Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Action Point - 2018

"Jackass, but it's an amusement park," essentially. Johnny Knoxville plays an elderly grandfather, telling his granddaughter about the amusement park he used to own back in the days before pesky things like safety regulations and health codes. 

So most of the movie is Knoxville, minus make-up and grey hair, running his park - or being run over by the attractions in his park - and day drinking constantly. Setting aside all the parts that are just about watching someone get hurt, whether it's Knoxville being blasted down the water slide by a firehose, or thrown through the side of a barn by a trebuchet, or an employee being shot in the butt with one of those automatic tennis ball shooters (which they have built into a little motorized tank for kids to use on the go-kart course), or - 

Where was I going with this? Oh, right, the parts of the movie other than the slapstick comedy/personal injury. A good portion of it is Knoxville trying to save his park from an annoying land developer working with a new, larger, more modern park. This takes the form of various bits; coming up with new attractions, sneaking an ad on the local TV broadcast. The sort of stuff from movies with similar plots in the '80s and '90s. I did rather like the one where they pretend to be people protesting how dangerous the park is to make people want to come.

The other half, placed in conflict with saving the park, is Knoxville's attempts to be a good dad for his daughter, Boogie (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), who is visiting for the summer. He tries to encourage her creativity and for her to take an interest in the park, but that's the problem. Between the park and Boogie, Boogie keeps losing.

The resolution of the two conflicts is not at all what I expected, but still satisfying. Knoxville's character makes a decision about who is most important to him, and what he has to give up on to stay in her life. But he manages to do so in a way that is still juvenile, petty, and ruins the day of the worst people.

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