'Freaky Tales' is an Oakland tribute that mostly misses
Fans of Eric "Sleepy" Floyd will be delighted, but most of what Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are going for fails to connect.
The filmmaking team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden made their bones making acclaimed indie films like Half Nelson, Sugar, and Mississippi Grind, before taking the MCU plunge in 2019 with Captain Marvel, which was better than the majority of what Marvel has cranked out in the years since.
Now, they’re back with Freaky Tales, their first film in six years. It’s a return to the personal work of their past, although it does offer plenty of action, fighting, and special effects that they deployed during their Marvel foray. It’s also fully and impressively steeped in 1987 period detail.
The result is a huge swing that mostly misses. It has about 15 big ideas, and only one of them is any good.
Freaky Tales, which Fleck and Boden co-wrote and co-directed, is a film that roughly 50 percent of critics will proclaim is “a love letter to Oakland in the 1980s.” (While Boden is from Massachusetts, Fleck is a Bay Area native who lived in Oakland for part of his childhood.) Set in that city on a specific night in 1987, Freaky Tales employs a Pulp Fiction-like nonlinear storytelling gimmick, spread across four stories that intersect at various times.
There’s not much that happens that justifies this story structure. And worse than that, all of the stories are connected by a mythical gimmick in which lightning that’s green — in the style of the Oakland A’s uniforms — shoots out of characters’ eyes and gives them magical powers. It’s a total dud of a conceit that does little but act as a deus ex machina and detract from each character’s victories.
And while the Oakland stuff is undoubtedly heartfelt, it’s not quite on the level of Blindspotting when it comes to recent Oaktown cinematic tributes.
The first story has a multicultural group of punk rockers defending themselves against a group of Nazi skinheads. Just about everything good in this segment, including the playing of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” is lifted straight from Jeremy Sauliner’s film Green Room.
The more entertaining second segment has a pair of battle rappers (Normani and Dominique Thorne) going up against the famed real-life Oakland rapper Too Short. The third, and by far the weakest, has Pedro Pascal as a guy who’s trying to extricate himself from a criminal organization, and pick out a movie to watch with his wife.
The final segment — and the one great idea — is built around the idea of 1980s NBA journeyman Eric “Sleepy” Floyd (played by Jay Ellis), the night he scored 51 points against the Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals, essentially reinventing himself as a blaxploitation hero, with a side of ninja heroics. This segment is funny, it’s exciting, and it successfully pulls together various threads from other parts of the film.
And no, not a single aspect of the movie’s Sleepy Floyd stuff, except for that 51-point game, really happened. It reminded me a bit of that fake biopic of “Weird Al” Yankovic, where he’s sleeping with Madonna and gunning down bad guys.
(The underdog Golden State Warriors of the ‘80s were very different from the team that exists now, which is not only the league’s model franchise but has since decamped from Oakland to San Francisco. There’s probably a funny cosmic joke in that the night I saw the film where Floyd scored 51, Steph Curry went for 52- and presumably didn’t follow it with a heroic killing spree.)
And yes, there’s a cameo by Tom Hanks, in which he plays a video store clerk- something that’s foreshadowed multiple times by characters conspicuously mentioning that Hanks is from Oakland. This is another big whiff, though- if you have access to a cameo from someone of Hanks’ stature, you should come up with a better idea than just having him riff on Jack Black’s schtick from High Fidelity. Plus, isn’t 1987 a little early for the “snobby video store clerk” archetype?
Certain characters, led by Ben Mendelsohn’s loathsome corrupt cop, pop up throughout. The real Too Short and Sleepy Floyd both show up as other characters, and the cast also includes the late Euphoria actor Angus Cloud, in what’s presumably his final role.
I credit Boden and Fleck with doing some different and offbeat for their first film post-Marvel, but the majority of Freaky Tales just doesn’t work.