Vince Young — the former Houston-area high school sensation, former University of Texas gamechanger and current Tennessee Titans starting quarterback — had an eventful Saturday night.
One that has the Dallas police looking to talk to him about an altercation at a strip club. Young is being called the ">prime suspect in an alleged assault that took place at Club Onyx — a place that advertises $2 dances on Tuesdays and stays open from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. on Saturdays. Last night, an assault allegedly occurred that left an individual with "bodily harm" according to the Dallas police.
A woman who calls herself a "model" and has a suggestive shirtless pose on her page tweeted, "So vince young came in onyx for two seconds then got in a fight and got kick out!!!"
Anytime, an NFL player gets involved in a strip club incident, visions of Pacman Jones' "making it rain" shooting night come rushing to the forefront of everyone's mind of course.
That's not exactly the image that Young — who's been dogged by questions of his commitment to football throughout his short pro career — wants to project. Young had worked hard this offseason to show that his dedication level had changed.
Even if this incident turns out to be a minor fight, expect NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to weigh in. Goodell does not like his league being tied to the strip club world in public reports involving violence — no matter how loyal many of the league's players are to these establishments.
In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.
The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.
Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.
Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.
The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.
It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.
Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.
Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.
