Held Up

this isn't a 5.2 it's at least an 8!. it's a comedy movie people!

Held Up_720p(480P)

source: Held Up

I was having kind of a bad day when I saw this, and I really needed this movie. It's a silly mess and won't win any awards, but it's something that could make me laugh without really using my brain or anything. John Cullum does a good job keeping his cool and staying in control no matter what. The robbers are incompetent and not really threatening. We even kind of sympathize with them after a while. Barry Corbin, John Cullum's "Northern Exposure" co-star, has his usual attitude and ends up going overboard in this case. And one more reminder of Cicely, Alaska--Jake Busey as a wise man who seems to know everything. Oh, wait, Ed wasn't wise but aspired to be a shaman. This man seemed to have arrived. One more highlight is the gorgeous dispatcher--Natalia Cigliuti of "Saved by the Bell", who wears short shorts while doing her nails when she is supposed to be tracking down the cops. It's amazing the incompetence of the police force. Barney Fife is a genius by comparison. And, of course, there is poor Jamie Foxx never knowing if he'll be able to catch up with his girl before it's too late. It's a fun adventure as he tries. I only wish he had a better car. I was never a fan of Studebakers but there were so many great cars in that era. I had fun.

To the point: I rented this DVD last night and was totally prepared for the simplest level of entertainment.... and was still disappointed. We turned it off. I chuckled a couple times, but the movie was going nowhere and Jamie was being wasted on some really, really, really bad dialogue. They all were. Dumb and Dumber looks like fine art compared to this.

This movie was okay. It made me laugh out loud more than once. It was however VERY slow moving in parts. I fell asleep watching it on Friday night, but it was decent enough that on Saturday morning I found where I dozed off and continued watching it. A good point is that the movie manages to be moderately funny without being crude or overly sexual... That's hard to find these days. The biggest negative is that virtually the entire plot occurs in one spot, and you get very little change of scenery throughout the entire movie. If you're looking for continuous laughs, this may not be the movie for you. But if you can endure the slow parts, the humor will sporadically appear.

Jamie Foxx comes forth with another dumbass comedy, but at least in this one he pretends that he can possibly portray a respectable person. Trapped in a tiny town full of rednecks, Michael (Foxx) tries to recover from his fiancee (Nia Long, whose talent was even more wasted than it was in Big Momma's House) leaving him just after his beloved car was stolen, when he finds himself stuck in the middle of a botched robbery. Yes, this is your stereotypical hick town. They have to have a tremendously fat guy (remember Billy Bob from Varsity Blues?), the police force winds up running around in their boxer shorts, and the sheriff seems to care more about the local sporting events than he does about saving the hostages in the gas station. This movie may not have been so awful had it not been for the fact that the writers were clearly trying to grab for laughs every second of the way, while ignoring the necessary elements (even in a slapstick comedy) of reality and credibility. (spoilers) The robbers become likeable, so of course the film has to have a happy ending. That's fine, but what happened? They got on the bus, rode off into the sunset, and evidently the idiot police force went back to their baseball game, because they ignored the fact that the attempted robbers just drove away. `Oh well, let's just all go home!' Even country police forces aren't that stupid. Held Up is slow paced, it's often boring, and it takes a serious situation and tries to get stupid laughs by making ridiculous efforts to make it all funny. It tries to force a smile on unhappy material, and was therefore doomed from the beginning. Hardcore Jamie Foxx fans may enjoy his cornball antics in this movie, but anyone looking for even the smallest hint of quality in their cinematic entertainment would be best advised to ignore this garbage.

I saw this film aboard a bus, in November of 2000, on my way from the Tallahassee Amtrak station and Walt Disney World (the tracks were being worked on). I was thus a captive audience for the bus driver's taste in movies; otherwise, I never would have seen it. It's hard to imagine that Barry Corbin and John Cullum (from Northern Exposure), and Julie Hagerty (from the Airplane movies) would have wasted their time with anything this bad: nobody could be that hard up for work. That's not to say that the movie didn't get a few laughs from me, and from the other passengers on the bus. But we weren't laughing WITH it; we were laughing AT it.

HELD UP / (2000) * (out of four) You have to be pretty stupid to cast Jamie Foxx in a leading role. He is not a strong actor, if you can call him an actor at all. He can't hold our attention for five minutes, let alone 89 minutes. Give him an insipid, unfunny script, provide a production crew who would turn a Canadian location into an Arizona desert, add the creators of "I Know What You Did Last Summer," and you get an experience that makes a Chinese torture chamber look like fun. Any one of those things is enough to trash a good movie, but "Held Up" uses all of them. Not only do we get unconvincing sets, throwaway jokes, sleep-inducing dialogue, horrendous performances, and pitiful direction, but we also have to endue them without variety. "Held Up" takes place during a dry, uninspiring day at a gas station in the middle of an Arizona desert. There aren't any neat editing techniques, innovative camera work, or eye-popping visual effects to inspire our imaginations or catch our attention. This movie is boring from the word go. You're probably wondering how the majority of a movie can take place at a gas station set in the middle of a desert. That's a very good question. An even better question: why would anyone want to see something like that. These producers obviously thought such material would interest $15 million worth of an audience. They were wrong. According to box office records, the film only earned half its money back, proving just how interesting people found this concept. "Held Up" even wastes the talents of Nia Long. She is a fine actress. In the press notes, she speaks highly of these filmmakers and actors. Unfortunately, actions speak louder than words. Her performance suggests she wants out of the project altogether. Probably because of the pay check and very strong self control, she bares with the painstaking agony. Long plays Rae, the fiancee of a Chicago businessman named Michael (Jamie Foxx). The movie opens as the two argue and fight as they drive down the empty roads of Arizona in Michael's recently purchased piece-of-crap car. We spend the first ten minutes wondering what a beautiful woman would see in such a loser of a man. A few minutes later, she leaves him. GO GIRL!!! I think we are supposed to become all hung up on whether Rae and Michael will get back together, but we don't really want them back together. Actually, we don't want any woman, or man for that matter, to endure a relationship with Michael. He is an annoying loudmouth. When a clan of stupid foreign criminals put Michael and other miscellaneous characters in the middle of a hostage situation, we actually want those gun-wielding robbers to pop him a good one. The movie just gets dumber and dumber. The plot sinks to a new form of monotony. The only things keeping us awake is the work by one or two of the supporting actors, and I admittedly enjoyed a few scenes here and there. But overall "Held Up" is boring, trite, and desperately unfunny hokum. Jamie Foxx creates a stench so tremendously putrid he ruins almost every scene that features him. I suppose you could laugh at this. You would have to be drunk out of your mind and be a huge fan of Foxx-but if you are drunk, you would probably fall asleep during this movie. Actually, writing about it is forcing me to remember certain scenes in the movie that were so incredibly boring that…Zzzzzzz. Zzzzzzz. Zzzzzzz.

There are a couple of these movies you catch on cable that manage to sneak some real wit and sympathy into a no-man's-land of stylistic boredom that doesn't even earn the name B-movie ( where this kind of movie is concerned, it's always 1986. ) There are rules to watching a movie like this. You never call them by their real name, because you can't remember their real name, but are to be referred to instead by embarrassed asides to your girlfriend that go entirely ignored while she flips through a Zagat guide, such as "I saw this piece of s--t with Burt Reynolds and Sinbad that was actually kind of funny." Also, you never watch them from beginning to end, but catch them in the middle. Failure to obey this law could result in a meteoric drop in self-esteem and feeling of productivity. That feeling like "the day's being wasted." The art of a car-wash movie consists of brushing against cliché then pulling back at the last moment. The trick isn't to get you to laugh, but to keep you smiling internally. It's all in the delivery. When Jamie Foxx first encounters a vaguely hostile Little League team and says "Children of the corn," it could very easily come off like a hokey black pop-culture reference to get the Magic Johnson Cineplex crowd roaring. But in this movie, he says it quietly, as if to himself, with a girlishly shocked tinge to his voice. The result is that you find yourself chuckling about the line a half-hour later or after the movie has ended, instead of while it's happening. Most of the jokes here work like that. And Jamie Foxx is so charming in this film. He looks "street" enough but acts the ninnyhammer as well as Woody Allen, and there's a refreshing lack of explanation about why he's such a nerd. Who else can play the badass, the geek, the samaritan, the tormented artist, the preening genius, and every shade in between, and never coast on the support and shared background of a presumed black audience? There is no pandering in Foxx's performances, no trace of the veiled minstrel show that otherwise plagues most black performers who fall back on those tricks for easy laughs. A prescription: If you don't believe me that there's a finesse to making even a good bland film, then watch Legally Blonde 2 back-to-back with this one and learn the error of your ways.