Susan Granger’s dvd update for week of Friday, Dec. 5th:
Will Smith’s frenetic “Hancock” casts him as a whiskey-guzzling, profanity-spewing grudging superhero, causing chaos whenever he catches culprits, until an earnest public-relations consultant (Jason Bateman) tackles an image make-over.
Eddie Murphy’s “Meet Dave” is a tedious time-waster in which he plays the captain of a human-sized spaceship; the outlandish set-up is amusing for about 15 minutes.
In “Step Brothers,” sibling rivalry reigns between Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, two paunchy, immature, middle-aged oafs who are forced to share a bedroom when Ferrell’s mom (Mary Steenburgen) marries Reilly’s dad (Richard Jenkins).
In “The X-Files: I Want To Believe,” David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson delve into whether a pedophile priest has the psychic ability to find a serial killer.
Animation aimed at kids: “Fly Me to the Moon” involves mischievous Florida junkyard flies stowing away on the Apollo II space flight in 1969 and includes 3-D effects. But the science is so out there that astronaut Buzz Aldrin concludes with a disclaimer about how no insect could ever get inside a NASA ship. And “Space Chimps” recalls 1961, when NASA blasted off a chimpanzee named Ham as a test-run for manned space exploration; that’s the premise for this fictionalized, psycho-babbling story about three brainy primates dispatched after an Infinity probe crash-lands on a far-away planet.
PICKS OF THE WEEK: For adults, “Wanted” chronicles the wry, viscerally thrilling transformation of a nerd (James McAvoy) into a superhero – with the help of friends (Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman) who know more about him than he does. For families, “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” picks up the imaginative adventures of the British schoolchildren a year after “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” but it’s 1300 years later in Narnia and much has changed.