ALSO SHOWING
The House Cert: 15A; Now showing
Just as Scott and Kate (Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler) are looking forward to a summer of doting over daughter Alex (Ryan Simpkins) before she goes off to college, they find out that the fund they’d set up for her tuition has been emptied. They need to think of something fast if their pride and joy is to follow her dream to study at Berkeley.
A solution arrives via hapless chum Frank (Jason Mantzoukas) who is floundering after his wife leaves him. He feels his large empty home would be perfect as an underground casino, and a desperate Scott and Kate come to agree. If the house always wins, as they say, then they would become the house.
So ensues a badly-behaved indoor carnival of mob-movie send-ups, piles of cash and gormless buffoonery as director Andrew Jay Cohen and co-writer Brendan O’Brien go for broke with the silly stakes. Over a trim 88 minutes, a tone akin to an episode of The Simpsons is maintained, even if quite a few jokes are failing to find their targets. Just enough do, however, and when the bullseye is struck — such as during the housewife boxing matches or when they decide to teach a card counter a lesson — you may struggle to stifle a belly laugh.
Ferrell remains in the love-him-or-hatehim bracket but forms a sturdy double act beside the excellent Poehler. Completing the trio is Mantzoukas, as — and I use the word lightly — the brains of the outfit. So-so.
Risk Club Cert; Now Showing IFI
In Ireland we have had ample cause to consider both the role and treatment of whistleblowers. There is a difference between a whistleblower who reveals a wrongdoing and someone who leaks secrets. Inevitably, the line between the two will blur but this is not something that Laura Poitras discusses with the man who has become the poster boy for that blurred line, Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks
Filming on Risk began as Assange is not put through to Hillary Clinton to warn her of the imminent leak of diplomatic cables. Although following Cablegate, Assange becomes a person of great interest to the various US agencies. Poitras films again in 2012 as Assange loses his appeal for extradition to Sweden on sexual misconduct charges and claims asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. We meet Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks’s tech expert. She shows him in Egypt confronting the tech companies who colluded with Mubarak before he too faces allegations of sexual misconduct. Poitras then takes several years away from the story to make the Edward Snowden doc
CitizenFour that would earn her an Oscar. When she comes back to Assange in 2015 nothing much has changed for him. They still don’t discuss the principles behind Wikileaks. Information is power — power as a guiding force in corrupting. They’re the main issues of our time and Risk doesn’t discuss them in depth. The result is an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying documentary.