The Super Mario Bros. Movie

 (Notice the THE at the front; this is THE Mario Bros movie. There's clearly never been another.)

 This one is clearly not for me. I'm not a Nintendo Fan, and I'm not ten, and those are the only surfaces that I could conceivably hold on to in a product that has had any possible edges so sanded down that all that's left is a very shiny, featureless series of surfaces. Other than Nintendo's very evocative and cute character/monster designs from the games, I found it more than a little soulless.

Best thing in the movie by a country mile, and one of the very few jokes that works.

 Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are a pair of Brooklyn Plumbers who get transported into a magical world when they enter a green pipe. This world is in the process of getting conquered by a big turtle dragon thing (Jack Black), and there's a plucky princess (Anya Taylor-Joy) who's trying to protect her kingdom of ineffective fungus people by entering into an alliance with the driving-enthusiast ape people of a few kingdoms over.

 It's a generic, arbitrary nothingburger of a plot; The Donkey Kong army, for example, a major plot point throughout the second act, is casually cast aside, rendered meaningless. The shoddy scripting is all the more infuriating because formula insists it needs to have 'relatable human emotions (tm)'. So you have to sit through the most generic possible kiddie-movie-subplot about Mario proving himself and some other piss-poor twaddle that's boring for the kids, and boring *and* insultingly dumb for older kids. Who could possibly give even the most negligible of fucks about that sort of thing? At least the script allows for a lot of action at a manic clip, which is the film's sole justification aside from being a reference-dispensing machine for game console fans.

 In that respect, it's... fine. More than fine in the Nintendo-referencing department: it throws all manner of franchise properties, easter eggs and blink-and-you'll-miss-'em cameos pulled from Nintendo's five decades of video game history. But I'm immune to that- I like some of the games, but I grew up playing Gianna Sisters, not this film's source material. I didn't have any Ninty console until SNES emulation came along.
 So I'm left with the adventure side of things to appreciate, and it's a little underwhelming; every now and then there's a fun action beat, or a nice-looking shot (I'm partial to the bit where the ocean is lit from below from the shards of a broken rainbow.) But taken as a whole it's loud, garish, and it doesn't have a single thing of interest to say, no real artistic reason to exist for non-Nintendo-heads.
 Oh well, at least it moves quickly enough that it doesn't quite get to be boring.

 The directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, are behind Teen Titans Go! - a series (and a couple movies) that can be very funny, inventive, and most of all, subversive; So it's a shame to see them so completely neutered here, unable to throw a single Dennis Hopper reference or anything that could be viewed as anything other than a complete orgasmic bliss at the prospect to be playing in Nintendo's toybox. Their energy sometimes shows through, but none of their humour or wit.
 I don't think this being an Illumination joint - purveyors of some of the safest, least interesting big animated movies out there - helped at all. Nor does it help to have the mandate to be a good babysitter movie for very, very young kids (notice the presence of so many 'cheerleader' characters, telling kids how fun and exciting what they're seeing is at several points in the movie.)

  It's an impressively expensive- and occasionally nice-looking movie; This is not to say it's interesting aesthetically, but it is elaborate and well made. The soundtrack is not really memorable, with frequent very obvious needle drops taken from an over-used roster of songs even seven-year-olds will be familiar with, along with tons of variations from the games' tunes.  

 I didn't hate the film - things keep switching up often enough to maintain some interest, and the production values are so huge that it'd be impossible for it not to luck into an interesting-looking bit on occasion. But slotted into what's been a pretty amazing couple of decades for kid's entertainment? It rings really, really hollow.

Spoilers! How about that ending? Bowser's castle squashes half of Brooklyn without a warning. I asked my son to estimate how many people were killed in their sleep in that scene, and his answer was "twenty k?".
 I wonder if all the people who complain about the third act in Superman Returns were outraged by it. I suspect their answer would be the same one for when you criticize this movie's vacuity: "It's a kid's movie, innit?"

 I leave you with the words of Mario Creator Shigeru Miyamoto, as quoted in wikipedia while explaining why this movie came to be:

 "our content business would be able to develop even further if we were able to combine our long-beloved software with that of video assets, and utilize them together for extended periods"

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

  The drama couldn't be higher for the Guardians in their third solo outing. Writer/director James Gunn is defecting to go run things over at DC, ending a run that includes some of the last memorable Marvel characters - this is in the middle of a disappointing couple of 'phases' for Marvel's corporate strategy.
 Market indicators signal that this immanentize the end, or at least a diminishing of Disney's pop culture dominance, with falling revenues over...

 Ugh.

 I originally planned on writing three or four paragraphs in this vein, and end the post with a sentence saying something along the lines of "oh, and by the way, the movie itself is pretty good!"
 But as much as the MCU is culpable for helping shift discussion from art to the corporate strategies behind it on the mainstream, I don't have it in my heart to take it out on the poor Guardians; they don't deserve it.
 They've been as much victims of all this corporate shit as perpetuators. Whether you like it or not, Gunn has always tried to put as much of himself as possible in these things, and the love for the characters and their world shines through. The guy is earnest; and he did try and make this last one special. It's not perfect- it's a bit messy, overlong, sometimes manipulative, the script spirals out of control in the third act, but... it's honest, it's fun, full of great character moments and story beats, and the music is great.

 I mean, it ends on a Replacements track!

 Pretty much in line with the previous two volumes, then. This one delves into the backstory of Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper), the team's furriest, smartass-iest member (and that's saying something, when most of the dialog consists of characters trying to out-smartass each other at every turn).

 The plot kicks off when the movie's villain, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) sends Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) to retrieve Rocket. Rocket is left gravely wounded, and the rest of the team have to jump through a bunch of hoops and visit a couple of exotic locales to save him. This time around we get a space station built out of bone, flesh and sinew, and a U.S. suburban neighbourhood peopled by creepy-ass furries.
 Meanwhile, Rocket has extended flashbacks of his time as a subject of animal experimentation.

 Story isn't this movie's strength, even with as powerful a driving force as Rocket's backstory - both previous movies have been shaggy dog stories held together by strong themes and character work, and this isn't really an exception. But when the big climactic action scene in the third act is the team just getting from one end of a hallway to another, even when said hallway is filled with low-level enemies... something's gone wrong.
 It's not even the MCUs traditional problem with weak villains; It's that the villain isn't in control of the third act, and most of the characters' actions don't really have anything to do with him. A case of poor scripting, basically, diminished by the fact that the script is clearly unconcerned by such concerns as final confrontations - it's much more interested in the characters' journeys.

 Mild issues aside Volume 3 is, as usual, a very colourful, very fun space opera, full of memorable characters, jokes and explosions, anchored by likeable, flawed characters the cast could play in their sleep by now, and that have enough depth built into to them that pathos can reliably be extracted from any of their different relationships. Hell, they even get Chris Pratt to act. I know, I was mildly surprised, too.

 Gunn also continues to try and come up with cool imagery (along with cinematographer Henry Braham), something they really started doing on Volume 2 of this series, and is carried out here with considerable panache. This is a very colorful, often striking movie; Add to that the hallway-crossing scene mentioned above, which is a successful attempt at doing the sort of cool, exciting, cleanly choreographed action that mostly eludes Disney's output.
 It's surprisingly violent for its PG13 rating, most of it enjoyably goopy alien slashing/blasting, but some of it consists in violence against animals. While that's pretty manipulative, it's also undeniably effective.

 If this all sounds like damning the movie with faint praise and too many qualifiers, know that it's not my intention. The trilogy capper is genuinely likeable and heartfelt and thrilling and very well made. It's a James Gunn movie through and through, full of the specific brand of weirdo sensibility that just has to give Howard the Duck an extended cameo, can go maudlin at the drop of a hat, or that ends on a run of pitch-perfect music jokes ending on a mention of Adrian Belew.
 Like all the other worthwhile Marvel movies, this is purely a Guardians of the Galaxy movie -  there's the unfortunate business with Gamora, which is incorporated into the flow of things gracefully enough even though it feels like a spanner int he works; But other than that, there's no extraneous MCU shit.

 It really is great.

Jurassic World: Dominion

  The second Jurassic World movie was an unexpected amount of (extremely dumb) fun, and it made me kind of wonder if the third one in this new trilogy might be any good, especially since there were some good bits in the trailers for it.

 No, it is not good. It is bad. It is fucking bad. It is the worst thing I've seen since Glass, and honestly I'm pretty confident in saying this is way worse than that. It is a cynical, hacky piece of shit where you can feel the contempt the writers have for the audience in every beat of it's cockamamie plot and in every worthless utterance of its shit characters.

 Either the strains of directing and writing were too much for Colin Trevorrow to apply the modicum of fun he applied to Fallen Kingdom's script, or maybe I forgave it too much because that was directed by J. A. Bayona, who is that much better at infusing the inane story with an energy and beauty undeserved by the material... I don't know, and at this point I don't care. This is pure shit, and some cool dinosaur bits can only mitigate that to a small degree.

This guy (or gal). This is one of the folks that slightly mitigate the overwhelming turdosity.

 So yeah, I guess it's safe to say I didn't like it! And I really don't feel like giving a movie I've wasted two and a half hours of my life to more time, so this will be even more hastily written than usual because this deserves much, much less than that.

 Here, let me illustrate just how bad this is. The two non-entities played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (imagine two decent genre actors getting to inhabit two characters as the protagonists for three whole movies - eight or so hour's worth of material! - and not making the least impression other than an annoyed 'ugh, these guys again?' whenever they appear...) Anyhow, they've recently arrived at Malta looking for their daughter. Malta has, Wikipedia informs me, just over half a million inhabitants, and they home in on an illegal underground dinosaur market because that's a thing now, which, ok, honestly that's pretty cool.
 So Pratt and Howard are looking for their daughter, who for blah blah shit plot reasons was abducted by a big company. Bryce Dallas Howard literally goes up to a random stranger - with absolutely no reason to chose her over the other hundred or so people in the market - and it turns out... it's a smuggler with a heart of gold that happened to see her daughter mid-abduction and feels guilty about it. One of the maybe dozen people who know anything about her on the whole island.

 You hear that? That, my friend, is the sound of the writers not giving a fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

 And that's what we're dealing with here. Shitty basic contrivances like this are basically what drive the plot forward. The action is deeply mediocre, there are no stakes because this movie is terrified of killing even tertiary sympathetic characters (guess Trevorrow misinterpreted why people disliked the childminder's death on part one). So the dinosaurs are as a result not scary, because they can't kill anyone unless they're evil.

 Yes, they bring back the characters from the one movie in the franchise everyone likes, except well, now they have to work with Trevorrow's lines and the b-plot of a movie that doesn't have much of a main plot in the first place. Goldblum is just let loose and allowed to be Goldblum, which in another movie would be lazy and distracting, but here at least his (what I'm guessing are) ad libs are kind of better (not by much) than any of the material anyone else gets. Poor Sam Neill is absolutely terrible, overemoting and mugging like an idiot, and given the general downturn in everyone else's acting quality, I'm sure as hell not blaming him.

 There are some bright spots. The movie is bookended by some neat vignettes of dinosaurs not-so-gracefully integrating with our modern ecosystems, and that's by far the best part of the movie, all ten minutes of it. There's a really good scene where Dallas-Howard is slow-chased by a hairy, fingernaily dinosaur that was really well done. The Malta bit, which I was looking forward to was a major disappointment, an extended action scene that tries to crib Mission Impossible and has some cool concepts but fails because, well, to be kind, it's not directed by someone half as capable as Christopher McQuarrie, and the way it develops is as stupid as the rest of this turgid mess.
 Oh, I did like when the shaggy/fingernaily dinosaur teams up with a T-Rex at the end to take out a bigger dinosaur [umm... spoilers?] That's the type of stupid, stupid shit I can get behind. And also, because the budget for this is around a cubic shit-ton of dollars, there's a bunch of really nice shots, both CGI and some good photography.

 But seriously? Just avoid this shit. Avoid it like the fucking plague. I believe in redemption, but I'm sure as hell not giving this motherfucker Colin Trevorrow another chance to waste my money and time unless the waters have been well and truly tested by viewers braver than me.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

 Had you told me as a teen that I would skip watching a big budget Jurassic Park sequel that prominently featured dozens more species of dinosaurs than in the original and had a huge setpiece around a giant volcanic eruption, I'd have thought you were nuts.

 Yet the first Jurassic World movie came out and was such an appalling mixture of pure idiocy, bad characters and a complete fucking lack of cinematic moments, that I not only completely avoided its sequel in the theaters, I've sat on it for four years.

 And you know what, it's a shit movie, but taken in the right spirit it's a fun shit movie, more than capably directed by J.A. Bayona. Its not good, but it does manage to be beautiful and well paced and its individual, technical components are made with skill and care.

As well-made as the action is, it's just as poorly written and dumb as the rest of the movie.
 This little guy, for example, somehow tosses a dino twice as big as him through a high window.

 Unfortunately, Jurassic World mastermind Colin Trevorrow provided the script, and it's a wall-to-wall turdfest. Proceeds start out well enough with a short prelude where a group of shady contractor types  return to the ruins of the partially submerged Jurassic World park to retrieve DNA from the first film's genetically altered dinosaur baddie find out that -gasp- maybe dinosaurs are dangerous.

 This establishes a few important things about the movie, mainly: a) It looks beautiful and has a lot of fun setting up its dinosaur attacks, and b) this is going to be a very, very dumb movie. Also c) these contractor types are really bad at their jobs. How-the-fuck-haven't-they-shot-themselves-as-soon-as-they-were-handed-guns terrible.

 After this introduction we jump to the mainland, a few years past the Jurassic World massacre. It looks like a volcanic eruption is going to wipe isla Nublar and its captive dinosaur population; There's some fun speculation about the world's reaction to that, which ends up being a shrug.

 Bryce Dallas Howard, a dinosaur businesslady in the first film, now turned dinosaur activist (her character's name is Claire, had to look it up despite just watching the movie) is forced to watch in horror as the situation unfolds. Luckily a millionaire long-time associate of John Hammond's intervenes and offers to fund an operation to rescue them. The old man is played by the redoubtable James Cromwell, so you know he's on the level. His right-hand man, though, is played by Rafe Spall, so you know that betrayal is incoming. The whole setup is tired and obvious.

 Claire then gathers a team to go to Isla Nublar: two new completely forgettable characters I won't spend any more keystrokes on, and estranged love interest Chris Pratt the dinosaur whisperer. That character is a large part of why I put off this movie for so long.
 I like Pratt as a comedian - and he does get to show off his comic chops here, particularly in a very funny scene where he needs to get away from some lava while heavily sedated - but holy shit he makes for a terrible straight leading action hero in these movies. And the script just piles on the douche on his dialog; It's not just that I find him utterly unconvincing as a rugged outdoorsman badass, I fucking loathe this character.
 Anyhow! Once on the island they meet up with a small private army of obvious villains, and at least the film wastes very little time before they betray our heroes and leave them to die in the volcanic eruption.
 Meanwhile, the contractors abscond with a bunch of dinosaurs to... sell for profit at an auction. Yes, seriously. That is the villain's plot. I know they're establishing parallels to the original Jurassic Park sequel, but this is dumber in any way that counts.

 Inane plot aside, this island sequence is actually the high point of the movie - the protagonists need to flee the island, escaping the volcano and a horde of scared dinosaurs. I mean, stupid stuff keeps happening, but it's beautifully shot and expertly handled. It's exciting! Bayona, a good director who has made good movies, classes up the joint even while serving up nakedly, cynically manipulative moments such as when sad brontosaur is left behind to die in the island and wails piteously at the leaving boat.

 The quick pace continues as the dinosaurs are taken to the mainland - to a Resident-Evil-style secret facility built under the mansion belonging to the millionaire that funded the expedition. Sigh. Of course life finds a way during the auction, and people find out the hard way that attending an event with a bunch of live dinosaurs might be a bad idea. Special mention to just how fucking bad security is here; I mean, it's been terrible during the whole movie, but these guys really put some extra effort to earning their Darwin awards. A... lot of really fucking stupid stuff goes down, the good guys escape, the bad guys get their comeuppance. Yadda yadda.

 At one point a raptor jumps and runs away from an explosion like an action hero. This is where the dumb script and the talent behind the cameras line up and make the movie shine like... like a really, really dumb diamond.

 Of course another genetic hybrid dinosaur is introduced as the main menace, the equivalent to the first Jurassic World's souped up T-Rex.
 This carries forward Jurassic World's brilliant insight that dinosaurs are not enough to get viewers interested, what people are after are genetically mutated dinosaurs. FUCK THAT SHIT. I mean, if you're trying to make them sexier, at least have the balls to give them bikini armor, jetpacks and monofilament whips; why the hell introduce these uber dinosaurs if in the end they a) look less cool than regular dinosaurs, and b) fail to do anything regular dinosaurs don't do already? (And of course they're going to get their ass handed by regular dinos in the end, anyhow.)
 It's wrong-headed, self defeating and honestly, emblematic of how rotten these movies are at their core.

 I'm really surprised to say this, but despite everything this is a worthwhile movie. I would not have had a bad time at the theatre. It's a decent mixture of pure idiocy, bad characters and a lot of awesome cinematic moments.
 I'm happy Bayona got to play with such a big budget, and acquitted himself so well. But as always with this sort of thing I'd rather see him return to smaller, more personal stuff. Fun as this is, it's nowhere near as good as The Orphanage or Monster Calls.