Paramount+ still sucks

T. Bruce Howie
Oct 10, 2021
6 min read

Yeah, so a couple of months ago, I wrote a review slamming Paramount+ Australia for its utter lack of meaningful content, not having suitable subtitles, and not even having the proper resolution for its content. It was so low-effort that I couldn’t believe it – in fact, the one piece of effort put in seems to have been to remove the cheating loopholes that people use to get 5 free trials of Prime or something (so I handed 9 bucks to Paramount for nothing).

So let’s do a review of the three awful films I saw on Paramount+ - Infinite, Queenpins and The J-Team. All of them are epitomes of trash, phoned-in cinema that were loathe to sit through. And I’ve heard that this service has another Paranormal Activity coming to it as an original film – so it could get much, much worse.

Infinite

Shamefully pulled from theatrical release at the last minute to be dumped on Paramount+ so it would be forgotten quickly, Infinite is bad from the outset. Looking like every single generic Matrix movie since 1999, starring Mark Wahlberg as an action hero, and made by Di Bonaventura Pictures, who haven’t made a good movie since 2007. Yeah, it wasn’t fun.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua (who just released the surprisingly good remake of The Guilty on Netflix), Infinite follows Evan, a man with a history of anger issues and mental strife who learns that he is the latest reincarnation of a man who has lived since the dawn of man. Many others like him exist, and are at war with one another, one wishing to continue supporting humanity, and the other wishing to destroy it so they can finally commit suicide in peace.

Reincarnation is a cool premise explored by many films, from big-budgets like The Matrix or indie titles like Uncle Boonmee, but Infinite takes that premise and uses it in the most generic way possible. Set in endlessly grey and over-edited corridors, with a ton of leather badasses and black-suited SWAT guys, where the heroes drive conspicuous Ferraris and do everything to look as cool as possible, Infinite is so basic and cookie-cutter that it could be used in the Honeycomb round in Squid Game (and you’d win).

All of the commitment to making the movie as cool and as generically-plotted as possible leads to many ludicrous scenarios, where scene and internal logic is sacrificed for a cool shot or cool design. Evan ends up in an interrogation room that looks like an exhibit from MOMA, and Chiwetel Ejiofor tortures a man…by waterboarding him with jars of honey. It had the very opposite effect of what it desired.

Every single scene has some sort of plot hole, or stupid line, or logic error, or something which isn’t clear enough, or a continuity error. It’s a goldmine for CinemaSins (if they were still good) and reeks of an uncaring studio with a lack of willingness to polish their work or to improve it.

None of this is helped by the bevy of unlikeable and uninteresting leading characters, all of whom somehow are less interesting than the comic side characters. Mark Wahlberg’s performance is so disinterested that his everyman persona makes no sense, and Sophie Cookson’s one-note character barely has anything else interesting either. Chiwetel Ejiofor tries his best as the movie’s ludicrous villain, as does Jason Mantzoukas as a “depraved” doctor (this is M-rated, so “depraved” is pathetic), but neither of their scene-chewing performances level out to anything significant.

With disinteresting characters, a nonsense plot, terrible internal logic, generic fight scenes, and only a couple of performances worth giving a damn, Infinite is January Cinema at its finest. I understand completely why Paramount threw it on their streaming service and left it there to die.

I’m going to give Infinite a D.

Queenpins

“Pink-collar” crime is a phrase suggesting a crime or act committed by women instead of men, supposedly a term of empowerment or female awesomeness (I’ll let Knuckles explain the flaw in that). I Care a Lot from last year got plenty of acclaim for its depiction, and even won a Golden Globe. Queenpins wants so desperately to be another dark-comedy, pink-collar crime story about modern Amerca, and it’s an utter lemon about it.

Following the semi-true story of two women (Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell-Baptiste) who set up a smuggling business for supermarket coupons, Queenpins is a movie that you come out of feeling really nothing about. It’s not funny, dramatically significant, or shockingly awful. It simply is, in many ways, and for a genre like crime comedy, that’s just not good enough.

Easily the biggest problem with the film is its unclear progression, because it feels like the entire movie is on an indeterminate floating timeline where seemingly interconnected events happen months apart. It’s never clear when their business gets underway, or how long something takes, and huge gaps of information are completely glossed over (like how the two are sentenced to 11 months prison due to their “amazing” lawyer, despite committing millions of dollars’ worth of fraud, smuggling and gunrunning).

Many of the interesting processes and explanations are completely cut out of the film, such as why these two just buy a ton of guns and potentially draw themselves out into the open, or how they buy a mansion even though they have not “cleaned” their money yet and both have terrible credit scores. In any real situation, anyone who suddenly made enough money to buy 5 Ferraris and a mansion would be under investigation by the IRS or their bank, and we don’t even see them make enough money to buy these cars either.

So much is missing in the film, making it feel like an unfunny Simpsons episode more than anything else. There’s no real structure, no consequence and a ton of missing content, making every compiling scene even more unsatisfying.

Our lead protagonists, Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell-Baptiste, lack the necessary oomph to really propel this film forward. Howell-Baptiste does an okay job with a decently charismatic performance, but Bell suffers under this movie’s floaty editing, making weird, unjustifiable turns like cutting out and insulting her grieving husband (a wasted Joel McHale) without any particular prompting. She’s never given the chance to be truly awesome either, with many of her decisions coming across as weird.

This is made even worse by the fact that the two small-time law enforcement officers chasing them, played by Vince Vaughn and Paul Walter Hauser, steal every scene when they show up. There’s a gentle rapport and development between them that speaks strongly to the theme of the power of the little guys, much better than the central duo can pull off. If the movie was about these two investigating this crime, it would be better.

By the time the movie ends on a Montenegrin beach called the Bay of Kotor (which is, more appropriately, the “Bay of Shit” in Indonesian), I had forgotten every significant event that occurred. Queenpins lacks the oomph or the coherence to really make a statement about pink-collar crime or the little guys, and it shows.

Queenpins gets a C-.

The J-Team

Paramount+ also includes Nickelodeon, which brings the proud content of an awful Spongebob-spinoff and two animated series I don’t care about. It also brings back all the Nickelodeon/Disney Channel movies that you swore were peyote hallucinations but were in fact real in this 2021 movie that could have come out in 2001, The J-Team. Strangely, though…it’s not markedly awful. Just mediocre. Hell, it's better than the other two films here.

You’ve seen this story a lot – young girl is denied from showing her “spark” (by a vengeful dance instructor), so she goes and forms her own thing (a dance troupe in this case) and goes to dance in a national competition to beat her enemies and be awesome. The girl in this case is Jojo Siwa, one of those vlogger singers who are really popular and whom I’ve never heard of.

The J-Team does not one thing different from a formula so ubiquitous that it could be made by the AI of a calculator. It’s a Disney Channel movie with a lot of dancing, colours, generic locations, gay stereotypes (man, I feel really bad for aspiring straight male dancers after watching this film) and a message about being yourself or summatorother. No deviations, no corners cut, nada.

Paramount+/Awesomeness....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Jojo Siwa isn’t as grating as I expected. She goes through the entire film with an almost plastic smile plastered across her face, singing brightly and dancing around a lot. Her character is bland and no-frills, but she tries as best she can, and doesn’t come off as unlikable. Really, the whole movie is like that – trying as least as possible and coming off as tolerable.

This is reflected in the many dance and music sequences throughout the film, all of which are choreographed okay, but shot with the energy of a low-budget wedding video, and filled with minor continuity errors that will really annoy anyone who is into editing. It doesn’t surprise me that this comes from the director of a lot of mid-2000’s comedies, because it possesses the exact same low-energy, competent helming that you’d expect.

Really, I can say barely anything about this film. I can’t be bothered talking about its flatness, or its generic structure, or its lip-syncing, or its dialogue (“You look like you came here by unicorn!” “I did!”). It’s a spectacularly inoffensive film, made for TV and with nothing significant about it. I was playing 2048 Fibonacci on my phone the whole time.

What I WILL say, though? Only 197 people have logged this on Letterboxd at the time of this review. Less people have seen this than the direct-to-TV 1999 Jesus movie, or a movie never officially given DVD or coverage since 1982 like Inchon. Nobody cares about this film at all. Considering I forgot it, it probably deserved it.