Superman

 I can't say I'm very surprised, but damn if I wasn't open to the possibility of this being good: Writer/Director James Gunn is, after all, responsible for some of the best superhero media of the last decade. The pressures of heading up the DCU, developing multiple IPs, and stretching out far, far beyond his comfort zone with that dadliest of wholesome superheroes have broken him, though, resulting in what's by far his worst movie up to now. Which, OK, isn't that bad from a guy who's only made good to great stuff, but the opening of a 'new phase' (and that should be a phrase that should fill any right-thinking person with dread) for the DC universe looks remarkably like the lower end of mid-tier Marvel (or any of their latter offerings).

 It is, simply put, a mess, a movie that overcomplicates things massively with politics and multiple threats, and then circles back and tries to cut everything into little chunks so that the youngest kids in the audience will, maybe, be able to follow the action. They should have chosen a tack and stuck to it, but instead we're left with muddled Saturday morning realpolitik. It is motherfucking dumb and worst of all, kind of boring even before it gets offensively manipulative. Dammit James, we shouldn't make it so easy for the assholes on the right to make fun of us!

 The action is forgettable, the only scene with any visual interest is played in the background as a (pretty good) joke, the CGI is omnipresent (completely ruining superpooch, who should be a bright spot in the film) and the guy they got to play Superman is a bore. As mediocre as Snyder's Superman was, at least it had some interesting action ideas, and Cavill was legitimally enjoyable in the role. This is probably better on the whole, but that's a really low bar to clear.
 Oh well, at least there's another Peacemaker season to look forward to.

Deadpool & Wolverine

 Remember a few years back, when at the climax of the godawful Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds got a hold of a big box of Disney(c) merchandise and used it to beat the bad guys? Hulk Hands, Cap's shield, and -the movie paused for effect - OMG, a freakin' lightsaber! Squeal, nerds, squeal!

 This cynical act of corporate fellatio did not go unnoticed. Only instead of leaving some money on the bedstand, the Disney powers that be instead awarded its director - consummate hack Shawn Levy* - the keys to the closest thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe's got left that's close to a sure thing: a crossover project between the Deadpool and The Wolverine franchises.

 It gets off to an extremely poor start. First we have to endure Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) commenting on just how awesome the Marvel intro music is, which unfortunately sets the tone for much of the movie, and then an introductory fight/credits sequence in which our protagonist digs up the Wolverine's skeleton from the grave he ended up in Logan, and ends up using the corpse's adamantium bones to kill dozens of faceless henchmen. It's a fun idea on paper, but it's spoiled with a joyless, very computer-assisted execution and extremely tacky, unfunny, endless cutaways to Deadpool dancing - foreshadowing his inevitable appearance as a skin in Fortnite.

 And then of course the film pulls a 'how did I get here' move (the script is nothing if not forthright about its own shoddiness) to pull back a little. Deadpool, it turns out, has been in the dumps after failing an audition to join the avengers (whose off-screen presence is lionized by the cinematography and soundtrack). He's left his superhero/merc days behind and is working as a used car salesman, his long suffering wife abandoned him (they didn't fridge her, at least, but this movie still finds a way to do without poor Morena Baccarin), and... well, basically, he's in your basic slump hacky scripts use to provide a bog-standard "rise to the occasion" heroic arc.

 The occasion here is that the TVA, an organization from one of those Disney plus shows I refuse to watch on principle**, tries to get him to mercy-kill his own timeline which is slowly dying off because Logan died when... he wasn't supposed to, I guess? (Don't even start poking holes on that because it's basically all holes.) They try to bribe him with the opportunity to join the avengers on a non-doomed timeline, but oh shock, surprise, Deadpool does indeed rise to the ocassion/hero's call, tells them to get bent, and goes across the multiverse to find a replacement Wolverine (various actors, but mostly Hugh Jackman).

 He does end up finding one that doesn't kill him outright, the worst Wolverine, apparently, one that committed a crime so heinous he's infamous across the universe (get ready to be disappointed when you finally learn why). Then our mismatched buddies are kicked out of reality by the TVA and dumped into a wasteland ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corin). There they meet some other castoffs from Marvel history and hatch a plan to get back to reality to stop Deadpool's timeline from being erased... and I should probably stop here before I spoil any of the bright spots in this otherwise fairly mediocre movie.

 Do you love Ryan Reynolds? Are you heavily invested in the Marvel comics and movies? If you do/are, chances are you'll like this. It's basically Ryan Reynolds doing his motormouth, sometimes low-key funny, sometimes annoying schtick, for about two hours, peppered with a ton -and I really mean a ton- of reverential fan-service, with a tiny side of (very gentle) making fun of Marvel and Disney. And while there's some obvious affection for the material and some odd turns in the script, it's patently, overtly cynical. A film created by market forces rather than any sort of authorial voice. Saying that it's 'Spiderman: No Way Home' but without a heart or a decent story might be taking things too far, but.. it kind of fits. The previous two Deadpool movies managed to carve out their own identity, but this feels first and foremost a mid-tier MCU movie - albeit one with a 15/R rating.

 Five people are credited with writing this. Five! That's about how many times I laughed out loud! That's not as bad as it sounds, as I was reasonably low-key-amused by Reynold's affable antics (I don't mind him, though his routine is pretty shopworn by now). And I appreciated a few other jokes even if I didn't find them particularly funny. Some casting choices and the meta-level humour are kind of inspired, if overtly geeky. Still, it was about half an hour until the film actually managed to make me chuckle. That first act is really dire.

 Having a serial fourth-wall-breaker like Deadpool take on Disney and Marvel and the current state of the MCU has a lot of potential for transgression, but this is ever the faithful corporate product. Punches are pulled and claws are sheathed at every single opportunity, leaving only the gentlest possible of digs to show that these corporate monoliths can laugh at themselves too - provided nothing too hurtful is said.

 And let's face it: if the movie were to be honest to itself, it would be built around a long, explicit sex scene featuring its two main characters. Wolverine and Deadpool, sitting on a tree, f-u-c-k-i-n-g. There's absolutely no way of getting around that, and you know it's true.

 But no one expects that - for all its posturing, this is still mainstream entertainment, same as it's ever been; And that's fine. The first movie, after all, made a huge show about not being your grandaddy's superhero origin story, while still being very much your grandaddy's superhero origin story. But with graphic violence and swearwords.

 What's depressing is how predictable everything in Deadpool & Wolverine is, a mish-mash of superhero media from the last decade, complete with life lessons and rote character growth. In a facepalm moment, it even tries to make a joke out of how we're all sick and tired of multiverse stories. Lampshading, the practice of making fun of how shit what you're doing as you do it, deserves a slow and ignominious death.

 Director Shawn Levy fails to bring anything to the table yet again, other than a basic competence at juggling the needs of a modern blockbuster and making his movie look pretty expensive. Not good, not cohesive, just expensive. If you want proof of this, look at his attempt to capture some of the Mad Max magic; The guy's got two of the most visually distinct films ever to crib from, and his version is still the visual equivalent of a bad SNL parody. Even worse, that whole element is completely, utterly unnecessary, as there are no action sequences or jokes that actually make use of all that (mediocre!) production design.

 The action is messy and uninteresting, with every fight shot in a completely different style; It's as if none of the secondary units were talking to each other or the director. I have to admit the very last one is pretty decent, though. I did like that one. Good job everyone involved.
 As for the acting... it's fine. You know exactly what to expect, and most of the actors are at least engaged and committed to their roles. Jackman, especially, whom we're dangerously close to taking for granted. It was unexpectedly nice to see some of the others again, even in these circumstances.

 So I didn't laugh much, and I didn't get excited at any point (except when a character I do give a damn about appeared to play second fiddle for a while)... but I also didn't get bored, mostly because the film does try and get weird quite a bit, and that's kind of interesting to see plastered on the big screen with such a huge budget. More interesting still is how muddled the film becomes as it goes along.

 For all its jingoism on how awesome the MCU is (aside from its current slump, which is duly noted), in the end the script is more about paying homage to the Sony and Fox incarnations of past Marvel movies, which... even if it's a little cynical, well, it's still rather sweet. The screenplay botches this and doesn't really know what to do with the new/old characters (they're literally just disposable accessories in the protagonists' quest) but the way things are set up hints at an interpretation where a rich cast of diverse characters are arrayed against a large, faceless organization where corporate synergies trump experimentation and individual voices.
 That's pretty clear, right? You can almost see the bones of something much more interesting somewhere behind the surface, intuit rough edges and actual commentary from maybe a few drafts ago, sanded down since so as to not cause any offense among the corporate overlords.

 But we're in a boring timeline - we only get a bland, mildly amusing shadow of that.

 Deadpool & Wolverine is not terrible, but it's pretty far from being good. It's already, depressingly, a huge success, which means that we're stuck with Shawn Levy for ages henceforth, and probably with the worst synergistic tendencies of modern superhero films too. But hey, at least there's a heartfelt homage during the credits, and the post-credits sequence is very, very funny.

 *: Levy, one assumes, has gotten really good at deep-throating big corporations by now; He's probably still got the taste of Google's dick in his mouth after (the also fucking dreadful) The Internship.

**: It's yet another cynical, shitty move, but honestly it's not nearly as bad as Scarlet Witch Featuring Doctor Strange; The organization's function is explained quickly, apparently it's basically a really shitty, poorly thought out version of Isaac Aasimov's Eternity but with multiple timelines. That's good enough for me.

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.

Blue Beetle

  I'm not a fan of superhero stuff, but I'm able to enjoy it when it's good. Blue Beetle is right at the edge of that line: On the one hand it's relatively well-made, pacey, and has a slightly stronger paintjob than usual of latin (mainly Mexican) culture which goes beyond just pop culture stuff. I can't think of any mainstream picture that even mentions the Escuela de las Americas, much less use it as a plot point. I can't be mad at a superhero film that does that, even when it does so without supplying any context or proper information on it.
 On the other hand... this movie is so very clearly not for me. It's a kid's movie, an old-school family film both in form and content, cheesy, cliché ridden and enthusiastically... wacky. Everything is either over-the-top, simplified, or both, and all the plot beats feel repurposed from a hundred other movies. Meanwhile, like most other superhero movies, it doesn't pay enough attention to the spectacle side of things, featuring the same boring, weightless set-pieces we've seen in a dozen Marvel movies.

Someone's clearly been watching too much anime.

 Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) returns to his family in Palmera City (which seems to be the DC version of Miami, but with a majority population of Mexicans rather than Cubans and other central Americans.) after being away a few years getting a degree at Gotham.
 Things aren't great, though; the family's about to lose the house, thanks to villain Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon). And I want to highlight this because it isn't just shitty storytelling, it dilutes the portrayal of systematic racism that the movie does try to show. It's shitty storytelling because... well, come the fuck on. You have the villain doing all sorts of world-breaking villainous stuff and, on an unrelated note, kicking out immigrant families for some sort of land development deal. That'd be like... I don't know, a third-act revelation that not only is Rhas Al'ghul behind the plot to destroy the city, he personally also had Batman's parents killed. How do you call it - oh, a Goyerism.
 But more importantly, it pins institutional racism on a very rotten apple. Wouldn't it have been much more simple and believable to say it was gentrification instead? I mean, that's evil enough.

 Anyhow. Through a series of pretty forced contrivances, Jaime ends up in the possession of an alien artifact that gives him exoskeleton-related superpowers, complete with Iron Man-style internal helmet cam. They should have trademarked that shit. There's a montage of misadventures as he gets used to his newfound powers, then he starts sparring against Victoria Kord and her cronies, his family gets dragged in, tragedy, comedy, extremely CGI-tired-marvel-looking action... all the sort of stuff you'd expect. It's not bad, necessarily, but none of it essential. And the film's constant pandering to the younger set is often cringeworthy.

 When the scarab first melds with him, it does so by... crawling up his butt, something that the movie avoids coming out and saying outright, but highlights a couple of times. Not funny, exactly, but bizarre. I guess it makes sense in a world where the hero's bug-shaped vehicle has a fart gas attack, complete with fart sounds. It's pretty rough.

 There's a few cool details: a couple of fight moves, some of the synth-driven music (by Bobby Krlic), and I like how the suit burns Jaime's clothes when it gets deployed: a pretty tactile effect that is unfortunately mostly there to get him naked so his zany family can make fun of his chorizo; They are so loco.
 It's hard not to be down on the acting when everyone is pitching to the rafters like this, but I did enjoy some of the quieter interplay between Maridueña (who's pretty good in this overall) and his sister (Belissa Escobedo). The less said about the zany grandmother character (Adriana Barraza) the better; She's a good actress (a regular with Iñárritu) - this is strictly a Blue Beetle tone issue.

 Director Angel Manuel Soto and writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer have their heart in the right place, but the clear aspirations this has to be a crowd pleaser, while having very little of interest to say or show kind of killed it for me.

Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham

 In case you're not aware, there's an imprint of DC that lets them put out non-canon, what-if stories with established characters: It's called elseworlds, and the formula is to grab a superhero and change something about them, or to place them in a strange setting for an alternate take. So you get... I dunno, what if Batman were a vampire? Or if Superman had landed in Russia, and had become a communist superhero?

 They're usually short, contained stories. Because the setting or the circumstances are changed pretty heavily, there's a nerdy appeal to them in seeing what they did not just with the superhero, but with their supporting cast: If Bruce Wayne is a Viking, what will they do with Selina Kyle or the Condiment Man?

 The Doom that Came to Gotham is the animated adaptation of an Elseworld title published more than twenty years ago, written by Mike Mignola (the creator of Hellboy) along with Richard Pace and illustrated by Troy Nixey and Dennis Janke. As you might expect from the title, the question it asks is: What if Batman, but Lovecraft?

 Or, like most pop-culture takes on Lovecraft, a light, much pulpier version of his signature cosmic horror. You've got to leave some room to fit in all the punch-outs and chases, after all.

 And in this case, I am very happy to report that these action scenes include a fistfight with Mountains of Madness-style mutant penguins. Faithful yet ridiculous, making the tone of the thing crystal clear.

Chillin'

 Bruce Wayne is heading an expedition to the artic to find a previous expedition led by one Oswald Cobblepot; he finds their boat abandoned, Cobblepot gone feral (the sight of him wandering  the artic wastes butt-naked is a wonderfully grotesque image), and a half-frozen man in an eldritch, cyclopean cave, whom he rescues. But not before the stranger frees That Which Should Not Be and is infected with some sort of parasite.

 The expedition returns to Gotham, where it quickly becomes clear that all this artic weirdness was just a prelude to something bigger. There's a cult trying to summon an elder god or two, an ancient conspiracy that may lead to the end of the world. As Batman investigates, he realizes science and rationalism may not be enough to see things through.

 The story's a decent, very comic-book yarn where half the fun is seeing who pops up next, and in what guise. This gets in the way of the narrative, but I guess that's the nature of the beast.
 As silly as it gets, the plot is a fun, pulpy trawl though Lovecraft-flavored nonsense; And it does have some pretty good horror imagery every now and then. Poor Mr. Dent.

 Dialog-wise there's a lot of appropriately purple prose and some great lines. My favorite comes after Jim Gordon accuses Green Arrow of helping contraband bootleg moonshine. Green Arrow's response: "Tell you what, though. If I do happen upon a case, I'll let you watch me polish it off. At least then you and your boys can see what getting to the bottom of a case actually looks like."

 Nothing else in the script comes close to that level of repartee, but that alone makes it above average.

 Delivery varies wildly: I liked what David Giuntoli did with Batman, and Jeffrey Coombs pops up to deliver an unhinged voice performance. Didn't really find anyone else memorable, for good or ill.

 The art style tries to ape what I imagine is the style of the comic (which I haven't read), and looks like a cross between the old Bruce Timm Batman cartoons and lesser Mignola. DC are putting out a lot of these animated films, but I haven't seen any of them so I can't really compare - the style looks a little cheap to me, a bit flat. But there's a lot of variety in the action and the backgrounds, it never feels half-assed.

 It's...  ok. Horror for kids, well-made enough to be perfectly watchable but not really worth seeking out unless you really like this sort of thing. Or if you want to see Batman deliver a beatdown on mutant (non-albino) penguins, which I admit is a strong selling point.

 Having fun with Lovecraft rather than actually engaging with his ideas properly, and that's fine, I 'd never expect this genre, of all things, to ever do that, to pit superheroes against something so powerful and alien it wouldn't even recognize them as a threat, let alone be defeated in any meaningful way. Wouldn't that be something, though?

The Flash

  I don't really care that much for superhero stories. I've hated pretty much every comic-book event/crossover/franchise-flex film made thus far, except maybe Far From Home. The less said of the director's previous movie, It 2, the better.
 By all rights I should hate The Flash. And yet, and yet... I don't. Color me surprised, but it's a pretty fun movie.

 Maybe it's those contrarian reflexes kicking in; I don't really pay much attention to film twitter or any of the other online outrage echo chambers, but I get the sense that this film got a bit of hate from fans and critics; and it was a notorious box-office flop.
 However, I lean towards it just being a likeable film. And I never could take superheroes seriously, so the film's major stoner comedy vibes resonated with me a lot better than most of these things do.

 In any case. The Flash is heavily embedded within Zack Snyder's take on DC continuity; It picks up after the events of Justice League, and hinges on plot points from the 2013 Superman movie.
 You don't need to have seen any of those films - My son hadn't, and he liked the movie just fine - but you might at least want to read up a little.
 And yeah, having to include these sort of caveats are part of why I hate this shit. At least it's easier to stomach when it's just a couple of movies and not a bunch of them plus a streaming-service-exclusive series.

 Barry Allen (Ezra Miller, who's been the target of some pretty troubling allegations) is The Flash, and plays him as a sort of motormouth smart-ass; Think Peter Parker. He's tapped at the beginning of the movie by Alfred (Jeremy Irons), Batman's butler, to help Batman (Ben Affleck) with an operation that's gone awry; a hospital is falling apart, and people need to be saved. You know, standard Super Friends stuff.
 And that's where the film's overtly goofy sensibilities kick into overdrive (where they remain for most of the runtime). Allen strikes a cool pose, ready to set out, the music swells, the titles card starts to form... and then a bunch of kids interrupt him. Music goes off, the title slinks off, defeated.
 I mean, it's not like it hasn't been done before, but it's a bigger commitment to the humor side of things than the smart-alecky banter that usually takes the place of jokes and punchlines in most of these films. When things get going and the film's first action sequence breaks out, it's an over-the top, extremely ridiculous scene where half a dozen babies, a nurse and a cute dog get thrown out of a high-rise; the whole thing owes more to Looney Tunes than any sort of comic book escapade.

 On his way back (and after a pretty funny encounter with Batman and Wonder Woman) Barry discovers that he can run fast enough to go back in time. So he gets the notion to use his new-found power to save his murdered-when-he-was-a-child-mom. What could possibly go wrong?

 Soon Barry is stuck on a different timeline completely. Because of the similarities to Far From Home and stuff like that, this movie seems to have been lumped in with the glut of multiverse movies Marvel seems to favour lately, but it's actually more of a straightforward time travel yarn (complete with multiple references to Back to the Future), with the twist that when Barry change something, he doesn't just create a branching timeline; He jumps to a completely new one.

 ...One that already has its own version of Barry Allen, one who grew up with a full family and is a complete, over-the-top goofy idiot. So for most of the movie you get the two versions of the protagonist quibbling and riffing off each other. I thought Miller was really good at this: he's pretty funny in both roles, makes them fairly distinct, and even manages to give some personality and a smidge of pathos to the overtly cartoony stoner persona.
 That's not the only difference from his reality. It turns out that there are no superheroes in this version of events, except for Batman... who's played by Michael Keaton, and brings with him the vehicles, suits, and Danny Elfman theme from his movies. Keaton is great as usual, but I wouldn't take this as a huge selling point - he's only a guest here in Barry's story, a passenger. The rest of the film in no way, shape or form takes any cues from Tim Burton's Batman duology, leaving the character as a really odd fit in all the overtly modern action movie sequences.
 And finally, it all takes place during the events of 2013's Superman, with General Zod laying a siege to Earth. Except that... no Superman. So the Barrys and Batman need to step up.

 The movie is, and there's no other way to put it, extremely messy, mostly owing to a sort of late-stage superhero movie shapelessness that seems to come with the genre (and many other blockbusters) these days. The film is as well paced as it could possibly be given all its disparate mandates, but a lot of the plot points are glossed over and there are more than a few, shall we say, stupid moments. The script (by Christina Hodson, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein) also writes itself into several corners by the third act, resulting in a very bleak, strange message for a blockbuster movie - I actually appreciated that! But, like on No Way Home, it comes with a whole lot of problems as it glibly elides delving into many of its practicalities and consequences. Not to mention that it clashes badly with the tone of the movie. It's solution? Just... don't think about that, here's a bunch of goofy jokes. Look! His tooth fell off, hahaha.

 It does, however, have a very powerful emotional payoff, and a decent amount of clever twists. The fact that it constantly finds ways to puncture any gravitas it develops may irk the people who turned on Thor 4, but I'm all for this sort of thing in superhero films.
 The action has some decent beats and ideas, but it's of the entirely artificial variety where almost everything is very obviously an effect against a green screen. There's some cool imagery and a couple of badass moments (loved Zod simply going through a helicopter to get at his enemy), and the spectacle is above average once you get used to how it looks, but nothing to write home about.

 Director Andy Muschietti is a huge proponent of quantity over quality in his CGI, so there is a lot of iffy-looking animation here. The visuals for the Chronobowl, the way the Flash visualizes time-travelling, are the worst offenders by far... But to be honest, it's so stylized that it's got to be a conscious decision. A shitty aesthetic choice, but an aesthetic choice nonetheless.
 I'm less of a fan of the rubbery, synthetic look of most of the action, starting with the cheesy way the movie visualizes the flash's warp speed running, and encompassing all of the fights - but you know what? It fits well with the movie's live-action cartoon tone. It didn't bother me that much, and after a while I got used to  the  artificiality of it.

 So... yeah. I honestly enjoyed it, warts and all; It's an overtly silly movie, but that's fine: it's a silly genre.

The Heroic Trio

 The Heroic Trio is a Hong Kong superhero movie from 1993 that I remembered pretty fondly, mostly for being absolutely batshit crazy. And yeah, that's still pretty much the main takeaway. 

 Here's a small list of what you can expect out of it:
 - A house viewing devolves into someone jumping out a second floor window, using the tendrils of ivy outside both as a Tarzan-style brachiation aid and as a lasso to catch a thief.
 - An invisible assailant steals two babies from police custody, and a female superhero comes to stop it; There's running across electric wires, a falling baby (a running theme throughout the movie; not all of them survive), and all sorts of crazy stunts.
 - The invisible assailant, who turns out to be Michelle Yeoh, reaches an evil underground lair and is gratuitously attacked by a crazed kung fu guardian.
 - We meet this guy:

 - When a child falls from a (different) tall building, someone jumps after her, falls faster and rescues both the kid and her cute kitten.
 - Some criminals hole up in a chemical plant with hostages; All the police can do is look on helplessly while they gun down a helpless woman. Then a mercenary shows up, puts some dynamite in an open empty barrel, sits on it as if it were a horse, and uses the explosion to vault into the second floor and take out all the criminals with her trusty shotgun. It's just as silly/amazing as it sounds.
 - A crazy man goes into a maternity ward to, in his words, "kill all the babies". He's foiled.

 And all of this happens within the first half hour! And I didn't even mention all the cheesy melodrama, corny comedy scene setting with the police and other random shit.

 The plot involves some sort of undead eunuch trying to set up an Emperor for China by kidnapping a bunch of babies. He's coercing Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh) to do his evil bidding, and is opposed by straight-laced superhero Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) and fun-loving mercenary Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung). As the title of the movie implies, the Invisible Woman may have a change of heart at some point.
 It's a Hong Kong take on American four-color comic stories, and it does a pretty good job of merging both types of madness. The results are never boring, but unfortunately the childish plotting, whiplash-inducing tone swings, wall-to-wall posturing, extremely broad humor, mawkish melodrama, and forced camp does kind of bring it down a few notches.

 It just doesn't ever pause to catch a breath. Everything is always dialed up to eleven; the constant barrage of heightened drama gets tiring, and the lack of anything substantive to latch onto -and the sense that the writer (Sandy Shaw) is just making it up as she goes along- makes it almost impossible to care about any of the events or characters. Even when it's a cute, doomed baby.

 Mui and Yeoh unfortunately don't get to do a lot with their characters - Mui is the earnest, glamorous, properly heroic one, and Yeoh gets the lion's share of all the angsty melodrama. They both look amazing, though. Cheung plays the sassy one - bad news is that she gets most of the shitty comedy bits, but at least she looks like she's having fun.
 The film is directed by Johnnie To, but this is a very, very different To than the one who'll eventually direct Election or The Mission; here he just piles on the scenes without any concern for pacing or coherence. It looks great, if you can get over the overtly campy tone. At least there's ample warning as the movie opens with a reference to the sixties batman series.

 And there's a lot of cool stuff. There's a bit where a motorcycle is driven off a wall and hurled, spinning horizontally, at a bad guy wielding a weapon straight out of Master of the Flying Guillotine. The villain's final form is an organic take on The Terminator's skeletal robot, one that opens its ribcage, traps Michelle Yeoh in it, and then puppeteers her to fight her teammates.
 The action is good, but except for a couple of fights it's the less exciting style of Hong Kong fights: pirouettes and twirly acrobatics rather than intricate combat, with a focus on things looking cool and fast, not so much on detail. Lots and lots of wire-assisted stunts, a lot of which look pretty silly but are a lot of fun.

 It's completely nuts in a way that works for it just as much as it works against it; I still like it a lot, but it's a hard movie to recommend to people who aren't used to this sort of thing.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

 2018's Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse set a high bar for any follow-up to clear. In purely aesthetical terms, its habit of smashing completely different artistic styles into each other with reckless abandon while still achieving a very distinct visual style has become extremely influential  (most notably in The Mitchells vs. The Machines or last year's Puss In Boots movie.)

 How could a sequel top that? Well... rather easily, as it turns out.

 As Spider-Woman/Gwen Stacey (Hailee Stanfeld) does the standard origins narration which the first film employed repeatedly with such great effect, she plays a drum solo. While the threads of her narration weave in and out between past events and the themes of the current movie, the imagery ranges far and wide with a ridiculous amount of invention and energy; it's an animation solo to accompany Stacey's playing, and a virtuoso one. And the good news is that this energy and level of invention never really lets up.

 The movie looks sumptuous. Production values, rhythms, technical execution, originality, everything;

Even as the storytelling starts following our characters - first Stacey, then Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), our actual protagonist, and the narrative gets a little more traditional, the film continues throwing curveballs and asides. It's DENSE: visual gags in the background, all sorts of inventive uses of superpowers, and an incredibly expressive use of the medium to communicate moods in magical surrealist ways where, say, the background can start looking like a Matisse painting while the characters have a heart-to-heart. Even when nothing crazy is going on, you still get very striking compositions and cool framing tricks.

 It looks good, is what I'm saying. Extremely so; The visuals, design and technical accomplishment are worth the price of admission alone, and is bound to reward multiple viewings.

 Gwen's prologue includes a (very funny!) confrontation with a renaissance-style Vulture (Jorma Taccone) who's been pulled in from a different dimension. It turns out that the exploding collider from the climax of the first film left some dimensional instabilities throughout the multiverse. Gwen is joined during the fight by another couple of Spider-people; Their leader Miguel (Oscar Isaac) has put together a sort of inter-dimensional police force, and begrudgingly accepts Gwen into the group.

 We then pick up things with Miles Morales pretty much where the previous movie left us: It's been a year, in which Miles has become the friendly neighborhood spiderman, his secret superhero life keeps getting him in hot water with his family (#Spider-person problems), and he misses his Spider-Friends. He has a confrontation with a rather hapless villain called, uh, Spot (Jason Schwartzman, very recognizable and very funny) whose power is basically throwing portals around, and blames Miles for his villainification - this whole thing may or may not be important later, you never know.

 Things start looking up for Miles for a while when Gwen comes calling. But she's actually there on business- to keep tabs on Spot, whom the interdimensional police consider a threat. Her quarry escapes while she's distracted hanging out with Miles, and when things inevitably escalate, Miles is dragged into all sorts of multiversal adventures.

 It's very much worth noting that it ends on a cliffhanger. It'll be completed with a third movie, hopefully within the next couple of years; This wouldn't be too bad - to be honest, it's got so much going on it feels justified - except that just this installment runs for almost two hours and a third. It doesn't feel interminable like some other recent superhero 'epics' -thanks to the mind-blowing visuals and a very busy script, mostly- but it does feel very flabby in a way the first one never did.

 That's not helped at all by the fact that its story is... it's just ok. It's a very modern superhero plot, by which I mean that in conventional terms it's kind of bad but pretty complex, and engages in all sorts of metatextual mindfuckery (a main plot point revolves around the fact that a certain type of heroic tragedy follows all Spider-people like a bad stink; They're playfully called Canon Points). I suspect the story will mostly resonate with comic nerds who have this shit internalized; It left me, as a nerd of a non-superhero denomination, pretty much cold.
It especially suffers in comparison to its prequel, which had a perfectly self-contained and much better crafted plot.

 Overall it succeeds, on a writing level, because the characters are still great and their emotional beats are fun and (mostly) feel true to them; And the script is full of constant laugh-out-loud gags, lines and situations, and facilitates great action set-pieces. There's a ton of cleverness and wit on display everywhere, and most importantly, it keeps the first movie's fundamental sweetness and good nature.

 As in with Spider-Man: No Way Home, sometimes that's enough. It doesn't completely dispel the sense, though, that it's all smoke and mirrors to distract us from the problems with its navel-gazing narrative.

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.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods

 There was a tiny window a few years back where WB seemed to give up with its DC cinematic universe.

 Having put out the most joyless crap possible with the movies leading up to (and possibly including, I never bothered to watch it) The Justice League, the next few that trickled out were a lot more interesting than most cogs set to fill out a function in a five-year phase or whatever usually are.

 I may not be a huge fan of either of the Wonder Women, but they do what they want to successfully - and in the case of the second one, it sets the movie in the eighties not just as a gimmick, but in an attempt to say something meaningful (if a bit shallow); That's worthy of respect. Aquaman is the most joyful, exuberant superhero movie this side of Into The Multiverse. Suicide Squad showed what James Gunn could do if given freedom to follow his batshit muse. The Joker is an uninspired mishmash of stolen stuff, and The Batman (2022) is a terrible, terrible movie, but they both at least have the grace not to give a single fuck about any continuity concerns. And Shazam!... You know how Superhero movies will often position themselves as belonging to a different genre? Like Antman being a heist movie, Multiverse of Madness being a Sam Raimi movie, etc. etc.?

 Shazam! is one of the very few of those that actually does justice to its adopted genre. It splits the difference between your standard superheroics and a teen comedy, and it does it with aplomb and plenty of great jokes.

 In any case, that period of the DC history is drawing into a close. No way to know how its new incarnation will go, but I doubt that we'll get a slate of movies with so much personality and that are allowed to... be themselves to this degree. It's a shame this 'no adult supervision' period had to close out with two of the most bog-standard superhero movies imaginable - first Black Adam, and now the Shazam sequel, which unfortunately loses most of what made the first one unique.

 It's a More-is-More-minded sequel, and it suffers for it. Overstuffed to the gills, it doesn't have space for nuance or character moments. Much like on those Marvel movies that mash together a dozen superheroes, everyone pretty much shouts out their character motivations and things happen because the plot dictates they must instead of any organic buildup.

 We begin where Shazam! ended, with Billy Batson (Asher Angel) now trying to lead a whole family of superheroes who are the laughing stock of his native Philadelphia. He's struggling with impostor syndrome (we know this because a pediatrician tells him, point blank, 'you suffer from impostor's syndrome!' and with getting his superpowered siblings to work as a team.

 Meanwhile, a trio of demigoddesses (played by Lucy Liu, Helen Mirren, and another one that's kept secret for a little bit) recover a mcguffin and start wreaking havoc, and Billy's brother Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) has the most unconvincing possible meet cute with a stunningly beautiful new student Ann (Rachel Zegler). Will a bundle of loose plot elements connect in the dumbest, most contrived way possible? Well, yes; this is a movie where an emotional beat is set early on when Mom (Marta Milans) makes a sadface when Billy calls her by her name instead of calling her mom. All T's are crossed, all I's are dotted in the hackiest way possible.

 Not that it's a complete loss. The villains turn out to be the Hesperides, and their motivation is a rather clever play on the Shazam origin story. This also gives the film license to pepper the film with mythological beasties; shame the one with the most screentime is a pretty generic-looking dragon.

 The humor is also a mixed bag, but hits enough of its marks that it doesn't leave a horrible taste behind. Shazam is played by Zachary Levi with a teen-like complete lack of filters, and is a pretty hilarious creation even when going for low-hanging fruit.

 As busy as the movie gets, it always remembers to be a comedy first, which might be its one saving grace. Loud, dumb, funny is one adjective better than how these things tend to go.

Black Adam

 Kanhdaq's had it rough. Four thousand years ago an evil king looking for an evil MacGuffin brutally enslaved its people until a superhero rose up to throw him down. This superhero (the first incarnation of Shazam, apparently?) was never seen again, and the country fell into turmoil, taken over by outsiders for much of its history. 

 These days the country is occupied by the Intergang, which seems to be some mixture of a mafia and a PMC (complete with South African accents). And they're after the evil MacGuffin, too. A plucky adventuring archeologist (Sarah Shani) manages to recover it to try to keep it out of Intercorp's hands, but when they move to forcefully retrieve it she unwittingly unleashes the ancient superhero protector of Khandaq, Teth Adam.

 Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson), looking cool with a ratty cape and The Rock's distinctive glowering gaze, proceeds to lay waste to a small battalion of mixed units. But it's different from the carnage in any other superhero movie because, you see, Adam's an Antihero. It's like a hero, but cooler, because he can kill people in any brutal style a PG13 rating will allow.

 Yes, we're back in Superheroland, where critical thinking is stuck at a twelve-year-old level.

Cool guys don't look at explosions. They also murder willy-nilly.

 Anyhow, I can enjoy that sort of thing, as long as the movie is upfront about it, which... this one is. The action is pretty fun - many, many explosions and deaths, some basic gallows humor, and lots of slow motion justified because, similar to Superman, Adam operates at a much quicker speed than humans can. It's marred by that weightless CGI feel when vehicles are thrown around, but at this point in time I guess we got to roll with it until the tech gets better.

 What is not acceptable is that they try to make it iconic by completely mangling the Stone's Paint it Black. Come on, dudes, that song will always be better than anything you ever do; if you're going to ride on its coattails, at least don't butcher it.

 After murderizing dozens of people Adam is wounded by a kryptonite-like missile and falls unconscious. He's rescued by the same archeologist that awoke him, and she decides to take the unconscious Adam and the evil MacGuffin back to her department.
 When he wakes up Adam gets a bit of a history lesson, bonds with the archeologist's obnoxious, superhero-obsessed (of course) teen son, and refuses the hero's call for the first of many, many, many times during the movie.

 And here we get a slight complication. The world at large - well, Suicide Squad's Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), is concerned about this new metahuman running amok, so she sends in the Justice Society to neutralize and contain him: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan, by far the best thing in the movie), plus a couple other minor superheroes that don't make much of an impression.

 Because Hawkman, the expedition leader, is portrayed as an arrogant, pig-headed idiot (I honestly thought this side of things was kinda well done; much better than the idiocy they had to cook up to get Batman and Superman to fight each other, at least), you could say things start off with the wrong foot. And so begin an endless series of fights and confrontations in different configurations between the three groups involved: Adam vs JSA, JSA and Adam Vs Intertec, etc, with the evil MacGuffin lurking off in the wings to provide a final battle.

 At the same time Adam's past will be fed to us piecemeal in an unsuccessful attempt to give his character some depth. Will he finally pick up The Hero's calls? Well, yes, dummy. Of course he will. What did you think you were watching?

 Like so many of these movies, the script's main motivation is to string action sequences together. We get almost zero background for any of the superheroes except Adam, which to be perfectly honest was a bit of a relief, and the movie's themes are treated as an afterthought.

 Everything's very adolescent and extremely shallow. The big act of rebellion that gets the king in ancient Kahndaq all hot and bothered? It's getting a bunch of guards run around and making a hand gesture from a high place. Posturing, it's all posturing, which kinda looks bad when later on it becomes obvious it's referencing the Arab Spring.

 The movie also flirts with taking a stand against imperialism; we know this because the obnoxious kid explicitly mentions the I word when sassing back to an Intersoft thug. But... after timidly raising some points it then sweeps everything under the rug so it can focus on the brawls. Same goes for the whole questioning of superheroes vs. antiheroes; at no point is there any question that Kahndaq will need a hero - hell, whenever the residents of Kahndaq, including intrepid archeologist lady, look at Adam they look as if they were seconds away from an orgasm.

 And fuuuuuuck does this movie overestimate how fascinating we'll find Black Adam and his antiheroing ways. Someone needs to remind WB that we've already seen antiheroes before, even within DC - the concept had been pounded to paste by Zach Snyder's ponderous, shitty, brainless take for hour upon endless hour, and then (for contrast) it was handled with grace and humor by James Gunn in his terrific Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. This one adds precisely nothing of interest to the conversation, despite putting the subject front and center.

 So... very much a spectacle movie, then. Luckily on that front it does pretty well.
 Catalan-born director Jaume Collet-Serra ably apes Zach Snyder's style down to the desaturated palette, soundtrack and variable-speed action. There's nothing here that will stick in the memory for long, but it's all entertaining if a bit stretched out; As in Snyder's films, there's a bit of abuse of slow-mo, especially when it's used to allow those involved to strike cool poses rather than clarify what's going on.

 It's breezier than any of Snyder's superhero crap, less self-serious (there are a couple of jokes here and there, some of them good, and a fun Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood/Ennio Morricone homage) and it doesn't insist on insulting our intelligence at every which turn. Only on a few turns, and the abuse is pretty mild compared to BvS.

 The actors do what they can with slim pickings. Dwayne Johnson has shown that he has enormous reserves of  charm and good comic timing, but they go untapped here; his one-note performance as Black Adam is all about intensity, which gets kind of boring pretty quickly. Pierce Brosnan gets to have a lot more fun as a wise avuncular uncle type, and he single-handedly elevates a lot of the character drama through sheer charisma. Finally, I did like Aldis Hodge as Hawkman, he makes for a good asshole.

 

 So, with the lowered expectations I approach any superhero movie these days, this was a modest success. It does what it sets out to do, its many many problems worth at most an eye-roll, not a facepalm. It's loud, crass, dumb, and it overstays its welcome by at least twenty minutes, but its action makes for an enjoyable way to waste a Saturday afternoon.

Thor 4

 Thor IV, or, to use its proper name MCU Phase 4 episode 6: Marvel's Thor 4 (the 4 is silent): Love and Thunder, is the direct sequel to the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. It directly includes elements of Guardians of the Galaxy, Immortals*, and of course the previous Thors.

 Other than that, it's pretty stand-alone!

 I talk shit about it, but honestly, at this point whoever is going to watch this would have already watched at least some of the marvel stuff - it's a weird place to be, but them's the breaks, right? The movie itself does a good job of giving you a very short (and pretty funny) catch up of what went on outside the main Thor series- it sort of, kind of handwaves it away, which is exactly the right take. Coming in having watched only the previous Thor movies wouldn't be the best viewing experience, but... well, the Marvel business model isn't going away any time soon. It leans the most on the first Thor movie, and otherwise does its own thing, which is great. It's got an arc and a semblance of themes, and it all revolves around Thor. Which is a long-winded way to say that it's not a repeat of this year's Dr Strange.

I never do get to mention these two, which is a horrible injustice. Awesome, and mythologically correct.

 So after the events of the awful, terrible, shitty, not very good 'Thanos does dumb shit' crapfests, Thor's recovered from his haha, depression is funny fatsuit episode, but feels a bit adrift. He's hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy (don't worry, they're only guesting for the prologue) serving as a sort of tactical nuke they can point at stuff they want to die. Basically, he's trying to think of himself as more of a weapon than anything else. Then he gets a warning from an old acquaintance that there's a dude going around the universe killing gods (said dude is played by Christian Bale, and his backstory is the first thing we see in the movie).
 Thor bids farewell to the Guardians (in a particularly unfunny scene that was featured prominently in the trailers) and goes his own way. Soon he's reunited with co-protagonist and old flame Jane Foster.

 If I have to be honest I find that Jane (played by the great Natalie Portman) is the only memorable, engaging  female character in the MCU (sorry Gamora and blue sister): socially awkward, enthusiastic and very funny. In the time since she and Thor went their own ways, she contracted cancer and found it could be held back by wielding Thor's old hammer, Mjolnir, in the process gaining his lightning powers. Together with Valkyrie and Korg (from Thor 3) they set out to stop the god killer's plan to break the universe. The usual.

 I like the Thor movies because out of all the MCU they're the ones that are the most allowed to exist as pure comedies. They're goofy larks- the first one was a fish out of water comedy, and the third is filled to the brim with silly sight gags and jokes, to the point where nothing was taken seriously. Oh, and they tried to make the second one more serious and it was kind of crap... but still had some great jokes.
 This one is a direct descendant from Ragnarok, and it's much more willing to be ridiculous. It's a shame, then, that it's not quite as funny - I really didn't find a lot of  the jokes as hilarious as the film clearly did.

 The plot is ok. It's a very basic story made complicated by MCU cruft and a lot of digressions, and a lot of its heft comes from a soap-opera-ish interweaving characters that have been established throughout the series. Very comic book. In this specific case it works because the principals are ridiculously likeable and most of the events reflect on or relate to Thor's existential crisis. Also, the jokes actually slow down in the last act, letting the story breathe a little.

 The visuals vary a lot. The first few battles are your standard CGI fest, and is vey much in the typical uninteresting MCU house style. But there's a couple of visual flourishes on later scenes that are pretty cool, and by the end they've fabricated an excuse to go (mostly) black and white for some real excellence in the biff! blam! pow! scenes. It's like there's at least one FX team that Marvel farms out its action scenes to that fail to get the memo to make the action as forgettable as possible.
 All the fights against the God Killer are good, as well - he's just a cool visual villain, all rags and shadows. Not actually a good villain, unfortunately, he's too simple and gets too little screen time for that. They waste his big monologue in a pretty bad scene, but he at least gets a cool sendoff.

 Finally, given how many feces I've thrown at the Russo brothers, it'd be remiss of me not to mention that it's got a world-changing wish plot point that's just as dumb as the whole Thanos thing. If anyone had said 'wait, maybe we can workshop it a little?' before making it... well, the movie would be ruined, but it's really glaring that no one involved acts as any half-intelligent person would. At least in this case those involved are dimwits or in a pretty bad place psychologically, all acting against a (perceived) time limit. Unlike with The Eternity Stones, this is not a years/centuries-in-the-making plan and it's got extenuating circumstances. I'll allow it.

 Is the movie any good? At this point, I honestly kind of don't know anymore. It's a mess, made harder to judge because how damn weird these things have become compared to more traditional movies. I enjoyed it, but it's probably safe to say it's only really good for an MCU film, and just OK- fun, but uneven, clunky and kind of overlong film in and of itself. It's cute as all hell, it's got a lot of warmth for its characters, and a bit more thought behind its themes than you'd expect from this sort of thing - in other words, director Taika Waititi's sensibilities have filtered through, which is not always a given. And it's got some stunning visuals, which at this point was also not something I was expecting going in.
 I'm just not fully in its target audience of people who buy into the broader Marvel thing and are onboard with their comic-book plot structures and conventions, and less so in this case because this one is even more aimed at kids than usual. Which is a weird thing to say about a movie that starts with a little girl dying of dehydration in her father's arms, and has more (many more) than one mention of orgies.

* I was kidding that you need to watch Immortals for this. No one does. Some of the big guys from that get a cameo, nothing else; but you know Disney's going to shoehorn them somewhere at some point.

Morbius

 At this point, I don't think there's any big studio out there with a worse track record for terrible, terrible scripts than Sony Pictures; With some honourable exceptions, they just don't seem to give a single fuck about storytelling.
 This has been clear for ages (Ghostbusters 2016, a movie I actually kind of like, feels like it was shot from an unfinished script; that's pretty characteristic of Sony Pictures), but it's never been clearer than with their latest slate of Spiderman Villain films: Venom is a movie that seems to be rejoicing at just how bad it is, and Morbius is somehow even worse than that.

 Jared Leto plays the titular vampire doctor with admirable conviction, but all his intensity and weirdo charisma are wasted in a cliched and pretty staid character. He's got some sort of consumptive disease, he tries to cure himself by something something vampire bats, and of course he becomes a vampire. That's the level we're operating at here. Which... fine, it worked for the Spiderman movies, but they had a ton of other stuff going for them; here we get cut-rate CGI, poor acting, some of the worst scriptwriting I've seen in a long time, plus a bunch of weirdness that's kind of respectable in how wrong-headed it is. I mean, there's a bit where Matt Smith struts around in his pimped-out room, preening and making evil vampire faces at the camera not once, but twice. And it's filmed like a commercial or a fashion shoot! Besides the titles, it's the best part of the movie.

Vamp's gonna vamp. Wish more of the film had as much fun as this bit.

 Smith plays Milo, Morbius's childhood friend turned antagonist. Since Morbius is one of those saintly characters that is always on the right, they had to introduce some conflict somehow, right? Matt Smith ratches up the camp admirably, but the film doesn't have the wit or verve needed to actually make his character fun. They fight a bit, Morbius kills him, then it's time to start setting up the sequel and a Sony Villains Assembled film that nobody in their right mind should want.

Every single scene in this film is weirdly truncated, its storytelling so blunt it can't be arsed to thread scenes together with any sense; It's just going through the motions, trying to get through its shit story as quickly as possible with seemingly nothing but contempt for its characters or the audience.
  Much as I hate the scripts for some modern superhero movies*, they at least have the decency to be slick and maintain a pretense of professionalism. This one... does not.

 Beyond the incompetent plotting, you get all the expected dumbness and then some. This is a movie that handles exposition by having characters tell each other things they both already know, that transitions from the line "that's so illegal that we should do it in international waters" to a shot of an ocean liner with a title card saying "International Waters"... OK, no, that's actually pretty good, if too dumb/easy a joke.
 It has a father figure (poor, poor Jared Harris) who's only there to dramatically die in someone's arms, and a "touching" scene where a villain who's been an irredeemable piece of shit the whole movie goes for a grace note that's so unearned it plays as comedy.

 There's at least an attempt to give the movie some interesting visuals, which mostly come down to giving the characters a kind of trail that looks like ropy coloured smoke when they jump and shit, and an echolocation effect that applies a similar mist effect to any surrounding structures. It didn't work for me at all - I found it to be a butt-ugly movie that looks remarkably videogame-y.
 And don't get me started on its (quickly abandoned) attempts to cultivate a horror movie atmosphere. Matter of fact, while we're discussing horror credentials, Blade proved that you could have a successful Marvel movie and keep it gory more than twenty years ago. This bloodless PG-13 crap was never going to cut it.

 They do have Morbius do some bat shit I haven't seen Batman do, including hanging upside down for a bit, and getting swept around in currents of wind; I don't think the writers understand echolocation (or, more likely, they don't give a flying fuck.) The first time Morbius uses it, he doesn't screech to get the echoes back, which is a huge wasted opportunity - that would have been hilarious! Now I think of it maybe he's meant to be getting the echoes from his fishtank bats? Still stupid, and much less fun.
 If I may make a humble suggestion for the sequel, maybe Morbius could fly into someone's house, and they would have to shoo him around with brooms until he found a window he could fly out of? I'd watch that.

 Anyhow them's the breaks with Sony. I had extremely low expectations for Morbius, and the film duly lived down to them and then some. I wouldn't say it's so bad it's good, but it did made me laugh out loud a few times. If I have to be honest, I prefer proper bad like this to mercenary, pandering mediocrity like Ghostbusters Afterlife or plain old shitshows like Uncharted.

Because I'm feeling magnanimous, let me list a couple of other things I actually liked about Morbius besides Matt Smith's glam scene:

- The title sequence and end credits kick ass, a neon laser-show-like display that have nothing to do with the rest of the movie but looked really neat.
- The movie is only one hour forty-four minutes long, which is about half an hour shorter than superhero movies inexplicably feel is the minimum runtime these days.
- Obligatory love interest Adria Arjona is very pretty, and Jared Leto is a good-looking weirdo. The acting is bad across the board, but with this material I wouldn't pin the blame on the actors; No amount of acting is going to elevate this shit, so why bother?

 And that's it; Morbius out.

*(And if you thought I'd miss a chance to fling some feces at the Russo bros or Snyder, you don't know me well enough!)

Thanos is a fucking moron and how the hell are people not talking about how stupid his whole deal is?

So - I  thought I'd posted this already, but apparently I didn't. Rant ahoy!

 Oh, Thanos. You purple moron.

 You're a con, pure bullshit. An established, overwhelming threat for so many movies. All your appearances used framing and cinematic language to double down on how tragic/awesome/dangerous you were supposed to be. And they got Josh Fucking Brolin to play you - that's a personality injection right there, and does wonders for your credibility.

 Which is useful because we never really get a good sense of who you are or why you do it, just some vague bullshit about balance and a wiff of a tragic backstory. We just know you by what you're trying to achieve, and how far you go to achieve it.

 So... let's talk about that - your plan, ok? Your genius plan.

 Your great work, for which you sacrificed so much, in which you used up the mcguffins seeded across several different films. Even if those pesky superheroes hadn't interfered, It wouldn't have lasted, you fucking idiot. A generation or two, tops. A blink in history, an infinitesimally small blip in geological terms, nothing on a cosmic scale.

 I guess being an alien, no one bothered explaining this to you, but as LaTour discovered back in the early 90's, people really like fucking. Although maybe you should know this, since Marvel seems to operate under Star Trek rules and aliens are just different colored people. Anyhow. Depopulations are followed by population booms. You know, as in baby boomers. People are just going to get it on more.

 So, you didn't foresee this? OK, fair enough, you're insane or delusional to a degree that would actually affect your basic reasoning, though you're never really portrayed that way. But none of the superheroes, some of which are supposed to be pretty smart cookies (despite all evidence to the contrary presented in the events of Avengers: Civil War). They never mention this, or call you out on it? Even when they can't stop quipping about whatever other bullshit crosses their minds?

 Bull. Shit.

 That's even before looking at how you actually went about doing it. You expended the stones to wish, if I understand it correctly, fifty percent of all life, determined at random, gone. Turned to dust.
 Let's assume this 50% took place within each species. This includes animals, because that's how they figure out things are fixed in Endgame, right?

 Let's also assume this includes rock-based beings, microbes, and other life forms, because this is Marvel, and there are Korgs and I'm sure nano-lifeforms too.

 We're talking mass extinctions, multiple. Ecosystems will collapse as they suddenly find they no longer have a viable local population.

 OK, OK. Let's say that the wish somehow keeps things so that the missing 50% has an even geographical and gender distribution, and most populations can hang on after such a drop. In for a penny and all that, it's a reasonable suspension of disbelief request for a superhero movie. Let's not go completely hard sci-fi on this shit.

 Still. You got free rein to rewrite the script for reality as it happens with a collection of artifacts with poorly-defined abilities... (incidentally: face it, dude, if you had any smarts at all, no superhero would have even got close to you once you collected half of them). And yet you barely used them except in the most brute force of ways, because... damn the scripts for these movies are so fucking dumb. These fucking Russos.

 Anyhow, this is the best you could come up with. This is the masterplan it took you however many MCU movies to build up to.

 Wiping both 50% of life in the universe, and 50% of the biological resources they consume, which is bound to be the biggest part of any given lifeform's consumer footprint.

 That's not bringing balance, dumbass. You're basically keeping the same ratios; It's just an exercise in futility. 

 Still, we get that shot of you looking satisfied with your job:

Magic hour lighting, Josh Brolin, an idyllic background, and a pose that says "I'm a tough antihero who just pulled off something amazing." Nope! You're just a fucking moron and you didn't do shit.

 You fucking idiot.

 You could have played with reproduction rates to force sustainable populations. If you have a boner for murder, you could have done what you did, but have said "50% of intelligent life to be culled every x amount of time ad infinitum (Mass-Effect style)." You could have made resources self-replenishing, but I guess that wouldn't be evil. Any mix of these would have at least made your wish consistent with what  you wanted, and some of them would have worked, kinda.

 Or you could have wiped out all life, started again from scratch; you know, proper supervillain shit, not this half-assed idiocy.

 I mean, I'm not an immortal, god-level intelligence (yet!) and I thought of most of these as I was watching these fucking movies. Just saying. Not that I'm smart, I'm saying that you're dumb; I'm explaining that because I think you're dumb.

 

 But I guess any of these options would preclude a hilariously maudlin scene where Spidey slowly pops out of existence in slow motion at the most melodramatic possible moment, in the most melodramatic way possible. (I'm so glad I didn't watch this at the cinema, because that scene made me laugh out really, really loud.)

 I guess it's kind of pointless to try to get through to you, though. I mean, you did think it was a perfectly good idea to do the whole 50% genocide thing in an analog fashion before you got the stones.

 Going planet by planet, taking a force big enough to conquer entire populations and handle the ensuing genocide, killing half of everything, I guess? Let's be charitable and say you only killed sentients, though I wouldn't be surprised if there's an extra somewhere in the Infinity War blu-ray showing your troops shooting down alien bunnies and centipedes and trees on whatever planet it is they show you killing off half of the population. Or actually, it would be surprised- that'd take way more consistency and thinking than I'm willing to credit the writers of these movies with.

 If you'd been doing that for a while (and I can only imagine how long it would take to organize random mass-murder on a planetary scale, even if after a couple of planets you had evolved an efficient industry around it that would have given the Nazi higher-ups raging murderboners) - as I was saying, if you'd been doing that for a while, it'd be easy to see just how unsuccessful your plan was, just go back to one of your previous stops. See how they're repopulating.

 Just something for your science team to bring up at some point. Bet that'd be a fun meeting.

  Anyhow. You did this all by hand, went artisanal with your depopulation plans for however many worlds. What's the carbon footprint of your genocidal spree, Mr. Balance? No suspension of disbelief is ever going to make this shit even remotely work - not even in a world where space travel is cheap and instantaneous, or where people shoot lasers out of their arse because they were bitten by a rabid unicorn.

 Based on the fact you considered that a valid use of your time, your (mis-)use of the infinity stones is perfectly in-character, I guess.

 Maybe you're just a genocidal maniac who doesn't really care about the sustainability, effectiveness, or even common sense of  your plan. You're just straight up insane, and shoot any underling who questions you.

 That's actually a fun take! I'd be completely on board with that, and it would make for a fun running gag as the avengers or whatever bring it up repeatedly. Except, no, that doesn't happen. The films, and the universe within them, completely buy into your bullshit. Because... well, let's not pretend the non-Thanos elements are worth a turrd-embedded peanut in any of the Russo films. They manage to cram a whole lot of heroes together, and that's their mission accomplished - logic, sense or narrative be damned. These movies run off excel sheets, not scripts.

 Disney's banking on viewers having invested enough into these characters or the MCU itself, to find enough goodwill to overlook these things.

 And lots of these things there are, but still lots of money these movies made, and almost universally beloved they are. So... good job, I guess? God I hate this universe so much it's made me speak like Yoda.

 I once played in a D&D game (I know, I know. Neeeerd! Shut up, you comic book character) where one of the players, after being injected with poison, made the following wish: "I wish all the liquid was taken out of my body, and deposited right there (pointing to a spot by his side.)

 So, shockingly enough, yours isn't the most obviously dumb use of a wish I've ever heard. It also gets at least some points for ambition. Dumb, dumb ambition.

 But you don't fool me, Thanos. I'm not drinking the purple kool-aid. You are a fucking moron and shame on anyone that posits you as a proper - or even marginally acceptable - villain.

 It's almost as if you were just a plot necessity, a poorly made hook to hang a creaking, tangled mess of just as dumb plotlines on.

 Fuck you and the fucking stupid movies you rode in on.