Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

 Count me as a fan of the first Aquaman movie, a ridiculous, exuberant, colorful movie that came closer to replicating the feel of 80's world-hopping adventure movies than things which mined that specific vein of nostalgia way more cynically (did Stranger things have a toboggan scene? Suck on that, Stranger Things).

 So now comes the inevitable sequel, under a cloud of both studio and behind-the-scenes drama, and at a time where the pendulum seems to finally be swinging away from the superhero reign over blockbusters. And... it's fine. It's OK. A decent time-waster.

 Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and his wife wife (Amber Heard) have settled into a sort of double life - on land they take care of their baby, while in the sea they rule over the kingdom of Atlantis. And in between he gets into random fights against pirates and polluters and whatnot.
 The movie starts with a fight on a cargo ship that highlights the film's main problem - the action this time around is really, really sloppy. At least the scene has a fun twist , as it turns out that Aquaman is recounting the fight to his baby son and the action alternates between the actual fight and Jason Momoa smashing action figures together. Cute.
 Not so cute: all the jokes about the baby peeing on his face. Come on, folks, you can do better than that hacky standup act crap.

 Meanwhile, Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is hunting down Atlantis tech so he can fix his suit and kill Aquaman/avenge his dad. Instead, he finds the black trident, a relic from a lost Atlantean kingdom. One that's all corrupt and evil and seems like it came out from a really mediocre D&D campaign; It's even called Necris, for fuck's sake. Anyhow, The old Necris king (a really goofy-looking lich-like thing) possesses Manta and gets him to start burning some ancient fuel to fuck up the environment.

 After some incidents Aquaman figures out Manta's up to no good again. To hunt him down, he decides he needs to team up with his brother (Patrick Wilson) - last seen trying to destroy the surface world, now imprisoned in a dusty jail by a bunch of undead critters who ride bony centipedes. Seriously, the D&D vibes in this movie are very noticeable.

Monstrous Compendium 3: Featuring Goofy Lich and its undead posse

 The meat of the movie is then a sort of a buddy movie as the odd couple hunt down leads and finally confronts Manta and the evil possessing him.

 It won't blow anyone away, but it's warm, likeable, pacey, has some cool bits, and doesn't take itself half seriously at any point. It also has a major asset in Jason Momoa, whose presence and charm, along with his character's folksy, irrepressible good nature, shouldn't be understated.

 But... But... Director James Wan can't prevent it from being kind of bland, especially when so many of its scenes compare unfavorably to the first movie. A lot of it can be blamed on a pretty lifeless script (by returning writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick), but the lion's share should go to a pretty huge downgrade on the spectacle department.
 The fights and most of the action, as mentioned above, are not particularly memorable; Hard to read and (mostly - there are some cool moves) poorly staged and choreographed. Jon Valera (a veteran stunt coordinator from 87Eleven veteran who worked on the fights on the first movie) is still on board, so not sure what's happened, but the difference in quality, especially in the larger brawls, is extremely noticeable.

 I'm not going to remark on plot holes or the dumbness of the script, because this is a movie where a seahorse actually makes whinnying horse sounds. Which is, of course, awesome.
 What concerns me more is that while the movie does land a few of its jokes, so many of them are so basic they barely register as attempts at humor; Martin Short turns up to deliver a terrific, Hammill-esque voice performance as a bargain bin Jabba the Hutt, for example, and he's given lame jokes that would make even Lucas cringe. 

 There's lots of dodgy CGI, but it's one of those movies where that isn't that big an issue as the visuals get so fantastic it might as well be wholly animated. What's important is the spectacle, and... well, it does a little better in that department than on the action, with some cool concepts like a city built out of sunken ships, a secret volcano lair, or the titular lost kingdom- but not that much. It gets the job done, barely.

 I suspect the film's getting dunked on by both people who hate/have gotten sick of superhero movies and by superhero movie fans who needed it to be that much better. It's a shame, and more than a little unfair, but to be honest the movie's not actually good or interesting enough to champion.

Insidious

  Twenty-eight years later... we finally got to see the ghost-world. Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist is a near goddamn masterpiece, but it has a fatal flaw (at least to pre-teen me, and I stand by this assessment): when Steve gets sent to the land of the dead to rescue Carol Anne, we never get to see anything.

 A late-movie twist in Insidious corrects that [retroactive spoilers!]. That it was done on a tiny budget ($1.5 million!) just makes me love it all the more.

 It starts out as a deceptively conventional haunted house movie. Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) Lambert have just moved house along with their brood - pre-teens Dalton (Ty Simpkins) and Foster (Andrew Astor), plus a baby girl. They have barely settled into the house when Dalton... just doesn't wake up; he's gone into a coma state that no doctor can explain.

 Months pass without his condition changing, and in the meanwhile, ghostly activity has gone haywire. The house had strange little quirks - stuff would get misplaced, thrown out of the shelves, supernatural pranks like that. But now random spooks are appearing all over the place, triggering the alarms at night... it gets to the point where the family has to pack up and move to another huge house.
 How they can afford that, with only one working adult (a secondary school teacher, at that!) is probably the most unrealistic event portrayed in the movie.

 Anyhow. The haunting resumes almost immediately at the Lamberts' new home, leading them to contact a team of parapsychologists led by a psychic (Lin Shaye) to try and figure out what's going on. And... that they do: the third act of this movie kind of goes off the rails, in a good way. The explanation is kind of goofy but internally consistent, original and fun. More importantly, the stage is set for some really imaginative low-budget madness of the underworld-spelunking kind.

 It's not (unlike Poltergeist) perfect. The low budget means that ghosts are basically presented as regular people in spooky makeup, which does drain their mystique a little, and there's even a sloppy brawl with one of them. The main bad guy kept reminding me of the villain from Episode One (Darth Insidious?)
 But the atmosphere is expertly judged and the filmmaking is so precise and energetic (DPs: David Brewer and John Leonetti) that these are minor complaints; the film is as well-crafted during its slow burn as it is when at full manic mode, building a land of the dead out of a collection of dimly lit rooms.
 There's excellent use of negative space throughout, a lot of neat tension-building devices, some pretty effective, well-paced jump scares and more than a few cool camera angles. A particularly showy one shows a scene through the whirring blades of a ceiling fan- no wonder director James Wan would later homage Russell Mulcahy in Malignant.

 Both Wan and writer Leigh Whannell made their name with Saw, a movie I still think fucking sucks; They have since redeemed themselves several times over, together and separately. The Conjuring might be their most popular film, but this one remains the scariest thanks to an edge that movie lacks (despite this being PG13, and The Conjuring having an R-rating). It's a silly, sometimes ridiculous horror movie, sure- but it packs a punch nonetheless.