Hokey Religions and Ancient Weapons Are No Match for a Good Blaster at Your Side, Kid.

I don’t think I would be wrong in identifying Solo: A Star Wars Story as the safest picture the franchise has ever seen, but it’s still a bizarre statement to make in the face of its remarkably disappointing financial run on top of other matters. Namely, it is very easy for one to ask the question “who is this for?” regarding Solo, not necessarily because we don’t know who the target audience for this four-quadrant blockbuster is. It’s because frankly nobody asked for it and the response to its announcement has always been very muted reluctance at most. That it’s doing dire work at the box office is more a shock simply because you don’t normally expect “bomb” to appear in the same sentence as “Star Wars” rather than because excitement was in the air.

Anyway, I called Solo safe and I’m sticking by it. After all, it is directed – after much internal strife – by Ron Howard, a director especially known for his lack of a characteristic style unless you call being unable to smooth out an episodic narrative structure a style. And Howard reliably performs that dysfunction here, though he’s not helped by any means with father-and-son team Lawrence and Jon Kasdan’s screenplay. It’s a script that was clearly built off of “well, we have several checkpoints we will have to arbitrarily connect the dots to” in regards to the early life of breakout Star Wars character, the cynical smuggler Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich): his meeting of hairy Wookie co-pilot Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) and slick gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), the famous Kessel Run performed in 12 parsecs, the acquisition of his famous ship Millennium Falcon, and a hell of a lot of time devoted to the shiny die that you may or may not have noticed the hanging on the Falcon’s dashboard in the original trilogy.

None of these were particularly things we needed to see and yet they’re spread out in the screenplay over the length of three years in the young man’s life. By which I mean that the first quarter happens where we see Han and his thief partner Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) attempt to escape the grasp of their shrimp gangster overseer Lady Proxima (Linda Hunt) but Qi’ra’s quick re-capture leads Han to try to join the Imperial armed forces in the hopes of earning enough to return to the industrial planet of Corellia and break Qi’ra away from its clutches followed by a big leap in with the title card “THREE YEARS LATER” and the rest of the movie just continues on from there in the form of clunky chapters – a train heist, a mine heist/droid revolt, and a good ol’ bunch of fourth act showdowns – sifted through without anything resembling structural elegance.

But already Star Wars fans come to a brief roadblock on how to take Solo: A Star Wars Story – they’ve turned Han, previously an ambiguous mercenary archetype with little more to him than that, into a young romantic driven by lost love. For indeed, his desire to reunite with Qi’ra is the driving motivation behind every decision he makes for the rest of the film as he and Chewie tag along with a motley crew of thieves made up of wise quickshooter Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), his lover Val (Thandie Newton), and their four-armed alien pilot Rio (Jon Favreau). And that romanticism is a pretty bold shift in characterization to make for one of the most beloved characters in one of the most popular franchises, especially coming from Lawrence Kasdan who is a long-time resident of the Star Wars creative force since 1980. And I have to admit the likeliness that original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were intending to take this sincere earnestness a little more tongue-in-cheek than intended interests me much more than the predictable emotional beats Howard hops into with straight-faced director after Lord and Miller were unceremoniously fired*. But there is a bright side to this: for one thing, it makes it a lot easier to shed any previous associations with the icon and approach the story as its own thing which I’d assume is the best line of inquiry for any Star Wars fan that doesn’t just go to these movies for the unbearably winking fan service (which is present in Solo, including an overabundance of sequel hooks littered all throughout the final minutes. One surprise character cameo only pushes the Disney Star Wars productions into becoming a new Marvel Cinematic Universe).

It also relieves Alden Ehrenreich of any need to attempt mimicry of his famed predecessor Harrison Ford, instead of inputting his personal charm and effortless boyishness as he leads a pretty bubbly ensemble. Glover himself is attempting mimicry of Billy Dee Williams and is getting it right on target. Suotamo, in his second go-round in that fur suit, has already gotten a good hand at the body language Chewie demands while Harrelson is another stand-out in a nitty gritty reluctant mentor, Newton gives tension as an aggressive moll, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge brings excitement as a very vocally conscious droid. Honestly, the only weak links are the inert Clarke and the unbearable Favreau (who is saddled with the most unspeakable word sandwiches sold as “jokes”) and otherwise the cast is the biggest reason to bother with Solo: A Star Wars Story.

I would say it is the world-building as well. For sure, there is a pretty wonderful amount of production design going about, like a giant luxury spaceship doubling as the den of bloodthirsty gangster Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany, replacing Michael K. Williams sadly) or the implication of Corellia’s involvement in the creation of the galaxy’s fleet of spaceships. And in some cases, that world-building has a full-on involvement in the spectacle: that train heist is easily the best moment in the whole film, where the bandits are on a mini-Snowpiercer unstoppable snow locomotive and stepping into it from different angles dealing with different obstacles, cut with utter frenzy by Pietro Scalia. And the Kessel Run sequence is no slouch either, utilizing the looming entity of the Empire as a fire under the ass of a chase sequence trying to use the freewheeling physicality of space for comic book pulp.

Again, I WOULD say it’s the world-building, except that Solo: A Star Wars Story heartbreakingly looks like hell as some idiot shot the film’s interiors with a murky lack of lighting obscuring characters and a sense of blocking that doesn’t seem aware of the objects in the frame and dared to slap Bradford Young’s name to this. Chewbacca’s entrance is the worst of these things, where the very “Hey it’s Chewie!” close-up where he roars into the camera and is “recognized” is botched by having not lighting on his face at all. It’s just watching undefined shadows and blotches on the screen occasionally*.

The concept of a space opera that just can’t bother looking good, especially with one of the best cinematographers working today in its arsenal, just feels offensive. It is the least a movie as forgettable as Solo could do and it nearly gets so well done with imaginative set, costume, creature, and CGI designs all around but none of that means much if you can barely see it. It doesn’t register a lot of confidence on its makers’ part. Somebody must have told them the odds.

*Between Lord/Miller getting booted for making a comedy and the burial of Star Wars: Detours, Lucasfilm is starting to feel like fan service gatekeepers.

*No less a reliable name than Bilge Ebiri swears it looked better in its Cannes premiere and it’s the theater projections that are messing up and I sincerely believe his experience except… y’know projectors don’t suddenly retroactively light sets and actors.

Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?

Discussing the highest-grossing film of 2017 six months after its release hits that sweet spot where I can just about open up with a SPOILER WARNING without worrying much about that turning away readers that weren’t already going to be turned away, yet on the other hand… I also have to reckon that almost anything I have to say about Star Wars: The Last Jedi has already been addressed, usually by better writers than I (for that is a long list). And yet the extreme responses on both sides to the film make one feel like a man without a country.

I mean, I am not neutral on the film: after watching it twice, I’ve settled on “I didn’t like it”. So I’m not onboard with the critical adoration stating it’s the best Star Wars movie of all time or since The Empire Strikes Back. And yet there’s a significant amount of criticisms towards The Last Jedi that I frankly don’t align with, even ignoring the ones I refuse to dignify involving the term “Social Justice Warrior” or complaining about the inclusion of anti-war politics, people of color, and women in significant roles. At worst, I think it’s on the same middling-to-mediocre level that every Star Wars release since 1999’s The Phantom Menace, so it’s not like I find “worst Star Wars movie” to apply to it either.

But The Last Jedi does land a lot of superlatives in my book, with the most gnawing one being the clunkiest narrative of a franchise that’s never been an exemplar of thematic depth and structural competence. Honestly, many of the criticisms regarding director/writer Rian Johnson’s screenplay are not really unique to The Last Jedi. Its unwieldy lack of balance with plotlines (essentially three but they mesh throughout) is definitely something already messed up by 2002’s much worse Attack of the Clones and its snail-in-a-black-hole pacing that leads to nowhere for an entire hour is something shared by the first two entries of the prequel trilogy. And yet, here I am finding it a lot more bothersome on three factors: Johnson’s normally a phenomenal writer and this is uncharacteristically clumsy of him, the movie is the longest in the franchise at a whopping 152 minutes, and it stresses that length by having its best elements bookended and the fairly good moments in the middle interrupted by a large chunks of bad.

The film starts on a great note with an incredible war thriller mini-movie starring Veronica Ngo about her duties as a Resistance gunner while her allies escape a First Order ambush, led by the plucky fighter pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). It’s cut right with outright urgency by Bob Ducsay as we witness slow bomber after slow bomber destroyed in the desperate hope of taking down a Dreadnought from the point of view of Ngo’s Paige, cramped and determined in an explosive setpiece. It’s a bit overreliant on turning Star Wars battles into World War II battles with complete disregard to space physics (I mean, these bombs are DROPPED into the vaccuum of space and Ngo stands next to the open door), but it’s bombastic exciting opening spectacle.

We cut to the remote island planet of Ahch-To, where we last left Rey (Daisy Ridley) attempting to appeal to self-exiled Jedi Master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) to teach of her developing Force powers. Luke, however, has grown bitter and resentful of the Force and the Jedi way of life in consideration of how his student Ben “Kylo Ren” Solo (Adam Driver) has gone off the deep end and demands to be left alone in his misanthropic state. And herein, the story boils very efficiently: eventually Rey – with the help with the familiar pair of ol’ Wookie Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo, officially taking over from Peter Mayhew) and chirpy astromech droid R2-D2 (Jimmy Vee) – is able to break Luke down to give reluctant and cynical lessons on how to focus her power. However, doubts fueled by Ren and desires in Rey’s heart to discover the truth behind her origins threaten to derail her journey inward and give her answers she won’t like. Which is why this happens to be the area in which the film is the richest in character drama and development.

It’s been a popular method of detractors to cite Mark Hamill’s resentment for developing Luke as a sullen old man, ignoring that he’s rolled back on his comments, but honestly I can’t pretend I agree. It makes a whole lot more narrative sense than anything else in The Last Jedi and Hamill takes that spot to facilitate a lot of growth Luke surprises himself with when Rey breaks into his life. And Rey remains the most dynamic character to emerge from the sequel trilogy, with Ridley herself having to drive Rey’s arcs and respond to some very empty, disappointing truths about herself before using them as a launchpad for an inspiring arc of self-realization. This happens to be the moment where all of the curveballs in Johnson’s script stick, like the revelation of Rey’s parentage and the usage of evil Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis in his MO mo-cap), but I’ll get to the criticism of the rest later.

Meanwhile, there’s the other plotlines, originally starting as just one: The First Order Dreadnought Supremacy is sadistically stalking the desperate evading Resistance forces, with the shocking capability to follow their main cruiser at light speed and make massive dents in Resistance defenses. It gets intense enough to incapacitate General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) and command is now assumed by Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern). Holdo’s refusal to share her plans to the recently-demoted Poe leads to an extended hissy-fit-turned-mutiny that is a lot less self-aware than it receives credit for. There’s no nicer way of saying this: this plotline and the subsequent split it makes for a secret mission of ex-storm trooper Finn (John Boyega) and the Resistance technician sister to Ngo’s Paige named Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) dangerous regresses nearly every character involved into a complete buffoon. The characters make decisions that end up circling the whole narrative back to the same spot an hour of character action later, even well before their floundering leads to results Leia stressed they CANNOT afford but has little affect on Poe, Finn, or Rose’s development. Finn especially goes through the exact same motivational beats he already had gone through in The Force Awakens with extra stress on turning him into a physical clown of a deserter, but all of the heroes* cast here are doing the best they can with disastrous material and barely selling fuck-ups as the actions of believable human beings in distress (in general, I think Dern outdoes Hamill as the second-best performance in the film behind Ngo and Tran has been receiving a frankly mean-spirited amount of vitriol she wouldn’t deserve even if her performance wasn’t the singular source of dedicated humane energy that it is). It just doesn’t stop the frustrating lack of thrust in a story that has too much time not to fill it up.

And that’s ignoring the inorganic way the movie halts to directly criticize war profiteering, a clunky but noble move often mistaken as deeming The Last Jedi an anti-war film which fits it about as well as Iron Man, a film that only seems to be against the bad guys having weapons. Star Wars is a Manichean environment produced by a company pretty spooked at the idea of challenging narrative norms. Moral complexity is alien to it and it’s a miracle that Luke Skywalker as a character accomplishes this, but nothing else in The Last Jedi facilitates this. Poe is rewarded for decisions that lead to a massive amount of lives lost by being promoted at the very end of this movie with Holdo, the very woman who Poe held at gunpoint after trashing her bridge, happily declaring she likes him because he’s feisty. Y’know, because he’s the good guy so that he commit such indisputable travesties. Or how about the fact that shortly after all these bodies occurred, Rose nearly kills Finn and herself in the aborting of a suicidal attack against The First Order and responds to this by saying they will win this war by “Saving the ones we love”, punctuated by her kissing Finn** while a Hitchcockian laser explosion occurs that totally added to the body count. That’s a wild misfire for a movie that is deemed anti-war.

In Johnson’s writing, there ARE fundamentally daring and engaging narrative decisions where the common criticism from the public is that they happened, while my big problem is that they were rolled back. The most notorious instance of this happens to be the apparent death and subsequent resurrection of Leia, a move that feels sincere in the wake of Fisher’s shocking death but existed before her passing and indicates an unwillingness on the part of this new trilogy to move past the legacy of the original. Or the constant feints The Last Jedi makes to affiliations and allegiances being subverted, only to return by the end of the movie to a distinct line between good guys and bad guys. Johnson’s never indicated the remotest dissatisfaction with the development of The Last Jedi and I’m sure he’s happy to have a chance of shaking things up for the duration of the movie, but all the “fake out!” resets feel like the result of the powers-that-be at LucasFilm stating “well, you have to put it right back when the movie’s over” with an Marvel-esque fidelity to their plans for Star Wars Episode IX. It makes the film feel safer than it should.

Now, I’ve long upheld that Star Wars is not an event you go to for the writing and I maintain that in this instance. In fact, some of the other elements are why I can’t damn it as hard as so many detractors seem to.

For instance, it is the best-looking Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back. It’s evident that Johnson brought his love of anime into Steve Yedlin’s cinematography with a finger on instant iconography like a character standing off against a First Order grand armada like a splash page imagined by Ralph McQuarrie or a steaming gnarled wreck of a black helmet in a glowing elevator. This movie crazy inventive with red as both an sleight-of-hand replacement for viscera (one scene halfway through the movie uses a red costume’s tatters to replace the gore of the character’s evisceration, another uses the salt-coated red surface of a planet to imply a character’s eruption and later a post-slice blood splatter) as well as just an excitably pure backdrop for the passion of battle – particularly one of the greatest lightsaber battles of the whole franchise, so many combatants cutting through a dome of bright crimson burning down to reveal the abyss of space while dealing with the space version of the armor from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

And those reds aren’t even the main showcase of production designer Rick Heinrichs and costumer Michael Kaplan. It’s actually an element of the Finn/Rose mission: the Monaco-inspired casino planet Canto Bight is one of the better elements of world-building since The Phantom Menace, various in eye-catching colors and creature designs and shimmering in an off-puttingly perfect way making it easy to understand why Finn is so easily dazzled and giving a full gap to the class lines Rose remarks upon to give the sudden politics enough heft. Or the salt planet of Crait, inventively straddling the line between desert heat and winter whites to give a relentlessly wild atmosphere for The Last Jedi‘s climax.

There is a caveat to that “Best Looking” title and it’s a significant one that hampers one of the reasons I go to a Star Wars movie in the first place: The effects are at an all-time worst. Which leaves enough room for dazzling setpieces like the opening escape, the throne room battle, the Canto Bight scene, or a moment of rapid black-and-white impact where Johnson is so proud of the imagery that he shuts off the sound for 10 seconds (you could heard the whole crowd go “whoa!” at my IMAX). But then there’s also the reminder that Snoke is the worst motion-captured character Andy Serkis has ever done, an extended setpiece involving very cartoonish animals rampaging through a planet, and Leia’s revelation as a force-user swinging back to the ship and they’re mighty worse than either of Rogue One‘s grave-robbery, largely because these effects involving living tissue as well that’s always in movement (where Rogue One‘s Tarkin and Leia occasionally were not moving) and pulls the effects further into looking like video game cutscenes. The practical effects are all fine as they always are and Star Wars otherwise still remains as competent in their effects work as an given blockbuster, but man those particular instances stick in my craw.

As does the growing dissatisfaction with John Williams’ returning as a composer for this trilogy. His cues for The Last Jedi don’t hit the depths of The Force Awakens – indeed he seems a lot more awake here, especially on Canto Bight – but his music just doesn’t seem like much more than him doing an imitation of himself this time around. And this is probably the killing blow for me: I specifically go to Star Wars for Williams’ music above anything else. His motifs don’t salvage horrible movies (“Across the Stars” is among his best and that’s from Attack of the Clones), but if his music doesn’t seem to be having fun, I’m not gonna be having fun. And the music doesn’t sound like he’s been having fun since Revenge of the Sith.

My attitude is clear: there are elements I like in The Last Jedi, but I am dismayed by the packaging. There are ideas I admire in The Last Jedi, but I find ruined by the execution. The Last Jedi is not a worthless film, in fact I think it’s quite interesting enough to understand why its supporters are so very devoted to the film. It’s a giant contradiction in a fascinating way that begs re-evaluation someday on my part, much as The Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi found. But not any time soon, sadly – partly because the goliath amount of time wasted does not entice me to rewatch it soon***, partly because watching it a second time with the intent on focusing on the good has only led to me finding more bad and it felt even more like a missed opportunity. Ah well, not everything has to be black and white. I can sit right in the middle of my island and stay out of the fight that Star Wars: The Last Jedi has started.

*I’m specifying “heroes” because the villains are much much worse than they already were in The Force Awakens. Domnhall Gleeson as General Hux is doing a dumber version of Ben Mendehlson’s flustering functionary work in Rogue One, Driver is tethered to the most predictable storyline Kylo Ren could have been saddled with, and Serkis is still doing nothing. I don’t want to add more problems to this review and I kind of don’t care enough about the characters to even be appalled at their treatment like I am with Finn, Rose, Poe, and Holdo, so they get a footnote and not an actual place in the review.

**They ruined Poe/Finn! Goddammit! Of course that was never canon, but the possibility of the first explicit non-heteronormative relationship in a Star Wars, erased just like that!

***There’s legend of a “fan” cut removing the women from the film which is not only sexist as fuck but wildly misses that all the best parts are starring the women. My fan cut would not remove a single millimeter of Rey or Paige’s storyline, though it would be quite liberal with the rest.

Make It Rain

I haven’t seen any of the Sharknado films*, but the vibe I get is that it’s self-aware in a smug way and trying too hard to appeal to the so-bad-it’s-good crowd. And that strikes me as obnoxious and unaware of what makes the appeal of a movie that’s so-bad-it’s-good: it’s not that the movie’s aren’t trying to be good on the assumption of a camp factor they haven’t earned, but that they are trying so damn hard that we can’t help admiring their chutzpah. It’s the same sort of vibe I get from Samurai Cop 2 casting Tommy Wiseau as its villain. You don’t cast Tommy Wiseau without trying to cheat your way into camp cinema cred and I apologize to the memory of Samurai Cop as a film I hold dear to my heart, but I didn’t feel like bothering with its 24-year-later successor.

I almost got the fear early into The Hurricane Heist, Rob Cohen’s latest action thriller. It was very quickly relieved by the fact that the same thing that made me wonder if they’re going to try too hard also made my friend and I laugh our heads off in the theater.

It was a CGI skull superimposed in the middle of a hurricane sky.

You see, Cohen is not new to making trash movies that have somehow turned into fine ironic entertainment. His very last film before this was the tawdry teacher-student sex film The Boy Next Door and my, would that have been quite a hit in the 1990s. Instead it’s a diamond in the rough of 2015**. And it’s hard to believe the people involved in that film were oblivious to the sheer lunacy of their screenplay but there wasn’t a shred of detachment from the execution of that film without letting the audience in on the fun as well. The Hurricane Heist is probably also aware of how utterly dumb it is, but it doesn’t want that to stop you from coming for some sincerely ridiculous “watch it with your friends while drunk” material, starting from that CGI skull (and let me tell you, this is not the last time we will see it).

The skull hurricane happened to be terrorizing the huddled children Will and Breeze Rutledge shortly after witnessing their father being killed by debris in a heavy Category 5. The incident left a distinct impact in each of them as they grew up into Alabama Good Ol’ Boys: Breeze (Ryan Kwanten) has become a functioning alcoholic taking care of their pops’ electrician garage, the only thing he has left to remember his pop. Will (Toby Kebbell) has become vengeful enough against the forces of nature to become a meteorologist who drives a high-tech version of the Tumbler from the Dark Knight movies. Will spend his whole runtime functioning as a harbinger of doom for the latest storm kicking up in the way of his hometown, declaring it pre-emptively as an off-the-charts Category 5 and trying to convince his headstrong brother to evacuate with the rest of the city.

This just happens to coincide with the treasury drop-off of $600 million set to be shredded, looked over by haunted agent Casey Corbyn (Maggie Grace) and her zen Irish partner Connor Perkins (Ralph Ineson). Casey just wants to get these done quickly to prove herself capable of handling official responsibilities again, Connor’s calm demeanor has something to do with the fact that he planned to use this opportunity to rob the Treasury of that doomed money with no intent of harming a single individual in the building. And so he enacts his plan almost immediately and while there is little understanding as to whether or not he was aware he planned this theft in the middle of a huge-ass hurricane, he was definitely aware that Casey was no longer in the building as she went off to grab Breeze so he can repair the Treasury building’s generator.

I say again, Connor was aware that Casey was no longer in the building and thus not among the hostages his heist team rounded up. And yet he still started his plan without that important detail. Shenanigans lead to Casey returning with Breeze to a welcome of gunfire in the stormy grey rain. While Casey is able to evade capture, Breeze is apprehended and forced to work on the generator so that Connor’s hacker couple, Sasha and Frears (Melissa Bolona and Ed Birch), can continue their hacking into the vault. Connor also needs Casey’s IPad to open it, which we as an audience are aware he simply needs to dig into, like, an inch of shredded bills to find. Y’know, Connor may not have figured his plan all the way through.

The overly complex presentation of a story that does not need to be this damn complex is only one layer where The Hurricane Heist brings joy to my heart. There are wild creative decisions all around, like the fact that Sasha and Frears are dressed like this is a night at the club or Will’s constant response to a physical threat by the robbers by using the strong tropical winds in his favor. At one point, he just throws a bunch of hubcaps down wind with unconflicted success in impaling several of Connor’s gang with them. At another instance, he swears to Casey they’re safe using sports equipment to remain tethered to a mall while their assailants are sucked into the focused cyclone. Meanwhile, Casey and Will are fucking SLAMMING onto the building’s roof and don’t die somehow. This movie does not give a damn about the physics except insofar as they could provide a ridiculous outlet for Will to thwart the villains without having to use a gun.

Meanwhile, this is also a movie very much aware of the fact that it’s set in Alabama despite being shot in Sofia, Bulgaria and not having a single Southern American in its main cast. The artificiality of the film’s Southern identity is like a wall for it to smash through. The sole yankee is Grace and everybody else is just doing their best mock-up of a shit-kicking cowboy. Except Ineson, but IS doing an understated imitation of an Irish accent and that’s the most sedate part of his performance. His brilliantly tragic work in The Witch would have convinced anyone he’s above this sort of work, but Ineson just doesn’t care: he’s channeling Nicolas Cage-esque tension, repeating unconvincingly that he’s not a violent individual before cursing and snarling at everyone that his plans are ruined including, yeah, at one point cursing the Hurricane face-to-face (again, this character does not appear to be smart).

Nobody else gets close to Ineson’s level, though Ben Cross from that most Southern of films, Chariots of Fire, tries playing every inch of a ruthless hick sheriff stereotype. And Kebbell is just about the source of any possible urgency the film has, constantly having a look on his face like whatever he’s about to do is a terrible idea but doing it anyway because the movie says so. It’s only more amusing that the points where the film’s pace slow down most are “character moments” between Will and Casey as they give a heart to heart while urinating outside IN THE MIDDLE OF A HURRICANE or take a lunch break to discuss the distinction between peanut butter and tuna fish sandwiches WHILE WILL’S BELOVED BROTHER IS IN DANGER.

I mean, it sounds contradictory to say that this film is proud of its own stupidity but I can’t help feeling like Cohen and company saw the potential to take this film off the rails and took it. And while its craft is not the stuff of masters, Cohen’s editor Niven Howie is certainly intent on presenting the action in a manner that can accidentally wow the right sort of viewer. This is an ambitious movie: one that wants explosions, dwarfing storm clouds, overwhelming overcast rains, destroyed models wherever it can fit them (showing Cohen’s heart is in the best place), and climactic truck chase involving the heroes jumping between them like they’re in a Western. And probably most ambitious of all: this is a film that presents the utopian concept of southern folk who are explicitly proud supporters of climate change theory AND the second amendment.

I wish one of those things was characters shooting guns at the hurricane to stop it, but we can’t have everything. Sometimes, it just takes the simpler things in life to satisfy me.

*Holy shit, there are 6 of them bitches.

**Not to imply that 2015 wasn’t an amazing year for movies because it actually was.

 

Devenomized

With the sincerest apologies to Lu Saitta, who had been waiting on this review for a while ever since she answered a question correctly last summer (I ended up delaying it for a Halloween Mummy marathon that simply never happened), I dedicate this review to her and her unyielding patience (or ability to forget bad writers sometimes offer to write stuff for people).

The Scorpion King‘s origins as a film in early 2002 are quite a doozy. It is not only a spin-off to the reboot franchise of Universal Studios’ Mummy movies from the turn of the millennium, it is a PREQUEL to the SEQUEL to the REBOOT of Karl Freund’s 1932 masterpiece. Less than a year had passed between the April 2001 premiere of The Mummy Returns and the April 2002 release of The Scorpion King, meaning that Universal Studios and WWF Entertainment fast-tracked the production of the origin story on a character who spent more screentime as CGI that already looked video game-like back then in the hopes that he would prove extremely popular in the wake of The Mummy Returns‘ success (not expecting it to make slightly less than its predecessor). This film is the purest form of synergy I can possibly imagine.

The Scorpion King made enough of a pretty penny for the studios to not regret making the movie, but it’s very likely not on the merit of the character’s appeal and more the actor who portrayed him. For The Scorpion King was essentially THE role that began building Dwayne Johnson’s future movie star status from his acquired superstardom as a wrestler for WWE (formerly WWF) under the ring name The Rock, the name which the actor was billed as*.

Now, despite the mercenary intentions that animated the production, there’s little conflict in me declaring The Scorpion King the “best” of the four Mummy reboot films (ignoring the multitudes of Direct-to-Video releases WWE milked), but that is not a tall order. It already has the significant upgrade of moving from the dashing enough and overeager but still out of his league Brendan Fraser to The Rock, who hadn’t yet harnessed his full charisma as a screen persona but is remarkably confident at being a brawny barbarian given that it only requires fierce and mean looks while swinging and grappling no different than he did in the ring. He plays right along with the sword-and-sandals set he’s inhabiting, aided largely by the fact that this time he actually gets to be in the movie with his legs attached.

Yes, the Rock’s just the right sort of arch tan-muscled masculine tower in which to build a very boilerplate story of The Scorpion King’s original identity: Mathayus (The Rock, duh!), last of the Akkadians after witnessing his brothers’ betrayal and slaughter during their mission to assassinate the warlord Memnon (Steven Brand)’s sorcerer that’s been ensuring his conquest of Mesopotamia. This mission is only further complicated by the discovery that the mark is in fact an attractive sorcerESS given the obvious name of Cassandra (Kelly Hu) and, after 30 minutes of escaping and taking another go at killing her without being distracted by her beauty (made harder Mathayus by the fact that his second ambush happens to be while she’s naked), discovering her to be a hostage of Memnon and decides to escape with her into the hot desert sun without much of a plan except to stay as far out of Memnon’s grasp as possible and smolder at each other, despite Cassandra’s clairvoyance promising certain doom for Mathayus’ valiant actions.

The screenplay by Stephen Sommers (who directed the previous Mummy films), William Osborne, and David Hayter (HEY KIDS, SOLID SNAKE!) meanders with betrayal towards its desire to fit enough plot and qualify as a feature without wanting to give unnecessary depth to its characters (it is somewhat dedicated to reminding us of Memnon’s formidability, probably because Brand has to pretend to give the Rock a good fight), but – barring the fact that Mathayus could have learned everything he learned about Cassandra well before the things he had to go through – it gets to where it needs to be without wearing out its welcome. There is the irresistible observation that placing this is the 2800s BC and identifying Mathayus as an Akkadian implies the events of the film to lead into the Akkadian Empire, but his name is Mathayus instead of Sargon and there’s the ahistorical claim that he’s literally the last survivor of the race. And the setting of the film being in the Biblical city of Gomorrah, famously destroyed long before by God in the Book of Genesis. And the fact that the Mummy Returns presented The Scorpion King as a bloodthirsty ruthless tyrant and here he’s a charmingly scrappy rogue. But y’know, I’m feeling generous.

The Scorpion King also makes the significant upgrade of replacing the computer-effects-dependent glutton Sommers. Now, we have Chuck Russell who doesn’t have much in the way of control of tone (see also: The Mask and Dreamscape) but luckily The Scorpion King doesn’t demand much in the way of shifting tone. It’s essentially a middle-tier feature-length episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, swashbuckler all the way down with occasional indulgence in extra badass star vehicle (and one I’d say Russell qualified for based on the Jason and the Argonauts-esque skeleton battle at the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors). Sure, there’s a tiny bit of comic overtones but they’re mostly pulled in by the quicksand-like gravity of the wily horse thief sidekick Arpid (Oscar winner Grant Heslov and if you’ve seen The Scorpion King, you do not need me to tell you that the Oscar was not for Acting), pushing them to the side of a scene rather than making them interrupt any of the action. Even before The Rock was an ACTOR, you could hardly upstage the dude with a clown.

Russell’s main strength is competently putting together setpiece after setpiece until the movie runs out of time (see also: The Mask and Dreamscape) and The Scorpion King bats a decent enough average to breeze on its 92 minute runtime as Russell’s shortest film. Not that some of them aren’t ruthlessly cut to confusion, such as the middle sequence where Mathayus returns to Memnon’s stronghold and escapes with Cassandra (somewhat a big setpiece made out of smaller setpieces, including the most blatant Indiana Jones rip-off in a franchise that spent most of its time ripping those movies off). But the grand majority of them have a Raimi-esque theatricality to them based on how “oh this really metal thing happens where the swords are on fire” and “then this really metal thing happens where he tosses a guy in the way of a tomahawk”. It’s all in the service of making The Rock look cool and having a coherent or interesting style is merely incidental. If there is to be one major highlight, I would say it’s a battle during the escape in which Mathayus leads the guards into a cave during a sandstorm, using the limited shafts of light and a panning soundtrack to impose on the viewer the same sort of frightened confusion towards our hero’s guerilla tactics as the head guard while his men are effortlessly killed (there is one “Are you fucking kidding me?” moment where a guard gets swallowed by quicksand and then ANOTHER idiot guard steps into the same quicksand after seeing the guard die that way and no surprise at HIS fate).

So, is the movie successful at being quality entertainment? I don’t know. The seams are pretty much there. This movie looks its budget, with less characteristic production design than its predecessors and much dodgier CGI including a sequence where The Rock steps through a wall of fire and it separates as though it were a curtain. But Russell makes quick, tight work out of a script that doesn’t entirely know where it’s going and the Rock is one of several archetypes portrayed by a capable cast (including Bernard Hill as an absent-minded professor and the late Michael Clarke Duncan as the big burly rival turned ally). It all feels barely adequate to me and I’m hardly going to look back on it after tonight, but y’know the saying about one’s person’s discardings is another one’s treasures. That is how artifacts get made, even ones from the early 2000s.

*You will notice that some folks such as myself who grew up in that wonderful time in the 1990s have trouble shaking off calling him by The Rock, even though he’s moved on from that brand. I think I mark the line at being born in 1998 as my sister was and strictly refers to him as Dwayne Johnson without much recognizing him for his wrestling origins.

X-Farce

Deadpool 2 is directed by David Leitch and, without identifying him until the closing credits (beyond a pretty funny “Directed by One of the Dicks who killed the Dog in John Wick” at the tail of a an amusing Bond credits gag complete with overqualified self-serious theme song by Celine Dion), you could instantly tell that this was a product of one of the best action filmmakers of the 21st Century.

Almost immediately, we jump into a montage of complex and extravagant combat sequences involving our titular invulnerable red-jumpsuit-donning Merc with a Mouth’s (Ryan Reynolds) growing business as an assassin (apparently only for bad people like human traffickers and drug kingpins). Each in a very distinct color palette like the cold blue pool-surrounded spa and green reflective high-rise bars with frenetic energy that matches the character’s interminable speech, topped off by the very best setpiece in the whole film: a single shot following a man fleeing from the carnage in a beeline while we watch Deadpool wreak havoc and slaughter everybody in the background, jumping around, shooting and slicing indiscriminately, ignoring a man on fire, and stealing a chainsaw until the man escapes into a panic room.

Now, I am not joking when I say that’s the best sequence in Deadpool 2, which sounds unpromising considering it’s only the first five minutes of a two hour movie. And that’s why I am happy to say even then, Deadpool 2 is pretty entertaining and a significant upgrade from its mostly annoying predecessor. I mean sure, it still has the handicap of being a platform for Reynolds (credited as co-writer alongside the returning Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and I wonder how much of that is the Spinal Tap rule of “he ad-libbed so much he may as well be credited”) to deliver unimpressive pop-culture-based quips, make heavy efforts at vulgarity, or call unsubtle attention to the superhero clichés being mocked, thereby dampening the hell out of any true bite in the attempted superhero parodying.

It’s also a pretty dense movie considering the punchline is just “lol, don’t all superhero movies do this stuff?”. It kicks off with the attempt by Reynolds and company to explore Wade Wilson’s (Deadpool’s true identity) exploration of grief and emptiness (catalyzed by an already pretty infamous story decision) and this is constantly undercut by Reynolds’ dedication to playing class clown under the mask, which IS the point of the character but demands a balance Reynolds is barely capable of providing. It’s improved by the subject of Deadpool’s first “X-Men” mission provided by his persistent recruiter of steel Piotr “Colossus” Rasputin (Stefan Kapičić for voice and face capture with Andre Tricoteux standing in on set for the CG character), the young distrustful Russell “Firefist” Collins played with magnificent effect by Julian Dennison. Dennison’s approach to the character is not all that different from his already charming turn as the contentious delinquent Ricky Baker in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a character that had a good amount of pent-up trauma informing his behavior and decisions.

Dennison turns that familiar territory into a sense of nervy hurt from the second we watch him surrounded by cops threatening desperately to kill anyone who approaches him, later on revealing a confused lonely desire for a friend that leads to unleashing one of the film’s surprise antagonists. It’s pretty hard to feel like there’s a more convincingly human performance in the whole movie, even while he’s calling Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) “Justin Bieber” or joking about sneaking pens into the steely foreboding mutant prison The Icebox via his butt. It works because both his desire to appear hardened and his genuinely pain-fueled rage come from the exact same place.

So yes, Dennison is one of Deadpool 2‘s best secret weapons, but I haven’t even finished discussing yet another layer of this overglutted screenplay. For the unsmiling cyborg Cable (Josh Brolin) comes from the future with his own vendetta against Russell, intent on killing the boy before Russell can set aflame to the venal fundamentalist headmaster (Eddie Marsan) that abused him and thus be locked on the path that ends with Cable’s family being massacred*. So Looper except Deadpool and Cable are coming from wildly different tones. Deadpool’s depression and newfound deathwish leads him eventually towards an epiphany that he can save Russell’s soul and move him towards a better path, leading to him being right in the crosshairs of Cable’s artillery requiring the recruitment of a special team of fellow mutants named X-Force.

So there is a lot going on and Leitch moves through that material like one runs on a shallow lake: trying to rush as fast as one can, but having to push really hard to move one’s feet. That said, a good amount of the character work is pretty well-earned even despite the sloppiness with which they’re set up thanks to an intelligent cast: I’d daresay that Brolin might not be inventing the wheel here, but he’s a lot more interesting than his other big superhero tentpole of the summer. Brolin sells contrivances with sobriety just on the line between outrageous and self-aware so that Cable’s decisions later in the film feel like an evolution that mirrors Russell’s without killing the fun. Morena Baccarin takes a thankless treatment of her character (apparently also self-aware, though certain criticisms of her writing have caused the writers to shamelessly play stupid in interviews – SPOILERS for that link by the way) and turns it into the moral center to Deadpool’s arc, probably doing much more to make me feel for Deadpool’s sadness than Reynolds himself. So Leitch and company’s labored flopping in these plot tangents aren’t for naught: there is a sense of emotional satisfaction at the third act that I can’t recall feeling in a comic book film for a long time and I wasn’t expecting that for a screenplay mostly making me go “oh man, another joke or introduced character”.

I must admit to its credit these jokes got me laughing more often than the first Deadpool, whether a frankly mean-spirited punchline to the X-Force team’s motley of cameos (both of X-Men characters and screen personalities like the always welcome Terry Crews) or a physical gag involving cocaine or really any moment in which Zazie Beetz as Domino has to defend the existence of her superpower, which is being continuously lucky. I feel there’s more misses than hits because Reynolds’ motormouth is firing on all cylinders and T.J. Miller is present, but every once in a while even Reynolds scores a chuckle (Miller never does).

And once again, these are pretty exciting action setpieces on various levels. Leitch brings with him his dream team from 87Eleven Action Design: cinematographer Jonathan Sela and editor Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir (the latter working with Dirk Westervelt and Craig Alpert though I assume they worked more on comedy or dramatic moments), all three of which know how to work together to give power to every piece of the constructed action and find room for cool money shots. In one scene, we get to watch Deadpool start with nothing but a brick and every face smash crunches on that soundtrack because Cable refuses to give him a gun, ending with the duo casually blasting the faces off their enemies with shotguns simultaneously. This is intercut with a fistfight of two CGI characters that gets momentum just by Sela’s camera movements, as if he’s being yanked around by those giants. Or even a slow-motion rube goldberg machine indicating the truth behind Domino’s abilities as she effortlessly action jumps her way through explosions and wrecks onto a moving van.

It’s certainly the messiest and least Leitch’s so-far three movies, but when you’re following up on Atomic Blonde, you have more than enough room to still deliver an enjoyable and charming enough piece of summer popcorn movie levity. That Deadpool 2 is able to accomplish that coming from such obnoxious material only proves my consistent faith in Leitch and his crew, Dennison, and Beetz. They were the reasons I rushed to the theater on opening night and the result was still a pleasant surprise.

*We do get to see Russell’s evil future self and I am very sorry to say that he is not played by Taika Waititi, which would immediately make this the best movie ever made.

Rimshot

John Boyega deserves better movies than the ones he’s been getting ever since his brilliant breakout in the fantastic Attack the Block. I mean, he’s certainly not suffering one bit as one of the stars of the Star Wars franchise and it’s very easy to see what interests anybody with the movies he’s been working on, so it’s not like he needs a new agent. But, I think just once he deserves a movie that matches his charismatic talents where they don’t need to be carrying the whole thing*.

Pacific Rim: Uprising is absolutely one such movie where the only joy in watching it as how Boyega takes the role of Jake Pentecost (son of Idris Elba’s character in the predecessor film), a young hotshot pilot with everything to prove in the face of the now-rebooted Kaiju monster attack on humanity. This is a hell of an upgrade from the block of wood that was Charlie Hunnam, to be honest. Boyega’s presence is the only thing that gives life to the most commonplace character traits a lead actor can be saddled with these days (though I also think it’s a stronger character for him to work with than Star Wars‘ Finn) and sells every inch of the scenario of Uprising‘s screenplay by Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, director Steven S. DeKnight, and… oh god, The Maze Runner‘s runner T.S. Nowlin back to haunt my soul with over-labored storytelling and diminishing return. Which means Boyega’s had his work cut out for him with this movie.

Suffice it to say four different writers means at least four different tangents on which Uprising wants to latch itself onto and none of them with any elegance: the training of a brand-new team of heroes by Jake and Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood), the re-introduction of a familiar face from the previous Pacific Rim as the new antagonist, the introduction of automated Jaeger drones as a possible replacement to the contingency, and the imminent return of the Kaiju threat long after Jake’s father Stacker and adopted sister Mako (Rinko Kikuchi getting treated dirty by this movie) thought they sealed that deal in the first movie. Actually, these are really subplots – many of them are supposed to feel like a thoroughline with one leading to the other and so on. DeKnight being a veteran of television with this being his feature film debut, he handles this with all the clumsiness of a television trying to pile on as many arcs for its imminent first season, calling attention to the clunkiness with which these plotlines collide over each other and their incompatibility in some places.

And I’m honestly having trouble remembering any performance except Boyega, Eastwood, and the first movie’s alumni (Kikuchi, Charlie Day, and Burn Gorman), let alone thinking highly of them. Most of them are just muted underwhelming plays at the most common character types – Plucky young bloods with their own high schooler drama. Eastwood’s attempt at grizzled by-the-book disciplinarian (between this and The Fate of the Furious, I’m starting to feel like he just sucks the air out of any dramatic moment in popcorn cinema). Mako has no character to work with whatsoever and what the movie lands on her feels slightly contemptuous on the part of everything her character grew on. Day and Gorman are the only ones whose characters seem to have developed into a schism in their previous partnership in the wake of their dive in a psychic Kaiju brain.

This hardly matters, to be honest. Pacific Rim itself was not an examplar of great dramatic writing or character work, it was barely survivable in that area. Probably what sticks in my craw is more how much effort it appears that Uprising put into trying to develop its own new threat through complicated swims of Kaiju brainwaves and digging into the politics that it all turns into a slightly better (read: shorter) version of Independence Day: Resurgence.

No no no, what does matter in the end with Pacific Rim Uprising is what we’re here for: The visuals. Not particularly the production design which is much less revelatory this time around beyond a brief introduction of a man-made mini Jaeger and a chase through the remains of a demolished one (the cities especially are utterly disinteresting to look at after the cool glowing streets of Tokyo in the rain in Pacific Rim). I mean that sweet nectar of Mecha and Kaiju monster action. And thankfully, Uprising is not really short in that department, though the quantity of Jaeger and Kaiju setpieces does not factor against the lack of variety between them as they all just seem to be framed in a lazy manner not calling attention to the fact that these are HUGE GIANT ROBOTS dwarfing us, but more as though these robots were having a civil dialogue scene with sedate camera movement. Or the lack of poppy color and within them beyond one hella cool shot in red smoke as we witness a Kaiju’s evolution into something even more menacing, totally blanketed in crimsons**.

Or the ballsy but fatal mistake for them to set all the CGI battles in broad daylight, giving them a slight bit of flatness that makes it impossible to recognize these as more effects than physical beings of cold steel. Y’know, say what you will about Pacific Rim‘s decision to include shadows in its fight scenes but it gave these beings shape and visual power while Uprising resembles a rejected episode climax from an episode of Power Rangers. A more polished one and one that gets the job done in distracting me long enough to get through a very rushed button ending, but everything about Uprising in the end seems to feel like an obligatory attempt at continuing a franchise while leaving behind the beating heart that was at the center of the film that started it all.

*And I am definitely aware that this is an unpopular opinion, especially when it comes to The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, though I will concede they are the best of his post-Attack The Block movies with enough in favor of them.

**Although this shot may have won me for reminding me of another better monster movie, Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla remake.

Above the Rim

Guillermo Del Toro has long been in the business of making movies for Guillermo Del Toro, who must be deep down inside still the monster-loving child he was at age 13. I think I acknowledged this the last time I reviewed one of his movies, in which I had to admit that The Shape of Water may have pleased many many people but I was not one. However, it is more often the case than not that the tastes Guillermo Del Toro and my own align with a click and I am very very happy to have the opportunity to talk about a film that illustrates that.

It is also the case that audiences have been very much on the way to devaluing Pacific Rim as a film since so quickly after its release in the summer of 2013, which is hilarious given that it was one of the few highlights of such a dire summer. Not even necessarily out of slim pickings, but in a summer where the biggest popcorn tentpoles included such consciously unsmiling fare as The Wolverine and Man of Steel, one can hardly be blamed for finding joy in one of the few non-animated wide releases to just be about looking cool and having fun while killing giant monsters in giant robots. But even beyond that retrospective of a timeframe I don’t think deserves one, there is of course several popular criticisms of Pacific Rim that I can’t help spending my time here shaking quickly off:

First, there is the shallowness with which it homages all the properties Del Toro yolked the concept from: beginning especially with the seminal anime franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion and moving down the line to Mobile Suit Gundam, Godzilla and the other Toho monster movies, Ultraman, and even a future noir influence out of a favorite of yours truly Blade Runner*. And certain of those influences – especially NGE – imply a sort of emotional and thematic severity that most popcorn films, let alone Pacific Rim, are even remotely interested in attending to. Pacific Rim never made any promises of being a 1:1 remake of Neon Genesis Evangelion and hardly needs to be an in-depth exploration of its protagonists depression and emptiness in a cruel world barreling towards their destruction.

It just needs to be one thing: a vehicle for how we watch giant mechas called Jaegers, sanctioned by the united governments of a desperate world, fight and crush the sinister skin-cracked sea-emerging creatures called Kaiju that threaten humanity so. Which the screenplay by Del Toro and Travis Beacham knock right off the bat, establishing that the world is in this state, that the war between humanity and alien invaders is in media res here, and boom! In less time than it takes to make a turkey sandwich, the game is on. The combatants are goliath, the environments variable, everything else is pure theory.

The efficiency of the screenplay does not somehow mean that it is devoid of weaknesses, however. For the lack of depth with which we are introduced to characters we ride along with the Jaegers are of a cliché sort: Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam), a former hotshot pilot, is being pulled out of a retirement originally brought on by the death of his co-pilot brother (it is established that the Jaegers require two compatible minds to operate and what better signifier of compatibility than fraternity). The grizzled no-nonsense General Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) is the one who pulls Beckett out and, after an assessment, pairs him up with Pentecost’s adoptive daughter and long-time aspiring Jaeger pilot Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi). And then there’s so many other clichés surrounding them: namely the pair of wacky scientists played by Charlie Day and Burn Gorman or the eye in the sky brains of the operation played by Clifton Collins, Jr. (a famously Mexican actor, though the name Tendo Choi suggests the character is… Chinese?).

And of course, there is the surrounding friendly rival allies from different nations (minus the friendly in the case of Robert Kazinsky’s Chuck), portraying an international unity in our heroes efforts. It’s more than textual as each of the main Jaegers – Gipsy Danger, Cherno Alpha, Crimson Typhoon, and Striker Eureka – are distinguished within the design of Andrew Neskoromny & Carol Spier with worn-out colors that suggest national pride in the face of an apparently losing war (the Chinese Crimson Typhoon lives up to its name) and bodily structures that suggest the utilitarian focuses of their nations, such as how Cherno Alpha has a core that resembles a defensive plant. Or even just doing more for character than the script, given that Chuck is easily the most aggressive of all pilots and his Jaeger Striker Eureka comes with blades on its forearms (though there is “that’s so cool!” moment where we learn Striker is not the only Jaeger with that edge).

The Jaegers are not the only place in which the design is inspired. To begin with, the Kaijus themselves are alive and crackled, the CGI giving their body that living feeling of movement that can’t be said for a lot of animation even in this day (look at the “zombies” of Rogue One). And we have here a world that recognizes the sort of social and aesthetical impact that the existence of Kaiju would have across a society: a religious shrine is made out of the bones of a dead Kaiju, jobs invented out of creating walls in a new defense economy, fallout shelters, black market interests, and the interior design of a Jaeger feeling like a mechanical brain. This isn’t world-building: the world is already built just beyond the corners of our eyes, it’s world exploring.

And again, rain-soaked night time neon metropolis backdrops are my personal catnip. That some of these Kaiju vs. Jaeger battles occurred in dark oceans with shafts of light above illuminating fragments or dark rainy cities, as though this obscures the giant beasts of metal and bone, doesn’t ruin the effects anymore than it did in Jurassic Park 20 years prior. It works, the goliaths have a sense of physicality and scale that the camera is barely able to hold onto in full and promises more than meets the eye, making the battles have punch and impact, earth-shaking popcorn movie spectacle that we rarely see these days. It’s absolutely hard to lose the joy Guillermo Del Toro had putting these battles together, complete with great “Oh snap!” moments within them.

Still storytelling through design and action does not hide two-dimensional storytelling in plot. The characters are mostly flat as a board beyond Elba showing you can’t keep him down with first draft writing (the rest of the cast sadly do not fare as well with Hunnam weakest and that just brings more attention to the flaws of the script). And yet, when I hear Transformers used as a ridiculous comparison, I have to say it doesn’t indulge in the weaknesses of that franchise: there are no real “idiot plot” characters, no racial caricatures, no garbage humor, the very last beat of Pacific Rim rejects the concept that Raleigh and Mako are anything beyond very fond friends without losing any of the heart behind their friendship. The only real elements of the writing that gnaw under my skin are the leaps of logic and misunderstandings of science or physics (including the much mocked line “Gipsy’s analog. Nuclear.” as a response to all Jaegers being digital) that barely hold together the concept of a series of nations deciding the best response to monsters is to punch them out to a hell of a lot of city damage in big mecha suits and I just need to shut that thought in my mind up with one response:

“Listen, motherfucker, do you want to see robots fight monsters or not? Eat your damn popcorn.”

*I will confess that while I was sold already from premise and filmmaker long before the trailer hit and blew my socks off, the moment that cemented that I was watching it the night of was the end of the trailer with a raining neon Tokyo backdrop and Ron Perlman wearing future suave gangster threads being told by Charlie Day “It is pretty cool.” Yes, it was.

Momma, I’m Coming Home

cw: assumed miscarriage

So, it’s Mother’s Day and Cinema has a lot of mothers (which is funny because people usually can’t figure out who their father is inste– ahem) and I think it’s just about time that rather than honoring my own mother like I probably should, maybe I should tell these fictional mothers (with two real-life exceptions) that I see them and the hard work they do for their children and how their status as a mother informs their actions and decisions within their films more than a little bit. Anyway, I gotta finish this intro real quick because I promised my mom I’d buy her tickets for Life of the Party.

Behold:

10. Lynn Sear (Toni Collette) – The Sixth Sense

9. Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) – The Exorcist

They both essentially play the same fields, so I’m discussing both Lynn and Chris in this entry. Both are characters being foregrounded within the first half as very desperately trying to find every option on why their child is performing some alarmingly bizarre behaviors and both are sidelined by the time that the element of the supernatural is fully acknowledged by the main players in the film. And yet these are both pretty overqualified actors giving fatigued urgent performances as they run through the options and find themselves in dead-ends that they have to barrel through. Chris gets the edge with an extra layer of dire guilt we watch on her face in a scene of torturous medical tests that provide more horror than any of the spooky ghost scenes after, but Lynn just as well has a standout scene upon her son Cole helping her accept his gift while he relays a message from her own mother.

8. Maria von Trapp (Julie Andrews) – The Sound of Music

Who could possibly hate Maria? Even her romantic rival for Christopher Plummer’s Baron is eventually able to see what wonderful things she does for the von Trapp household and the kids themselves, able to function in all areas as a step-mother before the prospect of marriage is put on the table. She sees why the children feel alienated by their father and yet also why their father is such a demanding disciplinarian and by her presence connects the two together again. And also it’s Julie Andrews indulging in song and hating on Nazis. That’s it, game over.

7. Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) – Mildred Pierce

It’s practically criminal to include a list of the best movie mothers and not have Mildred Pierce on here. She pointedly throws herself on every possible cross she has to to make sure her monstrous elder daughter Veda is able to have everything she needs and more, while her success as a businesswoman is driven by her memory of the more loving Kay. And despite the disparity in reciprocation, we don’t see her play any favorites between the two. The only reason she’s so low is, given how the movie is mostly dominated with the Mildred-Veda pairing (Kay’s death occurring early in the film), Veda’s malicious elitism towards her own mother mark out their relationship as so draining and toxic to Mildred one knows the best course would have been to move on from her daughter’s grip. Pretty funny given that Crawford’s real-life relationship with her own daughter is notoriously the inverse.

6. Beatrix “The Bride” Kiddo (Uma Thurman) – Kill Bill Vol. 2

I’m honestly getting more and more suspicious of Quentin Tarantino’s behind-the-scenes treatment of women, but I’m still no less a fan of his work nor can I think of many other American filmmakers so generous to their female protagonists (save for James Cameron, who has not ONE but TWO entries here). We aren’t really aware of the survival of Bea’s child until the very last line of the first movie. But the second movie’s final act especially makes casual weaponization of a maternal grief and instinct that Thurman delivers cold as ice, slicing and dicing her way to some sort of personal peace up until she finds her daughter alive. Of course, the point of the final moments is that even with B.B. around, all the Shogun Assassin sit-down watches with B.B. in the world won’t satiate her until Bill is dead. And yet the final beats of the film are Beatrix looking forward to restarting as a mother and holding B.B. in her arms.

5. Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett) – Strange Days

Ah yes, one of the James Cameron mothers (I bet you were expecting someone else) although directed by his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow. I don’t know who is specifically responsible for Bassett’s exhausted performance in the film as she carries the most moral and grounded perspective of any other characters in this film, but Mace’s function as a mother is more in the peripherals of a movie that has bigger concepts to acknowledge. And yet we know that Mace’s dedication to her son as a divorcée whose ex-husband is possibly still in prison is why she’s carrying two jobs (possibly at the same time). Her marital and parental status gives everything else about the character – her distrust of police, her unwillingness to indulge in virtual reality, and her feelings for Lenny Nero – a soul in which for Bassett to build the performance out of. Not for nothing that the very scene where we see her meet Lenny and infatuated with her is one where she finds him comforting her son as her ex-husband is being arrested right outside their home.

4. Erin Brockovich (Julia Roberts) – Erin Brockovich

Hottest Take: Julia Roberts totally deserved her Oscar for this movie, even above the crowd favorite of Ellen Burstyn’s more doomed mother in Requiem for a Dream. It’s a performance that turns around the image of America’s Sweetheart at the time into a gritted (but still lovable) mother, whose constant losses toughened her up enough to get really dirty when demanding what she needs to provide for her kids and without losing sympathy for the many other mothers and fathers and kids she is fighting for in the central legal case she’s cleaning up. The early ability of hers to statistically breakdown her financial and family status to Aaron Eckhart’s love interest later returned into easily reciting numbers and details of her clients towards a condescending legal assistant and her later explanation to her son’s feeling of abandonment by elaborating on the situation of a mother and daughter dealing with illness affected by her case boosts her hella up this list.

3. Tina Quintero (Carmen Maura) – Law of Desire

Tina, like every other character in Almodovar’s Law of Desire and especially her brother Pablo, is a character of contradictions of a variety. She’s a transsexual woman who remains devoted to a Church that judges her, she’s a struggling actress who feels like she must exploit her struggles to remain in the spotlight, she’s a coke addict who has image issues involving her age. And that’s all without spoiling the rest of the craziness that happens in my favorite film by cinema’s greatest provocateur.

And yet she’s effortlessly functional as a mother to Ada, who is not even her blood daughter but of her cold ex-wife, constantly putting her first in any consideration and comfortably able to have any degree of discussion with her. The tight family unit between Tina, Pablo, and Ada is an unexpected source of warmth within the film’s sexual and violent story and there’s no doubt that despite all the fucked up things that go on in the movie, Tina has provided Ada with a very healthy household to grow up in.

2. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) – Aliens

Frankly, this is the character I think of when “movie mom” comes up. Nobody gets points for recognizing that Aliens is secretly a treatise about motherhood and dealing with grief by finding one another in the vein of Ripley and Newt, but the reason why Aliens is such an easy choice is because Weaver is just so good at giving that sort of surprise savage Momma Bear turn, making it all nervy but determined against beasts that have clearly traumatized her enough. The only fucking reason this character is not number one is because I’m a shitty prescriptivist of a person who recognizes that 1) Ripley is not Newt’s blood mother and 2) most of the deeper character and relationship shaping for both of them are in the Special Edition of the film released in 1990.

Coincidentally, Aliens and Kill Bill are both movies my mom really loves.

1. Mrs. Jumbo (Verna Felton) – Dumbo

And apropos of nothing, Dumbo is one of the first movies I’ve ever watched and so the image of Mrs. Jumbo protecting her son from the laughter and gawking of everybody simply because he happens to be much much more adorable than any of them runs hella deep in me. And her desire to keep her son warm and comfortable even in her saddened imprisonment for whupping the asses of folks who deserved those whuppings jerks tears so hard half my face comes off with them. I mean, who doesn’t go awwwwww at that?

L.O.L. – ¡Loser on Line! (Hate the Player, Hate the Game)

So I can’t figure out if it would be more ethical to lay out my problems with the concept of Ready Player One on the floor now or to keep them to myself and pretend I’m not entering the movie with any pre-existing biases and I just figure I may as well come clean so whoever wants a shining review (pun unintended) will be let down easy.

I have never read Ernest Cline’s original novel of which Zak Penn based his screenplay on, but from what I understand of it (and Cline) it sounds shallow and emblematic of everything I am unimpressed with regarding “nostalgia as token” storytelling, especially 1980s nostalgia. And to be quite honest, I feel like Penn’s screenplay and parts of director Steven Spielberg’s storytelling retains a lot of the things that make the concept abhorrent to me: the strict focus on male-centric fan culture elements, the shallow background tokenism of minorities as support to the conventionally attractive white characters being the only ones with depth afforded to them (and even then, not by much), the gatekeeping moments where the villain is coded so because he doesn’t have enough John Hughes knowledge (including the now much-mocked line of “a fanboy can always tell a hater”), the antithetical ignoring of certain properties’ core substance to use them as bald action figures bashing against each other (most notably, the famously anti-violence The Iron Giant – created by a character whose only traits that aren’t a spoiler are their love for violent shoot ’em ups and their gearhead intelligence and the character is used accordingly).

None of those things are film-damning to my mind, honestly. It just means I stepped into Ready Player One with little faith to begin with, enough to overshadow my usual faith in Spielberg delivering another great piece of zippy popcorn entertainment despite the premise being trying desperately to sell the kind of escape a person can have in pop culture and video games. Probably because the movie doesn’t know whether or not it wants to also be a doomed look into a society so dependent on escaping reality that it falls apart and that’s honestly the more compelling area of the film to me.

That video game that society is escaping into is called the OASIS, an open-world virtual reality environment where folks have invested so very much of their time and finances to the point of nationwide (at least) dystopia. This environment is represented with two major characteristics: first, motion-captured computer-animated scenes by Industrial Light and Magic that’s understandably “poor” in the way video game graphics would be but also filled with dazzling lighting effects for an imagination playbox as opposed to the last time Spielberg played with this toolbox in the fully animated The Adventures of Tintin. Second, OASIS is filled with a nauseating amount of pop culture references beyond the frequent name-dropping that would occur in character design, set design, vehicle design, and even soundtrack – mostly with wide-eyed shallow love for the 1980s. Which… ok, I guess.

It is completely believable that an unlimited sandbox world would be quickly overpopulated with pop cultures models rather than unique designs or a desire to exude personality, in case we forget we essentially have the OASIS in existence in real as VRChat and damned if you don’t come across a million anime characters and Ugandan Knuckles in those worlds. Somehow instead of the world being bitter about the ruined economical state against the creators of the game, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), they are idolized to the point that when Halliday abruptly announces his death in a pre-recorded stream, he also announces an easter egg hidden deep within the game – the prize of finding it being his entire estate including total control of the OASIS.

Obviously that would attract the attention of a huge amount of players, including ones commissioned by the shadowy commercial corporation Innovative Online Industries and their apparently unimaginative profit-driven CEO Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendehlson), who is somehow able to make his choice of AI as himself except Thanos-color and -body type, desiring to turn the OASIS into a giant marketing platform that would feel like a Who Framed Roger Rabbit reference of a plot point if it wasn’t obvious this movie would telegraphing the hell out of such an intentional decision. It also grabs the attention of a ragtag group of egg hunters, including blue elf avatar Parzival and his Ohio teen player Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan). Watts’ hunt leads into digging deeper into the tragic hermit life of Halliday for several clues to help him, gun-lugging orc Aech, Ninja Sho, Samurai Daito, and the mysterious and determined similarly elfen avatar except pink named Art3mis.

And for being the major draw of the movie, it just feels so… bored of its own spectacle. There’s no true investment in most of the decisions on what reference to drop in the film, no giddy excitement like we know Spielberg to shake out of us except within a certain giant battle in the climax of the film and a certain second act challenge that’s an homage to a certain famous filmmaker friend of Spielberg’s right up until they add dancing and floating zombies. Otherwise, it’s no slouch but it’s no more an impressive fully-animated video game landscape than TRON: Legacy, which had character and felt a lot more solid and sleek in a manner that’s much more interesting to watch. Meanwhile, Ready Player One feels like a kid playing with actions figures, but not in an excited joyous way. More like a kid who doesn’t want his little brother to touch them. All the more so by the reluctance Spielberg openly had for referencing his own work, something that’s certainly valiant and humble but wrong-headed when his work defined the era that Cline fetishized.

In any case, it’s still a Spielberg film and it takes a lot of work for one of those to not at least have an efficient sense of pacing (something especially impressive given the 140 minutes it has to move through) and it even manages to give that time some compelling content in the form of the live-action scenes. They’re superior to the animated Family Guy skit of a plotline in every way: Mendelsohn’s performance is so much more interesting when we’re actually watching him flopsweat about (it’s a lesser version of his work in Rogue One but better version of him than The Dark Knight Rises), the design of the dystopian Columbus, Ohio as a stack of trailers looking Babel-esque is able to work at establishing the dive in class for its inhabitants without feeling like miserablism, and most of all, we get to see more of Halliday. It’s a role which Rylance is wildly overqualified to play but something he approaches with lovable earnestness – he takes the social blocks Halliday appears to have and twists them into either vulnerable windows of his fears of social interaction or truly alienating and difficult resentment depending on what the scene asks. In Bridge of Spies, Rylance came across as the least Spielberg-ian entity, but here he is the most Spielberg-ian element of all: a Willy Wonka of sorts that was unprepared to deal with real life with a downfall the movie treats with honesty but not harshness. It is the closest thing Ready Player One comes to feeling like it has a soul and so if you hold tight to the glimpses of Halliday like I did, you might just find yourself at the end of the ride quicker than you expected.

They do have Battle Toads, though. So passing grade.

The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Room

I honestly don’t know who missed which memo on the set of Rampage.

Whether or not director Brad Peyton and stay Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson missed the memo that a movie about dangerous animals turning giant by the abominable actions of science and turning a major metropolis into an utter ruin is not really a premise one needs to sacrifice an immense amount of entertainment and fun for. And mind you, this is hardly the first time they made this mistake or the worst perpetration of this tonal mishap. The stone-faced sobriety with which their previous collaboration San Andreas portrayed the devastating earthquakes The Rock was escaping makes Rampage look like Singin’ in the Rain. And yet you can get away with that sort of demeanor on the very real threat of a natural disaster. A gang of giants – ape, wolf, and crocodile – crushing a metropolis is inherently ridiculous. While it does well to give your film some sense of in-film logical grounding – which I assume is the reason this movie chose to have them actual animals who are exposed to a chemical rather than humans transformed into the animals as in the video game series it’s based on – it does not mean every character who isn’t played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan has to go unsmiling while the shit is hitting the fan. Plus, San Andreas has much more consistent and weighty visual effects than Rampage‘s frequently poorly composed animals and that leads to the second hypothetical memo.

Or if whoever was in charge of the major special effect in the film – the growing albino gorilla George (Jason Liles in mo-cap) whom Johnson’s primatologist character Davis Okoye cares for and raises – realized that he was bringing about an Adam Sandler character into a movie very certain on turning that character into something to fear for about 2/3 of its runtime. While the right idea is clearly in the makers’ mind, to both have some sense of levity and lean towards giving us a character that will hurt us to watch turn into a mindless monster, their execution is practically diving into Seth MacFarlane territory. With his constant usage of frat boy jokes to frequently undermine Rampage‘s sincerity (an extended usage of the middle finger, a finger-into-fist sign of inquiry), George would look right at home as the inarticulate best friend to Ted, if only Ted as a character wasn’t so well animated that he would make George look worse than he already does in direct juxtaposition. Either way, George and The Rock are clearly not starring in the same movie.

These are not good looking giant animals y’all, living on an entirely different plane from the rest of their environments and often interacting with humans as though there is either a sheet of glass separating them or their aim is just awful when it comes to snatching them into their jaws. This is certainly covered up a whole lot better in the dusty rubble of Chicago or the sunlight cutting forestations which is probably why George’s gigantic co-stars Ralph the Wolf and Lizzie the Croc (Ralph is named, Lizzie is not – these are names I got from the games) fare significantly better in my memory than any apes in the film. Lizzie in particular is the standout, proving that the animators almost certainly saw another giant reptile film and so had a handy basis on how to make the crocodile feel dense and make the earth rumble with each step it takes. She also only really has to exist in the third act while we follow George and Ralph’s travels to Chicago instead.

Whether or not you read whatever the unholy fuck is the barely rendered… I don’t know, I think it’s a rat with movements that are unconvincing even in the context of zero-g space. How you read opening Rampage with that would be up to you: it could either be the movie just getting its worst CGI out of the way or it could be an early indication that it’s not a movie that could effectively commit to its one job of providing BIG CONVINCING monsters for its popcorn movie. I think it’s both on top of earlier elaborating what was going to be the only elements that knew what kind of dumb matinee fare was this movie’s best case scenario: an occasional indulgence in camera movement to give a little more surrounding character to the chaotic scenarios (an imploding space station in this case, a crashing cargo plane later on, and the climactic destruction of Chicago), a composer in Andrew Lockington that’s only interested in finding the most peril-rich clichés in movie music to indulge in, and a supporting cast mostly qualified to treat this as scientifically as Deep Blue Sea – in this particular scene, introducing to us in voice-only antagonist Energyne CEO Claire Wyden (Malin Åkerman), who even without seeing her face can easily have temperature guessed into the below zeros.

When we do see her face, Åkerman along with Jake Lacy as Wyden’s impotent brother Brett make a punchy duo of recognizable corporate evil as Lacy gives nervy cartoon energy to Brett’s stupidity without a trace of inner logic beyond “I don’t wanna go to prison!”. Åkerman meanwhile is like what somebody’s impression of a fun Louise Fletcher character would be and her straight-faced ability to still sell on every pointedly evil thing she says and does makes it feel like the character only uses financial terms as replacement for “EVIIIIIIILLLL” spitting out of her lips as they watch and approve of their research landing on Earth and their work leading to devastated trails of carnage*.

And of course, in the meantime, Jeffrey Dean Morgan struts in as a government agent with the most unconvincing Texan drawl a man could put on, refusing to stand up even slightly straight, and treating the mid-film expositional dump he puts upon Okoye and Naomie Harris’ fired Energyne Dr. Kate Caldwell like the best chance to chew up all the possible scenery he can consume, making him a fellow valiant presence attempting to right up the ship sunk by Peyton’s sobriety to the material. Unfortunately, Morgan is not in charge of the movie nor his evildoer co-stars. Peyton and The Rock’s earnestness to the material is well-meaning but a downfall to a movie that shouldn’t need to be earnest to be entertaining and would probably do better with the low-quality of the animals, its main draw, to have the borderline silliness of a Roger Corman flick than its unironic insistence that yes… Rampage expects you to take these badly animated inserts as seriously as the Rock does.

*Also they have an arcade rack of the original game Rampage in their very professional high-rise office sticking out, implying that the game exists in this film and they were inspired by it for their Project Rampage. Which means they have wildly good aim and/or odds when they landed on the three animals of the game AND that ape would be named George AND that internet conspiracy theorists would name the wolf Ralph.