, an increasingly rare phenomenon where we all kind of agree?

• 10:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, I, I'm, I'm nervous to say it out loud. Like, I feel like I should whisper, like, and it's different.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Whisper it.

• 10:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Like whisper one battle after another, you know? And that's different because obviously.

• 10:26Sean Fennessey?

  High bar.

• 10:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, sure.

• 10:29Sean Fennessey?

  This movie.

• 10:29Amanda Dobbins?

  But.

• 10:30Sean Fennessey?

  This, also, this movie just straight up does not have black audiences. And black audiences are like, I'm going to see this movie three times. And I don't care. And I'll pay $75 a ticket to go see it. Like, One Battle After Another needs. A lot of me, you know, a lot of dudes just like me.

• 10:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Let me tell you, there are a lot of you out in the world.

• 10:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, they gotta get, we gotta get activated, you know?

• 10:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I think you are.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  I'm going, but I'm going as a Tiana Taylor fan. To what battle after another.

• 10:53Sean Fennessey?

  That is, that is the intersectionality that we're looking for here in movie fandom. I, I think there could be. Obviously, it's also the same studio, it's the same conceit of like, of a filmmaker with a strong vision.

• 11:04Amanda Dobbins?

  It's Leo.

• 11:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 11:05Amanda Dobbins?

  It is, like, we haven't seen the movie, we've only seen some trailers and are like doing some deep reading, but like, seems like it has something to say, but also just a lot of action and,

• 11:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 11:18Amanda Dobbins?

  you know, and sensational filmmaking, so and some, you know, sensational stuff to watch. So I, I don't know, it just, I'm, I'm only going on a feeling.

• 11:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think there's a couple of franchise movies.

• 11:28Amanda Dobbins?

  And I could be wrong.

• 11:29Sean Fennessey?

  There's a couple of franchise movies that could have a somewhat similar energy. Like, I do think that Mission Impossible and 28 Years Later, a certain kind of movie fan is very stoked for those movies.

• 11:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Sean Fennessey?

  Whether it's gonna have this, I mean, there's very few films that have dropped that low a percentage in the last 15 years of the movies. It's very, very unusual.

• 11:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't think this is gonna happen again.

• 11:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so I don't know if we'll get back to something that exciting. You know, the other thing that happened at the box office, which is quite astonishing, is that Revenge of the Sith, Episode III in the Star Wars saga was re-released.

• 12:00Sean Fennessey?

  Was re-released to celebrate its 20th anniversary in theaters and it made $25 million.

• 12:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Sean Fennessey?

  Now, there's a lot of reasons, I think, for this. I think for Gen Z and young millennials, Revenge of the Sith is a big movie. And there's a lot of like, this is my youth on screen.

• 12:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I love them.

• 12:17Sean Fennessey?

  I wanna celebrate it, and I totally understand that. There are some things I really like about Revenge of the Sith, it's my favorite of the prequels. I still don't think it's a great movie, but there's something like, like, it's kinda like going to your high school reunion, going to see this movie, you know, and like, kinda seeing who you are in the face of a thing that you loved when you were 11. And then there's also that communal thing that we're talking about, where people just want to get together and have fun and have a party and they want to watch Count Dooku get his, you know, his arms cut off, you know?

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Spoiler.

• 12:45Sean Fennessey?

  They want to watch General Grievous get cut down to size.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  I think the point you made about the generational thing is really important. I first noticed this when we got a chance to go to Prince Charles Cinema in London and we saw people lined up around the block for Interstellar, which is apparently like, basically a weekly event there. And I was like, oh, it turns out that people like find their own classics and find their own like touchstone films and Interstellar is to these people what 2001 probably was to my parents' generation or what have you, you know, or Star Wars was to ours. So Revenge of the Sith is a new hope to people who are in their twenties or in their early thirties and it makes a lot of sense.

• 13:24Sean Fennessey?

  It's really interesting. I mean, this is also a movie that is available on Disney Plus in perpetuity.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:29Sean Fennessey?

  It's probably one of the most purchased DVD Blu-rays of all time. Like everyone has access to this movie. They don't have to pay 25 bucks to go to a movie theater, but they did. I find that so fascinating. Right on the heels of the Ted Sarandos comments, where he said that we serve the consumer and the consumer's not interested in going to the movies. Now, obviously, there's a lot of truth to the utter dominance of Netflix and what they've been able to create for viewers, but to frame it against people not wanting to go to the movies is just not true. You just need to give people things that they want. Is it ideal? Like, are you going to be able to recreate Revenge of the Sith every other weekend? No, you're not. But it shows you something about what people do want. So how do you figure out if you're a theater owner, if you're a studio? Hopefully it's not just giving Sean Levy the keys to Star Wars, which I don't think we ever discussed on this podcast.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  No. Ryan Gosling.

• 14:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, and Ryan Gosling, yeah. But then who said no? Oh.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Anora.

• 14:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Sean Fennessey?

  Mikey Madison.

• 14:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, thank you.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  I couldn't remember her name.

• 14:24Sean Fennessey?

  She reportedly declined. Imagine if the character Anora, though, were sent to Tatooine. That would really be something.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Get the fuck away from me with your starfighter.

• 14:33Sean Fennessey?

  That's good.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:34Sean Fennessey?

  Nice work.

• 14:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Good job.

• 14:34Sean Fennessey?

  Um, any other takeaways from Star Wars being back in theaters?

• 14:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I saw this in theaters originally.

• 14:41Sean Fennessey?

  Did you?

• 14:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Sean Fennessey?

  Did you like it?

• 14:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I saw it with my dad.

• 14:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 14:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Over Christmas break, I want to say. Don't remember anything about it.

• 14:48Sean Fennessey?

  What did you think of Natalie Portman's performance in the movie?

• 14:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Like a very large, is that a crown?

• 14:55Sean Fennessey?

  More sort of a headpiece?

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's got like-

• 14:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Is she's a senator?

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Kind of like braiding up on the sides and stuff.

• 15:02Amanda Dobbins?

  What is her government designation?

• 15:06Speaker 03

  She's not a senator, she's a princess, right?

• 15:09Sean Fennessey?

  She's a princess, but she becomes a senator, I think.

• 15:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, please, you know what, don't marginalize women in Star Wars, okay?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 15:16Sean Fennessey?

  Jar Jar Binks also is a senator to be. Also Minecraft, just very quietly trucking along to a billion dollars. Basically made eight hundred million dollars in three weeks, that's insane for a Minecraft movie, which I was considering not doing an episode on like three weeks ago, so...

• 15:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And then you had an epiphany at the movies.

• 15:34Sean Fennessey?

  Well-

• 15:35Speaker 03

  And you can see a little bit of a trickle down effect of the health because the fourth movie had a really decent opening, right? Like the fourth or fifth movies are all doing like 20, 25, one of which we're gonna talk about.

• 15:47Sean Fennessey?

  Let's, let's talk about it. So, we've had four action movies released in the last couple of weeks. The biggest, I suppose, of the four is The Accountant 2, which opened on Friday.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Still countin'.

• 16:00Sean Fennessey?

  I wish that was the tagline. There's not a lot of counting, there's not a lot of accounting in this movie, actually, now that I think about it. The Accountant was a 2016 sort of surprise hit from Gavin O'Connor and Ben Affleck as the star, an autistic number cruncher for the mafia who's also a trained assassin and looks like Ben Affleck.

• 16:21Amanda Dobbins?

  In Hocus.

• 16:23Sean Fennessey?

  Is he in Hocus in the first film?

• 16:24Amanda Dobbins?

  He's not in the first one, that was a great update that they made to bring The Accountant into 2025 or some truly cringe-worthy Hocus.

• 16:30Sean Fennessey?

  You couldn't wait to get into the style breakdown of The Accountant 2.

• 16:33Amanda Dobbins?

  It really all that you need to know about what Ben Affleck, it was great costuming.

• 16:39Sean Fennessey?

  The original film, I think, did very well at the box office and then I think took on a real dad action movie Hall of Fame quality where it's on cable all the time, you can stream it on Amazon. People love this movie. I liked it just fine when it came out. I don't know if I had a wild enthusiasm. Did either of you really care about it?

• 16:56Speaker 03

  I didn't particularly care for the first one that much. But I, this was, this is just a B movie to me. Like, it's really funny that this was something Affleck was like, I need to take artist equity and throw it behind the accountant franchise.

• 17:10Sean Fennessey?

  And he did. His new company with Matt Damon co-produced this movie along with Amazon MGM. And it stars Jon Bernthal, your boy, Cynthia D. Robinson, J.K. Simmons, Daniela Pineda.

• 17:24Sean Fennessey?

  The plot is when an old acquaintance is murdered, leaving behind a cryptic message to, quote, "find the accountant," Christian Wolfe is compelled to solve the case. Realizing more extreme measures are necessary, Wolfe recruits his estranged and highly lethal brother Brax to help. In partnership with the U.S. Treasury Deputy Director Mary Beth Medina, they uncover a deadly conspiracy becoming targets of a ruthless network of killers who will stop at nothing to keep their secrets buried. That's a description of the plot. Amanda and I saw this movie together. We had a very nice time. But we spent the 30 minutes after the movie was over trying to figure out what was going on in this movie.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:05Sean Fennessey?

  Which is to say that despite having fun, I found this to be one of the most convoluted mainstream movies released in some time. Were you confused at all? Maybe not confused. That's not even the word, because I understood what happened.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Belaboring?

• 18:17Sean Fennessey?

  But trying to backtrack why the things had happened and how they got the plot to where it went, I found very odd.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  I broadly understood what was going on. I think the things that I found the most confusing were the efforts to tie it to forensic accounting.

• 18:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, there weren't very many efforts.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  But there was still like, it was like Deputy Director Mary Beth Medina certainly mentions her mentor, played by J.K. Simmons, a lot, and also their work and the kind of work they do and the ethics of their investigations versus Brax and Chris's more Devil May Care style of investigation. So the accounting part was actually like, I was like, iffy on. I ultimately understood that this was a human trafficking fever dream that was about these guys rescuing these kids in Juarez, Mexico, but- The nutty part about it is it's basically a buddy comedy for 80% of the movie that then turns into saving human trafficking victims.

• 19:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, part of the problem is that it's a buddy comedy for like 40%. And then there is 20% sprinkled around like the other 18 characters that constitute the human trafficking and like underworld aspects of the plot.

• 19:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's hard to keep track of all of those other people. And then you don't get as much of Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal setting on top of a airstream, you know, growing out, which, which was charming.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, if you told me that I would really have a good time at a movie that was just Rain Man meets Commando, I would probably not believe you, but I honestly really enjoyed myself watching this.

• 19:57Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it was pretty fun. I think the movie looks really good. It looks unusually good for a movie like this. You hear like Amazon MGM and you're like, okay, this is gonna be like Red Notice streaming action movie. It's all, we'll get to a streaming action movie that doesn't look like all streaming action movies soon, but movies shot by Seamus McGarvey, incredibly talented DP, shot the last movie, so.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  They shot it in Los Angeles. They got the rebate, so they were able to shoot all location and I think you can really feel it. I think, I think it matters, you know?

• 20:25Sean Fennessey?

  It does. I mean, this is like Lynn Ramsey cinematographer, you know what I mean? Like, he's a really, really good cinematographer. So I, I think it, it gets its head above water by just being one Ben Affleck's in the middle of the movie. He's just a great movie star. He's always entertaining. Bernthal pitched perfectly. This is like exactly what he's good at, which is like snide asshole with a gun who's also insecure. He is the master of that kind of character and he's really, really funny as brat.

• 20:50Amanda Dobbins?

  And they give him several like very good scenes, including.

• 20:53Sean Fennessey?

  His intro is phenomenal.

• 20:55Amanda Dobbins?

  In the hotel room with the, yeah, well, I mean, he just, he longs to be a pet owner, you know? And that's something that is carried throughout the, the film. And then also when he gets the call from his brother is a really, really delightful and funny scene by him.

• 21:11Sean Fennessey?

  Do we even see his, oh yeah, we do, he's, cause he's in Germany.

• 21:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 21:14Sean Fennessey?

  Doing a job.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  After he's killed seven people and he's eating ice cream.

• 21:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's a nice reveal on that sequence. I found the framing of the Daniela Pineda story just bizarre.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Oh, the, the like woman, the migrant woman who then has a car accident and becomes a savant and a like champion killer?

• 21:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 21:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but then also, and you're supposed to understand all this, this hinges on an old photograph.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:44Amanda Dobbins?

  That as Sean spent like great lengths like yelling in the middle of the Americana at like on a Wednesday night on Tax Day, by the way, we went to a Tax Day screening.

• 21:52Sean Fennessey?

  We did go to the Tax Day screening.

• 21:53Amanda Dobbins?

  And Sean is just like, but it just doesn't look like her.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  But she has the Black Dolphin tattoo.

• 21:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I understand. I understand. I think, I, you know what, maybe I'm a moron.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 22:04Sean Fennessey?

  I think for a conventional audience to be like, that's the same person is a little bit of a stretch.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:11Sean Fennessey?

  Daniela Pineda is incredibly striking and that does not look like her in the photograph. It may be her in makeup.

• 22:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 22:17Sean Fennessey?

  It may be her, you know, maybe digitally altered. I'm sure all of that is true, but the efforts to be like, that woman is that woman. And also because of her car accident and like whatever it was done to her frontal lobe, she is now Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  And a chess master.

• 22:32Sean Fennessey?

  What?

• 22:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 22:32Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and a chess master. Yeah. That, that was like.

• 22:35Amanda Dobbins?

  And all.

• 22:36Sean Fennessey?

  Waterline supernatural in a commando movie, which I found very strange.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I just remembered all the kids in the, in the special.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Harbor, uh, what's it called? What's the neurodivergent hacker army?

• 22:48Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I forgot about that part.

• 22:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, no, because the only, the only reason I thought about it.

• 22:51Sean Fennessey?

  That is nuts.

• 22:51Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I know. It was because that like the whole sequence in which like what happens to Daniela Pineda's character is explained to you is from like the, the neurosurgeon who accepts like some sort of grant from this like, from the, um, you know, the world renowned Harbor Neuroscience, you know, whatever, which is located in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is also where Dartmouth is.

• 23:16Sean Fennessey?

  You were very excited about that.

• 23:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I was like, hey, was not told in.

• 23:19Sean Fennessey?

  Did you not attend that?

• 23:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you know what? That's not where, and so, but anyway.

• 23:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Christian Wolf, Ben Affleck's character, the accountant, is now running his rogue accounting and also all of his ops with the help of a group of children

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:38Amanda Dobbins?

  who are studying at the neuroscience school and they're like the world's greatest hackers. You, Sean, went to the bathroom during the hacking scene and I just like the whole time.

• 23:49Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I was watching on the side. I was, I was, I didn't come back to my seat.

• 23:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay.

• 23:53Sean Fennessey?

  I was standing there.

• 23:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Because I was like, I can't believe he's in the bathroom as these children are hacking into this lady's camera in order to...

• 24:00Speaker 03

  And like ringing her doorbell so that she goes away from the email. I thought that was a great moment.

• 24:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean, that was insane and funny.

• 24:06Sean Fennessey?

  It's like, it's a very pulpy, silly kind of a story and it can withstand this level of absurdity in the plotting. But I was like, this is a lot to ask for the sequel to a movie that came out nine years ago that most people watch on TNT.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  A friend of mine had a very funny observation that had not occurred to me while watching Accountant 2, which is that this is the original Good Will Hunting script.

• 24:28Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Where Good Will Hunting gets drafted by the NSA and CIA to become like a super spy.

• 24:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  And this is the script that William Goldman was like, you guys should lose all this shit and just make it a like a human drama. But it's like Affleck was probably like, that's a good fucking movie.

• 24:45Sean Fennessey?

  That's amazing. That is amazing. I had, that's a great shout out.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Shout out to my friend. I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah.

• 24:50Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of, did you know Ben was in the Criterion Closet this morning?

• 24:54Amanda Dobbins?

  No, this, this very morning.

• 24:55Sean Fennessey?

  Posted this morning.

• 24:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, wow.

• 24:56Sean Fennessey?

  He spoke beautifully about many films.

• 24:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, among them?

• 25:00Sean Fennessey?

  Rules of the Game by Renoir. Malcolm X by Spike Lee. He spoke at length about his commentary work on the Armageddon DVD.

• 25:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, no, I know. He's really, he's really out there.

• 25:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's, uh, he's the best.

• 25:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Selling that. You don't need to tell me that.

• 25:12Sean Fennessey?

  He is a hardcore cinephile and we respect it. Um, I, I would like soft recommend this movie. It's fun. It's stupid.

• 25:19Amanda Dobbins?

  It was really stupid, but we had a good time.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  It's a, to use a Bill Simmons, or actually Bill Simmons' dad thing, it's a classic five o'clocker.

• 25:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 25:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Just a great, like, why don't you go see Accountant 2 and then grab a burger?

• 25:31Sean Fennessey?

  It's a really good... I've been thinking a lot about like, kind of, how to elevate the experience of being in movie theaters. In part, I think, because I'm in movie theaters so often. And I have a complicated relationship to alcohol these days. Sometimes I'm really in on it, sometimes I'm really out on it. But this is a great beer movie. Like, this is a movie to enjoy with a beer.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Unless it makes you have to pee and then you can't see the neurodivergent army of hackers.

• 25:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, maybe I'll just get a pee bag attached to me at all times.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Can I ask two more things? One, did you guys notice that Bernthal actually goes, "God damn!" At one point, sorry. I saw you drinking it, I was like, shit.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  He actually says, he says it, he says the thing.

• 26:08Sean Fennessey?

  That was even a soft goddamn, so you didn't go full register there.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  And also, why does the guy who works out of, like, the Reseda Human Trafficking Hub, or wherever that dude Burke is, right? The bad guy.

• 26:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  The bald, bad guy who gets killed.

• 26:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, the fish guy.

• 26:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we forgot about that part.

• 26:25Amanda Dobbins?

  We totally forgot about the fish guy.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Why is he, A, a sashimi dealer? And also, only has one, like...

• 26:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, he's like, what, is that his son? Or is he like, one handshake?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  But he's like, yeah, you solo go to Juarez.

• 26:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  And it's like...

• 26:38Sean Fennessey?

  But he runs a human trafficking organization. From Boston, from, where is he?

• 26:43Speaker 03

  No, he's in, I think he's in, like, San Pedro or something. Yeah.

• 26:47Sean Fennessey?

  It's a really weird movie. Okay, well, this is the first of two films we'll discuss that features human trafficking heavily, and it's plotting, but we'll get there in a minute. Let's talk about Havoc next. Did you get to Havoc?

• 26:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I did.

• 26:59Sean Fennessey?

  Shout out to you. You had a weekend out of town with your family.

• 27:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I did.

• 27:02Sean Fennessey?

  And you sat down to experience the cinema of Gareth Evans.

• 27:06Amanda Dobbins?

  I did.

• 27:07Sean Fennessey?

  Gareth Evans, of course, the director of the Raid films. I think he's the creator, certainly one of the filmmakers behind Gangs of London, a show that Chris loves. And one of the foremost action filmmakers of the 21st century. This movie has been in the works for a very long time.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  I think I have drafted it as an anticipation auction three times?

• 27:26Sean Fennessey?

  At least twice, as far back as 2022. Maybe even 2021. This is Tom Hardy's collaboration with Gareth Evans after Gangs of London. It's a straight-up crime movie. It's a cops and villains movie. It's a political corruption movie. And it's ultimately just an excuse for Gareth Evans to go ham, like, three or four times in the movie. I feel like we have to start with Chris to get his take.

• 27:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, of course.

• 27:53Sean Fennessey?

  Because this is an important film for him.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, this starts out 45 minutes of which is essentially like ChatGPT writing a Gangs of London episode. And it basically takes place in Sin City, like there's no sense of-

• 28:05Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't that Chicago?

• 28:06Speaker 03

  I think it is.

• 28:07Sean Fennessey?

  I was reading it as Chicago.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  I mean, Working Man is Chicago and, and-

• 28:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Shot there? No.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  I have no idea. Probably shot in Romania or something. I don't really have a lot to say about the opening half of this film, other than if I die because someone throws a washing machine through, full of cocaine through my body, you guys can laugh about it. I think that that would be an extraordinary way to go out, and that's the opening sequence of this film.

• 28:35Sean Fennessey?

  That sequence is a perfect metaphor for what it's like to watch a Gareth Evans action sequence. It feels like you're inside of a washing machine full of cocaine. That's a great idea.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  It's pretty boring until you get to the nightclub about an hour in, and Gassafelstein starts playing, and I left my body and joined my ancestors. And we looked down on myself and we said, no one's ever had it better than this kid right now. I had my fucking big headphones on in the dark in my house, and I watched the nightclub scene literally three times back to back.

• 29:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is like a full-length movie, by the way, because that scene-

• 29:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's very long.

• 29:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Is very extended. They, they don't leave anything out.

• 29:20Sean Fennessey?

  There's all kinds of like butchered knives going on there, machetes. Yeah. That scene is crack. It is so good. It is so entertaining. I thought this movie was like legitimately subpar, except for 28 minutes. 28 minutes of it, I was like ecstatic, so thrilled. And I think that's justification for its existence. The nightclub scene is the best one. What a, what a, what a summer for Gassafelstein.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:45Sean Fennessey?

  The, uh, the electronic music artist, whose music was also featured in that A24 Thunderbolts trailer.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 29:51Sean Fennessey?

  And now here, not one, not two, not three, but four songs during the duration of that nightclub sequence in this movie.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Bad DJ, he's just playing Gassafelstein picks. Yeah.

• 30:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Maybe he's distracted?

• 30:02Speaker 03

  He might be distracted.

• 30:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, it might just, you know, the track listing might just keep going.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Holy shit, did that guy just get hit with a machete?

• 30:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sure that he's actually, like, at one point.

• 30:11Sean Fennessey?

  That's one of the ideas I like in the sequences, that for the most part, the people on the floor of the club have no idea that this brawl is happening.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Off the balcony and bricks in half.

• 30:22Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, any thoughts about this movie that have not been shared by Chris?

• 30:24Amanda Dobbins?

  No, even watching this scene, I was like, okay, so this is a Chris Ryan movie, you know, which I knew, Tom Hardy action film on Netflix, I was like, okay, I'm watching this with my Chris goggles on. And then that was confirmed, and I was happy for you.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  A couple of other highlights I thought you might enjoy, Forest Whitaker just doing Eric Adams.

• 30:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Is that what that was?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  I think so, but sure.

• 30:48Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty much. Does Eric Adams have, like, a flunky, loser-y son?

• 30:51Speaker 03

  I'm pretty sure he does, allegedly, and then also, like, I mean, it just, I felt like his whole delivery was very Eric Adams-coded.

• 31:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  What did you think of Olafon?

• 31:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, without, I understood what would be, his character's arc would be, within the first two minutes of the film.

• 31:11Sean Fennessey?

  He's giving it away pretty quick.

• 31:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's not, it's not very subtle, anything that's going on in the first 30 minutes, as you guys, as you guys mentioned. I'm always happy to see him, I continue to think he's incredibly handsome.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Yes, okay.

• 31:24Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  I thought maybe.

• 31:26Sean Fennessey?

  He's in his 50s?

• 31:27Speaker 03

  I was wondering how many of those stunts he did. Like, Hardy is getting his ass kicked.

• 31:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Hardy's in it, no, I will say in the nightclub scene, you know, like.

• 31:36Sean Fennessey?

  He's 56 years old, Olafon.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:37Amanda Dobbins?

  With, what an achievement, you know, of, of people just jamming stuff into each other to, to, in a club for like 30 minutes. But I did notice, I was watching everything, but you know, at some point, like, the limbs going places, kind of your eyes start to glaze over, and then like. His head just does peek around a corner in a way that's like, oh, you weren't there before.

• 32:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Amanda Dobbins?

  So, but that's okay.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. The other big set piece in this movie is a fight in a house that resembles a little bit of a Gangs of London famous set piece where basically, first of all, I gotta say, I don't think I've ever seen a bad movie with triads involved.

• 32:17Sean Fennessey?

  I had a note about this as well.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  And the two triad ladies in this movie are some bad chicks. I was pretty into them.

• 32:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Uh, Mother.

• 32:26Sean Fennessey?

  They both get knocked out, pretty, in pretty brutal fashion.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Um.

• 32:30Sean Fennessey?

  Mother is, did you feel attracted to her?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  No, but I was definitely like emotionally engaged with her on a deep level.

• 32:39Sean Fennessey?

  What was the other gal's name?

• 32:40Speaker 03

  Um, well, that was played by a UFC fighter, um, Michelle Waterson Gomez.

• 32:46Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Um, and she and Tom Hardy have a fight that is so intense, the entire house falls down.

• 32:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 32:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  And then spoiler, he shoots her with a fucking whaling harpoon.

• 32:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's just a great idea. He's like.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Why does he have a fucking harpoon? I know he's fishing.

• 33:03Sean Fennessey?

  I guess they're like in a shack where you go fishing.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  But who has a harpoon on like, lake fishing?

• 33:09Sean Fennessey?

  Fairly small harpoon. I laughed really hard at that scene. The harpoon, did it go through her neck or through her head?

• 33:15Speaker 03

  And then she tries to like walk down it a little bit.

• 33:17Sean Fennessey?

  Sliding down.

• 33:20Sean Fennessey?

  We need more things like this in the movies. We need people to get harpooned on camera. This is great.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  And then they just wild bunch it up at the end. It's great.

• 33:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Crazy big shootout. Uh, this is a pretty, pretty fun movie. It's a, it's a, it's a time killer. I was wondering two things about this. One, I think we do have to have a Tom Hardy conversation. 10 years ago, I thought, not only one of the most exciting actors in Hollywood, many people thought he could be a future James Bond, but I thought he had a lot of variance in the kinds of voices and characters he was playing. And now he only plays one guy, which is anonymous, metropolis, American angry dude, like in Venom.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  I know your answer is gonna be, have you watched Mobland at all?

• 33:58Sean Fennessey?

  I have not.

• 34:00Amanda Dobbins?

  My in-laws were really big on Mobland this weekend.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Very enjoyable series, for one thing. Real, like, just like, be, kind of like, crime show. He's delightful, and it's the closest he's been to Inception, Tom Hardy.

• 34:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Eames.

• 34:16Sean Fennessey?

  He was charming, you're saying?

• 34:17Speaker 03

  He's charming, and, you know, he's just trying to, like, keep all the warring factions from, like, annihilating each other. It's essentially like a very cartoonish Michael Clayton in the British underworld. And he's getting to play a guy in London, you know?

• 34:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think he should retire this era. The, like, hyper-grizzled, muttering, barely enunciating, trying to be a cop from Nowhere Town, USA. I think we got it.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 34:42Sean Fennessey?

  He's done it. I'm ready for, I'm ready for his 50s.

• 34:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Chris will let him know.

• 34:46Sean Fennessey?

  Please call him. Send, send a, send a stork to Taboo Island.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  I think he's done with it, too. First of all, this was filmed, like, in 2020, or whenever they started filming this movie. He's talked about how he's like, "I wanna, like, kind of get back down to planet Earth a little bit."

• 34:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Number one on Netflix, though.

• 35:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Sean Fennessey?

  Seems like this movie is working.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  That's only just for my plays, so.

• 35:06Sean Fennessey?

  This is the kind of thing that really works on Netflix. Like, this is a defining genre of Netflix when you think about Carry On.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Extraction.

• 35:12Sean Fennessey?

  Extraction, Triple Frontier, Rebel Ridge, The Old Guard, like, the grim, dark action movie is sort of their brand alongside teen coming-of-age movies.

• 35:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:26Sean Fennessey?

  And hallmark-ish rom-com slash holiday movies, right? Like, those are the movies that they're best known for at this point. Is there anything I'm forgetting?

• 35:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, awards plays that don't pay off.

• 35:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 35:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. But this is, I think, of all the categories you named, this is the one we're most at peace with.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, if Netflix wants to keep making these types of movies with these budgets and these level of movie stars, like, they have a competency at them. They don't look, they don't make us angry, and they bring, Chris, a large amount of joy. So, like, this, this is okay. If this is what they wanna do, okay.

• 36:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm with you. Well said. Uh, any closing thoughts on Havoc?

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Uh, I just am curious why it took so long. Um, like, what was the thing that they had to reshoot in here? Like?

• 36:13Sean Fennessey?

  I would imagine that the transition from the old film team leadership to the new one was a factor.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 36:20Sean Fennessey?

  But.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Got some notes?

• 36:21Sean Fennessey?

  Could have been.

• 36:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:23Sean Fennessey?

  But it seems like it's working for them. Gareth Evans, can we get him a better script?

• 36:28Speaker 03

  He wrote this, so obviously he trusts himself as a writer.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  I've never like, I've never like, I could do this, you know? I never like, think to myself, I go, just let me get a pass on this.

• 36:41Sean Fennessey?

  Except when he fired that harpoon gun through the triad woman's neck.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  I just mean like, I don't, I don't have the hubris to think that I could do what he does at all, even as a writer, but I would love to have just taken like, a quick run past some of the dialogue.

• 36:53Sean Fennessey?

  Editor Chris, get your, get your notes on.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, just have like, this guy say this, you know? Or just get like, a, like a average crime novel to adapt, you know? And just take that and then you do the action sequences.

• 37:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  I'm not trying to limit him.

• 37:07Sean Fennessey?

  I wrote in the notes that David Koep is writing the new Jurassic Park movie, which I think is a reason to be excited for the new Jurassic Park movie. And I, like, let's just get Gareth-

• 37:15Speaker 03

  Jurassic world rebirth, is that what you're talking about?

• 37:16Sean Fennessey?

  Jurassic world rebirth.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:19Sean Fennessey?

  New film coming July 2nd from Universal, thank you. I think it'd be great if he got someone like a David Koep, just like, a locked and loaded, genre for hire movie maker, so that then he could do his Gareth Evans shit around a movie like that.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Would you have watched Gareth Evans's Black Bag? Same script, same actors. But, the nightclub scene.

• 37:43Amanda Dobbins?

  It was like, and the dinner scene just becomes like, everyone-

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Smashing each other, but yeah, sure.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:49Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by the Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo. The Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo is built for travel. You can earn rewards wherever you book, your favorite hotel site, your go-to airline, and more. You get five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants, and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Whether it's a big vacation or a quick getaway, from booking your stay to that first meal when you arrive, you're turning your trips into rewards with the Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo. Learn more at wellsfargo.com/autographjourney. Terms apply.

• 38:21Speaker 04

  Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms, don't pause for the moments that matter. That's why understanding your treatment options matters. Discover what's possible with Trinphaya. Guselkamap. Trinphaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Talk to your doctor and explore what's possible. Or call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Trinphaya and visit trinphyradio.com.

• 39:06Sean Fennessey?

  This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with the big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

• 39:31Sean Fennessey?

  Let's talk about a working man.

• 39:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Did you watch this one?

• 39:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I watched, I watched every movie on the, on the doc, on the document.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  This is a lot of men at work.

• 39:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I did actually watch this one while doing prep for last week's Big Picture.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  So you lost some of the nuance, might be.

• 39:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you're right. So I'm excited to have Chris Ryan, our political correspondent, here to explain it to me.

• 39:53Sean Fennessey?

  I had high hopes for this one. This is the new film from David Ayer, a director that Chris and I have a lot of time for. He was most recently seen utilizing Jason Statham's unique talents in The Beekeeper, another surprise success from 2024 that we all liked, that is a batshit crazy movie about the deep state paranoia, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden's kids, Donald Trump.

• 40:15Sean Fennessey?

  And bees. Uh, I was hoping that it would have some of the same manic energy. This is more of a classical Jason Statham kind of a movie. It's based on a novel called Levin's Trade by Chuck Dixon. The screenplay is co-written by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone.

• 40:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Sean Fennessey?

  Which I think tells us maybe a little bit about the energy of the film. That is also about human traffickers. It's about a foreman on a construction site whose boss's daughter is abducted by human traffickers.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  The Russian mob.

• 40:45Sean Fennessey?

  The Russian mob.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Or a faction of the Russian mob.

• 40:47Sean Fennessey?

  And he's a former British special ops soldier who has moved to Chicago.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  As they do.

• 40:55Sean Fennessey?

  And to work on construction.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  And be with his family, presumably.

• 40:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And we spend a lot of time with them. We really learn about them.

• 41:02Amanda Dobbins?

  But everyone else is his family, you know? And they keep bringing him foods and stuff.

• 41:06Sean Fennessey?

  Michael Pena, for example, his boss.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  I mean, the best films are about found families.

• 41:09Sean Fennessey?

  Let me ask you this. If Bill's kids were abducted, would you go on a one-man spree? To save them? Because that's the plot of this movie.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:18Sean Fennessey?

  That is truly the plot of this movie.

• 41:26Sean Fennessey?

  That's, I just want to point it out. It's kind of weird. It's like, could Jason Statham just let the FBI do their jobs?

• 41:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm just like imagining Chris just like out in that room getting the call and being like, okay, what am I gonna do? We should make this movie.

• 41:42Sean Fennessey?

  And imagine what the human traffickers would think when you rolled up, leered out, dripped out, and you were just like, you've never heard of me. You'll never see me again.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  I'm 5'7".

• 41:51Amanda Dobbins?

  What is your first move when you get that call?

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Uh, have my lawyers and agents look at the deal and see if we've got any notes.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Have my team interrogated a little bit. Find out whether I have IP rights to it, you know? No, I think, uh... This is a goofball movie, man. I mean, there's part of it that is like played incredibly straight and soberly and is about like this guy who's grieving the suicide of his wife and is trying to reconnect with his kid and clearly sees this girl Jenny as like a surrogate and is doing all this stuff. And then there's also like a little bit of like Mad Max Fury Road going on underneath of it where there's sub gangs of the Russian mob who all dress like they're in Road Warrior and sell meth in Juliet. And then they all show up at a house and fight.

• 42:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Who are those guys? What's that? Is that a real scene? Is that a scene that we can be a part of?

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Speaking of ladies in these action movies that caught my eye, Artemis, the one with the face tat. What's up with her?

• 42:52Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:53Sean Fennessey?

  It sounds like you got really jazzed up this weekend.

• 42:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you're discovering.

• 43:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you watch all four of these movies this weekend?

• 43:02Speaker 03

  More or less, yeah.

• 43:03Sean Fennessey?

  Did you see the amateur too?

• 43:04Speaker 03

  I see the amateur a while ago.

• 43:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, yeah.

• 43:07Sean Fennessey?

  Any thoughts? Like, what did you think of this? You were half paying attention.

• 43:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I was half paying attention. And, and once I realized like, okay, this is not The Beekeeper, there is not anything like bizarre and entertaining about what it's trying to sandwich in in terms of the Beekeeper's strange political valence, or just like Jeremy Irons or like Mini Driver calling for one seat.

• 43:30Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 43:30Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, seeing anything like, I need my paycheck. I was, this is a basic good guy, you know, good guy revenge type movie. I was back to my document.

• 43:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a classic statham vehicle. I mean, he's made a lot of movies like this over the last 15 years. He's one of the most reliable movie stars and he's, he is really the working man's Tom Cruise. I mean, he doesn't really make streaming movies.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 43:52Sean Fennessey?

  He makes movies for movie theaters for a very specific audience. He basically makes one a year. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, some of them are so strange that they're really compelling. He obviously also has a part in big franchises like the Fast movies.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Can we give the Mini Driver and Beekeeper award to David Harbour in A Working Man, playing a blind ex-SEAL?

• 44:11Amanda Dobbins?

  So that was a real, I knew he was in this.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:14Amanda Dobbins?

  But I, you know, I had phased out and then I looked up and it was like a profile shot with like a giant. Beard and it took me a while to be like, wait a second, that's David Harbour.

• 44:25Sean Fennessey?

  We have a date with David Harbour tonight.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  We sure do.

• 44:27Amanda Dobbins?

  We sure do. Also, have you guys been following David Harbour's press tour?

• 44:30Sean Fennessey?

  No. How's it going?

• 44:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I don't know if you have kept up with his personal life.

• 44:35Sean Fennessey?

  He was with Lily Allen, but they split up.

• 44:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And now he may or may not be dating someone younger than Lily Allen and then he's being asked about it and.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  How's he taking that?

• 44:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh.

• 44:45Sean Fennessey?

  What do you, like, how, how young are we talking here?

• 44:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I mean, I, you know, I, younger.

• 44:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. But if you told me Lily Allen was 37, I wouldn't be stunned.

• 44:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but I, I'm, I meant more like 20s.

• 44:58Sean Fennessey?

  34?

• 44:58Amanda Dobbins?

  20, right, okay. I was, I was trying to be respectful.

• 45:02Sean Fennessey?

  He's dating a 19 year old. He's dating, is he and Bill Belichick are sharing a girlfriend?

• 45:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And Lily Allen, who has a podcast, is not excited about it.

• 45:10Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, oh, she's speaking on it publicly?

• 45:12Speaker 03

  She's making, she's taking like little subs.

• 45:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  At him, you know?

• 45:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't believe you're not.

• 45:16Sean Fennessey?

  You guys are up on this.

• 45:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, this is a thing.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. I love Lily Allen.

• 45:19Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly in the zone of like social media that I don't have access to.

• 45:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 45:23Sean Fennessey?

  I don't pursue it and so it doesn't come to me.

• 45:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Lily Allen also apologized to Katy Perry for being mean to her about Blue Origin.

• 45:30Sean Fennessey?

  I'm going the other way on that one.

• 45:31Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm with.

• 45:32Sean Fennessey?

  Shame them.

• 45:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Agree.

• 45:34Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay. Well.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Wait, there was one more thing I wanted to talk about.

• 45:38Amanda Dobbins?

  David Harbour.

• 45:38Sean Fennessey?

  There's a couple of things. I mean, one, this is post Sound of Freedom Corps. That's the thing about the human trafficking thing is that that movie was a huge sensation. We thought, what would be the ripple effect of this? We talked about Angel Studios. Could you have a different kind of storytelling? The truth is, is it was always there. You know, Lionsgate was always making movies like this. And this is a movie that is pitched at a very specific audience. It just doesn't have that harebrained craziness that Beekeeper has that kind of propulsively kept you interested in where the story was going because it was so strange. It's just very straightforward. He's going to kill these guys and then he's going to win.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  This movie was dying for a twist, which would essentially be like spoilers for Man on Fire, essentially be the Marc Anthony twist of Man on Fire. Like, it's really dying for like another step. And you get like midway through and you're like, oh, it's just like he's going to single-handedly disassemble the Russian mob.

• 46:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:23Sean Fennessey?

  And that, that would be the thing I think also that would get people to say, you know, you got to see is A Working Man. That movie's crazy. Um, but it doesn't really have that. Like, it's solid. It's doing what it wants to do, but it's not great.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  What's up with these guys, though? Human trafficking. I mean, like, I guess, you know, it goes all the way back to like the searchers or whatever. It's like a child kidnapped is like.

• 46:41Sean Fennessey?

  It goes back to the slave trade, Chris. So, you know, ancient Rome.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  No, I know, I understand, like, the origins of that. I meant in cinema.

• 46:52Amanda Dobbins?

  As soon as you put this in, I was like, oh, great. Here comes the jam up. Um, yeah.

• 46:58Sean Fennessey?

  I would, I would say this idea as a central preoccupation of a certain kind of man who's trying to present his idea of like, his vision of family and patriotism is just really weird. It's like you can be, when you're so obsessed with something, it's suspicious to me.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:13Sean Fennessey?

  And the fact that it has like infected mainstream action movies.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  It's a big plot line on Lioness in the second season.

• 47:20Sean Fennessey?

  Right. I, you know, it's suspect.

• 47:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Sean Fennessey?

  As Chucky once said.

• 47:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course.

• 47:26Amanda Dobbins?

  You said it just like him. I was like, oh, my God, is he gonna?

• 47:32Sean Fennessey?

  This is an Affleck-coded pod today.

• 47:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Sean Fennessey?

  Any other thoughts on The Working Man?

• 47:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Pretty boring.

• 47:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I thought it was pretty boring, too. The Amateur. This is a movie that I, uh, triggered a feeling that I shared on the pod. It's not a bad movie. Uh, directed by James Hawes.

• 47:49Sean Fennessey?

  It's based on a novel written some 35 years ago. You've read it.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  My boy, Robert Latell. Yeah.

• 47:54Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Really good espionage writer, wrote a book called The Company, which is kind of like an epic of the CIA that was adapted into a TNT mini-series with Alfred Molina and Chris O'Dowd. No, Chris O'Donnell, my bad. Uh, and then has written a bunch of like slimmer novels that are actually really cool and have like some Paul Oster, Don DeLillo stuff going on, including, I think, Amateur, which I do have, but don't remember reading, but is much different than what the film winds up being.

• 48:24Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting. That's good to know. So, you know, in brief, the plot is Rami Malek plays a brilliant but introverted CIA operative, like a tech ops guy, who works out of a basement office. His wife goes to London for a work trip. She's played by Rachel Brosnahan, and she is killed in the, in a terrorist act in London. And he is completely destroyed by this and goes on a quest to find the actual terrorist who killed him against the wishes of the CIA and frankly, everybody else involved in this story, and kind of goes on a strategic killing spree throughout Europe. Says one of the best casts of the year, features not just Malek and Brosnahan, but Katrina Balf, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCalleney, Julian Nicholson, and Lawrence fucking Fishburne.

• 49:11Sean Fennessey?

  And it's one of those movies that's like 68% there. And the final 32% is the most important percent. So it's not bad. But it's not good. And the reason it triggered the feeling for me was I was like, God, how do we get to the final 32%?

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So like, why am I seeing this on a Monday night?

• 49:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, instead of doing bad time.

• 49:33Sean Fennessey?

  So what did you think? We haven't talked about it.

• 49:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, instead of seeing it on a Monday night, I saw it on a Friday at noon.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Which is probably optimal.

• 49:40Amanda Dobbins?

  It's absolutely optimal. And this is also in the Amanda wheelhouse, right? Like tinges of international espionage, famous actors. And, and so I, I would maybe give it like 72%. I would watch one of these every month if they would make them. I had a perfectly nice time. There is something missing. Shall we, shall we name it?

• 50:05Sean Fennessey?

  We have to say.

• 50:05Amanda Dobbins?

  It is, it's an actor at the center of the movie. This movie stars Rami Malek. I'm sorry, that, that I does not connect for me.

• 50:12Sean Fennessey?

  I think there's, certainly I think Rami Malek can be an effective actor. I think he's the-

• 50:16Speaker 03

  And an effective hacker.

• 50:17Sean Fennessey?

  And an effective hacker. And it does feel like he was cast out of his role in Mr. Robot, which is where he became famous, a role he was born to play. Um, this movie needs like a more handsome and dynamic person at the center of it. Like it needs like a lead to be the lead. And Rami Malek is like kind of a number two for a movie like this. He's the guy who helps. The movie is obviously very purposely trying to subvert your expectations there. Like, oh, this meek little guy would come along and blow up this pool and kill these Russian bad guys. I totally get the idea of the movie. But in my head, I was like, if you just put Andrew Garfield in this role and puts him, put him in some glasses, it's probably just a better movie. And I felt that the whole time I was watching it. I was like, I'm not really with Malek at all. I know he's mad that his wife was killed. It's completely understandable.

• 51:01Sean Fennessey?

  Anybody would be completely destroyed by this. But I just couldn't get emotionally invested in the story.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  I, I thought while I was watching this that it was a really good concept for the movie would be like, what if Q was James Bond? Um, and then I got really distracted being like, what if-

• 51:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Ben Whishaw?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Was just, but he got to be Q, but he was like-

• 51:19Sean Fennessey?

  Ben Whishaw's even better than Andrew Garfield. If it was Ben Whishaw, that would have been, that would have been great.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it's a little bit of like, it's what Ben Affleck is doing in The Accountant and Accountant 2, but weirder. But you do need someone who is

• 51:34Speaker 03

  is full.

• 51:35Amanda Dobbins?

  who is the type and then is like playing against type.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 51:38Amanda Dobbins?

  But then can become the the type in the center of the film. You need a movie star.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  We are probably, do you think at the very end of or still in the throes of Wick adaptation variations like Nobody, Love Hurts, you know, like these like, you thought he was just a normal guy, but he's actually a killer, you know? I guess Wick's not like that, but like that style of fighting applied to almost everything.

• 52:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think this is pulling from a different aspect of the Wick storytelling. Like, this is a very grim, straightforward, serious spy movie that happens to have these remarkable set piece kills. Like, it actually is, to your point, like, a little closer to Bond, where you're, it's like episodic and you're kind of waiting for him to get to the next kill, the next set piece. It doesn't have any of that attempt at action humor that Love Hurts or Nobody or all of these movies where you're trying to be like, it does have, I guess, the surprise of what if Kiwi Kwan or Bob Woodkirk punched a guy in the neck?

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:40Sean Fennessey?

  But this has none of the levity of those movies. It has none of the mythology or none of the like grandeur of the Wick movies. The Accountant, which I dubbed John Bick in the document here, I hope all of you caught that. That's some of my best headline work that I no longer get to use publicly.

• 52:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 52:59Sean Fennessey?

  That was great once at that very specific thing.

• 53:04Sean Fennessey?

  The Accountant, I think, kind of is like self-knowing, you know? It might not be, it's like self-aware, and this movie is not that self-aware. You know, it's played much more seriously. So, again, like,

• 53:16Sean Fennessey?

  This is not a bad film. It's actually very well made by Haas. I think a couple of the set pieces are very exciting. They were all given away in the trailer. Which is becoming a recurring discussion point here, but the pool sequence is really cool and the design of that is a great idea and it looks good in the execution. But we saw it and we saw it, I think, because the studio was nervous that people wouldn't go see it if they didn't have a big set piece like that. So I think-

• 53:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Would you go in a pool like that even before, having seen this movie?

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm pretty, I'm pretty open to lots of different pool experiences.

• 53:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Even like floating up thirty-

• 53:47Speaker 03

  I don't really like indoor pools, but other than that, huh.

• 53:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Thirty feet. I don't know, that would freak me out. Yeah.

• 53:53Sean Fennessey?

  You wouldn't swim in that pool.

• 53:55Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it's, the height kinda counteracts the, the joy of being in a pool, which I do love.

• 54:01Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think about infinity pools?

• 54:04Amanda Dobbins?

  On ground? You know, like-

• 54:07Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean on ground?

• 54:08Amanda Dobbins?

  As opposed to suspended between two large towers? Yeah.

• 54:12Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'm not naturally a cringe-

• 54:13Speaker 03

  That's actually what Two Towers is about. It's just Frodo wants to go swimming.

• 54:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Let's go see it! No, I have seen it, I think. Is that the first one?

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 54:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Second one?

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 54:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I've seen the second one and the third one.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  Second one's with the-

• 54:28Sean Fennessey?

  But not the first one.

• 54:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I can't really remember.

• 54:31Sean Fennessey?

  You went to go see the second one, having not seen the first one?

• 54:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh huh, and the third one. I saw them back to back, because in college, they did like a, a thing.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  Were you blackout drunk by the end of the third one?

• 54:40Amanda Dobbins?

  No, because you weren't allowed to have booze in these, they were serious film screenings. I don't know why I went, but I did. I saw both of them.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 54:48Sean Fennessey?

  Did you have a companion with you, or no?

• 54:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, but I can't remember who it was. It wasn't a boy.

• 54:53Sean Fennessey?

  It wasn't Elijah Wood?

• 54:56Speaker 03

  It wasn't, okay, nevermind.

• 54:57Amanda Dobbins?

  It wasn't like, it wasn't a date. I wasn't like there, yeah, on the behest of, you know.

• 55:02Sean Fennessey?

  Have you seen Fellowship of the Ring?

• 55:03Speaker 03

  I have, yeah.

• 55:05Amanda Dobbins?

  I guess I've seen it once, right?

• 55:07Sean Fennessey?

  Excellent movie.

• 55:08Amanda Dobbins?

  The Hobbits, they set off, right?

• 55:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, they set off on a quest to throw the ring into the-

• 55:13Speaker 03

  It's a mysterious guide named Strider.

• 55:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 55:17Sean Fennessey?

  Aragorn?

• 55:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, they call himself Strider in the beginning.

• 55:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Why?

• 55:21Sean Fennessey?

  What's the-

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Because he's trying to obscure his royal lineage.

• 55:25Sean Fennessey?

  OJ Simpson? A football player? Aragorn? The Lost King?

• 55:33Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 55:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Infinity pools, I'm open.

• 55:36Sean Fennessey?

  What about you, infinity pool?

• 55:38Speaker 03

  I'm always kind of curious about Airbnbs that market a pool close to a natural body of water as a selling point. To me, it seems a little bit redundant. I know the pools are a cleaner experience usually, but like, I don't want to go in a pool next to the ocean.

• 55:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree with you. Going to throw a couple of things though for you. You and I have been there on the Surf Reports, you know, and if it's a choppy day, you can't get in. There's nothing worse than being at the beach and not being able to get in the water. So, and then also, smaller kids, sometimes the, you know, you can't really take a baby in the ocean, but in the way that you can take a small kid in a pool.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  William Finnegan, the author, was raised by waves.

• 56:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I know, on Will Rogers, yeah.

• 56:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's a wonderful book.

• 56:30Sean Fennessey?

  What do these four movies tell us about where action stands right now?

• 56:33Speaker 03

  I was wondering if there was going to be any conclusion to this podcast.

• 56:36Sean Fennessey?

  I'm curious for your points of view, you know? Action is not a genre that you shy away from. You see all the action movies with us. So it's not, you know, it's not like horror where you're like, I don't know. Like, you watch all these movies. Is there something good happening, bad happening? Is it just April?

• 56:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I think it's a little bit April. These were all, with the exception of the amateur, the first three were pretty, were gnarlier and more gun-focused than I tend to like. Which is, that's just a preference thing. That's obviously like a huge part of the genre and a huge part of even action movies I really like, like the John Wick movies, but...

• 57:22Amanda Dobbins?

  They're all, so that's, but they're all like, pretty grody and pretty, let's just like shove things in people's faces. There is a lot of choreography involved in all of this, but I wouldn't call them like balletic, you know?

• 57:36Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 57:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, that's okay. There are lots of different ways to kill a guy.

• 57:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there is some, a little bit in Havoc.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  I think Havoc has that like crazy Busby Berkeley energy that I think Gareth Evans actually would like to make a musical and is just like, I can't, so I just have these people fly through each other. Um, I don't know. I mean, I think that The Accountant 2's success is like, honestly quite charming because it is an original story and it really, really just reminds me of like 80's action movies in a big time way, even down to like, like abrupt tonal shifts, like they kill 80 dudes and then Jon Bernthal adopts a cat. You know, it's like, it's really, the entire spectrum of the human experience happens.

• 58:17Sean Fennessey?

  It has literally one thing that I neglected to mention, uh, very similar to those Schwarzenegger and Stallone action films in the 80's where there are 100 men facing two men and all 100 men have guns and for whatever reason, they will not pick up their guns and shoot the two guys who are attempting to take them out.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  When Bernthal's like, "Time for hand-to-hand combat," they're all like, "Yes, an honest fight."

• 58:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's just, it's great that we still have that at the movies.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Doesn't Bernthal also get shot like nine times in his draper vest?

• 58:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, not ideal.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  I, I don't know if I can draw any massive conclusions from these four films together. I think obviously we talked about some of the political undercurrents of, of three of them. Um, and I think even Amateur has some like, you know, suppressed masculine urges and like, you know, like not being part of the physical world, you know, kind of stuff that I think is a, is a affliction.

• 59:14Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's a probing insight. I think there's some, definitely something to that.

• 59:17Amanda Dobbins?

  It also has the basic, like, there are parts of the CIA that are- You know.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Working against our better interests.

• 59:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it has.

• 59:25Sean Fennessey?

  Men would rather avenge their dead wife.

• 59:27Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 59:28Sean Fennessey?

  Rather than go to therapy.

• 59:29Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I meant, whole McElhenney. Would rather copy and paste suicide bomber on a drone attack than like face consequences.

• 59:36Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 59:37Amanda Dobbins?

  So there you go.

• 59:38Sean Fennessey?

  There's an incisive.

• 59:39Amanda Dobbins?

  But Julianne Nicholson, who's the head of the CIA, because in this world, women can have it all, knows what's up.

• 59:44Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 59:45Amanda Dobbins?

  So she's got her own guy to go check in on the situation.

• 59:48Sean Fennessey?

  Him mansplaining how black ops work in the diner scene, that's a great moment in that movie.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Do you know what I will say that I noticed about all three, all four of these movies is, no, not really about havoc, but the other three is how annoying smartphones have become with the storytelling of a lot of this stuff where they're just like, download the security footage to my phone and let me stream it now. And you're just like, this is stupid. This is like 20 minutes of the movie. Should be you getting the footage or figuring out who this is. And instead, like, these kids can hack into any computer in the world and then like, now you're, you're all good. You know who it is? This should be a big mystery.

• 1:00:24Amanda Dobbins?

  They, it takes them a little while. That was one of the more riveting sequences, you know?

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  I'd like to know if they're actually, like, what are they actually doing? Cause they're doing a lot of like.

• 1:00:33Sean Fennessey?

  I, I prefer Cronenberg's vision of what we can do with smartphones, which is we can have a 24 hour surveillance camera on our dead spouse's decomposing corpse and look at it anytime we miss them. That's, he is, he is the only one who truly understands technology in this world. I'm not sure if I have some big takeaway. I mean, we're now entering a time of the year where the action movies are really big. We're about to see Thunderbolts. We're about to see Mission Impossible. You know, we're about to see, F1 is a kind of action movie.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  Jurassic's kind of action movie.

• 1:01:01Sean Fennessey?

  Jurassic is an action movie for sure. These are like tent pole films. These four films are trying to come by their audiences in a slightly different way. They're if not original stories, they're more or less original based on novels. They're star oriented. They need, you need to be like, I like action movies to go see this movie, not I like franchises or I like this character. And.

• 1:01:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It's all a little, it's a little, all a little dad action to your earlier point.

• 1:01:26Sean Fennessey?

  It is. You're waiting for ballerina.

• 1:01:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I'll see it.

• 1:01:29Sean Fennessey?

  You want a lady in the center of the screen? You think it's women's time to be dancers and assassins?

• 1:01:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I like it when they can dance and fight.

• 1:01:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Do you think my daughter would like ballerina?

• 1:01:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, no, I don't. But I think she's gonna try to see it many times.

• 1:01:44Sean Fennessey?

  What if I tell her, sweetheart, I'm going to see ballerina tonight?

• 1:01:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Can she, can she read yet?

• 1:01:48Sean Fennessey?

  Can she read yet? She's three and a half.

• 1:01:50Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. She's very smart, way smarter than my sons. And she also, that's fine. It's just relatively how it works.

• 1:01:57Sean Fennessey?

  She knows the alphabet.

• 1:01:57Amanda Dobbins?

  And I would think that she could-

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Don't you think Knox intuitively understands all the makes and models of the American Air Force?

• 1:02:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, he does. Also, he's been like putting in the work, you know? He's been at the museum, he's been running the tape. Um, I think that she, I wonder if she can recognize the word ballerina at this point.

• 1:02:16Sean Fennessey?

  That's a really good question. If she sees the commercial, we're in a lot of trouble.

• 1:02:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19Sean Fennessey?

  Um, she will get very invested in the action filmmaking styles of Chad Stahelsky. I think we, we did watch a Godzilla movie yesterday. We watched King Gidera, the three-headed monster. And it's Japanese subtitles.

• 1:02:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:02:31Sean Fennessey?

  And she did say, what are the words on the screen? Which obviously you can't understand the Japanese characters.

• 1:02:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:36Sean Fennessey?

  So I explained it to her and I would read them along, sometimes, but not all the time, because there's a lot of strange human plot aspect of Godzilla movies. But, um, that like will lead to a conversation about languages and different ways of communicating.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Have you thought about giving her immersive Japanese lessons?

• 1:02:51Sean Fennessey?

  Would you like to be the one to give them?

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  No, but like, aren't their brains like sponges at this point?

• 1:02:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think I should take her out of school?

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  No, just so, it's much easier when you're younger to learn the language. I didn't have that.

• 1:03:05Amanda Dobbins?

  So this is a part, so Camp Chris, there is gonna be soccer drills for three hours a day, then-

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Catalonian soccer practice and then immersive conversational Japanese.

• 1:03:16Sean Fennessey?

  And then, after dinnertime, we'll be screening Havoc every night.

• 1:03:22Amanda Dobbins?

  But first, they have to make a meal according to his Instagram reels.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Here's what I eat today.

• 1:03:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you can get ready video with all of them every morning. That would be sweet.

• 1:03:33Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if I have any other conclusions. I do have a bit of news to share with you guys, which is that it was just announced that a Miami Vice remake directed by Joseph Kaczynski is going into development right now.

• 1:03:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, Chris?

• 1:03:46Sean Fennessey?

  This is, this is big for you, Chris. What does this mean?

• 1:03:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Or is it?

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  We'll see.

• 1:03:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  I doubt that Michael Mann has any involvement. Obviously, Don Johnson on the Marc Maron WTF suggested that Miami Vice was not so much Michael Mann's baby as much as it's been proclaimed.

• 1:04:05Sean Fennessey?

  Those were strong words he had.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Very strong words. And I would argue that the Miami Vice film answers all the questions I had about Michael Mann's relationship to the, to the material. It's a superior product, incredible movie.

• 1:04:18Sean Fennessey?

  What if I told you Dan Gilroy was writing the script?

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  I think it has the potential to be incredible, you know, but.

• 1:04:24Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, you, you're, this is, this is a muted response from you.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  I just, I'm in a weird spot with it. Kaczynski also, I'm glad to hear that Dan Gilroy is writing that script because I think Kaczynski, not unlike Gareth Evans, needs a good screenwriter.

• 1:04:40Sean Fennessey?

  He does.

• 1:04:42Sean Fennessey?

  What if the announcement said it was Christopher McQuarrie writing the script?

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  I think that would be great. I think that would be great. I mean, they're not, Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell are not reprising their roles. I take it.

• 1:04:52Sean Fennessey?

  That's not the impression I'm getting.

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  It's gonna be a reboot.

• 1:04:55Sean Fennessey?

  What if it's Brad Pitt and Danson Idris from F1?

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  Let's see if F1, if they have the charisma.

• 1:05:03Sean Fennessey?

  Where's, where's your head out with F1?

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  I think I'm pretty, I'm pretty excited. I've definitely, like, I'm like, you guys have shown me enough footage. I will watch this film. I want to see it in IMAX, but.

• 1:05:14Amanda Dobbins?

  But you're waiting, you're not getting any more content? I'm with you.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  I think, I think I'm, I'm sold.

• 1:05:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm at the point now with Mission Impossible where they like debuted some new poster or something and I'm like hiding my eyes, you know? Like I instinctively just jumped from the computer because I was like, don't spoil anything for me until I actually get to see this film. I know it, yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Will you watch all the Mission Impossible films leading up to this to get the canon locked down?

• 1:05:39Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't decided yet. I am, I already bought my tickets for the May, the Thursday fan event. I bought two in case you'd like to join me.

• 1:05:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:49Sean Fennessey?

  I also, not, I don't want to disinclude you, but if you'd like to join us, please buy one after this.

• 1:05:58Sean Fennessey?

  I also, we got our invite to, for the press screening.

• 1:06:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I received it.

• 1:06:03Sean Fennessey?

  Mission Impossible is a religion to me, especially Macquarie Cruz's Mission Impossible. But there's something about like not being overexposed going into the new one. Like I've seen these movies a lot. I've seen Dead Reckoning three times. Like I don't know that I even need to re-watch that one to go into this.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  I also feel like the way that they're pitching the film is, I have a feeling not going to be as important in the actual watching the film. Like they're pitching the movie as like Ethan Hunt, this is your life. And you're like, alright, like Rabbit's Foot, this, that, Kremlin, you know, I got it. It's up here.

• 1:06:37Sean Fennessey?

  But most people don't have the powerful mind that you have.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  No, but they made those movies up as they went along. So now to look back and be like, these essential moments in the, in the history of this like honestly improvised action blockbuster series.

• 1:06:51Sean Fennessey?

  You prefer how the MCU does it, you know, where it's just established storyline told over 10 years.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  And you cannot deviate.

• 1:06:56Sean Fennessey?

  And do not miss anything. You have to see every episode of Secret Invasion, otherwise you're just lost.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  I'm really excited for hanging out with you post-credits on Thunderbolts tonight.

• 1:07:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, you're coming tonight?

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, good, I never know.

• 1:07:09Sean Fennessey?

  I've been told. Uh, sit through the credits.

• 1:07:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:07:13Sean Fennessey?

  The Thunderbolts, just a heads up.

• 1:07:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you see, uh, Tom Cruise did go to see Sinners?

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  And said, sit through the credits.

• 1:07:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Hopefully posted, sit through the credits. Tom, where were you?

• 1:07:22Sean Fennessey?

  If only you had waited and you would have known the truth was told and Tom spake it. Um, yeah, I mean, of course he loved that movie performatively, as he does.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:07:32Sean Fennessey?

  He loves the movie.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  You see, is virtue signaling?

• 1:07:35Sean Fennessey?

  No, I just mean, he performed that he liked it.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:07:38Sean Fennessey?

  To us in the public via the social media.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  I'd like to see Tom Cruise get behind a real stinker, you know?

• 1:07:43Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  Like Tom Cruise being like, I'm home watching Havoc.

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  On my phone.

• 1:07:52Sean Fennessey?

  It would be more interesting if it was like Minecraft movie is my favorite movie of the year. You know?

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Sean Fennessey?

  Like a movie.

• 1:07:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Would that be interesting?

• 1:07:57Sean Fennessey?

  It would be interesting, yeah. I, I need to see some glimmer of personality from Tom this time around.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  Thunderbolts, kinda sucked.

• 1:08:08Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not sure if that's in play.

• 1:08:11Sean Fennessey?

  So you're feeling good about the movies?

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, but I also, I'm always right there, rise, right, even keel with film.

• 1:08:18Sean Fennessey?

  The rehearsal?

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  What about it?

• 1:08:21Sean Fennessey?

  You watched that episode too?

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  I have not watched episode two yet.

• 1:08:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Jack was explaining it to me before.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  I'm aware of the discourse around it, but yeah.

• 1:08:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I was not until Jack Sanders gave me a recap.

• 1:08:31Sean Fennessey?

  Who hasn't seen it.

• 1:08:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's the funniest thing I've seen since the last time Nathan Fielder was on TV. I, he has, he has a, he's tapped into my cortex and Eileen and I were laughing very, very hard at the final 10 minutes of the episode last night. Um, that's a TV show.

• 1:08:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Sean Fennessey?

  Which is not technically what we do here, but Nathan Fielder at work on his debut feature film for A24.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:08:55Sean Fennessey?

  Not sure if you guys knew that.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Did you, are we just throwing around news headlines now?

• 1:08:59Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Are you guys excited about Hater coming back with the, the Jonestown show?

• 1:09:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I mean, you and Andy pointed out that the studio synchronicity of it is, it's really funny. Um, so.

• 1:09:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I still want the movie though.

• 1:09:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Me too.

• 1:09:14Sean Fennessey?

  I want the Bill Hader movie. And I trust, I mean, he is a great TV maker, as we know. Um, and I like, I assume this is a mini series, not a feature.

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  I think it's a mini series.

• 1:09:24Sean Fennessey?

  Which sounds cool, but where's Bill Hader's horror movie? Where's his incredibly violent action movie? Where's his thriller?

• 1:09:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it could be this.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  Could be all of those things.

• 1:09:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. Where are you at on Jonestown? Good idea, bad idea?

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  I said on the, on the pod, I'm actually like, I know all of the highlights without actually knowing the story.

• 1:09:46Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting. Why have you been keeping away from it?

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  It's just one of those things in, in history or in life where you're like, right, the punch. But then you're like, oh, I actually don't know what was up with that guy.

• 1:09:56Sean Fennessey?

  You know.

• 1:09:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Sorry, it even took me a minute. Yeah.

• 1:10:01Sean Fennessey?

  I really like, uh, The Sacrament, the Ty West movie, which is very loosely based on the Jonestown situation. I'm not saying that that's the whole story there. It's obviously not, but it's been kinda, sorta done before. There was a, was there a Jonestown TV movie? I believe there was. Somewhat famously like an Emmy winning Jonestown.

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  There's a Koresh one recently.

• 1:10:21Amanda Dobbins?

  That was with Riggins, right?

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Taylor Kitsch.

• 1:10:24Sean Fennessey?

  Did you watch that?

• 1:10:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I watched the first couple and then I got the gist and I moved on. I want to, what was the name of the show that you and Andy were talking about on the same episode?

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Sandbaggers.

• 1:10:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Sandbaggers, right. And then, so I'm excited to see it, but then the, the creator who was, uh, ex-military and was basically a spy was like disappeared over Alaska?

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, that's, that's conjecture. That's the movie I want to see.

• 1:10:51Sean Fennessey?

  Can I give you one last question on the action movies tip?

• 1:10:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Sean Fennessey?

  So relative to our TV versus movie stuff, I think if you look at TV right now, a lot of the things that are really working, Reacher, Lioness, and/or The Last of Us, have those shows kind of supplanted A Working Man, The Accountant 2? Cause we talk about this with a lot of different kinds of things, like prestige TV, did that come for Rain Man's ability to be both the biggest movie of the year and the best picture winner? That's a, we've had that conversation 900 times. But this is like a slightly different thing, cause it, it feeds this, Reacher feeds the same.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  It does. I don't think it ever reaches any of the ecstatic action heights that, say, Havoc does. But it does allow for a lot more, it's closer to The Accountant that it probably is, uh, Working Man. You know, where it's just like, it's got a lot of humor and it's got a lot of like.

• 1:11:48Amanda Dobbins?

  But it doesn't have Ben Affleck or Jon Bernthal.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  It doesn't.

• 1:11:52Amanda Dobbins?

  You know?

• 1:11:52Sean Fennessey?

  How do you feel about Alan Richson?

• 1:11:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Large.

• 1:11:55Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think he's compelling?

• 1:11:57Amanda Dobbins?

  He was pretty, I mean, he had to act opposite Brie Larson in the, it was on one of the fast-

• 1:12:02Sean Fennessey?

  He blew her off the screen in Fast X.

• 1:12:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, he did. No, it was just like, and they were like, they were in, you know, some weird room and I was distracted by her eyebrows. And then he was very charismatic opposite her.

• 1:12:12Sean Fennessey?

  Legitimately.

• 1:12:13Amanda Dobbins?

  But that's, and, and I marveled at his physique.

• 1:12:16Sean Fennessey?

  It was Marlon Brando and someone who's never acted before.

• 1:12:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  He was good in the Guy Ritchie movie.

• 1:12:21Sean Fennessey?

  He was. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Uh, that was a fun movie. Guy Ritchie, speaking of action, he's got a film coming soon called Fountain of Youth.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  He's got like three films coming.

• 1:12:31Sean Fennessey?

  That's going directly to Apple TV Plus. My question, why? It stars John Krasinski. Is, is it Natalie Portman?

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:39Sean Fennessey?

  John Krasinski and Natalie Portman in an adventure film directed by Guy Ritchie, straight to Disney Plus, I mean, T, uh, Apple TV Plus. Why?

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Money.

• 1:12:49Sean Fennessey?

  What money? They left money on the table.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  They got their money up front. It's probably why it costs like $300 billion to make it.

• 1:12:55Sean Fennessey?

  But shouldn't Apple try to make some more money on it? Am I crazy?

• 1:12:58Amanda Dobbins?

  They have enough money.

• 1:12:59Sean Fennessey?

  Like, this is not Havoc, where it's like 300 Chris's in a room crying and then like nothing on the second weekend.

• 1:13:07Amanda Dobbins?

  It's never fun on Netflix.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  Season three of the rehearsal.

• 1:13:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Havoc is far and away out of the four movies we discussed. Havoc is by far the most widely seen.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  And the best.

• 1:13:17Amanda Dobbins?

  But, but I understand that Apple TV is different than-

• 1:13:19Sean Fennessey?

  They have 300 million subscribers.

• 1:13:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:22Sean Fennessey?

  Fountain of Youth is coming out in a, less than a month.

• 1:13:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:13:25Sean Fennessey?

  Does anyone know what that is?

• 1:13:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, everyone at this table now does.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  I know a fair amount about it just because I'm very curious about it.

• 1:13:32Sean Fennessey?

  Because of Krasinski?

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  No, because Guy Ritchie is an object of fascination to me. And when he, like, I'm always interested in his, like, when are you trying?

• 1:13:40Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  Versus like, when are you directing via iPad from the set of a commercial you're also directing?

• 1:13:44Sean Fennessey?

  The Covenant was really good.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Sean Fennessey?

  I liked that movie.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  Wrath of Man was good, but he was not on set for the direction of that film.

• 1:13:50Sean Fennessey?

  Where was he?

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  He was in England, directing via iPad because of COVID.

• 1:13:55Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:57Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think I knew that.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think he does.

• 1:13:59Sean Fennessey?

  I know that's a big Tim Simons talking point.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  He works, he's like, he shot the first two episodes of Mobland, Fountain of Youth, The Grey, what's the next one coming with Gyllenhaal?

• 1:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  In the Grey.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  In the Grey, that's like later this year, and then he just signed up for another movie that he's directing.

• 1:14:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Sorry, did you read the plot summary of this film? And I just wasn't listening to you.

• 1:14:18Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't it actually a quest for the Fountain of Youth?

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  It's a brother and sister search.

• 1:14:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, using historical clues. They embark on an epic quest filled with adventure.

• 1:14:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's like National Treasure.

• 1:14:25Amanda Dobbins?

  If successful, the mythical fountain could grant them immortality. The siblings are John Krasinski and Natalie Portman?

• 1:14:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

• 1:14:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you say that out loud and I just like blacked out?

• 1:14:34Sean Fennessey?

  No, I didn't say that.

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  I assumed that you saw the trailer or something.

• 1:14:36Sean Fennessey?

  Who's the bad guy? I texted Chris about this like three weeks ago and I was like, why the fuck is this movie going to streaming?

• 1:14:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, so Stanley Tucci is someone called the Elder, who I'm guessing probably, you know, has wisdom, but then, yeah.

• 1:14:45Sean Fennessey?

  Is it the same character from The Electric State that he played?

• 1:14:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I forgot about that. That was tough, probably.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  Did you see a picture of all the Conclave guys smoking at the actual Conclave?

• 1:14:56Sean Fennessey?

  The real, the real Cardinals.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  The real Cardinals. I think that was after the funeral, but there were a bunch of Cardinals outside just like.

• 1:15:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it can't start till next week, right? So what are your plans? Let's go.

• 1:15:05Sean Fennessey?

  Good question.

• 1:15:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. We've already got one spinoff.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  We texted a little bit about some of our clubhouse favorites.

• 1:15:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  There's one guy who pissed off Mike Pence, who I was scouting.

• 1:15:17Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. You're trying to put your weight behind.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  Well, I worked for Ratsiger.

• 1:15:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and that worked out great for the world. Great choice on your part.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  I was just like, I liked him.

• 1:15:26Sean Fennessey?

  You mean for the betting markets?

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Sean Fennessey?

  Not for your passions as a avowed Catholic? You're not a Catholic?

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:15:33Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, you have a pick?

• 1:15:36Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm more interested in the machinations, much like in the film Conclave. Apparently Francis was sort of expanding the court. He was appointing a lot of new Cardinals, which, I mean, you know, that was in his rate. So, so that, that changes the demographic, you know?

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  And there's one guy who's a favorite, who I think is the Stanley Tucci, like the Secretary of State guy.

• 1:15:59Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. Is he the favorite?

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  He was the first one on the list on timemagazine.com. No CNN.

• 1:16:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm trying to find the blog that I read. By the way, said this privately, great blogging podcast.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 1:16:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know.

• 1:16:15Sean Fennessey?

  You revealed Conclave So Real on that podcast, which we have revealed on this pod 900 times because it's one of my favorite things that ever happened. When you were just like, look at what I just wrote. August 19th, 2007.

• 1:16:27Sean Fennessey?

  I was like, my friend is mentally ill. I love him.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  I don't know if it's gonna work out for Chris. 10 years later. Chris, what do you think of having?

• 1:16:36Sean Fennessey?

  10 years later, a leader in your field, a god among men.

• 1:16:40Sean Fennessey?

  I can't get over the fountain of youth thing.

• 1:16:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I.

• 1:16:42Sean Fennessey?

  Also, they're releasing it on the same day as Lilo and Stitch, which is gonna make a billion dollars. And Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning. What the fuck? What?

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Is it where the Mission Impossible Final Reckoning is gonna come in second? It's opening weekend?

• 1:16:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's very possible. It's very possible. Perhaps even likely. I think Lilo and Stitch is tracking for over 100 million dollars.

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  And that's a guy. What's that about?

• 1:17:04Sean Fennessey?

  It's about, yeah, keep talking, keep going.

• 1:17:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Tell us what you know about Lilo and Stitch.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Stitch is a cat?

• 1:17:11Amanda Dobbins?

  And what then?

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  No, this isn't a bit. Like, I'm actually trying to like, figure it out. Like, I, because I keep seeing commercials, I think.

• 1:17:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. Stitch is a cat.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  But is he, and then is Lilo his owner?

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  It's about ownership?

• 1:17:29Sean Fennessey?

  It's about human trafficking.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  It's Casavio?

• 1:17:34Sean Fennessey?

  No, Stitch is an alien who comes to Earth.

• 1:17:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, but he's cute.

• 1:17:38Sean Fennessey?

  And enters a young girl's life and they form a bond and she, he becomes a part of the family and he gets up to a lot of mischief. Ultimately, Jason Statham comes and has to solve everything. It's a, it's a family story, really. It's a beautiful movie. Uh, it's a live action adaptation of a Disney animated. Gen Z classic.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  It's just kind of insane that Tom Cruise is gonna be like, I came in second.

• 1:18:01Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that's gonna happen?

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  Do you think he's gonna do an Instagram post about going to Lilo and Stitch?

• 1:18:06Sean Fennessey?

  Bye bye, you're blowing Tom Cruise's head off at the box office. It makes me really sad. I gotta be honest. That's not what I want.

• 1:18:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I think he will acknowledge it and he'll be like, have a great time out at the movies this weekend, you know?

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  No matter what you see.

• 1:18:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, just don't stay at home and watch Fountain of Youth on Apple TV Plus. That's what he'll tell you.

• 1:18:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I guess we do know that the kid market trumps the grown up market. So it probably will come in second, but I think it's gonna do well.

• 1:18:35Sean Fennessey?

  Me too. It's, is it, but it's not Memorial Day weekend, right? Is that Memorial Day weekend?

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  Memorial Day is the last weekend.

• 1:18:43Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, no, it is Memorial Day.

• 1:18:44Speaker 03

  Isn't it?

• 1:18:46Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:18:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Is Lilo and Stitch is also, yeah.

• 1:18:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's Memorial Day weekend, okay. And last question for you, CR.

• 1:18:56Sean Fennessey?

  Are you gonna see Hurry Up Tomorrow, this film about the weekend?

• 1:18:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably. Let's check it out. I mean, I liked the idol.

• 1:19:03Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true.

• 1:19:04Sean Fennessey?

  You did, you did like the idol.

• 1:19:07Sean Fennessey?

  I was with you for like 1.7 episodes and then we were at a party and a friend of ours accosted us. Actually, we were at a party at your house and he called us on the carpet and he was like, this is a shameful public act that you have participated in.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  That was like where.

• 1:19:20Sean Fennessey?

  You must stand down.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  I was like Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring.

• 1:19:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  Just taking all the arrows.

• 1:19:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I remember you were like, I'm committed now.

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was like, I'm in too deep.

• 1:19:31Amanda Dobbins?

  It was the night before the finale and you actually had to go home. You're like, I gotta go watch the idol because.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  We've all been there. We've all been in like, I'm in too deep to get out now, just like Sonny Crockett. I was too committed to the idol.

• 1:19:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yep, I could have had a world-class French meal seated beside Ethan Hawke, but instead I went to go see Niyad. You know, that was what I, that was what I did for the game. And you went home to watch the idol. You left a party early to watch the idol.

• 1:20:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Sean Fennessey?

  And you made content out of it. What have you done? What were your great sacrifices for the game? Watching Havoc in Palm Springs?

• 1:20:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Please know that I watched Havoc at 8 a.m. this morning.

• 1:20:11Sean Fennessey?

  Not in, okay, in Los Angeles, California.

• 1:20:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I handed the children off, I was like, good luck kiddos. I have to go heck upstairs and watch Tom Cruise. I mean, Tom Hardy feed people into a pulp. Uh, I think every other decision I've made is good.

• 1:20:25Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Chris, thank you. Thanks for your service today. I really appreciate you turning your time over to this show. Thanks to Jack Sanders for his work. Amanda, thank you. We'll be back in, I don't know, 36 hours with a new 25 for 25 episode. No spoilers about what it will be. We will see you then.

• 1:21:00Speaker 05

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 1:21:16Speaker 06

  When everyone's finally together, what makes mornings even brighter? Keeping things deliciously simple. Whether you're pouring up a glass of morning refreshment or topping off festive drinks for a family brunch, Simply Orange brings that 100% fresh squeezed taste to every moment. Deliciously bright and delightfully easy, Simply Orange is made for all your seasonal gatherings. Simply Orange. Say yes to simple.