Movie Review: "Inside Out"

World Wrestling Entertainment’s brief flirtation with family friendly films has ended. But the residue of this effort sticks to “Inside Out,” a half-hearted return to the violent men of the ring doing violent things on the screen model that predated the PG years.

And they refuse to abandon their efforts to turn one of their stars into the next Rock or Hulk Hogan, a crossover phenomenon about to carry movies and TV shows, and not just other wrestlers and folding chairs.

Paul “Triple H” Levesque has the look, the demeanor and the skills to be a useful heavy in other people’s action films. He’s so muscle-bound, his arms can’t quite drop to his side. His face is more scary than handsome. Yet “Inside Out” is yet another attempt to make him a leading man.



Levesque plays an ex-con, A.J., whom we meet the day he gets out of a 13 year stretch in a Louisiana prison. He re-connects with Jack, played by the motor-mouthed goombah Michael Rapaport. Jack’s a former running mate, a low-rent gangster who is the son of another low-rent gangster. Counterfeit cigarettes is his game.

“What are you gonna do?” Jack wants to know.

“I’m gonna make pickles,” A.J. growls.

Jack didn’t visit his pal in prison, and took up with and married A.J.’s ex-girlfriend (Parker Posey). He’s determined to drag the hulking A.J. back into “the life,” and keep his veterinarian-mobster dad (Bruce Dern) off his back.

But A.J. has nowhere else to go. Mom’s in a nursing home. So he moves in with Jack, his wife and his teenage daughter. “Inside Out” could have gone the way of WWE’s last Levesque vehicle — “The Chaperone.” There’s a teenager, a guy wanting to stay out of trouble and make pickles, Rapaport bellyaching about his life.

“I don’t care how bad prison was. Middle class is worse.”

There’s also a hapless state tobacco control agent trying to bust this cigarette smuggling ring, at all costs, a role sort of played for laughs by Julie White (Shia’s mom in the “Transformers” movies).

But the profanity and alcohol abuse tip us that this movie is going darker. There are shootings, bodies to be dealt with.

Lawyer-turned-screenwriter Dylan Schaffer’s script is an unhappy combination of genres, tones, too many dead stretches of people in cars and inept dialogue. Rapaport’s tiresome patter doesn’t allow for the weak laughs to land.

“Why do I gotta drive the hybrid? God gave us the internal combustion engine for a reason!”

And the single resonant line about prison comes too late to give the movie the tone they might have been going for. Asked, fearfully, about jail time, A.J. intones, “You just sit there — and it passes.”

That’s a pretty fair description of “Inside Out,” too. Dern could have played this mobster whose cover job is running an animal hospital a seriously strange or seriously silly spin. But he has nothing to play. Parker Posey does her best to hide that this is just a WWE paycheck part.

And Levesque does nothing to suggest that if the WWE weren’t backing him that he’d ever be anything on screen other than the guy who beats the heck out Jason Statham or whoever in someone else’s action picture.

source: orlandosentinel.com