(SPOILER ALERT)
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I'm not a professional film reviewer, and so I don't really have to go by any of their rules or criteria when it comes to reviewing movies, and unlike them I tend to be generous with my ratings with movies that I like. That said, even I know that giving a movie an 11 out of 10 is a bit much, but in the case of Avengers: Endgame, for all of its quirks and flaws, I really could do no differently. I realize I don't really need to explain why I enjoyed this movie as much as I did, as its review aggregate score of rottentomatoes is insanely high and it looks like the entire world is about to embrace it, but I'd like to share just some of the reasons, eleven to be specific, on account of my higher-than-perfect score of 11, for why this movie is the most satisfying movie I have EVER seen, in over three and a half decades of watching movies. So, in ascending order, here they are...
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(Again, SPOILER ALERT)
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11. BRAINY HULK - In my review of the film I made prominent mention of the fact that one of the things that really makes this film work is the filmmakers' clear love for the fans, and a sterling example of this is "smart" Hulk, or the result of Bruce Banner basically embracing his big green "other." While casual fans who know Hulk to be stupid will scratch their heads, fans who have invested in these movies, and especially those who have read Peter David's Hulk comics will nod knowingly and gratefully as this iteration of the character, a staple for much of the 1990s, finally makes it to big screen, and for good reason within the context of the story; while smart Hulk never throws so much as a punch in the whole movie, it's his strength that saves the day as he undoes Thanos' snap with one of his own, and gives some serious foreshadowing as to what can happen to anyone without his power levels who tries to use the Infinity Stones.
10. SCHLUBBY THOR - Here, as it was in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the concept of a well-known superhero who's let himself go and picked up a pot belly is played for laughs, and quite effectively at that, but Thor's increased girth, which, to my gratification, doesn't magically go away when he suits up for the big final fight, is quite effective in helping convey his despair and self-loathing following the events of Infinity War. It also makes him even easier to relate to for those of us who don't adhere to next-to-no-carb diets or spend all of our free time at the gym. Finally, it helps him personify the effect of losing one's purpose in life, and it makes his crucial encounter with another character that I'll describe elsewhere on the list even more meaningful.
9. FULL-ON BAD GUY THANOS - I've read quite a few glowing reviews by now, most of which I agree with, but I've noticed that even the most effusive praise has been, to my mind at least, oddly silent about the very reason why this movie is even happening: Josh Brolin's Thanos, the Mad Titan. Sure, there was much talk of him in the reviews for Infinity War given that he was essentially the movie's main character, but nowadays he's pretty much taken a backseat to discussions about how the original six Avengers, and in particular the core two, Iron Man and Captain America, are the heart and soul of this film, which they of course are. The thing is, though, it is an utter pleasure to watch this particular Thanos, who hails from earlier in the MCU timeline, because he is basically unburdened with the sacrifices and losses that his future self, the one who did the nefarious deed in Infinity War, had to endure to achieve his goal. This iteration of Thanos is a full-on villain, a smug, entitled asshole, who intends to snatch the Infinity Stones away from the Avengers, who basically put in all the work of finding them in this movie, unlike his other self who went through a lot more effort and heartache. Both the script and Brolin quite effectively convey that this is a different, more malevolent Thanos we're seeing, one quite different from the weary, grieving Thanos in the last film, and watching his defeat at the end is that much more satisfying for their efforts.
8. PAYOFFS AND CALLBACKS GALORE - To keep this list down to 11 I had to trim a lot of stuff out, but suffice it to say I think it's about right to at least give a category to the numerous callbacks to not only the last movie but a generous selection from the Marvel Cinematic Universe's 21-film catalog. It's not just some "greatest hits" regurgitation but an inventive revisiting of key moments from earlier films. When Captain America, for example, steps into an elevator with a bunch of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents whom he knows to be HYDRA agents because of future events which, at that point, haven't even happened yet, I'm certain many people in the audience were expecting a recreation of Cap's iconic elevator slugfest from Captain America: Winter Soldier, but what we got instead was even better as Cap yet again showed the brains that makes him such a fitting leader for the Avengers, and gave us a good laugh in the bargain, all with two simple words: "Hail HYDRA." There are many others, like when Black Panther addresses Clint by name, harking back to their first encounter in Captain America: Civil War, or Cap calling Spider-Man "Queens," or Spider-Man finally getting to use his suit's "instant-kill" setting, and many, many others besides, but Cap in the elevator was what really stood out for me.
7. FATHER AND SON - Since Iron Man's entire saga has hinged largely on his issues with his father, it was only fitting that the time travel story device would give him one more encounter with his dad, and this was really one of the stronger moments of the film, hugely important because it really helps bring Tony's journey to its end as he is finally relieved, in a way, of one of the heaviest burdens he has borne all throughout the Infinity Saga. It's a moment played to subtle perfection by both Downey, Jr. and an amazingly-retouched John Slattery who, along with Michael Douglas (looking like he walked straight out of The Streets of San Francisco) and the late, great Stan Lee showcase just how far de-aging computer generated imagery has come since the awkward airbrushing days of X-Men: The Last Stand. More than fancy graphics, though, what really sells the moment is some very nicely-nuanced writing and some really fantastic acting from both the men playing Starks.
6. MOTHER AND SON - This one came as a bit more of a surprise than the Stark reunion, given that all throughout her character Frigga's life in the Thor franchise, Rene Russo has had relatively little to do. In the first movie, she was little more than Odin's trophy wife, and in the second movie, well, her main purpose in the story was to die, if I'm honest, so I think it was really nice of the Russo brothers to not only give her one last go at the character but to give her easily her most meaningful moment in the whole of the MCU; she gets to be there for Thor when he absolutely needs her the most. Their family dynamic was a sorely neglected one; Thor's had more than enough interaction with his father, step-brother and long-lost sister, and so it was past time he had an emotionally affecting moment with his mother. It was undercut ever so slightly by gags about Thor's girth and his strange new eye, but it still worked quite well. It's fairly high up on the list because if I'm honest, unlike the Stark moment, I wasn't expecting it at all. Rather, I was expecting him to meet up with Natalie Portman's Jane Foster again. This, I think, was a much better idea.
5. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE - This was one of two moments teased by Joss Whedon in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and which the Russos complete with utter pizzazz. The build-up to the moment Cap utters this signature phrase is considerable; the full force of the "undusted" heroes show up just as all is looking lost for Cap and the other stricken Avengers, with yet another callback as Anthony Mackie's Falcon chuckles "On Your Left" into Cap's earpiece, recalling the very first words Cap actually said to Falcon in The Winter Soldier. It would be higher up on the list, but for two reasons: it followed a bit too closely the pattern of Thor's Wakanda entry in Avengers: Infinity War, and the fact that it had only just been preceded by an even more incredible moment which will show up later on this list.
4. WIDOW'S SACRIFICE - Black Widow's death was one of the two deaths of this film about which so many people (including myself) were so certain that when news of her solo movie was finally confirmed, it was a foregone conclusion that the film would be a prequel. The good news is that her death, while foreshadowed quite early in the film, is about as redemptive and noble as an onscreen death can get, and it's interesting how the Russos basically recreate the scene in which Thanos murders Gamora, right down to the music score, in order perhaps to highlight the contrast between Gamora's unwillingness to die for Thanos, and Hawkeye's and Black Widow's determination to sacrifice themselves even if it means fighting each other for that opportunity. Neither of them having a solo film, they're about equal in terms of how developed their characters are, but whereas Hawkeye has a family who needs him, it was established sometime ago that Nat's only family is the Avengers, and it's quite poignant that she gets to make the supreme sacrifice for them here.
3. TONY'S SNAP - This is the moment that's been foreseen by so many people for the last three or four years that it's been discussed in everything from blog posts to youtube videos to memes. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE knew Tony Stark was going to die, and judging by the screams of audience members in the movie theater when Thanos stabbed Tony with his own weapon in Avengers: Infinity War some people thought it might happen as early as that film. As heart-wrenching and widely predicted as his death might have been, however, the Russos gave him a note-perfect moment of sacrifice that recalls his willingness to lay down his life for everyone as he did in the very first Avengers movie. By the time he makes his snap that completely annihilates Thanos and his army, he's seen what it's done to Bruce and almost certainly knows what will happen to him, but he knows exactly what he has to do. It is actually a nice touch that he pauses before uttering his iconic "I am Iron Man;" there may be a number of ways to interpret this, like dramatic effect, but my take is that he hesitates for the briefest of moments because he knows he will die, something that feels a lot more difficult now that he has a wife and daughter, something he didn't have to worry about in the first film, and that makes his momentous decision all the more moving. Iron Man is the heart of the MCU, and it is only fitting that he, and no one else, got to deliver the crushing death blow on Thanos and his evil aspirations.
2. CAP RETIRES - It may seem strange that I rank this over Tony's snap but the truth is that it's high on this list because I honestly didn't expect it. At one point, when whispers of time travel in the plot were first circulating online, it occurred to me that maybe Cap could retire with Peggy Carter somehow, but I never thought to call it because I didn't think Marvel would actually do it. I honestly thought that Cap, being a tragic figure, would die along with Black Widow and Iron Man. I was genuinely moved by Cap's brief interaction with the aged Peggy in The Winter Soldier and even more so by her funeral scene in Civil War, which Chris Evans absolutely nailed with some wonderfully understated acting. Looking back this was all now clearly foreshadowing of where the Russos wanted to take Cap, but I just figured it was a way of establishing that he really had nothing left. I was, therefore very pleasantly surprised that they took this route with Cap, and while at least one reviewer I've read finds Cap's decision to be selfish, I'll have to respectfully disagree as I think that, having saved the world more than once, Cap is definitely entitled to his happy ending, and I am glad that Marvel not only gave him one, but made it the film's ending as well. Nice touch.
1. CAP WIELDS MJOLNIR - This is the second moment that Whedon teased in Avengers: Age of Ultron which the Russos paid off handsomely. If Avengers: Endgame ends up grossing a billion dollars over the weekend, I humbly submit that THIS is one of the main reasons it'll happen. It is a visceral, cheer-out-loud moment that happens at exactly the right time, and in exactly the right way. This is the kind of narrative punch that J.J. Abrams was going for without having really earned it when he had Rey force-grab the lightsaber back in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Here, thanks to the Russos, Chris Markus and Stephen McFeely, Joe Johnston and Joss Whedon, Captain America has absolutely earned this moment. No, it's not the climax, and Cap obviously doesn't defeat Thanos with Mjolnir, but for me, this moment was the absolute highlight of the movie, and has officially displaced Thor's arrival in Wakanda as my single favorite moment in cinema history.
There are many, many other things that rang absolutely true with me about this movie, despite the obvious issues with time travel, but these, for me, are the best highlights. This movie is at the top of my list of all-time greats.
Friday, April 26, 2019
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Culmination: A Review of Avengers: Endgame (SPOILER FREE)
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo
written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
Eleven years and twenty-one films after a fledgling studio took out a half a billion dollar loan and a chance on some of its lesser known characters, audiences all around the world will be treated to the astonishing, utterly satisfying conclusion of what has quite arguably been the most sprawling, extraordinary ongoing cinematic saga of all time. Yes, that sounds like a lot of hyperbole to start off a film review, and were it any other movie but Avengers: Endgame I would almost certainly balk at such language, but this movie just hit all the right buttons for me, every single one.
After the events of Avengers: Infinity War, specifically the snap of the fingers by the Infinity-Stone wielding madman Thanos (Josh Brolin) which has decimated exactly half the population of the universe, the Earth has been left reeling. Although a handful of the original Avengers, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor/uhm...Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) joined by James Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) almost immediately try to put things right, it's not all that simple, and for a while, people have to simply come to terms with what has happened.
Then, five years later, something happens, and for the first time in a long time, the Avengers may just have the chance to save the world. All the Avengers have to do now is bring back Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Clint Barton/Hawkeye, and go someplace they've never gone before.
It's hard to go into detail about why this film rings true to me without flirting with spoilers of one kind or another. This movie is just packed to the gills with treats and surprises for fans that need to be experienced cold, without any expectations. Before I attempt to navigate the challenging territory of the completely spoiler-free review, I can put down to exactly one word the reason why this movie works as well as it does for nearly the entirety of its mammoth three-hour runtime: love. Love is the bedrock on which this film is built, love for this universe and the characters that inhabit it, love for the stories (for better or worse) that have led to this point, and love for the audiences all over the world that have made the Marvel Cinematic Universe the single most lucrative film franchise in history. This movie is not, as one arrogant, anonymous Oscar voter crassly described Infinity War when asked about its chances for winning the Best Visual Effects Oscar earlier this year, a "cash grab," but a loving ode to over a decade of meticulously interwoven narrative and the people who have diligently followed it.
Underlying it all is a solid story full of real affection for these characters, specifically Captain America, Black Widow and of course Iron Man. It was gratifying to see Cap and Widow get much more screen time here than they did in Infinity War, and to see the follow-up on Thor's story that the last film kicked off quite well. This movie belongs very much to the six OG Avengers. Strikingly enough, the big action set pieces work because there's an astonishing amount of character work going on here; the story involves revisiting various points of the MCU's decade-long history, and it's not spoiling anything to say that one MCU actor in particular gets more meaningful dialogue than she's ever had in any prior MCU movie. In short, it's the quieter moments, the moments of conversation between the lead characters and people they care deeply about, that give the final, slambang action sequence real weight and consequence. Of course, none of it would work if the actors playing the scenes didn't bring their "A" game but they did.
It helps, of course, that everyone else who worked on this film, from composer Alan Silvestri, cinematographer Trent Opaloch, editors Jeffrey Ford and Matthew Schmidt, as well as the rest of the cast and crew, especially the army of visual effects artists from no less than four different outfits brought their absolute best to this momentous closing chapter as well.
So forceful is the narrative that the Russos, their writers, their cast and their crew have crafted that even when the inevitable questions about the implications of time travel arise (which the writers try to preemptively dismiss by explaining "time travel doesn't work that way") it's the easiest thing to dismiss them, as it was with classics like the first two Terminator movies or the Back to the Future trilogy (both of which, incidentally, are explicitly mentioned). This movie is just too good a ride to allow us to get bogged down in the details.
Given the scale of the story to be told, it was inevitable that a number of characters would get short shrift, and so as to avoid spoilers, suffice it to say that there was one such character in particular whose reduced participation would have disappointed me had the movie not been the masterpiece that it is.
After being disappointed somewhat by Captain Marvel I was really overjoyed to have my socks blown off by Endgame. I think it's fair to say that, my love for this film notwithstanding, it is NOT for the uninitiated; there are FAR too many references and callbacks to films in the MCU's 21-film catalog for this film to make anything vaguely resembling sense to anyone who has not seen at least the three Avengers movies. For those of us who walked in fully invested, the payoff was everything we could ever have hoped for...and then some.
11/10
written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
Eleven years and twenty-one films after a fledgling studio took out a half a billion dollar loan and a chance on some of its lesser known characters, audiences all around the world will be treated to the astonishing, utterly satisfying conclusion of what has quite arguably been the most sprawling, extraordinary ongoing cinematic saga of all time. Yes, that sounds like a lot of hyperbole to start off a film review, and were it any other movie but Avengers: Endgame I would almost certainly balk at such language, but this movie just hit all the right buttons for me, every single one.
After the events of Avengers: Infinity War, specifically the snap of the fingers by the Infinity-Stone wielding madman Thanos (Josh Brolin) which has decimated exactly half the population of the universe, the Earth has been left reeling. Although a handful of the original Avengers, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor/uhm...Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) joined by James Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) almost immediately try to put things right, it's not all that simple, and for a while, people have to simply come to terms with what has happened.
Then, five years later, something happens, and for the first time in a long time, the Avengers may just have the chance to save the world. All the Avengers have to do now is bring back Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Clint Barton/Hawkeye, and go someplace they've never gone before.
It's hard to go into detail about why this film rings true to me without flirting with spoilers of one kind or another. This movie is just packed to the gills with treats and surprises for fans that need to be experienced cold, without any expectations. Before I attempt to navigate the challenging territory of the completely spoiler-free review, I can put down to exactly one word the reason why this movie works as well as it does for nearly the entirety of its mammoth three-hour runtime: love. Love is the bedrock on which this film is built, love for this universe and the characters that inhabit it, love for the stories (for better or worse) that have led to this point, and love for the audiences all over the world that have made the Marvel Cinematic Universe the single most lucrative film franchise in history. This movie is not, as one arrogant, anonymous Oscar voter crassly described Infinity War when asked about its chances for winning the Best Visual Effects Oscar earlier this year, a "cash grab," but a loving ode to over a decade of meticulously interwoven narrative and the people who have diligently followed it.
Underlying it all is a solid story full of real affection for these characters, specifically Captain America, Black Widow and of course Iron Man. It was gratifying to see Cap and Widow get much more screen time here than they did in Infinity War, and to see the follow-up on Thor's story that the last film kicked off quite well. This movie belongs very much to the six OG Avengers. Strikingly enough, the big action set pieces work because there's an astonishing amount of character work going on here; the story involves revisiting various points of the MCU's decade-long history, and it's not spoiling anything to say that one MCU actor in particular gets more meaningful dialogue than she's ever had in any prior MCU movie. In short, it's the quieter moments, the moments of conversation between the lead characters and people they care deeply about, that give the final, slambang action sequence real weight and consequence. Of course, none of it would work if the actors playing the scenes didn't bring their "A" game but they did.
It helps, of course, that everyone else who worked on this film, from composer Alan Silvestri, cinematographer Trent Opaloch, editors Jeffrey Ford and Matthew Schmidt, as well as the rest of the cast and crew, especially the army of visual effects artists from no less than four different outfits brought their absolute best to this momentous closing chapter as well.
So forceful is the narrative that the Russos, their writers, their cast and their crew have crafted that even when the inevitable questions about the implications of time travel arise (which the writers try to preemptively dismiss by explaining "time travel doesn't work that way") it's the easiest thing to dismiss them, as it was with classics like the first two Terminator movies or the Back to the Future trilogy (both of which, incidentally, are explicitly mentioned). This movie is just too good a ride to allow us to get bogged down in the details.
Given the scale of the story to be told, it was inevitable that a number of characters would get short shrift, and so as to avoid spoilers, suffice it to say that there was one such character in particular whose reduced participation would have disappointed me had the movie not been the masterpiece that it is.
After being disappointed somewhat by Captain Marvel I was really overjoyed to have my socks blown off by Endgame. I think it's fair to say that, my love for this film notwithstanding, it is NOT for the uninitiated; there are FAR too many references and callbacks to films in the MCU's 21-film catalog for this film to make anything vaguely resembling sense to anyone who has not seen at least the three Avengers movies. For those of us who walked in fully invested, the payoff was everything we could ever have hoped for...and then some.
11/10
Saturday, April 20, 2019
Undeserved/Underserved: A Tale of Two Captain Marvels
Having been a Marvel fan for over three-fourths of my existence on this Earth, I can admit to sometimes being as loud and obnoxious as some of the worst of them. After all, I've lived long enough to have actually seen on Betmax, some of the earliest Marvel movies, like disastrous Howard the Duck, as well as the direct-to-video debacles that were 1989's Punisher and 1990's Captain America. I'm old enough to have felt agony seeing Batman movie after Batman movie getting made, while Spider-Man languished in development hell. In short, these days, in which we are virtually guaranteed that every year at least two quality movies based on Marvel Comics characters are released, are the days for which I, and many, many others like me have yearned for decades, and I'll be damned if I don't enjoy them while they're here.
In this context, when I learned that movies based on Marvel's Captain Marvel and DC's Shazam (who used to be called Captain Marvel) would be released within a month of each other, as a die-hard Marvel fan, I knew which movie I would be rooting for when they came out. At least, that's what I thought at the time. Personally, I'd wanted to see a movie featuring Carol Danvers some time ago.
Flash forward to a few years later and I find myself scratching my head, having seen both Captain Marvel and Shazam and having enjoyed the latter much more than the former. I suppose it was bound to happen; having been consistently enamored of Marvel movies for the last few years, it was inevitable that one of their films would fail to click with me. Conversely, given that Warner Brothers and DC have been aggressively retooling their approach to adapting their properties in the wake of the failure of Zack Snyder's ultra-dark approach to set the box office on fire, there was a fair chance that I would like the light-hearted Shazam.
Looking past what I thought of the two movies, though, there was something I observed about their respective performances at the box office that got me thinking: How did Captain Marvel, with its lukewarm reviews (78% on rottentomatoes.com, with an average score of 6.77/10), and its alleged army of haters, manage to gross over a billion dollars at the global box office, while Shazam, with its glowing reviews (90% on RT, average score of 7.3/10) and the love of "everyone" will be lucky to finish with even half of that? The answer I came up with is hardly scientific, but I wouldn't be surprised if data bore it out, and it's that Captain Marvel has tapped into an audience that has been starved for movies in the last ten years of the current cinematic superhero hegemony.
Since 2011, there have been an average of three or four comic-book based movies in a year, most of them based on characters from Marvel Comics. Spider-man has gone from being stuck in development hell to having eight movies in the last eighteen years. My cup ran over quite some time ago, if I'm honest, and the Marvel geek from the 80s who wept in frustration has been satisfied many times over. With all these movies, however, it was inevitable that a pattern emerged; their lead characters were almost exclusively white and male.
This wasn't an issue when these movies first started breaking out and we fans were just overjoyed to see them, but with each box office hit that came and went there was a part of me that wondered when we'd start to see prominent Avengers characters like Black Panther, the Wasp and Captain Marvel, to name a few. That was just me as a casual fan; I wasn't one of the black Marvel fans who wondered where Black Panther was, or the female fans who wondered where Captain Marvel was.
As it turns out, there were quite a few people who wanted to see the beloved Marvel brand do a black superhero, as Black Panther proved to the tune of 1.3 billion dollars at the global box office last year. One might argue that it was the quality of that film, that garnered critical acclaim and three Oscars, which put fannies in the seats, but then one now has to add Captain Marvel to that conversation, a movie that nobody is tipping for Oscar glory and which has conclusively debunked the years-old myth pushed by bitter DC fans that film critics are on Disney's payroll, given that the reviews have been lukewarm at best. Whatever I may have thought of Black Panther and Captain Marvel (loved the former, didn't much care for the latter), what mattered was that they served audiences that had been neglected for years, in the same way that the first Spider-man movie did for Spidey fans back in 2002. I reckon that the people who have propelled Captain Marvel to over a billion dollars in global grosses are audiences starved for content, the ones who made Jennifer Lawrence's (mostly mediocre) Hunger Games movies a nearly Three Billion Dollar global box office phenomenon, and who powered Wonder Woman to $821 million in 2017. My pet theory is that Captain Marvel's success is only vaguely related to its quality, as subjective as that may be. I can think of at least three, possibly five movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe that are quite arguably better than Captain Marvel when measured up by objective criteria like story cohesiveness, but which grossed far less than its 1 billion global take. None of these movies, however, were any sort of significant departure from MCU's usual fare.
Viewed from that lens, Shazam doesn't have much to set it apart from the plethora of superhero movies we've had in the last decade or so, with its Caucasian protagonist, cookie-cutter villain and fairly standard storytelling, right down to the generic CGI. Sure, it's entertaining, but the stakes aren't particularly high, and it isn't anything that hasn't already been done before; the die-hards and a few casuals have come out in force (it'll probably manage half a billion when all is said and done) but that's about it.
Superhero fatigue isn't quite a thing yet, but given enough repetition, people are more likely to see something they haven't seen yet than something that they have. Consider that, as good as last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was, audiences almost gave it a pass until they realized that it wasn't just another Spider-Man movie.
Whatever I or anyone else may think, therefore, about the quality of Captain Marvel, it remains an important movie because it underscores just how potent underserved audiences can be. In fact, if it can actually be argued that the movie is objectively mediocre, it becomes even more important as a cultural touchstone of sorts because it shows that this particular audience segment is so starved for strong female lead characters that they'll embrace any movie that features them, even mediocre ones, or for that matter, terrible ones (coughcoughAlitaBattleAngelcoughcough). They deserve characters like Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs or Ellen Ripley from Aliens or even Mattie Ross from the 2010 remake of True Grit, and given that superhero movies are basically the most commonly-consumed cinematic staple today, audiences should be able to find their capable female/person of color hero in these movies. Notably, though, the Hunger Games movies demonstrated diminishing returns as did the new Star Wars films, and it's not too much to speculate that future Marvel movies that just coast on their brand name will be similarly afflicted.
While it is just about set in stone that we'll get sequels to Black Panther and Captain Marvel, I sincerely hope Marvel took notes from the legitimate complaints that were raised about both movies (e.g. bad CGI in Black Panther, bad writing in Captain Marvel) and come up with sequels that can stand among their best work like Captain America: The Winter Soldier or the first Avengers movie. Also, given that Marvel's next avowed goal is to bring LGBTQ+ characters into the spotlight with The Eternals, they might want to consider focusing on crafting a strong story before highlighting the sexual orientation/gender/race of any given character. That way, they won't have to ride off the massive reservoir of audience goodwill they've accumulated over the last decade, and will be able to keep the hits coming for decades to come.
In this context, when I learned that movies based on Marvel's Captain Marvel and DC's Shazam (who used to be called Captain Marvel) would be released within a month of each other, as a die-hard Marvel fan, I knew which movie I would be rooting for when they came out. At least, that's what I thought at the time. Personally, I'd wanted to see a movie featuring Carol Danvers some time ago.
Flash forward to a few years later and I find myself scratching my head, having seen both Captain Marvel and Shazam and having enjoyed the latter much more than the former. I suppose it was bound to happen; having been consistently enamored of Marvel movies for the last few years, it was inevitable that one of their films would fail to click with me. Conversely, given that Warner Brothers and DC have been aggressively retooling their approach to adapting their properties in the wake of the failure of Zack Snyder's ultra-dark approach to set the box office on fire, there was a fair chance that I would like the light-hearted Shazam.
Looking past what I thought of the two movies, though, there was something I observed about their respective performances at the box office that got me thinking: How did Captain Marvel, with its lukewarm reviews (78% on rottentomatoes.com, with an average score of 6.77/10), and its alleged army of haters, manage to gross over a billion dollars at the global box office, while Shazam, with its glowing reviews (90% on RT, average score of 7.3/10) and the love of "everyone" will be lucky to finish with even half of that? The answer I came up with is hardly scientific, but I wouldn't be surprised if data bore it out, and it's that Captain Marvel has tapped into an audience that has been starved for movies in the last ten years of the current cinematic superhero hegemony.
Since 2011, there have been an average of three or four comic-book based movies in a year, most of them based on characters from Marvel Comics. Spider-man has gone from being stuck in development hell to having eight movies in the last eighteen years. My cup ran over quite some time ago, if I'm honest, and the Marvel geek from the 80s who wept in frustration has been satisfied many times over. With all these movies, however, it was inevitable that a pattern emerged; their lead characters were almost exclusively white and male.
This wasn't an issue when these movies first started breaking out and we fans were just overjoyed to see them, but with each box office hit that came and went there was a part of me that wondered when we'd start to see prominent Avengers characters like Black Panther, the Wasp and Captain Marvel, to name a few. That was just me as a casual fan; I wasn't one of the black Marvel fans who wondered where Black Panther was, or the female fans who wondered where Captain Marvel was.
As it turns out, there were quite a few people who wanted to see the beloved Marvel brand do a black superhero, as Black Panther proved to the tune of 1.3 billion dollars at the global box office last year. One might argue that it was the quality of that film, that garnered critical acclaim and three Oscars, which put fannies in the seats, but then one now has to add Captain Marvel to that conversation, a movie that nobody is tipping for Oscar glory and which has conclusively debunked the years-old myth pushed by bitter DC fans that film critics are on Disney's payroll, given that the reviews have been lukewarm at best. Whatever I may have thought of Black Panther and Captain Marvel (loved the former, didn't much care for the latter), what mattered was that they served audiences that had been neglected for years, in the same way that the first Spider-man movie did for Spidey fans back in 2002. I reckon that the people who have propelled Captain Marvel to over a billion dollars in global grosses are audiences starved for content, the ones who made Jennifer Lawrence's (mostly mediocre) Hunger Games movies a nearly Three Billion Dollar global box office phenomenon, and who powered Wonder Woman to $821 million in 2017. My pet theory is that Captain Marvel's success is only vaguely related to its quality, as subjective as that may be. I can think of at least three, possibly five movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe that are quite arguably better than Captain Marvel when measured up by objective criteria like story cohesiveness, but which grossed far less than its 1 billion global take. None of these movies, however, were any sort of significant departure from MCU's usual fare.
Viewed from that lens, Shazam doesn't have much to set it apart from the plethora of superhero movies we've had in the last decade or so, with its Caucasian protagonist, cookie-cutter villain and fairly standard storytelling, right down to the generic CGI. Sure, it's entertaining, but the stakes aren't particularly high, and it isn't anything that hasn't already been done before; the die-hards and a few casuals have come out in force (it'll probably manage half a billion when all is said and done) but that's about it.
Superhero fatigue isn't quite a thing yet, but given enough repetition, people are more likely to see something they haven't seen yet than something that they have. Consider that, as good as last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was, audiences almost gave it a pass until they realized that it wasn't just another Spider-Man movie.
Whatever I or anyone else may think, therefore, about the quality of Captain Marvel, it remains an important movie because it underscores just how potent underserved audiences can be. In fact, if it can actually be argued that the movie is objectively mediocre, it becomes even more important as a cultural touchstone of sorts because it shows that this particular audience segment is so starved for strong female lead characters that they'll embrace any movie that features them, even mediocre ones, or for that matter, terrible ones (coughcoughAlitaBattleAngelcoughcough). They deserve characters like Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs or Ellen Ripley from Aliens or even Mattie Ross from the 2010 remake of True Grit, and given that superhero movies are basically the most commonly-consumed cinematic staple today, audiences should be able to find their capable female/person of color hero in these movies. Notably, though, the Hunger Games movies demonstrated diminishing returns as did the new Star Wars films, and it's not too much to speculate that future Marvel movies that just coast on their brand name will be similarly afflicted.
While it is just about set in stone that we'll get sequels to Black Panther and Captain Marvel, I sincerely hope Marvel took notes from the legitimate complaints that were raised about both movies (e.g. bad CGI in Black Panther, bad writing in Captain Marvel) and come up with sequels that can stand among their best work like Captain America: The Winter Soldier or the first Avengers movie. Also, given that Marvel's next avowed goal is to bring LGBTQ+ characters into the spotlight with The Eternals, they might want to consider focusing on crafting a strong story before highlighting the sexual orientation/gender/race of any given character. That way, they won't have to ride off the massive reservoir of audience goodwill they've accumulated over the last decade, and will be able to keep the hits coming for decades to come.
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
A Bit Infirm: A Review of Five Feet Apart
directed by Justin Baldoni
written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis
When The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance film about cancer patients, made a mint at the box-office some years ago, I suppose it was inevitable that someone else would dip into the well of life-threatening-illness-as-a-backdrop-for-romance before very long, and sure enough, five years later, we now have Five Feet Apart, a movie that swaps out Cystic Fibrosis for cancer, replaces one gangly towering matinee idol (Ansel Elgort) with another (Cole Sprouse), and finally replaces one up-and-coming ingenue (Shailene Woodley) with another (Haley Lu Richardson).
Five Feet Apart is the story of cystic fibrosis patients Stella Grant (Richardson) and Will Newman (Sprouse), who meet while receiving treatment at St. Grace's Hospital. Stella, who follows her treatment regimen religiously, has, by her own admission, control issues, and when she sees Will being somewhat lackadaisical about his own treatment it triggers her. After a lot of banter and semi-hostile exchanges, Stella convinces Will, who is suffering from a much rarer strain of CF that makes him ineligible for a lung transplant (unlike Stella) and requires experimental treatment, to take his regimen more seriously and to take his meds at the same time she takes hers. Inevitably, as they get to know one another, they fall for one another, but because CF patients cannot come within six feet of each other, a rule constantly enforced by the nurse in charge Barbara (Kimberly Gregory), they cannot so much as touch one another. Having lost much in her life, Stella, frustrated by these setbacks decides to rebel in her own little way: she declares that instead of staying six feet apart at all times they are near each other, Will and she will, instead, stay five feet apart, hence the movie's title.
It had been a while since I'd seen a young adult romance film prior to this; the last one I saw, coincidentally, also had a distance-themed title ("The Space Between Us") and fortunately, while this was was, like that film, similarly riddled with narrative tropes dating back to the 80s and probably even before then, it manages to be slightly more coherent as narrative.
As with most movies like this, the film stands or falls on the chemistry of its lead actors, and while their leaden dialogue is weighed down by the obvious prime directive of the plot (i.e. they have to fall in love) Richardson (vaguely resembling Keira Knightley in her youth) and Sprouse manage to strike up a fair bit of sparks in a few scenes. There is something off, though, about how glamorously healthy their faces look considering that their characters are both supposed to be quite ill.
Anyway, for all the cliches the filmmakers indulged in throughout this film, some of which made the movie quite predictable, it was gracious enough to eschew some of the more egregious tropes in movies about grave illness. I don't enthusiastically recommend the movie, but fans of this genre might find something to like here.
6/10
written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis
When The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance film about cancer patients, made a mint at the box-office some years ago, I suppose it was inevitable that someone else would dip into the well of life-threatening-illness-as-a-backdrop-for-romance before very long, and sure enough, five years later, we now have Five Feet Apart, a movie that swaps out Cystic Fibrosis for cancer, replaces one gangly towering matinee idol (Ansel Elgort) with another (Cole Sprouse), and finally replaces one up-and-coming ingenue (Shailene Woodley) with another (Haley Lu Richardson).
Five Feet Apart is the story of cystic fibrosis patients Stella Grant (Richardson) and Will Newman (Sprouse), who meet while receiving treatment at St. Grace's Hospital. Stella, who follows her treatment regimen religiously, has, by her own admission, control issues, and when she sees Will being somewhat lackadaisical about his own treatment it triggers her. After a lot of banter and semi-hostile exchanges, Stella convinces Will, who is suffering from a much rarer strain of CF that makes him ineligible for a lung transplant (unlike Stella) and requires experimental treatment, to take his regimen more seriously and to take his meds at the same time she takes hers. Inevitably, as they get to know one another, they fall for one another, but because CF patients cannot come within six feet of each other, a rule constantly enforced by the nurse in charge Barbara (Kimberly Gregory), they cannot so much as touch one another. Having lost much in her life, Stella, frustrated by these setbacks decides to rebel in her own little way: she declares that instead of staying six feet apart at all times they are near each other, Will and she will, instead, stay five feet apart, hence the movie's title.
It had been a while since I'd seen a young adult romance film prior to this; the last one I saw, coincidentally, also had a distance-themed title ("The Space Between Us") and fortunately, while this was was, like that film, similarly riddled with narrative tropes dating back to the 80s and probably even before then, it manages to be slightly more coherent as narrative.
As with most movies like this, the film stands or falls on the chemistry of its lead actors, and while their leaden dialogue is weighed down by the obvious prime directive of the plot (i.e. they have to fall in love) Richardson (vaguely resembling Keira Knightley in her youth) and Sprouse manage to strike up a fair bit of sparks in a few scenes. There is something off, though, about how glamorously healthy their faces look considering that their characters are both supposed to be quite ill.
Anyway, for all the cliches the filmmakers indulged in throughout this film, some of which made the movie quite predictable, it was gracious enough to eschew some of the more egregious tropes in movies about grave illness. I don't enthusiastically recommend the movie, but fans of this genre might find something to like here.
6/10
Thursday, April 11, 2019
It's a Kind of Magic: A Review of Shazam!
directed by David F. Sandberg
written by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke
Around this time last year, when the lights came on after Avengers: Infinity War, my daughter told me that she had observed a little boy of around eight or nine years crying into his dad's shoulder, presumably because one of his favorite heroes had turned to dust (I'm betting it was Spider-Man). Being the 40-plus-year-old man-child who's been reading comics for the better part of three decades, of course I had a laugh, knowing that most of the "deaths" in Infinity War probably have all the permanence of the tide, as did both of my older, more comics-savvy kids. Thinking about it afterwards, though, I came to realize how a great many of these comic-book based movies nowadays really aren't for kids anymore, or at least, not primarily for kids but rather for that coveted late-teens to mid-thirties segment of the market (more colloquially known as men-children) that make enough money to watch movies over and over again.
It was a long-running debate among one segment of fandom, for example, that Marvel movies are for kids while DC movies are for adults, a notion inspired in part by Christopher Nolan's decidedly dark, noir-inspired take on the Batman movies and Zack Snyder's poor attempt to channel that vibe into his own take on the Superman mythos and the eventual DC Extended Universe. I could go on as to why the proponents of that argument are wrong (and maybe I will, someday) but in truth, it's all become moot and academic now since the executives at Warner Brothers, the parent company of DC have apparently gone and said, "what the hell, let's just eighty-six all that dark crap and make movies that are more kid-friendly."
The drastic shift in overall tone of DC movies from "dark" to "light" started as early as last year's colorful adventure Aquaman, and arguably even 2017's Justice League but while the latter was basically a sloppy retrofit mandated by studio execs who basically wanted their year-end bonus, Aquaman was a from-the-ground-up change in approach to the way Warner Brothers made superhero movies and an effective abandonment of Snyder's overall tone. I can't comment one way or the other on what I thought of Aquaman because I was at that point so disenchanted with Warner Bros' DC movies (thanks to Justice League) that I didn't even bother to watch it.
In the case of Shazam, however, I was hooked from the very first trailer, because this movie looked pretty darned funny.
Teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) has one goal in life: to find his mother (Caroline Palmer), from whom he was separated as a toddler while they were at a fair. To this end, he has fled one foster home after another, and even gone to the extent of hijacking police databases just to find people with his last name. His last attempt to find his mother ends with him being placed in a group foster home run by Victor and Rosa Vasquez (Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans) where he meets foster kids Pedro (Jovan Armand), Eugene (Ian Chen), Darla (Faithe Herman), Mary (Grace Fulton) and Freddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), all of whom he views as a distraction while he continues his search. However, when he is recruited by an aging wizard (Djimon Hounsou) to fight against the Seven Deadly Sins, an ancient cabal of evil that has escaped into the world and taken control of the deranged Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong), Billy will have to take on the mantle of Shazam (Zachary Levi) a hero with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury. Before all of that, though, Billy, together with his new guru and expert on all things superhero Freddy, intends to have a little fun first.
This may seem strange, coming from a "Marvel guy" like myself, but in all honesty, I haven't seen a movie embrace its campy comic book origins this gleefully since the first Spider-Man movie way back in 2002, and it is great fun to watch. Zachary Levi, last seen in a comic-book-based movie getting murdered in Thor: Ragnarok, is the perfect embodiment of the super-powered man-child and even though he still hasn't totally convinced me that his suit isn't even just a little padded, his exuberant performance makes me extremely glad Dwayne Johnson chose to play Black Adam instead of this character. He's basically pure joy to watch, and his pairing with Jack Dylan Grazer's uber superhero nerd Freddie is the stuff of comedic genius, particularly in the scenes in which the two of them are testing out Billy's newly-gained superpowers. If anything, Angel's iteration of Billy is the weak link here, not because he's not a good actor, (and in fact, he is quite appropriately earnest in his performance and gives the movie its heart), but because the seriousness with which he vests his performance creates a slight disconnect between his Billy and the musclebound adult-bodied counterpart that Levi plays. It's a minor quibble, though, if I'm perfectly honest, because the team of Levi and Grazer is simply dynamite. While comparisons to the similarly irreverent Deadpool make some sense I submit that this movie is very much its own thing. There is a bit of a jarring shift in tone in one especially violent scene involving the film's antagonists and a bunch of executives in a board room, but director Sandberg and his writers, for the most part, make a properly lighthearted movie.
Another minus for this movie is the computer-generated imagery, which is a bit on the weak side by today's standards but which is nonetheless forgivable given the relatively frugal budget and the fact that the movie is basically just embraces its glorious camp in much the way Deadpool did. The CGI is mostly poured into the Seven Deadly Sins as well as the climactic fight scenes and is really nothing to write home about, but the storytelling is so effective that it's easy to forgive the filmmakers this little misstep.
It also helps that the film steers clear of the world-ending stakes and keeps things relatively intimate, like the message at the film's heart about the importance of finding one's family, including in places where one might not expect to find it.
Finally, one of the film's biggest assets, in my opinion, is that it is basically a spiritual remake of the Tom Hanks/Penny Marshall comedy Big, which I loved as a kid, and which the movie directly references during on the fight scenes between Shazam and Dr. Sivana. Sure, Marvel has had great success with (most of) its Spider-Man movies, which also feature a kid as a hero, but there's nonetheless something genuinely refreshing about this take on the kid-as-superhero concept, and if I'm honest, I'm ready for a whole lot of more of these, for as long as they keep those belly laughs coming.
8/10
written by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke
Around this time last year, when the lights came on after Avengers: Infinity War, my daughter told me that she had observed a little boy of around eight or nine years crying into his dad's shoulder, presumably because one of his favorite heroes had turned to dust (I'm betting it was Spider-Man). Being the 40-plus-year-old man-child who's been reading comics for the better part of three decades, of course I had a laugh, knowing that most of the "deaths" in Infinity War probably have all the permanence of the tide, as did both of my older, more comics-savvy kids. Thinking about it afterwards, though, I came to realize how a great many of these comic-book based movies nowadays really aren't for kids anymore, or at least, not primarily for kids but rather for that coveted late-teens to mid-thirties segment of the market (more colloquially known as men-children) that make enough money to watch movies over and over again.
It was a long-running debate among one segment of fandom, for example, that Marvel movies are for kids while DC movies are for adults, a notion inspired in part by Christopher Nolan's decidedly dark, noir-inspired take on the Batman movies and Zack Snyder's poor attempt to channel that vibe into his own take on the Superman mythos and the eventual DC Extended Universe. I could go on as to why the proponents of that argument are wrong (and maybe I will, someday) but in truth, it's all become moot and academic now since the executives at Warner Brothers, the parent company of DC have apparently gone and said, "what the hell, let's just eighty-six all that dark crap and make movies that are more kid-friendly."
The drastic shift in overall tone of DC movies from "dark" to "light" started as early as last year's colorful adventure Aquaman, and arguably even 2017's Justice League but while the latter was basically a sloppy retrofit mandated by studio execs who basically wanted their year-end bonus, Aquaman was a from-the-ground-up change in approach to the way Warner Brothers made superhero movies and an effective abandonment of Snyder's overall tone. I can't comment one way or the other on what I thought of Aquaman because I was at that point so disenchanted with Warner Bros' DC movies (thanks to Justice League) that I didn't even bother to watch it.
In the case of Shazam, however, I was hooked from the very first trailer, because this movie looked pretty darned funny.
Teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) has one goal in life: to find his mother (Caroline Palmer), from whom he was separated as a toddler while they were at a fair. To this end, he has fled one foster home after another, and even gone to the extent of hijacking police databases just to find people with his last name. His last attempt to find his mother ends with him being placed in a group foster home run by Victor and Rosa Vasquez (Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans) where he meets foster kids Pedro (Jovan Armand), Eugene (Ian Chen), Darla (Faithe Herman), Mary (Grace Fulton) and Freddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), all of whom he views as a distraction while he continues his search. However, when he is recruited by an aging wizard (Djimon Hounsou) to fight against the Seven Deadly Sins, an ancient cabal of evil that has escaped into the world and taken control of the deranged Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong), Billy will have to take on the mantle of Shazam (Zachary Levi) a hero with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury. Before all of that, though, Billy, together with his new guru and expert on all things superhero Freddy, intends to have a little fun first.
This may seem strange, coming from a "Marvel guy" like myself, but in all honesty, I haven't seen a movie embrace its campy comic book origins this gleefully since the first Spider-Man movie way back in 2002, and it is great fun to watch. Zachary Levi, last seen in a comic-book-based movie getting murdered in Thor: Ragnarok, is the perfect embodiment of the super-powered man-child and even though he still hasn't totally convinced me that his suit isn't even just a little padded, his exuberant performance makes me extremely glad Dwayne Johnson chose to play Black Adam instead of this character. He's basically pure joy to watch, and his pairing with Jack Dylan Grazer's uber superhero nerd Freddie is the stuff of comedic genius, particularly in the scenes in which the two of them are testing out Billy's newly-gained superpowers. If anything, Angel's iteration of Billy is the weak link here, not because he's not a good actor, (and in fact, he is quite appropriately earnest in his performance and gives the movie its heart), but because the seriousness with which he vests his performance creates a slight disconnect between his Billy and the musclebound adult-bodied counterpart that Levi plays. It's a minor quibble, though, if I'm perfectly honest, because the team of Levi and Grazer is simply dynamite. While comparisons to the similarly irreverent Deadpool make some sense I submit that this movie is very much its own thing. There is a bit of a jarring shift in tone in one especially violent scene involving the film's antagonists and a bunch of executives in a board room, but director Sandberg and his writers, for the most part, make a properly lighthearted movie.
Another minus for this movie is the computer-generated imagery, which is a bit on the weak side by today's standards but which is nonetheless forgivable given the relatively frugal budget and the fact that the movie is basically just embraces its glorious camp in much the way Deadpool did. The CGI is mostly poured into the Seven Deadly Sins as well as the climactic fight scenes and is really nothing to write home about, but the storytelling is so effective that it's easy to forgive the filmmakers this little misstep.
It also helps that the film steers clear of the world-ending stakes and keeps things relatively intimate, like the message at the film's heart about the importance of finding one's family, including in places where one might not expect to find it.
Finally, one of the film's biggest assets, in my opinion, is that it is basically a spiritual remake of the Tom Hanks/Penny Marshall comedy Big, which I loved as a kid, and which the movie directly references during on the fight scenes between Shazam and Dr. Sivana. Sure, Marvel has had great success with (most of) its Spider-Man movies, which also feature a kid as a hero, but there's nonetheless something genuinely refreshing about this take on the kid-as-superhero concept, and if I'm honest, I'm ready for a whole lot of more of these, for as long as they keep those belly laughs coming.
8/10
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Seeing an Elephant Fly...And Not Much Else: A Review of Dumbo
directed by Tim Burton
written by Ehren Kruger
Of all of the beloved animated feature films that Walt Disney Studio has chosen to adapt into live-action form for modern audiences, Dumbo was arguably the one most in need of a complete overhaul. The story of a circus elephant named Dumbo with ears so big he is able to fly with them, the film was riddled with racism (it featured a murder of crows played by white actors pretending to sound like black men, led by a character named "Jim Crow" for Pete's sake), inebriation, and quite a bit of animal-on-animal cruelty. Like its more-or-less contemporary films Bambi and Pinocchio, the original Dumbo was extremely dark in tone, and was further hamstrung by blatant racism. It's no surprise, therefore, that Disney threw the old script out.
The new one, however, while free of racism and talking animals, isn't any better as far as narratives go.
Max Medici (Danny DeVito) runs the Medici Brothers Circus, a traveling attraction in America featuring the usual circus fare such as trained animals, clowns and acrobats. One of his star performers, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from Great War in Europe less one arm, only to find that his wife has died, all of the horses he used to ride for the circus have all been sold, and the circus itself is basically on its last legs. Medici, however, has bet all his money on one last gambit: Mrs. Jumbo, a pregnant elephant, and the beautiful baby elephant she is sure to deliver. No longer having horses to ride, Holt must now care for the elephants, which he does with his science-geek daughter Milly (Nico Parker) and his dutiful son Joe (Finley Hobbins), and in doing so they stumble upon Jumbo's newborn elephant calf, which has enormous ears. Jumbo Jr. is made part of the show, but after the audience unexpectedly jeers the poor elephant calf, and after one of Mrs. Jumbo's cruel handlers causes her to go wild, destroying the tent, Mrs. Jumbo is sold back to the person from whom Medici bought her, and Medici is at a loss as to what to do next. That is, until Farrier's children discover that Dumbo can fly. An overnight sensation, Dumbo captures the imagination of the whole country, including that of wealthy industrialist V.A. Vandermere (Michael Keaton) who runs a theme park called Dreamworld and who thinks Dumbo, when ridden by the star of his show Colette Marchant (Eva Green) will make a sensational new addition to his show. His plans, however, aren't necessarily in Dumbo's best interests.
Like the original Dumbo this film purports to be about personal triumph in the face of oppression. In the original film, the talking elephants in the circus constantly ridiculed the giant-eared Dumbo, but without talking animals, it's basically up to the human characters to stand in as the bad guys, and it is here that this film fails somewhat miserably. Sure, Tim Burton fills his cast with actors whose credentials range from stellar to basically competent, and in particular replaces Dumbo's talking mouse friend from the first film, Timothy, with a whole bunch of humans whose shortcomings, insecurities and fears are supposed to make them gravitate towards Dumbo and relate better to the audience. To be fair, most of these actors do pretty much the best they can with their roles (though Colin Farrell's Southern drawl made me wince at times), but it's ultimately the writing that lets them all down.
In the scene in which Dumbo (or Jumbo Jr., as he's called at that point in the story) is paraded before a 1920's era circus crowd, the lot of them begin screaming that he's a fake, and ridiculing him in lieu of the mean elephants from the original film. For me, that moment rings distinctly false, as does much, if not most of the film after that. If people nowadays swallow things like fake news hook, line and sinker, the level of credulity back then was arguably that much higher, and the notion that so many people would instantly react to seeing something extraordinary like a giant-eared elephant with skepticism and jeers felt distinctly inauthentic and basically set the tone for the rest of the movie. People's motivations, from that of the cruel animal handler to Michael Keaton's cut-and-paste evil tycoon, felt less like the things real people would say or do and more like plot contrivances to compensate for the characters that were cut out from the original because, ironically enough, they would not have been believable to modern audiences. It's not that there wasn't such a thing as animal cruelty in those days; the fact that animals were made to perform for humans and then kept captive shows the horrible things people were capable of back then. The problem is that Kruger and his presumed ghost writers are just so obsessed with having humans stand in for the evil cartoon characters of the original film that the humans become nothing more than cartoons themselves.
Not only that, but Kruger fills his world with far too much baggage that doesn't really go anywhere, and basically doesn't add anything to the characters. Farrell's Holt loses his arm in the war and his wife to sickness, so he's clearly supposed to be a tragic character, but what specifically is his journey here? Does his having one arm represent an obstacle he has to overcome? Not really, it seems. DeVito's Max Medici inexplicably, packages his circus as "Medici Brothers" when he doesn't even have a brother, and the script basically does next to nothing with that, other than a throwaway line of dialogue from Vandemere. I'd say spoiler alert, but that little detail contributes nothing to the plot. Speaking of Vandemere, he feels a distinct step down from the last heavy Michael Keaton played; the working class Vulture, who actually made a pretty compelling argument to Spider-Man about who were good guys and who were bad guys. Eva Green's Colette, Burton's apparent new goth-girl muse, isn't anything more than yet another narrative cliche. Not every detail has to have a reason for being there, but when one's characters are as paper-thin as the ones with which Kruger has populated this world, seemingly insignificant details start to matter, as does their overall pointlessness.
Saddled with this limp script, Burton leans on his tried-and-tested tropes; quirky supporting characters, a choir belting out Danny Elfman's score, which we've heard in numerous other movies either by Burton or Sam Raimi, and some echoes of the visual panache that shot him to the A-list back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, one other aspect he brings to the film from his past work is an inordinately dark color palette, which is distinctly out of place in a Disney film. As much as I hated Burton's other Disney live-action regurgitation, Alice in Wonderland, at least it was appropriately colorful. Here, despite the fact that the story is set in a circus, most of the action looks like it's taking place at night, probably in an attempt to mask any flaws in the computer generated visual effects.
Fortunately, for all of its flaws, the film at least gets one thing right: Dumbo himself, especially when he's flying. I may be jaded about a lot of things, including movies, but even I can admit that these sequences, basically the "money shots" of the film felt uplifting, with the visuals, sound-editing and score all melding together in perfect unison. Sure Burton kind of started leaning on it a little bit, but given that it was the one thing about the movie that really worked, I can't really blame him. It's somewhat ironic (again) that some of the early comments that surfaced about the trailer were about how creepy the CGI version of Dumbo looked. In my opinion, that's one of the few things that Burton and his crew got right.
My younger kids enjoyed the film, and I can understand why, but to families with a limited budget for movies I'd recommend saving up for Aladdin and The Lion King instead.
5.5/10
written by Ehren Kruger
Of all of the beloved animated feature films that Walt Disney Studio has chosen to adapt into live-action form for modern audiences, Dumbo was arguably the one most in need of a complete overhaul. The story of a circus elephant named Dumbo with ears so big he is able to fly with them, the film was riddled with racism (it featured a murder of crows played by white actors pretending to sound like black men, led by a character named "Jim Crow" for Pete's sake), inebriation, and quite a bit of animal-on-animal cruelty. Like its more-or-less contemporary films Bambi and Pinocchio, the original Dumbo was extremely dark in tone, and was further hamstrung by blatant racism. It's no surprise, therefore, that Disney threw the old script out.
The new one, however, while free of racism and talking animals, isn't any better as far as narratives go.
Max Medici (Danny DeVito) runs the Medici Brothers Circus, a traveling attraction in America featuring the usual circus fare such as trained animals, clowns and acrobats. One of his star performers, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from Great War in Europe less one arm, only to find that his wife has died, all of the horses he used to ride for the circus have all been sold, and the circus itself is basically on its last legs. Medici, however, has bet all his money on one last gambit: Mrs. Jumbo, a pregnant elephant, and the beautiful baby elephant she is sure to deliver. No longer having horses to ride, Holt must now care for the elephants, which he does with his science-geek daughter Milly (Nico Parker) and his dutiful son Joe (Finley Hobbins), and in doing so they stumble upon Jumbo's newborn elephant calf, which has enormous ears. Jumbo Jr. is made part of the show, but after the audience unexpectedly jeers the poor elephant calf, and after one of Mrs. Jumbo's cruel handlers causes her to go wild, destroying the tent, Mrs. Jumbo is sold back to the person from whom Medici bought her, and Medici is at a loss as to what to do next. That is, until Farrier's children discover that Dumbo can fly. An overnight sensation, Dumbo captures the imagination of the whole country, including that of wealthy industrialist V.A. Vandermere (Michael Keaton) who runs a theme park called Dreamworld and who thinks Dumbo, when ridden by the star of his show Colette Marchant (Eva Green) will make a sensational new addition to his show. His plans, however, aren't necessarily in Dumbo's best interests.
Like the original Dumbo this film purports to be about personal triumph in the face of oppression. In the original film, the talking elephants in the circus constantly ridiculed the giant-eared Dumbo, but without talking animals, it's basically up to the human characters to stand in as the bad guys, and it is here that this film fails somewhat miserably. Sure, Tim Burton fills his cast with actors whose credentials range from stellar to basically competent, and in particular replaces Dumbo's talking mouse friend from the first film, Timothy, with a whole bunch of humans whose shortcomings, insecurities and fears are supposed to make them gravitate towards Dumbo and relate better to the audience. To be fair, most of these actors do pretty much the best they can with their roles (though Colin Farrell's Southern drawl made me wince at times), but it's ultimately the writing that lets them all down.
In the scene in which Dumbo (or Jumbo Jr., as he's called at that point in the story) is paraded before a 1920's era circus crowd, the lot of them begin screaming that he's a fake, and ridiculing him in lieu of the mean elephants from the original film. For me, that moment rings distinctly false, as does much, if not most of the film after that. If people nowadays swallow things like fake news hook, line and sinker, the level of credulity back then was arguably that much higher, and the notion that so many people would instantly react to seeing something extraordinary like a giant-eared elephant with skepticism and jeers felt distinctly inauthentic and basically set the tone for the rest of the movie. People's motivations, from that of the cruel animal handler to Michael Keaton's cut-and-paste evil tycoon, felt less like the things real people would say or do and more like plot contrivances to compensate for the characters that were cut out from the original because, ironically enough, they would not have been believable to modern audiences. It's not that there wasn't such a thing as animal cruelty in those days; the fact that animals were made to perform for humans and then kept captive shows the horrible things people were capable of back then. The problem is that Kruger and his presumed ghost writers are just so obsessed with having humans stand in for the evil cartoon characters of the original film that the humans become nothing more than cartoons themselves.
Not only that, but Kruger fills his world with far too much baggage that doesn't really go anywhere, and basically doesn't add anything to the characters. Farrell's Holt loses his arm in the war and his wife to sickness, so he's clearly supposed to be a tragic character, but what specifically is his journey here? Does his having one arm represent an obstacle he has to overcome? Not really, it seems. DeVito's Max Medici inexplicably, packages his circus as "Medici Brothers" when he doesn't even have a brother, and the script basically does next to nothing with that, other than a throwaway line of dialogue from Vandemere. I'd say spoiler alert, but that little detail contributes nothing to the plot. Speaking of Vandemere, he feels a distinct step down from the last heavy Michael Keaton played; the working class Vulture, who actually made a pretty compelling argument to Spider-Man about who were good guys and who were bad guys. Eva Green's Colette, Burton's apparent new goth-girl muse, isn't anything more than yet another narrative cliche. Not every detail has to have a reason for being there, but when one's characters are as paper-thin as the ones with which Kruger has populated this world, seemingly insignificant details start to matter, as does their overall pointlessness.
Saddled with this limp script, Burton leans on his tried-and-tested tropes; quirky supporting characters, a choir belting out Danny Elfman's score, which we've heard in numerous other movies either by Burton or Sam Raimi, and some echoes of the visual panache that shot him to the A-list back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, one other aspect he brings to the film from his past work is an inordinately dark color palette, which is distinctly out of place in a Disney film. As much as I hated Burton's other Disney live-action regurgitation, Alice in Wonderland, at least it was appropriately colorful. Here, despite the fact that the story is set in a circus, most of the action looks like it's taking place at night, probably in an attempt to mask any flaws in the computer generated visual effects.
Fortunately, for all of its flaws, the film at least gets one thing right: Dumbo himself, especially when he's flying. I may be jaded about a lot of things, including movies, but even I can admit that these sequences, basically the "money shots" of the film felt uplifting, with the visuals, sound-editing and score all melding together in perfect unison. Sure Burton kind of started leaning on it a little bit, but given that it was the one thing about the movie that really worked, I can't really blame him. It's somewhat ironic (again) that some of the early comments that surfaced about the trailer were about how creepy the CGI version of Dumbo looked. In my opinion, that's one of the few things that Burton and his crew got right.
My younger kids enjoyed the film, and I can understand why, but to families with a limited budget for movies I'd recommend saving up for Aladdin and The Lion King instead.
5.5/10
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