Crammed to the margins with peaceable punks, vicious skinheads, ambitious rappers, racist police — oh, and a green supernatural whatsit — Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Freaky Tales” is a nostalgic homage to the music, movies and personalities of the 1980s.
Set in 1987 in Oakland, where Fleck grew up, this revenge-of-the-underdogs picture unfolds through a lens of pop-culture goofiness. Blending multiple genres — action, comedy, horror, martial arts — Fleck and Boden’s screenplay is blunt and broad, a flurry of flyby references only loosely tethered to narrative logic. Bursts of animation and graphic-novel gore lend familiar gimmickry to the film’s four, vaguely connected stories, none of which feel fully cooked.
In the first, two teenagers (Ji-young Yoo and Jack Champion) and their fellow punks are forced to defend a beloved music venue from a tribe of marauding neo-Nazis. This segues into a sparking rap battle between a young female duo (Dominique Thorne and Normani, both standouts) and Too $hort (played by the hip-hop artist Symba). The third segment feels more robust, thanks to Pedro Pascal’s performance as a burned-out enforcer trying vainly to escape his violent past. And a bloodily operatic finale sees a loathsome detective (Ben Mendelsohn) pay when a scheme to rob the home of the basketball star Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) goes spectacularly awry.
High on revolutionary spirit, “Freaky Tales” is a frisky, frantic pastiche that doesn’t always make sense. (In the third chapter, an unexpected cameo by a major celebrity is such a non sequitur even Pascal seems momentarily flummoxed.) Yet the visuals are meaty, and the filmmakers (whose last feature collaboration was on “Captain Marvel” in 2019) show considerable affection for their movie’s setting. I wish, though, they had focused less on the era’s greatest hits and more on the details of their script. Maybe then we would have learned the provenance of that supernatural whatsit.
Freaky Tales
Rated R for lewd lyrics, slow-motion bloodletting and an exploding racist. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters.
