“Date Night” is everything its trailers don’t make it appear to be–a hugely entertaining, rowdy, wacky slapstick film featuring two comic geniuses.  Steve Carell and Tina Fey, two major stars of the two biggest sitcoms on NBC, have an exciting chemistry that carries this goofy, mainstream film to glorious heights.

The duo plays a middle-aged suburban married couple out for a night in New York City.  After attempting to get a table at a fancy seafood restaurant, they are shot down cold, and decide to take the reservation of the seemingly absent Tripplehorns.  Toward the end of their meal, two thugs arrive at their table and escort them out, quickly waving guns in their faces and demanding an important flash drive from them.  Mayhem ensues as these two spend the night dodging crooked cops, mobsters, and bullets in the midst of a go-to mistaken identity plot.

Luckily for Director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum II, yikes), this very mainstream script can’t bog down Fey and Carell.  The two make an unstoppable pair when Levy stops the action in favor of their witty banter and improvisation.  Add in some entertaining cameos from James Franco, Mila Kunis and supporting player Mark Wahlberg, and “Date Night” is a very funny, entertaining, action-romance-comedy serving up shameless mainstream hijinks.  With the weight on the shoulders of Carell and Fey, this potential disaster of a movie, turns into the perfect date night movie.  I really enjoyed it a lot more than I anticipated.

Action, Comedy, Romance James Franco, Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Shawn Levy, Steve Carell, Tina Fey

Denzel Washington strays from his recent Tony Scott thrillers (Deja Vu, Pelham 123) to participate in an odd post-apocalyptic tale (yes, another one of those).  While I think much of the audience interested in this film already knows what Denzel’s “Eli” character is protecting as he wanders through what’s left of Earth’s wasteland following a nuclear fallout, I will refrain from revealing the big mystery.

With “The Road,” “Terminator Salvation,” “2012,” “I am Legend” and even “Wall-E,” audiences have seen the end of the world quite a bit lately.  “The Book of Eli” fits right in.  While this film deserves to be stronger than it is, the Hughes Bros. (absent for a decade) deliver a gutsy, expensive mainstream movie.  The set design is amazing–you can definitely tell lots of studio money went into this one.  The action sequences are sharp, bloody, and stinging.  Some of the flick feels a little generic, but I expected as much.  While it won’t be the post-apocalyptic film to remember, it is a challenging and consistently entertaining film with the likes of Denzel Washington (in a refreshing out-there movie for him, even if he often settles back into “Man in Fire” mode) and Gary Oldman (back to his smarmy evil best).  The action delivers, and while the message of it is certainly obtuse, “The Book of Eli” is a daring offering considering its subject matter.

Action, Drama Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, The Hughes Brothers