Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas hit the right notes in ‘Power Ballad’
Let’s just say that the wedding band has never occupied the most exalted rung of the ladder in music.
Playing “September” and “Celebration” is often what’s most required. As one member of the Bride and the Groove, the band at the center of John Carney’s new film, puts it: They’re not rock stars. They’re human jukeboxes.
But in “Power Ballad,” a wedding band singer and pop star cross paths. For one night, all of the stratification of the music world falls away. “Power Ballad” starts like a fairy tale.
Since 2007’s “Once,” the Irish writer-director has focused his films on the redemptive capacity of music. Carney, who was once a bassist for the Frames, knows from experience. From “Sing Street” to “Flora and Son,” he has made unabashedly earnest tales where a song, or just picking up an instrument, changes lives.
This can, undoubtedly, lead Carney into sentimental territory. Lucky for him, his chosen subject — music — is more worthy of sentiment than almost anything else. Yet the song doesn’t quite remain the same in “Power Ballad,” a movie that begins with the gentle sweetness Carney is known for, but detours into something more discordant.
Rick (Paul Rudd) is an American musician who gave up on his once-promising rock band’s future to instead live with his wife (Marcella Plunkett) and teenage daughter (a spunky, underused Beth Fallon) in Dublin. His former group was called Octagon, a perfect former band name if there ever were one.
But for years, Rick has fronted the Bride and the Groove. It’s an unromantic day job (or rather a night one) that hasn’t entirely sapped his belief in his own songwriting. During an encore at one wedding, he plays an original tune and is mentally transported to an arena full of swaying fans. When he snaps out of it, he’s staring at an empty dance floor and faces that say: That wasn’t Kool & the Gang.
At another wedding at at a castle, the band is asked to let a friend of the newlyweds sit in. They reluctantly agree, and are surprised to see the very popular boy band veteran, Danny (Nick Jonas), step on stage. He sings Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” and it’s great. Though Rick had just dismissed Danny’s music as “manufactured content for young, excitable teens,” he discovers Danny is a genuine musician.
But, later that night, something even more remarkable transpires. Rick bumps into Danny, and the two quickly hit it off. They begin jamming together and sharing songs that need work. They are both so jazzed by their unlikely collaboration that they play into the next morning.
The actual moment of artistic creation, and the craft it requires, is something the movies almost always skip over. But capturing collaborative juices flowing is exactly what Carney excels at. You can feel his joy in it. So it’s fitting that one of the unfinished songs Rick plays for Danny, “How to Write a Song (Without You),” is about creative invention.
It’s here when you wonder where “Power Ballad” is headed. Is this, for Rick, the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Will they turn into the next great songwriting duo, lifting Rick out of weddings and proving to the world that Danny is more than a boy-band pretty face?
That is very possibly the movie Carney might have made a decade ago. But “Power Ballad,” which he co-wrote with Peter McDonald (who also co-stars as a band member), shifts six months ahead in time. Rick is standing in a shopping mall when the familiar lyrics of “How to Write a Song” softly float through the stores. He stands dumbfounded in the gleaming halls of commerce, a befuddlement that slowly turns into outrage the bigger and bigger Danny’s smash hit grows.
“Power Ballad” loses some of its steam in its second half, which follows Rick’s struggle for justice. Making things considerably harder is that he can find no recorded demo of the song. His family and his band don’t even really believe him.
But even as the movie struggles to sustain its opening refrain, Carney’s film is always riffing on ideas of authenticity and aspiration in music. That Jonas is, himself, a former boy band star who has at times gone it alone, lends the movie a direct connection to contemporary music, where tussles over authorship are increasingly common.
Jonas has been good in other films (notably the “Jumanji” movies), but this is his most ambitious and convincing performance to date. It’s a testament to the movie that Danny’s theft isn’t a purely villainous act. He gives the song a bridge and the vocal power to take it to another level. He’s under mounting pressure from his label to deliver a hit. An executive (Jack Reynor) wants “Danny 2.0” but has little faith he can supply it.
But it’s an even more well-tailored role for Rudd. He memorably and very goofily played a bassist in the 2009 comedy “I Love You, Man.” But while he sings well, it’s not his musical chops that lift the performance. It’s more that Rick, a contented family man with unrealized rock-star dreams, gives the exceptionally genial Rudd more notes to play as an actor. Rudd makes for a very likeable everyman out to convince the world he is capable of a beautiful song.
And that’s the abiding belief of Carney’s. No matter all the struggles, the artistic injustices, the corporate hegemony, he still believes that if you make something truly soulful, it will break through. It will claw its way to the surface, and move people. It’s undoubtedly gotten harder since “Once,” this movie seems to admit. The world is against you. But what one person can offer, a ballad or otherwise, still has power. Fairy tale or not, that’s worth believing in.
“Power Ballad,” a Lionsgate release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language throughout and some drug use.” Running time: 108 minutes. Three stars out of four.
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s June 6, 1986, and we’re off to see Invaders from Mars, Raw Deal, and SpaceCamp.
Invaders from Mars
While everyone complains about how there are no original ideas in today’s films, welcome to the same issue in 1986.
12-year-old David Gardner dreams of space, and after staying up to watch a meteor shower, he sees what he believes is a UFO landing over the hill behind his house. The next morning his dad goes to investigate, but comes back not acting like himself. It seems the Martians have come to town and they’re going to start taking over the world by controlling one person at a time. With the help of his teacher, David starts to fight back and hopefully drive the Martians off the planet.
Other than some very goofy looking designs for the Martians, the film was a bit of fun, I felt. It certainly didn’t break any new ground, but I also definitely didn’t hate it. Throw it on for a mindless watch.
Where to watch: Available to stream.
Raw Deal
Even for a Schwarzenegger movie, this one was pretty bad.
Mark Kaminski (Schwarzenegger), was thrown out of the FBI on trumped up charges, but when his old boss, FBI Agent Harry Shannon, (Darren McGavin) finds his son killed while protecting a mafia informant, there’s only one man he trusts. Kaminski goes undercover in the mafia and tries to bring it down from the inside, ending up in a lengthy shootout with all of the members of two different mafia families.
I’m not sure how a movie with such a basic plot can be this boring, but it somehow succeeds. Not once was I engaged with the story. The only saving grace was I would watch McGavin in anything.
Where to watch: Available to stream.
SpaceCamp
Apparently, we’re all going to try to forget this movie existed.
When a group of teens attends Space Camp, they find themselves in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sit inside a Space Shuttle while it’s on the launch pad. Following an ‘accident’ orchestrated by a friendly robot, they end up having to launch with their adult supervisor and trying to find their way back home with limited resources.
As of this writing (June 6, 2026), this film is out of print physically, not streaming (legally), and is not available for digital purchase. YOU may be able to find it on a TUBE somewhere, however, if you look around.
Honestly, I kind of enjoyed it. It’s silly, but it pretty much knew what it was. Lets put it this way, I enjoyed it more than Raw Deal.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on June 6, 2026, with Invaders From Mars, Raw Deal, and SpaceCamp.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: June 5th, 2026 / 09:01 PM
CHUM movie poster | ©2026 IFC
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Alice Eve, Eric Michael Cole, Elle Haymond, Sarah Siadat, Johnny Gaffney, Lisa Yaro, Jim Klock, Vince Jolivette, Stephen Oliver
Writers: Jonathan Zuck and Joe Leone, story by Dick Grunert and Ryan R. Johnson and James Kondelik
Director: Jonathan Zuck
Distributor: IFC
Release Date: June 5, 2026
CHUM is the latest entry in the shark-obsessed-psycho-with-a-boat subgenre. It also meshes, perhaps coincidentally, with the 2024 sharks-but-no-psycho-ruin-a-Mediterranean-destination-wedding SOMETHING IN THE WATER.
Our narrator is Roy (Jim Klock) who, in the opening sequence, loses his wife to an enormous Great White in the sea off Malta. He begins by saying in voiceover, “You took her from me.” This is followed by a monologue about how much Roy loves his wife and includes the line, “Her scream lost in the roar of the sea.”
There isn’t anything particularly wrong with the line, except that we see the whole incident and then some – CHUM is very gore-friendly in all its shark attacks – and the woman is already underwater when the attack occurs. There’s no scream.
So, are we supposed to think that Roy’s imagination is playing tricks, or that director Jonathan Zuck and his co-writer Joe Leone, working from a story by Dick Grunert and Ryan R. Johnson and James Kondelik, aren’t paying close attention to what they’re doing?
Roy says he spent his life on the ocean, but “when you took her, I learned something new.”
Then we cut to a wedding banquet, where proud father Reginald (Stephen Oliver) is toasting his daughter the bride Tina (Alice Eve) and her groom Tom (Eric Michael Cole). Also in attendance are Tina’s irritable younger sister Sadie (Elle Haymond), bridesmaids Rachinda (Sarah Siadat) and Britney (Lisa Yaro), and Eric’s bro-ish best man Rick (Johnny Gaffney).
It’s a beautiful setting and a good-looking group, but it doesn’t take long for us to realize this union may not last. Tina and Tom have had a bitter fight about something that they seem unable to resolve. Tom winds up sleeping on the beach near the tide line, while Tina passes out on their hotel room bed in her wedding gown.
The nature of the dispute turns out to be one of the best aspects of CHUM. It’s real, it’s not the clichés that we too often get about onscreen marital disputes, and it’s wholly plausible that the timing is such that the couple haven’t had to confront it earlier.
Unaware of trouble in paradise, Rick has arranged a boat outing for the wedding party (sans Dad). Tina and Tom don’t want to go, but Rick guilts them into it – renting the boat for the day cost him a fortune.
The proprietor of The Tipsy Mermaid, Captain Mackey (Vince Jolivette), welcomes the six passengers aboard. He assures shark-averse Britney that there have never been attacks in these waters.
This again makes us wonder what’s happening on a meta level. We can see that The Tipsy Mermaid is out by the same coastline that we saw in the opening, so we know there’s been at least one shark attack here. Is Captain Mackey uninformed or lying?
A little later, we see that the microphone on the communications panel is severed. Our minds leap toward sabotage, but – spoiler alert – no, it’s just shoddy upkeep on The Tipsy Mermaid.
In reality (and easy to Google for Mackey or anyone in the group to who knew they’d be going out to sea that day), while they are rare, there have been shark attacks off Malta.
Furthermore, Tom, who is meant to be an expert on these matters, asserts that Great Whites are strangers to these waters, but are being driven north by climate change. It’s laudable that CHUM makes climate change part of the plot (and not just because of where the shark is), but again, there is a whole actual (albeit declining) subspecies of Great Whites in the Mediterranean.
We’re trying to figure out how all this will link up with Roy and what he’s learned, and we get to that, although perhaps not the way we expect, which is another CHUM asset.
Except for when the shark needs to interact with humans and/or vessels, the animal looks realistic, like footage of a genuine Great White. We also get a variety of fish in the underwater shots, which is a nice touch.
But there are the common-to-the-subgenre tropes of the shark looking way too big every time she breaches and eating way too much. Also, sharks do not growl.
One key aspect of this subgenre is how intrigued we are by the human villain. Here, the link between motivation and action doesn’t stack up well against that of comparable characters (e.g., Quint in JAWS or Bruce Tucker in DANGEROUS ANIMALS).
As these kinds of movies go, CHUM is moderately diverting, but it’s easy to see where it could have been better.
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It just isn’t sure what, exactly.
Photo: Giles Keyte/Amazon MGM Studios/Everett Collection
There’s a maybe half-hour stretch of Masters of the Universe that takes place in the real world, and I have no idea why. It isn’t something the original He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon felt compelled to do. The ’80s TV show, which was conceived of as an elaborate commercial for a Mattel action-figure line, was about the adventures of Adam, a brawny pageboy’d prince who transformed into the equally brawny hero of the title when he held his special sword aloft and intoned some magic words. Adam may have been half-Earthling on his mother’s side, but that was just a biographical footnote — he was an avowed citizen of Eternia, a planet where sword and sorcery elements exist alongside sci-fi ones like fighting robots and flying ships. It’s a setting made up of a bunch of shit a kid might like, mashed up together with no concern for internal logic, and the new movie can’t help but start there, too, even though that messes up its whole premise. Masters of the Universe kicks off with an introduction to Eternia in all of its kid–safe–Frank Frazetta glory, summarizing lore about the Sword of Power and its osteal resting place, Castle Grayskull, before exploring the angst of young Prince Adam (played as a child by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), who’s small for his age and easily pushed around during weapons training. Then it flings Adam off to Oklahoma City as a refugee from the attacks of perpetual villain Skeletor (Jared Leto, allegedly), and it becomes clear that no one involved in this project has a clue how to make a tolerable product out of this aging IP.
That’s the bar everyone involved in this movie was aiming to clear, and I’m not just saying that because the “fan screening event” I attended began with a heartwarming speech from a Mattel executive about how “Masters of the Universe was one of the most important brands we wanted to bring to life” (he mentioned Travis Knight only after a long ode to their corporate producing partners). The script for the movie, which is credited to Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and Dave Callaham, feels overwhelming, like something hastily patchworked together from different passes at the story over the years, rendering some aspects repetitive and others nonsensical. Take that sojourn in Oklahoma, in which we see a grown Adam, played by Nicholas Galitzine, go on a failed date, go to his job in human resources, and go home to the apartment he shares with a roommate. There was obviously an earlier version that started here, presenting Adam as either the exiled prince of a fantastical kingdom or an office drone who made up a grandiose backstory for himself to cover up the trauma of his parents’ death. But because the movie leaves no question about our hero’s identity, the Earth interlude is not just pointless but confusing. Like, what happened when a 10-year-old dropped out of the sky with no record of previously existing? Was he adopted, and does he have any investment in the people who raised him? And why does it take him so long to find a sword that appears to have been right down the block the whole time?
It’s possible to make a real movie out of the most dire of corporate circumstances — even a toy line, the way Greta Gerwig did with Barbie, and the way that Knight himself, best known for heading up the stop-motion studio Laika, did with the improbably charming Transformers spinoff Bumblebee. But Masters of the Universe isn’t a real movie. It’s a bunch of half-realized, semi-contradictory ideas accrued over years. It takes the rough shape of a comedy without ever really landing a joke, up to and including the potentially great one that Eternia warriors “Fisto” and “Ram Man” aren’t actually named that, that those are just the childish labels given to them by Adam as a kid. It never decides whether it’s fan service for nostalgic adults who’ll get some juice out of a cameo from Dolph Lundgren, star of the notorious 1987 Masters of the Universe movie, or an action-adventure for kids (Alison Brie, as henchwoman Evil-Lyn, is the only cast member who seems consistently aware she’s in a comedy). It cast Leto as its big bad, despite his reputational baggage and the character’s computer-generated skull for a face, then excised the actor from all promotional events. What was the point of shelling out for his participation in the first place? (He does trill his “Rs” impressively, I guess.)
Its action sequences are marked by endless pratfalls as Adam sorts out his He-Man powers and also endless pratfalls as his former weapons teacher Duncan (Idris Elba) tries to recover from his years as a depressed drunk. This gives their scenes together the feel of two different drafts that were document merged incorrectly. (As Duncan’s hypercompetent daughter Teela, Camila Mendes is left to roll her eyes.) The movie never really decides whether its source material is to be mocked or to be approached with a more wry affection. Worst of all, Masters of the Universe is under the impression it has something to say about masculinity without deciding what that is, exactly. It’s not difficult to see how Knight and company arrived at this thesis, when working with a main character who transforms into a bulgy warrior in a loincloth wielding, as Skeletor himself points out, an incredibly phallic weapon. But it’s exasperatingly impossible to sort out how the movie delineates good masculinity from the toxic kind. The movie wants to free up its hypertough characters to talk about their feelings but also has a clear contempt for the HR speak it presents as the alternative. In his regular-guy garb, Adam acts humiliatingly out of place at the gym and then weird on a date with a model-beautiful woman, despite looking like a handsome if charmless actor who’s been training intensely for months. In his He-Man form, Adam makes a show of reluctance about embracing brute force, then rips his foes’ arms off and beats them to death.
Masters of the Universe ends by making fun of the blunt moral lessons the original animated series punctuated its episodes with but couldn’t come up with even a joking conclusion of its own if pressed. There’s something appropriate about the movie coming out in the wake of two horror movies from 20-something YouTubers that have been setting box-office records. Obsession and Backrooms may not be perfect, but they are both, thrillingly, the visions of their respective young auteurs, while Masters of the Universe belongs to no one — a project engineered at enormous cost from the needs of IP.
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