Top Five movie review:
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8/10
Release Date: Dec 12, 2014
Director: Chris Rock
Genre(s): Comedy
Starring: Chris Rock, Gabrielle Union, Kevin Hart, Rosario Dawson
Summary: New York City comedian-turned-movie star Andre Allen (Chris Rock) tries to get his career back on track.
Review: There’s a lovely running gag—a jumping gag, actually—in Chris Rock’s gloriously funny “Top Five.” It is, quite intentionally, the only thing the writer, director and star doesn’t throw himself into with infectious joy. For the rest, Mr. Rock has made a pyrotechnic pinwheel of a personal comedy, and he’s had the wisdom to share it with a strong co-star. While he sends sparks flying every which way, Rosario Dawson keeps the story grounded in calm intelligence and classic romance.
Classic elements pop up often during this day in the life of Mr. Rock’s surrogate funnyman, Andre Allen. Back in an earlier day, Andre made his name as a stand-up comic in New York, but he doesn’t want to be funny any more. Much like the comedy-surfeited hero of Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels,” he wants to do something serious, something meaningful: “I’m tellin’ you,” he says in the first line of the film, “everything means something.” He says it to Ms. Dawson’s Chelsea Brown., a New York Times writer who has come to interview him, at the start of the couple’s classic Woody Allen walk-and-talk through the streets of Manhattan.
“Top Five,” which borrows its title from our cultural addiction to taxonomic lists, borrows freely and gleefully from all sorts of sources, both reputable and dis. (The raunch quotient is substantial.) Yet the film feels freshly minted because the man who made it has such a lively mind and fearless style. At a time when all too many movies are selling bleakness and dysfunction, it also feels like a revenant from Hollywood’s golden age, when an entertainment’s highest function was to entertain.
The basic joke is that Andre has lost his sense of humor. There are serious reasons for this in a script that’s full of seriously familiar and occasionally creaky plot devices. Yet the joke gets steadily better as Andre’s dismay deepens. He can’t fathom the instant failure of his new film, a frenzied piece of absurdity about the slave rebellion that began in Haiti in the late 18th century. (Why wouldn’t mainstream audiences embrace a machete-wielding hero whose battle cry is “Kill the white man!”?) He’s terrified by the prospect of marrying a steely-eyed star of reality TV—she’s played stylishly by Gabrielle Union—in a wedding arranged by the Bravo Channel.
Through it all, though, Mr. Rock, his spirit as sweet and vulnerable as his tongue is sharp, delivers a dazzling succession of epigrams, one-liners and trenchant observations about contemporary life. (I refuse to quote, and spoil, a single one of them, but keep a lookout for an early moment devoted to the plight of a black man hailing a taxi in Manhattan.) And Ms. Dawson, whose character has suffered her own wounds, matches his barbed exuberance with a performance of remarkable clarity. A perfect foil, Chelsea lives in the really real world, and tells Andre the truth about it; she’s the dream girl he didn’t know he was looking for.
Part of the fun of “Top Five” is spotting celebs in cameo roles, so I won’t spoil any of that either. But there’s no need to search for Cedric the Entertainer, who plays a self-styled Houston bigshot; he is eminently visible, shriekingly audible and so far over the top—so coarsely and hilariously far—as to be beyond gravity’s pull. The cast includes Kevin Hart, Tracy Morgan and J.B. Smoove. Their work is first-rate too, reflecting Mr. Rock’s expert direction. In a film that’s fairly bursting with talent, he triumphs as the Top One.
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Source: wsj.com
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