Superhero films - 2015

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So, another Marvel superhero property has been rebooted after only an eight-year break. And in spite of some optimistic buzz generated from the trailers released over previous months, the critical response has been almost universally bad. Rottentomatoes.com give Fant4stic (Fantastic Four) a 9% approval rating. My favorite Youtube reviewers both give the film an F. So, is it really that bad? Are these ratings fair? In my opinion, not really.

Am I just being contrary? Possibly. But let's be clear. There were two other superhero films released earlier this year and they were both better. I simply don't find Fant4stic that bad. If I were letter-grading, I would probably give it a B-. But then, I was fine with the last two FF films from the 2000's. The Fantastic Four stories were never intended to be gritty and dark, and that may be why they are so hard to sell these days. In fact, if there was ever a film that came close to getting the Fantastic Four right, ironically, it was a film made about another superhero family - The Incredibles. But one of the important things they got right in that "other" superhero movie from a few years ago, The Avengers, was the idea that even if the world is dark and dangerous, our heroes don't have to be. A little bit more of that here, might have helped.

In our rebooted FF universe, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is a young genius, experimenting with teleportation with the help of his childhood friend, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell). They later encounter Professor Franklin Storm (Reg Cathey) and his daughter, Susan (Kate Mara), who inform them that their "teleporter" isn't crossing space, but dimensions of reality. Professor Storm brings Reed into his research program, also bringing in Storm's son, Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), and a previous protege of Storm's, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Their experiment succeeds, of course, and the energies of the extra-dimensional world alter them, as cosmic rays did in the classic version of the story.

This film spends much of its time crossing genres. What started as youth-oriented science-fiction, now crosses over to horror. The depictions of how the characters are transformed are genuinely frightening - Ben, encased in and apparently transformed into stone, Johnny, constantly on fire, Sue, phasing in and out of sight, and Reed, his body impossibly stretched and contorted out of shape. Horror gives way to political intrigue as greedy elements in Storm's company choose to exploit the young people as weapons while planning to make more. The story finally finds its way to superhero territory when Doom returns for a showdown which forces the four to band together against him.

So, while some have found the film a disappointment, I'm not really sure why. It successfully reboots the franchise with each member of the group grounded in science, warfare, or both. This version of Doctor Doom, while still not faithful to the original version, is at least much more appropriately sinister and frightening than the 2005 version, who came off more like a sleazy businessman.

As in Man of Steel, the biggest obstacle to acceptance that the film faced was the preconceptions of an audience that expected the story to be something else. This is a fairly serious re-writing of the characters and their origins. But so what? In DC Comics' Silver Age, they rebooted nearly every character and altered their backsories. Then, in 25 years, they did it again. Maybe after over 50 years, the story and the characters of the Fantastic Four really needed some fundamental changes.

A sequel was planned for the summer of 2017 and hopefully it will still be made. In this storyline of young scientists essentially made into monsters by their own experiments, I look forward to seeing where they might go with it in the future.

-JC

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Ant-Man is the kind of superhero who doesn’t get a lot of respect. “So this guy here can lift a building. This girl over there can throw lightning bolts. And . . . you can shrink down to the size of an ant. Hm.” This was even a part of a 1979 SNL skit. Garrett Morris played Ant-Man at a superhero cocktail party while the Flash and the Hulk make fun of him. (And in a nod to that skit, Garrett Morris has a cameo in the film as a cab driver.) In the comics, Ant-Man was a founding member of the Avengers. But in the films, he is only making an appearance now after their second movie. No respect. So, an Ant-Man movie is a ridiculous idea, right? Kind of like Guardians of the Galaxy? Hm. Well, just to set the record straight. Ant-Man rocks.

The story: Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is released from prison and is making a serious effort to go straight and build his relationship with his young daughter. However, difficulty getting a job and a need to catch up on unpaid child support, push him into a heist recommended to him by his still-larcenous friends – robbing the house of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). The theft winds up involving Lang with Pym, who was the creator of a shrinking technology decades past and had once worked for SHIELD. Pym recruits Lang to become the new "Ant-Man," in order to stop the people who took over Pym’s company from selling the potentially dangerous shrinking technology, that they finally managed to duplicate, to the highest bidder.

The plot isn’t overly complex or terribly original. It’s similar to the Tony Stark/Ironman stories where he is trying to keep his own weaponry from being mis-used. But what distinguishes Ant-Man are the character performances and their inter-relationships. Paul Rudd shines in his starring role. He plays Scott Lang as a believable buddy to criminals, a heartsick father missing his child, and a guy fighting to do the right thing to earn his redemption. He is convincing as a nice-guy hero who knows his past choices have been far from perfect. Michael Douglas is outstanding as Hank Pym, the scientific genius who invented the Ant-Man tech and used it to be a superhero long before the Avengers were around. He does a good job portraying a hero whose fight for right took a heavy toll on him in more ways than one. Evangeline Lilly is very good as Pym’s daughter, Hope, who clearly feels that the Ant-Man legacy should have been hers. And providing excellent comic elements, Michael Pena is pretty great as Lang’s ex-cellmate and criminal best friend, Luis.

Some people have given Corey Stoll, who plays the villain, a hard time. I don’t really think this is entirely fair. His performance suffers a bit because the others are so strong and he doesn’t get enough opportunities to play off of them. But I felt he did a good job portraying a man who felt that Pym was like an adoptive father, but who wasn’t willing to share his secrets with him. His character, Darren Cross, who becomes “Yellowjacket,” shared this feeling to a degree with Hope – the pain of a parent implying that they weren’t worthy of the mantle and how they chose to deal with that. This probably could have been developed a bit more.

The special effects and action sequences are very good. This is one of those rare films where seeing it in 3D might actually be worth the money to enhance the spectacle.

Unless you hate all science-fiction, fantasy, and adventure films, you should enjoy this movie. In other words, if you regularly read our reviews, you should enjoy this movie. Go see it . . . and sit through all of the credits.

- JC

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After a 3 year buildup and lots of waiting we finally have the second Avengers movie – Avengers: Age of Ultron. Was it worth the wait? I say yes, mainly because I’ve missed these characters on the big screen and secondly because I feel they are at their best together.

Joss Whedon returns after directing and writing the enormously successful first film, The Avengers, to attempt to create lightning in a bottle a second time. In a film little more than two hours long (I don’t really count the 10 minutes of credits for the army of people who contributed to this film) Whedon manages to craft a story about the Avengers saving the world from a villainous artificial intelligence which includes significant plotlines for a full dozen different characters and jams so many fantastic-to-watch action scenes that the whole experience scarcely gives you a moment’s pause to hazard a guess at what comes next.

The basic story: Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) had already contemplated an idea of creating an “iron legion” of peacekeeping robots to protect the world, but after some mental manipulation by the psionic Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and with the addition of the stone from Loki’s scepter, Stark and Banner manage to bring an alien AI to life in the identity of Ultron (James Spader). Ultron, originally designed with peace as its objective, sees humanity as its main impediment. He enlists the assistance of Wanda and her speedster brother Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to help wreak havoc with the Avengers while Ultron works on upgrading himself and planning mankind’s extinction.

The personal interactions between the cast members we have come to love and the incredibly realistic (even though impossible) action scenes make this film a pleasure to watch and I’m anxious to see it again. The possibility of a romance between the Hulk / Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and the Black Widow / Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) added some touching elements to the story. An unexpected back-story for Hawkeye / Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) fleshed out his character considerably. And scenes between the Avengers’ “big three” – Captain America / Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), Iron Man / Tony Stark, and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) – seemed to show them settling into their roles as the core members of the team.

Quibbles: It was a wonderful time, but I can still nitpick on a couple of things.

1. It felt rushed. With the main plot, all the character stories, and the action sequences, this could have been a 6-hour miniseries. But that’s not the genre they are in unfortunately. I couldn’t help but think about how in the Netflix Daredevil series they had 13 hours to show the rise of Daredevil and his friends and the fall of the Kingpin. Daredevil didn’t really need that many hours, but the Avengers could have used a few more.

2. OK, I am going to say what I haven’t heard anyone else say – I didn’t like James Spader as Ultron. I know some actors are in or out of vogue and Spader’s star is high now, but that doesn’t mean he automatically gets a pass on every role no matter how he plays it. Though I can’t really blame Spader. “Snarky” is what he does. But a snarky Ultron makes zero sense. Cool malevolence would have been better in my opinion. Benedict Cumberbatch would have been good if he hadn’t already been tapped for Doctor Strange. Christopher Waltz would have been an excellent choice, but really there are so many.

But the quibbles aren’t that important. It was wonderful seeing how the lives of the Avengers had progressed, seeing them in action, and getting some more hints about the over-arching threat of the Infinity Stones. Bring on phase 3.

- JC

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