Help!

It’s hard to have a high ceiling on a movie with The Beatles. They’re not actors, and their movies are going to be vehicles for their music first and movies second. A Hard Day’s Night has less plot than an episode of Sesame Street, and Yellow Submarine is a deliberate attempt to provoke acid flashbacks even in people who’ve never touched LSD, but it has even less plot. Help is the weird movie in the middle. It has a plot, but it’s a simple one: Ringo has a ring that both a cult and a mad scientist want. The movie is essentially “The Beatles fight off people, run, repeat”. The difference is mostly in set pieces; their conjoined brownstones, a ski slope in the Alps, the streets of London, and so on. It’s not a complicated movie by any stretch. It’s all zany antics and deadpan line delivery, but it’s mostly the same set up over and over again. It gets a little tiring by the end, but I can’t say it ever runs out of energy. It’s always amusing and charming and has a steady pulse, and it never asking the Beatles to do anything beyond be there and react. So, in that regard, Help is probably the best of the Beatles movies for the purposes of a conventional movie. It is by no means deep or intelligent, but it also isn’t trying to be. It’s just a silly romp with good music and humor from either the dry performances or the wild hijinks. And that’s fine. I don’t really expect anything more.