It Could Have Been Worse: A Review of Suicide Squad

written and directed by David Ayer

With Batman vs. Superman having left theaters a couple of months ago, it seems film critics were in need of a new whipping boy, and in Warner Brothers' new film Suicide Squad, they have found one. Inspired by the comics of the same name, as well as the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen, the film tells the story of a team of supervillains recruited by the United States government to fight superhuman threats.

Following the events of Batman vs. Superman, high-level government honcho Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) makes a pitch to the highest echelons of the United States government's security apparatus to put together a team of super-powered individuals (referred to here as "metahumans") to serve as a response to future Supermen who might not be as friendly. The twist is that each and every one of the proposed individuals is either a convicted felon or, in one case, a potentially-world ending threat that is extremely difficult to control. This roster includes assassin-for-hire Deadshot (Will Smith), who never misses a shot, psychiatrist-turned-psychotic-criminal Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the girlfriend of notorious criminal the Joker (Jared Leto), East-LA gangbanger Diablo (Jay Hernandez) who can manipulate fire but who, following personal tragedy, is reluctant to use his powers, sewer-dwelling, reptilian human Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnoye-Agbaje), who is super strong and feral, Australian bank robber Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) who is extremely proficient in the use of...well...you know...and finally, the super-powerful but highly unstable Enchantress, an entity thousands of years old that happens to have taken possession of archaeologist June Moone (Cara Delevingne). Enchantress is easily the most dangerous of the group, but Waller is confident she has her under control, because she has her heart in her briefcase. Waller convinces the government to sign off on her plan, and in short order, after a world-ending threat emerges, the team is activated, but under the close watch of Col. Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman) a Navy SEAL who also happens to be Dr. Moone's boyfriend and the mysterious Katana (Karen Fukuhara) armed with a sword that steals people's souls. As an extra safety measure, the members of "Task Force X" ("Suicide Squad" is a name thought up by Deadshot) are fitted with explosive devices in their necks lest any of them get any ideas about escaping. Considering the magnitude of the threat, even Waller's motley crew may not be enough to save the day.

Now, does this film deserve the critical thrashing it's been getting over the last couple of days?

Well, no, not to the extent that it's been criticized, but it's far from a perfect movie.

The writing, for one thing, leaves quite a bit to be desired. Not only is Waller's grand plan to have a bunch of extremely dangerous people serve as some kind of deterrent against threats kind of inherently untenable, as the development of the story reveals, but her idea of a "failsafe" in the event her plan goes wrong is basically laughable. While her characterization as Machiavellian and utterly amoral is well-done and, to the best of my recollection, in keeping with the comics, her incompetence rather took me out of the story on more than one occasion. Not only that, but Rick Flagg, supposedly the lone "straight" man in the team as he is the mobile "warden" of the jailbirds, is a thoroughly unlikable character, and while Davis does her best with some really bad scripting, the failings of Flagg are equal parts Ayer (and his presumed ghost-writers) and Kinnaman. Also, the movie suffers some serious internal logic failure as the script cannot seem to decide exactly how fragile or tough the zombie minions against which the team face off are supposed to be. At some times they can take a hail of bullets but at others all it takes is a baseball bat to the head to take them down.

The editing is chaotic, and the sound editing or mixing even worse, as I had to strain to hear a lot of the dialogue over the pop music blaring while it was going on. I get the gripe about there being a "tonal shift" from one scene to another, but it wasn't that jarring for me, though far too often, the bad writing was.

For all that, this film is not the cinematic apocalypse some reviewers make it out to be. The lead performances, for one, are pretty solid, with Will Smith's Deadshot marking a return to action-movie form for him after the disastrous After Earth almost killed his career. Whether the rumors are true that there were re-shoots to make the film "funnier" I can be pretty sure that Smith brought the humor up front, as it has been a defining aspect of his career, really. Ayer wisely anchors the movie on his character, for the most part. Robbie is also a hoot as Quinn, though her somewhat exploitative outfit somewhat undermines the film's aspirations towards subversiveness (more on that later). The scene in which she is "reborn" by jumping into a vat of chemicals at the behest of her beloved Joker, with its mix of candy colors against the white goo, is haunting and quite honestly belongs in a different movie, which is something that, to be fair, can be said for quite a few of the visuals here. One wonders if Ayer's vision wasn't somehow adulterated by meddling suits.

As the fourth onscreen iteration of the Joker (including the one from the 1966 Batman movie), Leto does what he can to make the role his own, and succeeds for the most part, but his participation in the story is quite peripheral. It would be interesting to see him face off against Ben Affleck's Batman (who does show up in flashbacks, incidentally, but only opposite Deadshot and Harley Quinn). Hernandez's Diablo infuses the movie with a little bit of soul, though his arc is more than a little hackneyed. Incidentally, I was happy to see quite a bit of ethnic diversity among the lead actors (you HEAR that, Marvel? Black guys/cultural minorities can be more than SIDEKICKS!), though I will dock WB/DC points on the diversity score for the fact that Native American actor Adam Beach basically showed up just so that Amanda Waller could show the team she wasn't messing around about the neck explosives. That is not a spoiler in any meaningful way.

The action, while uneven and chaotic at some points (again, due to internal logic issues, among other things), is still pretty watchable, and pretty much every team member gets to showcase his or her signature talent once or twice.

I suppose what rankles critics is the notion being peddled by some that this movie is in any way subversive, because really, it's not. It falls quite readily on the "crooks with hearts of gold" story trope, as well as several others, and the fact that Harley Quinn's choice of wardrobe is designed to get male butts into the seats really debunks any notion that this movie is some groundbreaking statement on female empowerment as some people tried to suggest early in the film's marketing phase. It's basically one's average male-centric action movie that follows a fairly standard formula. It's hardly a storytelling maverick.

Fortunately, it's not the creative black hole it's made out to be by critics, and with better writing and editing, a sequel to this could actually be quite entertaining.

It's a decent way to kill time at the mall...but not much else.

6/10

Comfortable Old Shoes: A Review of Jason Bourne

directed by Paul Greengrass
written by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse

Whatever one feels about Universal Pictures' Bourne series of films starring Matt Damon, one cannot deny that it has been a remarkable action movie franchise. Each film has earned more at the box office than the last, and has gotten better reviews than the last. Their hot streak broke a few years back when neither director Paul Greengrass, who helmed The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum nor star Matt Damon was interested in making a new film, and Universal unwisely decided to make a spin-off/sequel hybrid with then "it boy" Jeremy Renner playing a different character, albeit one similarly conditioned as Jason Bourne. That film was not well received critically or commercially, and the studio was at a loss as to where to go next.

Fortunately for Universal, Greengrass finally decided a year or two ago that he was interested in giving the franchise another go, and with Damon in tow they proceeded to make the first movie featuring Jason Bourne in nearly a decade entitled, aptly enough, Jason Bourne.

It's been several years since the events of The Bourne Ultimatum (with the events in The Bourne Legacy spinoff having been conveniently ignored) and former amnesiac assassin for the Central Intelligence Agency Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is spending his days as a bare-knuckle boxer somewhere in Greece. Meanwhile, his erstwhile colleague and fellow CIA operative gone rogue Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) has unearthed a chilling new black-ops program of the CIA involving online invasion of privacy that could be even worse than the one that created Jason Bourne. In hacking into the system, Parson has put herself in the crosshairs of the CIA, now headed by Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) with the help of IT wizard Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander). She also learns crucial information about the only person she knows who could blow this whole thing wide open: Jason Bourne, whom she tracks down in Greece. Unfortunately, that puts him in the CIA's sights as well, particularly a rather nasty assassin with a score to settle (Vincent Cassel). Bourne's a bit older, and considerably more world weary, but this time he has good reason to come in out of the cold: this time it's personal.

As much as I have enjoyed all of the Bourne films prior to this one, I have to admit they all follow a very similar narrative structure: Bourne unearths a mystery that involves his past with the CIA, fights through a bunch of throwaway CIA agents, including at least one "boss battle" (in the first one, there were two), gets involved in a lengthy car chase, then manages to ruin the big bad guy without his fists. It's a perfect balance of exposition and action, a formula from which the last film, the one without Jason Bourne in it deviated, for which they paid dearly.

Well, with the return of Greengrass, Damon and Jason Bourne to the series after a one-film and nine-year hiatus, we also see a return of the old formula, complete with the mystery, the boss battle and the car chase, albeit in a slightly different order, and to be honest, for the most part, I didn't mind. It was the cinematic equivalent of eating comfort food.

The thing is, while Greengrass still has serious action storytelling chops and while Damon still has the edginess that made Bourne such a watchable character, I could not get around how tacked on this movie felt. For example, the given reasons for Bourne getting back "in the game," especially considering how neatly The Bourne Ultimatum tied up the trilogy felt a tad forced. Basically, Greengrass (who co-wrote this film with film editor Christopher Rouse) retroactively gave Bourne yet another axe to grind against the CIA. I'm also not sure I really care for the subtext behind that particular plot device. Are the writers suggesting that Bourne won't do anything to stop the CIA (which has a particularly insidious scheme in this film) if it doesn't somehow involve tidbits of his past?

Not only that, but as gratifying as the action sequences are, they definitely have a been-there-done-that feel to them. Greengrass's fight scenes still pack a wallop and Damon looks great, even at 45, but really, after Gareth Evans' The Raid films, the Russo brothers' Captain America movies and even Netflix's Daredevil series took bone-crunching hand-to-hand action to another level, the onus was on the Bourne crew to step things up a bit as well. They didn't do their fight scenes any favors by having several of the sequences semi-obscured by darkness, including a climactic fight scene. The "boss battles" in the first three Bourne movies still stand out for me, especially since they were all filmed in daylight.

Finally, Greengrass and company approach the requisite car chase with somewhat uncharacteristic bombast and excess, the sort of over-the-top, illogical approach one would see in a Michael Bay movie. The chase in Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity, involving a Mini Cooper and the streets of Paris, was so well-done that it compares favorably to such classic car-chase scenes as those in Ronin or The French Connection. The chase here, set along the Las Vegas strip and which features an armored truck which is more like a cross between a Lamborghini and a tank, looks like it came out of a Transformers movie and, unbelievably enough, actually manages to take too long. My 14-year-old son, a huge fan of the series who has seen every one of the original films on DVD at least twice, fell asleep during the chase, and while I did not doze off (at least not during that particular sequence), I cannot say I blame him.

The performances, fortunately, are generally good. Damon and Stiles, the only veterans from the original films, slip quite comfortably into their roles again, and I was grateful that, in a day and age in which digital de-aging and botox are all the rage, the actors wear their wrinkles quite prominently. Tommy Lee Jones is, well, Tommy Lee Jones again as he puts a somewhat malevolent spin on his federal marshal from The Fugitive. Vincent Cassel was appropriately stoical as an unnamed CIA asset (I'm serious; in the credits, his character is identified solely as "Asset"), but I have to reiterate that he was totally wasted in the climactic fight scene. I'd known this guy could do impressive onscreen fighting since I saw him in 2000's The Crimson Rivers and 2002's The Brotherhood of the Wolf, and when I read he was cast in this film I was genuinely excited to see his character throw down with Bourne. There was quite a gap, unfortunately, between expectation and the actual product. Alicia Vikander turned in a decent performance as Heather Lee, but as a Swede playing an American she seemed to be struggling with her accent, not completely unlike the way her compatriot Noomi Rapace strained a bit to play an Englishwoman in Prometheus. One performance that stood out for me was that of Riz Ahmend as Aaron Kapoor, a Mark-Zuckerberg-like IT magnate who makes a deal with the devil and is keen to wiggle out of it.

The good news for me is that I think Greengrass and Damon still have a few stories left to tell with this character, and judging from the grosses, it looks like they'll get to tell them. I just hope they feel a little fresher than this one does.

6.4/10

Love Letter to a Saint: A Review of Ignacio de Loyola

written and directed by Paolo Dy

To honor the saint who was largely responsible for the foundation of the Society of Jesus, Jesuit Communications Philippines has produced a film dramatizing his conversion from a Spanish aristocrat obsessed with the notion of a romantic death in battle to a simply, holy man dedicated to serving others in the name of Christ.

Born to an affluent family, Inigo Lopez de Loyola (Andreas Munoz) is the youngest of several children. With his mother having died in childbirth, he is raised by a blacksmith while his father grieves, and as he loses a brother to armed conflict Inigo himself grows up fixated on the idea of a hero's death in battle himself. He nearly gets his wish when, during an invasion of the fortress of Pamplona by French-Navarese forces, his leg is crushed in the course of battle by a falling rampart. As he convalesces, he despairs at the knowledge that, having been crippled by his injury, he will never be a soldier again. While at home, though, he reads of the lives of the saints (which are the only books to be found in the house) and finds a new calling: that of the holy man. He determines to live the simple life of a holy pilgrim, inspired by the example of St. Francis of Assisi. He begins a journey to discover God that will transform not only his own life, but those of the people whose lives he touches with his kindness.

One thing that really struck me about this film was the attention to detail, from Dy's taut script, to the costume design, to the choice of location, this film is truly a labor not only of love but of extremely meticulous planning and execution. It calls to mind another Filipino film which, a little under a year ago, was making waves on social media, Heneral Luna. I am overjoyed to live in an era when passion projects like this, Heneral Luna, and films like Brillante Mendoza's Ma'Rosa, among many others, are being made. Even though they face tall odds in the form of generic Hollywood blockbusters or lowest-common denominator pap, Filipino filmmakers, much like Dy's take on St. Ignatius, hurl themselves into the breach.

As was the case with Heneral Luna, one can see the seams in the film's visual effects, which is to be expected as these filmmakers do not have a whole lot of money to work with, but Dy unfortunately makes the mistake of asking a little too much of his effects team in a particularly stylized sequence in which Inigo faces off against an antagonistic specter who may well be his own tortured subconscious. The result is a little wince-inducing. I also noticed repeatedly throughout the film that the camera would, at somewhat inopportune moments, suddenly lose focus. I think I get what Dy was going for in those sequences, but I feel his timing might have been a bit off.

While I appreciated the script's reverence towards the title character, I was a little disappointed by how relatively little attention was paid to how he was antagonized by the Catholic Church in the film's third act. This a period in the Church's history where they were basically killing people for the simple act of disagreeing with them. To be honest, this was, for me at least, a wasted opportunity, especially considering that the current Pope is a Jesuit and much could therefore have been made about St. Ignatius winning over his doubters. As cinematic bad guys go, one couldn't have gotten juicier material than the Inquisition-era Catholic Church; they're right up there with the Nazis in terms of sheer malevolence. While the ending had all the requisite beats of a good confrontation, I feel it wasn't quite as emotionally charged as it should have been.

Also, while the script was quite lyrical at times, it didn't quite have the gut-punch that I thought a film championing Ignacio's impact on Christianity should have, and there weren't quite any zingers like Antonio Luna's now-famous line: "You're like virgins believing in the love of a whore." Interestingly enough, one particularly engaging scene for me was one in which the newly-converted Inigo, upon a visit to a brothel instigated by his brother Beltran (Lucas Fuica) and cousin and confidant Xanti (Javier Godino), rather than lie with the woman he has been presented, actually talks to her and shows her compassion she has never before known in her life. It's a quiet, but moving scene, and Munoz and the actress who played the prostitute Ana (whose name unfortunately escapes me and is not listed on the internet), really sell it well. The film, unfortunately, does not have quite enough scenes like this, which could have helped it more than the somewhat generic battle sequence in the beginning and the repeated focus on Ignacio's daddy issues.

It's really a shame, because lead actor Munoz really gives his all in essaying this role. While there were other notables in the cast like Godino as Xanti, Fuica as Don Beltran, Julio Perillan as Father Sanchez and a whole host of other very capable Spanish actors selected for their skill and their facility with the English language, Munoz carries the film, just as John Arcilla very ably anchored Heneral Luna last year. Unfortunately, though, there were some actors with small but pivotal roles whose grasp of English was apparently so bad that Dy made the creative decision to have Filipino actors dub their dialogue, and in one case the substitution was embarrassingly obvious. In the other case, fortunately, the swap was a bit muted.

One thing that definitely wasn't muted, and which deserves prominent mention is Ryan Cayabyab's soaring musical score, which for me is easily a highlight of this film. I really appreciated how he employed a full orchestra and choir for some of the film's more "epic" scenes but did not hesitate to have solos by guitarists or other instrumentalists during the film's more intimate moments.

Ultimately, I appreciate this film for having quite a bit of heart, even for all its flaws, though I can't quite be sure if people not at all familiar with St. Ignatius would really get into it. Still, one compliment I can pay the film is this; I walked into it having had minimal sleep in the last 24 hours and I was fully expecting to doze off at some point into it, but I didn't sleep a wink. I can't even say that about the action film Jason Bourne, which I will review next.

8/10

Abrams Passes the Baton: A Review of Star Trek Beyond

directed by Justin Lin
written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung

I may be in the minority, but I quite honestly liked JJ Abrams' resuscitation of the Star Trek film franchise better than his record-shattering sequel to the Star Wars saga. I can even go as far as to say I enjoyed the much-maligned Star Trek Into Darkness which is now described as a poorly-realized remake of the well-loved Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The decision to watch Star Trek Beyond, even with a new director at the helm, was a bit of a no-brainer.

In this new film, Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and the crew of the USS Enterprise are halfway through their five-year mission to explore deep space, and feelings of boredom and monotony have started to set in, at least as far as Kirk is concerned. The crew dock at the space station Yorktown to fill up on supplies, and Kirk finds himself at a bit of a crossroads, with a chance at a juicy promotion that would mean leaving the Enterprise, while his First Officer Spock (Zachary Quinto) learns sad news that influences a decision on his part that will also entail him leaving the Enterprise. This is all put on hold, though, when the Yorktown receives a mysterious distress call from an uncharted nebula. The Enterprise responds, and disaster ensues, with the mysterious and brutal Krall (Idris Elba) attacking them. Kirk, Spock, Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho), Chekhov (the late Anton Yelchin), and Scotty (Simon Pegg, pulling double-duty as screenwriter here), will have to summon all of their skills to deal with this unique and formidable threat, though they will have help from the fierce and clever Jaylah (Sophie Boutella). There is more, however to Krall than meets the eye.

While Lin's hyperkinetic approach to narrative, honed on several Fast and Furious movies did not really rock my world the way Abrams' did seven years ago, I found the film enjoyable enough and that whatever over-the-top excesses Lin may have indulged (Kirk's motorcycle riding comes to mind as well as a couple of others) were tempered by the script Pegg co-wrote with Doug Jung, which endeavors to preserve the Abrams vibe and even maintain a sense of connection to the original series of films. The opening scene, in which Kirk basically laments how monotonous his mission has come to feel, and the quieter moments, like Kirk and McCoy toasting over an empty glass of Chekhov's vodka (which proved to be oddly prescient given Yelchin's death just a month before the film's release), provide moments for the characters to shine. Also, while there is still quite a daredevil in him as evidenced by his motorcycle scene, this Kirk is a bit less brash than he was in the first couple of movies, having benefited quite a bit from his experience as a starship captain.

As always it's a challenge to give screen time to the ensemble, but Lin and his writers have managed this quite handily by having the characters pair off midway through the film, Kirk with Chekhov, Scotty with the newbie Jaylah, and most notably Spock with Bones. Karl Urban's take on the character popularized by DeForest Kelley is one of things I quite like about this new iteration of the franchise.

Elba's Krall is an improvement over Benedict Cumberbatch's Khan from the last film and Eric Bana's Nero from the first in the new series, and while neither set a particularly high bar to hurdle (particularly Bana), Elba vests this role with as much menace as he can muster, and his performance is especially impressive considering the amount of makeup he has to act through.

I really like the fact that the whole reboot concept has allowed audiences to see the world of the 1960s television series with updated visual effects, and the Yorktown sequence is particularly rewarding in this regard; the cityscape in space is a wonder to behold, and while computer-generated imagery is a dime-a-dozen these days, here it was put to particularly good use.

I still liked 2009's reboot the best, but this film, to my mind at least, does a good job of keeping the franchise going.

7.5/10

Who You Gonna Call? A Review of the Ghostbusters Remake

directed by Paul Feig
written by Kate Dippold and Paul Feig

Few films have come into theaters with more concerted efforts by outside forces to ensure their failure than this one. When it was announced that Paul Feig would helm the long-gestating "Ghostbusters" sequel, which eventually metamorphosed into the remake it now is, and that all of the leads would be female, a vocal population of male netizens probably best described as trolls was quite vocal in their outrage and campaigned quite vigorously against this film. Apparently, in the hierarchy of obnoxiousness of fanboys, DC and Marvel fanboys have absolutely nothing on Ghostbusters fanboys in terms of sheer vileness.

Unfortunately for those fanboys, however, this film is nowhere near the train wreck that they were desperately hoping it would be.

Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) is a physics professor at Columbia University just on the brink of acquiring tenure when a little bit of her past comes back to haunt her: a book she co-wrote with her friend and former colleague Abigail Yates (Melissa McCarthy) about the paranormal, a book she thought had never been published, surfaces in the hands of a man (Ed Begley Jr.) who believes a house-turned-museum that he is managing to be haunted. Incensed, Erin confronts Abby, who is continuing her research on the paranormal at a small college with her colleague Jill (Kate McKinnon). Abby agrees to take the book out of circulation as long as Erin introduces her to the man seeking help with his supernatural problem. When the three of them actually find an honest-to-goodness ghost, they are elated, and start pursuing their research more doggedly, and not a moment too soon, as the mysterious Rowan (Neil Casey), a loner working in the basement of a hotel, seems to be actively inviting ghosts from the other side, which include the malevolent spirit of a rich heiress and an electrocuted convict. Erin, Abby and Jill, along with subway ticket seller Patty (Leslie Jones), who volunteers to help them after seeing one of ghosts herself, set out to save the city, and possibly the world, from this supernatural threat, with or without the help of their thoroughly useless assistant Kevin (Chris Hemsworth).

This movie spent the better part of the last three decades in what can politely be described as development hell and the fact that they were able to get it done at all is a minor Hollywood miracle. It's even more impressive that it was as good as it turned out to be.

The storytelling was reasonably taut, the characters gelled well, and the visual effects were a nice update on the ones that appeared in the thirty-two year old original. No new ground was broken here, as the filmmakers basically went for what worked in the original, with the pseudo-science, soft horror and broad comedy, and, thankfully, removed the bit about one of the main characters stalking one of the team's clients. It was a clean-sheet remake; I had half-expected (and hoped for) some kind of torch-passing sequel, but I can understand why the filmmakers decide to just start from scratch. Speaking of passing the torch, though, almost all of the living main cast members (Harold Ramis passed away three years ago) showed up in cameo roles to lend their support. Sigourney Weaver looks awesome; the years have been kind. It was a flawed movie, to be sure, but still a lot of good fun. It does not deserve anywhere near the amount of pre-cooked hatred that was aimed at it.

Oddly enough, what disappointed me about this film was that, as films by Paul Feig starring Melissa McCarthy go, it was rather tame, even taking into account the PG-13 rating that is out of the pair's usual R-18 wheelhouse. I had expected Kristen Wiig to be the "straight" character to McCarthy's zany one, but what I didn't expect was that over the course of the movie, McCarthy would end up playing it straight as well. It's almost as if she can't be as funny without a potty mouth. McKinnon and Jones were absolutely delightful all throughout, though, as was Hemsworth as the clueless Kevin. McKinnon, in particular, was the standout as, apart from being funny, she was also the team's weapons designer, and in that aspect brought some freshness to the movie as they went beyond the traditional proton packs and traps. She's also the star of some pretty snazzy "proton fu" during the film's climax.


Obviously, there's some franchise-building here as the film has a post-credits stinger setting up a sequel, but fortunately, this film stands on its own just fine. If indeed this turns out to be a franchise, it's off to a reasonably decent start.

7/10

Big-Budget Live Action Role-Play: A Review of Warcraft: The Beginning

directed by Duncan Jones
written by Jones and Charles Leavitt

I played the strategy game Warcraft II for a few months after I had graduated from college.It was engaging, and I welcomed the distraction from the rigors of law school, but beyond that I never truly felt invested in this world or its characters, and by the time it basically exploded as a worldwide online gaming phenomenon spawning expansion sets, sequels and spinoffs, I had long moved on to other things.

My lack of personal investment in the game notwithstanding, I found myself with some time to kill and had some interest in watching the film adaptation. For one thing, I had enjoyed the work of director Duncan Jones such as Moon and Source Code, and, having enjoyed the game to an extent back when I played it nearly twenty years ago, I was genuinely curious. I like to think, however, that I had kept expectations reasonably in check, especially given how little I thought of the trailers.

Apparently, my expectations weren't quite low enough.

The film begins with a voice-over narration explaining that humans and orcs have been enemies since time out of mind, then proceeds to show the story of how this came to be. The orc world, Draenor, is dying, and all of the tribes of orcs follow the sorcerer Gul'dan (Daniel Wu) who, using the life force of various prisoners and a dark magic known as the Fel, conjures up a portal to another world, the world of Azeroth, populated by humans, elves and dwarves. There are only enough prisoners to send through a small war party, but the plan is to round up enough prisoners to bring all the orc race through. While the orcs favor this plan, one chieftan, Durotan (Toby Kebbell) has his misgivings, as he recalls how the Fel has destroyed their world, and fears the same thing is happening here on Azeroth.

In the meantime, the orcs' widespread plunder and abduction catch the attention of the humans, elves and other races in Azeroth. King Llane (Dominic Cooper) must decide how best to protect his realm, with the help of his greatest warrior Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), a young mage named Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) and Azeroth's appointed guardian, the powerful sorcerer Medivh (Ben Foster). They may even have a little help from a half-breed orc named Garona (Paula Patton), but Gul'dan, his lieutenant Blackhand (Clancy Brown), the might of the Orc Horde, and the Fel may be too much for even the champions of Azeroth to handle.

Growing up, I used to watch quite a few movies on television which were cheaper, obvious knockoffs of better, more expensive, and more successful films. These films were made without even a token attempt by the filmmakers to approximate the quality of the films they were ripping off. When we finally got cable television I watched quite a few of them, and years later I finally learned that they actually had a name: they are called mockbusters. Sitting through this film I was reminded of those.

My first problem was with the acting, or more specifically, the fact that all of the actors apparently came to work and, presumably at the behest of director Duncan Jones, began reciting their lines in their native accents, with one exception. I can imagine and to an extent understand why Jones might be peeved by the time-worn movie trope that in any English-language fantasy film or period piece, even if the characters aren't actually supposed to be speaking English, they all have English accents. It's convenient and lazy, and spares the filmmakers the effort of having to figure out ancient linguistic nuance or invent new speech patterns and tics for imaginary worlds. Also, to paraphrase Neil Patrick Harris, everything sounds better with an English accent.

James Gunn apparently came up with a different solution to this when he made the blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy: have everyone speak in an American accent, which explains why the Scotswoman Karen Gillan spoke with a distinctly American accent (though English actor Peter Serafinowicz was the lone actor who broke ranks).

Jones' approach feels like he basically told the actors to speak in whatever accent made them comfortable, and the results alternate between hilarious and cringe-inducing. Cooper speaks in his native English accent, Foster speaks in his native American accent, as does Schnetzer (on whose "acting" I will have quite a bit to say shortly), but for some reason, Fimmel, rather than speak in his native Australian accent or put on an English accent similar to Cooper's, dusts off the proto-Scandinavian accent he puts on when playing Ragnar Lothbrok in the Vikings television series. On top of that, Lothar has a son named Callum played by Canadian actor Burkley Duffield, who, despite having been raised solely by his father with the weird Viking accent, has a distinctly North American accent as well. I really don't know what kind of effect Jones was going for with this absurd hodgepodge, but it sure as hell didn't help his storytelling in any way. The Orcs, with the exception of Patton's half-orc (and Shrek cosplayer) Garona, all speak with British accents, but their voices were so heavily filtered they might as well have all been played by one person. And for all of the effort that went into rendering them, they were never able to convince me that they were anything more than video game characters. Think of Ang Lee's Hulk with braided long hair, a loin cloth and big teeth and multiply that several times over, and that's the general appearance of the Horde.

Going back to Schnetzer, of the many things I despised about the film, his performance was hands-down the worst; it was what inspired the title of this review. He comes across as an American student immersed in a role-playing game with his school buddies. There was nothing urgent or convincing about his performance, and the problems go well beyond his accent. He could not have been more out of place had he been talking like Michael Pena in "Ant-Man," and because for some reason he vaguely resembles him, at some points during the movie I actually found myself envisioning the character speaking in Pena's voice. Ben Foster likewise speaks with an American accent but manages to imbue his performance with some level of credibility. It occurred to me that perhaps Schnetzer's Khadgar was written as the avatar for all the Warcraft nerds in the audience.

Apart from the acting, I had serious issues with the script, both in terms of story and dialogue. There's something distinctly depressing about being able to foresee a "twist" in the story the moment the character involved in the twist actually shows his face, but what's even more depressing is reading about how Jones rewrote the script wanting to remove the narrative cliche of humans being good and orcs being bad, and then seeing a number of other story tropes, like revenge, interspecies romance and other time worn story devices play out on the screen. The movie trotted out one cliche after another.

Finally, while I could see the considerable effort that Industrial Light and Magic's animators invested into creating the Orc Horde and the movie's other visual effects like the gryphons and the fantastical cityscapes, none of them was able to transcend their obviously synthetic origins in the way that, say, the Lord of the Rings movies were. Virtually every effects-laden shot made me feel that I was watching a computer game "cut scene" rather than a feature length motion picture. This was down to the fact that none of the performances was particularly compelling, or at least compelling enough to get me to suspend my disbelief that these fantastical creatures or this fantastical world could exist. This has to have been ILM's lowest moment since "The Scorpion King" though to be fair to them, the movie was let down more by the humans acting onscreen than anything to do with the visual effects.

On a positive note, Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi came up with a pretty decent if slightly generic music score.

I really should have waited for this movie to come out on cable television; then at least I could turn it off without thinking of the money I had spent watching it.

3.5/10

Wear and Tear: A Review of X-Men: Apocalypse

directed by Bryan Singer
written by Simon Kinberg, Singer, Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty

After the mind-bending entertainment provided by mixing two generations of X-Men cast members with X-Men: Days of Future Past, director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg, with the help of Singer proteges Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty, bring us the first X-Men adventure exclusively featuring the "First Class" ensemble.

The film opens to a scene in Egypt, 3,600 Before the Common Era (the acronym BCE having replaced the religious-themed less-PC "before Christ"), where an ancient ritual is taking place, in which a decrepit but powerful mutant, worshiped as a god by the ancient Egyptians, is about to transfer his consciousness into a much younger mutant (Oscar Isaac). Although this ancient being has many followers, there are those who decry him as a false god, and conspire to collapse the enormous pyramid in which he is conducting the transfer of his consciousness, with him and his acolytes still in it. All are killed except him, but he successfully transfers into the younger man's body.

In the next scene, the year is 1983, and it's been ten years since mutants surfaced in public for the first time, with Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) saving then-American President Richard Nixon from Erik Lensherr, aka Magneto (Michael Fassbender). The former is regarded as a hero by young mutants everywhere, while the latter has gone into hiding in Poland. Meanwhile, CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) is looking into the activities of cults that are hell-bent on raising the ancient mutant from his resting place. As it happens, they succeed, with MacTaggert barely escaping alive to report her findings.

A continent away, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is running a successful school for mutant children at his Westchester Mansion, with Henry McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) as one of his teachers. High-school student Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan) has just had his mutant powers, or energy blasts from his eyes, manifest, so his older brother, former X-Man Alex (Lucas Till) takes him to Xavier's house, where they meet the professor, and Scott means powerful telepath and telekinetic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner). The emergence of the powerful mutant in Egypt is felt all around the world, and as Professor Xavier uses Cerebro to investigate and finds his way to Moira, who tells him and Havok all about this "Apocalypse."

Meanwhile, the newly-reawakened Apocalypse starts gathering his "horsemen": a street urchin who can control the weather (Alexandra Shipp) better known to us comic-book fans as Storm, a henchwoman for a mutant trafficker with mentally-generated weapons called Psylocke (Olivia Munn), a disgraced, broken former cage fighter in Berlin with angel's wings (Ben Hardy), and Magneto himself, who flies into a murderous rage after tragedy strikes him once more.

Meanwhile, Mystique, having rescued a mutant from the aforementioned Berlin cage fights, a blue teleporter named Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) learns from the news of the tragedy that has befallen Magneto and also makes her way back to the X-mansion to ask for Charles' help in finding him. Peter (Evan Peters), the superfast mutant from the last movie whose showstopping "Time in a Bottle Sequence" was easily a highlight, also sees the news report and wants to find Magneto, too, because of a very personal reason, and heads over to the mansion as well.

Unfortunately, the Apocalypse and his horsemen head for the mansion as well, and all hell breaks loose.

As Apocalypse puts into motion his plan to lay waste to the world and build a new one on its carcass, the X-Men find that they are the only thing standing in his way.

As as action movie, this film works well enough, and if X-Men and Spider-man movies were the only product on the market, this would hold up pretty decently against the likes of Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, X-Men: The Last Stand, either of the two Wolverine spin-off movies, and if I'm honest, even the first X-Men movie which, as instrumental as it was to kicking off the current boom of comic-book-based films, has not aged all that well. It's not in the league of the sublime X2: X-Men United or either of its own immediate predecessors, First Class and the aforementioned Days of Future Past, but it's a decent enough product.

The problem is that this film exists in a world onto which the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been unleashed. While the MCU doesn't quite have a perfect batting average, when their movies are good, they are very good, and whatever their critics may say, most of the key MCU films have been excellent. This problem is compounded by the fact that this film comes almost immediately in the wake of one of the MCU's strongest films thus far, the outstanding Captain America: Civil War, which has, along with its predecessor Captain America: The Winter Soldier and several other MCU films, quite simply raised the standard for this kind of movie by showing that a film can be both solid entertainment and intelligent at the same time. The two previous chapters also achieved this to an extent by telling their stories in the context of the turbulent politics of the 1960s and the 1970s, embedding the narrative firmly in the reality of the time.

With this film, however, Singer eschews the chance to take a shot at Reagan's politics (and the 40th American President doesn't even make an appearance here, unlike Richard Nixon in the last film), and instead elects to tell a straight-up action film about good guys fighting the world-destroying bad guy, with minimal (if any) subtext about prejudice or hatred. Heck, if anything the movie seems to suggest that all of the irrational fear and hatred felt by human towards mutants is justified, as Apocalypse, aided by his horsemen, virtually lives up to his name (as bestowed upon him by Xavier and MacTaggert) and lays waste to major population centers. Apocalypse doesn't ever experience humanity's hate of mutants; he basically sees that his people aren't ruling the earth and decides to change that.

Another problem I have with this film is that, as the first film showing the "repaired" timeline of the X-men (otherwise known as the one in which X-Men: The Last Stand no longer exists) the movie is basically a hot mess. Singer's insistence on trotting out characters that have already appeared in past installments like Jubilee and Psylocke only highlights how screwed up the whole thing is. Singer clearly attempts to dodge the fact that the Angel character already appeared in the aforementioned deleted X-Men movie by never mentioning his alter ego, effectively creating two mutants in his world with wings and blond hair, based on the same character from the comic books. Also, given that Cyclops was a teen in 1983, he would have been significantly older than the James Marsden he supposedly grew into by 2000's X-Men. Also, Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr haven't aged a day despite the fact that it's been twenty years since they first met in X-Men: First Class, and they're basically supposed to start looking like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen by now. I know I should be appreciating these films on their own individual merits, but considering the conscious effort to belatedly tie everything together I really cannot get out of my head how much of a clusterf**k this particular universe has become, and this movie adds to that.

Anyway, rant aside I took away quite a few positives. Singer seems determined to tell the Dark Phoenix Saga, something he missed the chance to do when he left the X-men for Superman. This, I think, is the main reason he wiped the slate clean, and I honestly hope he gets his shot this time. This movie basically feels like it was meant to pass the time between his palate-cleansing Days of Future Past and his dream X-men story (though of course, in the comics, the chronology is completely different). Also, this was the first X-Men movie that was not at all centered on Wolverine, which was a welcome relief. I would have wanted Cyclops to get a little more screentime, but the fact that he actually gets a character arc in this film is already a huge step forward from the short shrift James Marsden used to get in the original trilogy. I also liked the all-too-brief look into Storm's origins as a thief in Cairo, which is quite faithful to Claremont's comics. Finally, while Quicksilver's--err--Peter's "super speed scene" in this movie was enjoyable and set to a song I actually knew (Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics), it still pales in comparison to his "Time in a Bottle" scene back in DOFP.

This was a decent movie, but if Fox are going to keep up with Marvel and their cinematic universe, I think they'll have to do a whole lot better than this. This franchise is starting to show some serious signs of wear and tear.


6.5/10